When I told my 95-year-old mother I planned to stop by on Mother's Day, she asked, "Are you doing it for me or are you doing it for yourself?"

This was at the end of a ten minute soliloquy- prompted by what she thought to be impudence on my part- in which she enumerated all the things she regretted doing in her life. I wasn't included by name, but an overly sensitive individual could have made that inference due to associations with certain other events and individuals she referenced.

It should have been obvious I wasn't planning to return to her house on Mother's Day because I enjoyed listening to her ramblings of what she perceived to be her past dystopian existence. I suspect my anticipated visit wouldn't be the highpoint of her day, either.

I'm going to see her on Mother's Day because that's what a son does. Especially when you're an only child. In this time of societal breakdown, it's important to uphold tradition. I respect the office, if you know what I mean.

Sunday is Mother's Day. Grandmothers are a subset of that cohort. I've done mother-related quotes in the past; this year, let's go with grandmas.

And don't forget to at least call Mom on Sunday. At best, she'll appreciate the sentiment. At worst, she'll realize everyone makes mistakes.

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A grandmother will put a sweater on you when she is cold, feed you when she is hungry, and put you to bed when she is tired.
-Erma Bombeck

A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt.
-Florence King

Grandchildren don't make a man feel old; it's the knowledge that he's married to a grandmother.
-G. Norman Collie

If nothing is going well, call your grandmother.
-Variously attributed

Just about the time a woman thinks her job is done, she becomes a grandmother.
-Edward H. Dreschnack

Let's bring back grandmothers! A real family consists of three generations. It's time Americans stopped worrying about interference and being a burden on the children and regrouped under one roof.
-Florence King

Grandmamma had been the last connection to our past. I had understood her as some referent moral authority to whom we paid no heed, but by whose judgments we measured our waywardness.
-E.L. Doctorow

My grandmother gave me five dollars and said, 'Don't tell your mother.' I told her, 'It's going to cost you more than that.'
-Steven Wright

My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the hell she is.
-Ellen DeGeneris

My grandmother was a very tough woman. She buried three husbands. Two of them were just napping.
-Rita Rudner

My grandmother was insane. She had pierced hearing aids.
-Steven Wright

To reform a man, you must begin with his grandmother.
-Victor Hugo

Grandmas are moms with lots of frosting.
-Variously attributed

Whoever said 'Grandmas are moms with lots of frosting' obviously never licked one.
-John Alejandro King (The Covert Comic)

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Remembering Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985):

On the evening of October 9, 1985, Welles recorded his final interview on the syndicated TV program The Merv Griffin Show, appearing with biographer Barbara Leaming. "Both Welles and Leaming talked of Welles's life, and the segment was a nostalgic interlude," wrote biographer Frank Brady. Welles returned to his house in Hollywood and worked into the early hours typing stage directions for the project he and Gary Graver were planning to shoot at UCLA the following day. Welles died sometime on the morning of October 10, following a heart attack.

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The Hot Topic:

"'The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It's almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re- imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn."'
-from a 2018 social media post by Dave Barnhart, a pastor at Saint Junia United Methodist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

What are Alito's primary sources for suggesting the criminalization of women for terminating their pregnancies? One is a 1732 journal called Gentleman's Magazine. (via Slate)

The GOP doesn't want your 12 year old daughter to read "The Handmaid's Tale". But they are absolutely giddy at the thought of making her live it.
-@dan6654

For all those worried about "The Handmaid's Tale" coming true, there had to be a plague first that disrupted everything so... oh, shit.
-@iamisaided

In honor of Mother's Day, the Republican Party is trying to force more women to be mothers.
-@middleageriot

Don't like abortions?
Just ignore them like you do kids in foster care.
-@TrisResists

"Judges can't just wake up one day and say I have an agenda - I like guns, I hate guns, I like abortion, I hate abortion - and walk in like a royal queen and impose their will on the world. It's not the law of Amy. It's the law of the American people."
-Amy Coney Barrett, 10/13/20

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Categories: Abortion, Amy Coney Barrett, Dave Barnhart, Grandmothers, Mother's Day, Republicans, Roe v Wade, Supreme Court, The Handmaid's Tale

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As I've aged, I've come to feel that people are getting more stupid. Just watch the current crop of political advertising, and you'll understand what I mean. Some of these commercials are so stupid, you wonder at whom they're aimed. Dietrich Bonhoeffer offered a convincing explanation. The fact this is not a new phenomena is not comforting- especially since it has a disturbing record of success.

"If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must man be of learning from experience."
--George Bernard Shaw

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No conservative judicial nominee repeated Bork's mistake:

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"It reveals a rip in the culture of the Court that we've not seen."

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Why are gas prices so high? These obscure traders are partly to blame. "Nobody with power is looking at what they’re doing," but they're helping to drive soaring gas prices despite increased oil production.

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66 possibly ethical but probably illegal things.

