We’re cutting loose day. Getting wild. That’s right. C-R-A-Z-Y.

As Seal so aptly put it, “we are never gonna get by unless we get a little crazy.”

So here are some non-traditional, wacky and unusual quotes meant to inspire your inner lunatic.

“Ever wonder if illiterate people get the full effect of alphabet soup?”
John Mendoza

“Whatever I want to be known for I need to be doing.”- Unknown

“Beware of the young doctor and the old barber.”
Benjamin Franklin

“Some days it’s not worth gnawing through the straps.” - Unknown

“Insanity: a perfectly rational response to an insane world.” - Unknown

“I have a grip on reality, just not this particular one.” - Unknown

“A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?”
- Albert Einstein

“My psychiatrist told me I was crazy and I said I want a second opinion. He said okay, you’re ugly too.”
- Rodney Dangerfield

“There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.”
Oscar Levant

“Sometimes we reach the boiling point before we realize that the stove is on. Become aware of your feelings – keep your eye on the stove.”
Karen Dougherty

“Life is a short, warm moment and death is a long cold rest. You get your chance to try in the twinkling of an eye: Eighty years, with luck, or even less.”
Pink Floyd

“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”
Carl Gustav Jung

A friend of mine relayed a story I wanted to share with you:

Last week, a good friend of mine really laid into me. She had been harboring resentment toward me for a long time. I had no clue! Suddenly, she started detailing all of my flaws and faults, like a long grocery list.

At first, I wasn’t hurt. I thought obviously she is working through her own stuff. This isn’t just about me. But after we parted that day, the pain set in. Almost as if I was in a car accident - I didn’t feel the pain at first but the next day, I couldn’t move my head.

Her words were toxic and painful. And they had sunk in deeper than I thought. I had to think of some way to cope.

First, I took a step back. I looked at it, from a distance. Why did her words hurts so badly? What did it remind me of? What chord did it strike? I wrote about it in my journal and found myself remembering all sorts of things I had forgotten about.

Then, I did some repair work. I let myself feel crappy for a few days. I talked to a trusted friend of mine and vented. In short, I took care of myself.

Of course, I had evaluate my friendship with this person: was she “toxic” as they say? Or did we stand a chance of remaining friends?

When I felt a little more in control, we talked. I’d like to say she was apologetic, but she wasn’t. This time, though, I felt better prepared.

Those words of hers still hurt. But on some strange level, they feel like some guide - a guide leading to me some pain that has been hindering me anyway.

Here’s a piece one of our writers, Beth Mann, submitted to Open Salon about the miracle elephant, Mr. Shuffles:

Mr. Shuffles is a miracle elephant.

After almost 2 years in his mother’s womb, the vets could find no vital signs and he was presumed to be stillborn.

At a press conference, the staff at Taronga Zoo in Australia announced the sad news.

Katharina Theodore was one of the first keepers in the elephant barn the morning after Porntip, the mother elephant, gave birth.

“We went to greet all the elephants, walked up to Porntip and she didn’t react at all.” Theodore said.

“She seemed to be in a stupor and so I started to cry literally. I noticed blood on her legs and the bulge that was holding the calf was missing. So Gary and I walked into the paddock and we found a calf.

“I was kind of happy that at least she’d expelled the calf and I was thinking that’s great, we can move on and look after her.

“And then, mind-blowingly enough, the calf raised its head.”

20 vets and keepers quickly went to work, round the clock, administering to the calf who they feared suffered brain damage.

When Mr. Shuffles was well enough to take his first steps, they were heavy and unsure, like that of an old man, hence the nickname “Mr. Shuffles.”

He was officially renamed Pathi Harn in a ceremony held by Buddhist monks to celebrate his Thai culture. This caused a minor uproar online (by people like me) who really, really like his nickname.

Parthi Harn is the Thai word for miracle.

Pathi Harn is getting stronger day by day, feeding heartily from his mother and playing with his cousin, Luk Chai .

