Category: Best Line of the Day

And so let freedom ring — from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring — from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring — from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring — from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring — from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that.

Let freedom ring — from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring — from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring — from every hill and molehill of Mississippi, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,

“Free at last, free at last.

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
__________

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., 51 years ago today

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

Henry David Thoreau, who was born 197 years ago today.

“Death, taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them.”

Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.

“Today is 50th anniversary of manned space flight, sadly defunded probably because of space abortions or something.”

Twitter / pourmecoffee (2011).

When NASA was preparing for the Apollo Project, it took the astronauts to a Navajo reservation in Arizona for training. One day, a Navajo elder and his son came across the space crew walking among the rocks.

The elder, who spoke only Navajo, asked a question. His son translated for the NASA people: “What are these guys in the big suits doing?” One of the astronauts said that they were practicing for a trip to the moon. When his son relayed this comment the Navajo elder got all excited and asked if it would be possible to give to the astronauts a message to deliver to the moon.

Recognizing a promotional opportunity when he saw one, a NASA official accompanying the astronauts said, “Why certainly!” and told an underling to get a tape recorder. The Navajo elder’s comments into the microphone were brief. The NASA official asked the son if he would translate what his father had said. The son listened to the recording and laughed uproariously. But he refused to translate.

So the NASA people took the tape to a nearby Navajo village and played it for other members of the tribe. They too laughed long and loudly but also refused to translate the elder’s message to the moon.

Finally, an official government translator was summoned. After she finally stopped laughing, the translator relayed the message: “Watch out for these assholes. They have come to steal your land.”

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This story has been around the Internet since at least 1995. According to the Urban Legends Reference Pages: “Although it might possibly have earlier antecedents as yet unknown to us, the origin of this tale appears to be a joke Johnny Carson included in his Tonight Show monologue on the evening of 22 July 1969, two days after Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to set foot on the surface of the moon.”

“Life is like a maze – you turn left, you turn right and just when you think you’ve found the right way, there’s Jack Nicholson with an axe.”