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The perfect passive-agressive Mother's Day gift.

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May the Fourth be with you...

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Las Vegas outlaws grass.

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The Weird Al biopic teaser has dropped:

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Categories: Abortion, Dave Brubeck, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Drought, Ethics, Gas Prices, Las Vegas, Mother's Day, Star Wars, Stupidity, Supreme Court, Weird Al Yankovic

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This is the card I sent this year.
Inside I wrote:
"It could be worse. You could have married Woody Allen."

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A boy's best friend is his mother.
Robert Bloch (author of Psycho)

A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother.
Variously attributed

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.-Sigmund Freud

A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher

A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.
Washington Irving

A mother who is not everything for her children: a friend, a teacher, a confidant, a source of joy and founded pride, inducement and soothing, reconciliator, judge and forgiver, that mother obviously chose the wrong job.
Joseph Goebbels

A mother, who is really a mother, is never free.
Honoré de Balzac

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.
Peter De Vries

Almost everyone who has gone to the bad early in life has had a deceitful mother.
Henrik Ibsen

An ounce of mother is worth a ton of priest.
Variously attributed (Spanish Proverb)

Anything that makes your mother cry is fun.
P.J. O'Rourke

Behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begin.
Mitch Albom

Being a king, emperor, or president is mighty small potatoes compared to being a mother.
Billy Sunday

Being a mom is no picnic. Raising the kids is the mother's responsibility. It's a thankless, solitary job, like sheriff or Pope.
Stephen Colbert

Being a mother is a noble status, right? So why does it change when you put 'unwed' or 'welfare' in front of it?
Florynce Kennedy

Being a mother is an attitude, not a biological relation.
Robert A. Heinlein

Consult a real expert: call your mother.
Variously attributed

Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth.
Robert A. Heinlein

Don't worry about what your mother thinks of your language.
Elmore Leonard

Every mother is like Moses. She does not enter the promised land. She prepares a world she will not see.
Pope Paul VI

Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother.
W. Somerset Maugham

His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.
Mae West

I doubt if a charging elephant, or a rhino, is as determined, or hard to check, as a socially ambitious mother.
Will Rogers

I have always admired the Esquimaux. One fine day a delicious meal is cooked for dear old mother, and then she goes walking away over the ice, and doesn't come back.
Agatha Christie

I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother's poor mental health.
Jean Piaget

I should warn you that while Frasier is a Freudian, I am a Jungian. So there'll be no blaming Mother today.
-(From the TV series Frasier)

I would have gone home to my mother, but I'm not that crazy about my mother.
Cher

If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby 'it.'
Jerome K. Jerome

Mother is a verb, not a noun.
Shonda Rhimes

Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother's Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents.
Anne Lamott

My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six.
Alan Alda

My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son of a bitch.
Jack Nicholson

My mother said, 'You won't amount to anything because you procrastinate.' I said, 'Just wait.'
Judy Tenuta

My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet. She's now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia.
Barry Humphries

My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have to potential to be the comic stories the next.
Nora Ephron

My mother's menu consisted of two choices: take it or leave it.
Buddy Hackett

My mother's obsession with the good scissors always scared me a bit. It implied that somewhere in the house there lurked: the evil scissors.
Tony Martin

My old mother always used to say, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you stare them in the face hard enough, they generally run away.
Dorothy L. Sayers

Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them.
Rita Rudner

No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother's Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture's bad people and behavior.
Anne Lamott

Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.
Dan Quayle

Sometimes you need a B-2 bomber and sometimes you need your mother.
P.J. O'Rourke

The fastest way to break the cycle of perfectionism and become a fearless mother is to give up the idea of doing it perfectly- indeed to embrace uncertainty and imperfection.
Arianna Huffington

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
Honoré de Balzac

The love of a mother is never exhausted; it never changes, it never tires. A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands: but a mother's love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world's condemnation, a mother still loves on, and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; still she remembers the infant smiles that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful shout of his childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can never be brought to think him all unworthy.
Washington Irving

The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served us nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.
Calvin Trillin

The mother- poor invaded soul- finds even the bathroom door no bar to hammering little hands.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

There are only two things a child will share willingly- communicable diseases and his mother's age.
Dr. Benjamin Spock

There is no slave out of heaven like a loving woman; and, of all loving women, there is no such slave as a mother.
Henry Ward Beecher

There's a lot more to being a woman than being a mother, but there's a hell of a lot more to being a mother than most people suspect.
Roseanne Barr

There's no way to repay a mother's love, or lack of it.
Mignon McLaughlin

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.
James Joyce

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.' To this day, especially in times of 'disaster,' I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers- so many caring people in this world.
Fred Rogers

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.
Alice Walker

You never get over being a child, long as you have a mother to go to.
Sarah Orne Jewett

Your mother knows how to push your buttons because she installed them.
Variously attributed

The surprisingly sad origins of Mother's Day.

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Categories: Mother's Day

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