And while his beautiful Thai name reflects his regal status which he rightfully deserves, he will always be known as Mr. Shuffles to many.

He’s a little wide-eyed and goofy - a creature who has gone through something. A creature who is happy to be alive.

Follow Mr. Shuffles on Twitter.

Sources:
Brisbane Times
ABC News Australia

This story gives new meaning to women reaching new heights…quite literally!

Congress is awarding the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor, to members of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, a civilian branch of the Army Air Force. Fewer than 300 of the 1,100 survive. Relatives of those who have died or could not attend will also get medals.

When Jean Springer (above) joined, “it was kind of a lark,” she says. She had been taking flying lessons. “It was patriotic. And boring at home. I loved flying.”

The WASP was created to allow more male pilots to go to the war front.

Prohibited from flying in combat, the female pilots transported military personnel, towed targets for gunnery practice and shuttled planes from factories to bases.

They flew every military plane model flown in the war.

“Sometimes the guys who gave us weather predictions in the morning when we left weren’t particularly accurate,” Springer says. “In snowstorms, it was scary.”

Yet no military honors were granted to the 38 women who were killed during service to the program.

In December 1944, as the war was ending and male pilots were coming home, the program was disbanded.

“One day I came back from a flight,” says Doris Nathan, 93, of Kalamazoo, Mich. “And the commanding officer said, ‘I just got orders to tell you to get off the base by tomorrow morning.’ ”

Some of the women kept flying as instructors in Florida or bush pilots in Alaska, says Albert “Chig” Lewis, a Washington lawyer and founding member of Wingtip to Wingtip, an association that promotes the fliers’ legacy. His mother was a WASP. Others raised families and accepted that most of the nation didn’t know what they’d done.

The fliers were already trying to gain recognition as military veterans in 1976 when the Air Force announced that “for the first time ever” it would teach women to fly military airplanes, says Kate Landdeck, an associate professor of history at Texas Woman’s University who is writing a book about WASPs and their lives after the war.

“They realized their Air Force had forgotten about them,” Landdeck says.

In 1977, after a “huge effort in Congress” and with the help of Sen. Barry Goldwater, who had flown with WASPs during the war, the women were recognized as military personnel and given partial veterans benefits.

“They get to go to VA hospitals, and they get that flag on the coffin,” she says. “That’s the most important thing to them.” Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican, co-sponsored the bill to honor the women with the medal.

“These women have yet to receive the recognition they deserve,” Hutchison says.

Source: USA Today

Often positivity is found after we acknowledge some of the negative feelings we’ve worked hard at repressing. This week, we explore one of the most difficult “negative” emotions: anger. Here we have an interesting combo of takes on this difficult emotion.

Always write angry letters to your enemies. Never mail them.
James Fallows

Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding.
Mohandas Gandhi

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
George Eliot

Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.
Albert Einstein

Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before - it takes something from him.
Louis L’Amour

Anger is a short madness.
Horace

Anger is a wind which blows out the lamp of the mind.
Robert Green Ingersoll

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
Mark Twain

Anger is one of the sinews of the soul.
Thomas Fuller

Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.
Maya Angelou

Expressing anger is a form of public littering.
Willard Gaylin

Fair peace becomes men; ferocious anger belongs to beasts.
Ovid

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Get mad, then get over it.
Colin Powell

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
William Congreve

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.
Buddha

How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
Marcus Aurelius

Get mad, then get over it.  ~Colin Powell

The world needs anger.  The world often continues to allow evil because it isn’t angry enough.  ~Bede Jarrett

Never go to bed mad.  Stay up and fight.  ~Phyllis Diller, Phyllis Diller’s Housekeeping Hints, 1966

That’s right - after years of debating and in-house feuding, the United States of America has passed a healthcare reform:

The US House of Representatives has narrowly voted to pass a landmark healthcare reform bill at the heart of President Barack Obama’s agenda.

Under the legislation, health insurance will be extended to nearly all Americans, imposes new taxes on the wealthy and bars restrictive insurance practices such as refusing to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions.

They represent the biggest change in the US healthcare system since the creation in the 1960s of Medicare, the government-run scheme for Americans aged 65 or over.

President Barack Obama:

“It’s a victory for the American people.”

Damn straight.

President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and senior staff, react in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, as the House passes the health care reform bill, March 21, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Source: BBC News

It might not seem like a lot, but for an endangered species, one egg could mean a world of difference.

According to the LA Times (which has a great positive news section, check it out):

Biologists at Pinnacles National Monument are celebrating the first condor egg produced by a mating pair inside the park boundaries in more than a century.

The egg marks the latest encouraging development in the slow recovery of the endangered flying giants in the regions they historically inhabited. The effort has been hampered by hunters and lead poisoning of the birds.

A female released in 2004 in the Central California park and a male released the same year 30 miles west at Big Sur had been observed engaged in courtship behavior earlier this year, park spokesman Carl Brenner said.

“They are now the proud parents of a small egg,” Brenner said.

Biologists confirmed the presence of the egg after hiking to the site on Friday.

In 1982, the last 22 California condors were placed in a captive breeding program. Today, there are 348 in the world, with about 180 flying free at three locations in California and at the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Another dozen are in Baja California.

The goal is to have 450 birds in three distinct populations, with 15 breeding pairs in each group.

“We had a good year last year in Southern California, but it’s not universal because we had a number die of lead poisoning in the Pinnacles area and Central Coast,” said Michael Woodbridge, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Condor Recovery Program.

One of the dead birds was the mother of a male chick that eventually learned to fly in the wild last April on a ranch outside of Pinnacles National Monument. The chick survived and lives with its father.

Some birds suffer lead poisoning after eating gut piles left by hunters, despite a ban on lead bullets in condor country.

Of the 77 eggs laid in the wild since 2001, 33 lived for at least six months — long enough to fly — with the success rate increasing every year, Woodbridge said.

“That’s close to 50 percent, which is probably on par for any species in the wild,” Woodbridge said.

Condors, with 10-foot wingspans, generally mate for life. By coincidence, the Pinnacles pair with the egg are numerically sequenced — female 317 and male 318 in the population being tracked. It was the first mating attempt by both.

Please check out the California Conservation Project and see how you can help.

With Spring right around the corner (insert huge sigh of relief), it’s time to “green” your life. This could mean many things: a good spring cleaning, planting your garden, some new clothes, an exercise plan - anything that brings you back to life after a long winter!

Here’s a few Spring suggestions you may want to take into consideration:

Check out these tips from a Gimundo article:

1. This year I’m eliminating any chemicals from my garden and planting all organic plants. It’s a little more expensive and a little harder to find, but it’s a lot healthier for your kids if they play in your yard to get rid of those awful fertilizers full of chemicals.

2. My spring cleaning will be done with lots of vinegar, baking soda and plant derived cleaners. Get rid of those old cleaners that are made with petrochemicals, unnatural fragrances and use products that bring a healthier environment to your home. Did you know that your indoor air could be causing health issues to you and your family?

3. Open your windows and let the fresh air in. Wash your windows with a mixture of half vinegar and half water, usually this will improve your indoor air quality and leave your windows spotless.

4. Is it time to clean out a few clogged drains? Here are some helpful tips for a more natural way to clean drains. Throw away those chemicals; they go straight to our water supply.

5. Time to go green with your hot water heater; your water heater uses a lot of energy to keep water hot 24/7. Check out tankless water heaters or called hot water on demand systems.

Source: Gimundo

Here are a few others I came up with:

6. If you’re in need of new clothes for the Spring, check out your local second-hand store or Salvation Army first. Not only are you saving money, you’re “precycling.”

7. Fix up your bike. A bike that’s had a little tune-up is more likely to be used. Put it in an easy, accessible place. Remind yourself that it’s time to get on the bike and not hop in the car. Put a basket on your bike for even more flexibility.

8. Back to the washing machine: most clothing does not need tons of detergent or hot water. Move over to eco-friendly detergent, use less of it and use cold water.

This Wednesday, we’re going down the easy road. That’s right - this week’s quotes are just funny. Hope you appreciate. And feel free to send us some suggestions on possible themes for quotes. We’d love to hear from you!

A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.  ~Fred Allen

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.  ~H.L. Mencken

A compromise is an agreement whereby both parties get what neither of them wanted.  ~Author Unknown

A gentleman is a man who can play the accordion but doesn’t.  ~Author Unknown

Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today.  It is already tomorrow in Australia.  ~Charles Schulz

All generalizations are bad.  ~R.H. Grenier

All my life, I always wanted to be somebody.  Now I see that I should have been more specific.  ~Jane Wagner, The Search For Intelligent Life In The Universe, performed by Lily Tomlin

I have six locks on my door all in a row.  When I go out, I lock every other one.  I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they are always locking three.  ~Elayne Boosler

Man was predestined to have free will.  ~Hal Lee Luyah

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.  ~Aldous Huxle

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.  ~Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

Today is the last day of some of your life.  ~Author Unknown

It’s always darkest before the dawn.  So if you’re going to steal your neighbor’s newspaper, that’s the time to do it.  ~Author Unknown

You can’t have everything… where would you put it?  ~Steven Wright

He’s turned his life around.  He used to be depressed and miserable.  Now he’s miserable and depressed.  ~Harry Kalas, on Garry Maddox, 1981

I plan on living forever.  So far, so good.  ~Author Unknown

As to the Seven Deadly Sins, I deplore Pride, Wrath, Lust, Envy and Greed.  Gluttony and Sloth I pretty much plan my day around.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

There’s no such thing as fun for the whole family.  ~Jerry SeinfeldThe universe is merely a fleeting idea in God’s mind - a pretty uncomfortable thought, particularly if you’ve just made a down payment on a house.  ~Woody Allen

My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fiber and that I am therefore excused from saving Universes.  ~Douglas Adams

A great name for a new country song:  If I’d Shot You Sooner, I’d Be Out of Jail by Now.  ~Author Unknown

Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself.  ~Rita Mae Brown

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes.  That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile way and you have their shoes.  ~Author Unknown

How do the angels get to sleep when the devil leaves the porch light on?  ~Tom Waits, “Mr Siegal,” Heartattack and Vine

Duct tape is like the force.  It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.  ~Carl Zwanzig

Can we actually “know” the universe?  My God, it’s hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown.  ~Woody Allen, Getting Even, 1971

All my life I’ve wanted, just once, to say something clever without losing my train of thought.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case, and got my tuition back.  ~Fred Allen

Just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.  ~Colin Sautar

She’s the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.  ~Mae West

If you cannot answer a man’s argument, all it not lost; you can still call him vile names.  ~Elbert Hubbard

If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?  ~Author Unknown

It seems like a strange and counter-intuitive concept but research concludes that a healthy, attractive avatar representing you online could actually motivate you to make improvements to your non-virtual self!

Read on:

Jesse Fox, a researcher at Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab, discovered that when subjects created computerized avatars based on their own appearances, watching these avatars model good behaviors could help the subjects overcome their own weaknesses.

For example, when subjects saw images of their digital doppelgangers running on treadmills, they were motivated to exercise after leaving the lab. On average, they did one more full hour of exercise than subjects who had been shown lazy lookalike avatars or non-lookalike exercising avatars.

“If they saw a person they didn’t know, they weren’t motivated to exercise. But if they saw themselves, they exercised significantly more,” said Fox.

In addition to guiding participants to make better nutritional and exercise choices, Fox believes that the avatar program could also be used to help people with self-esteem issues, such as anorexic women. These women could be paired with a healthy-figured avatar, and learn to become comfortable in this body in the virtual world while recovering from their disease. We can see a whole range of other possibilities, from quitting smoking to adapting to better work habits.

Source: Gimundo

This is a bit of a long shot, but the underlying premise remains rich: sometimes changes in your life can be made by using an “outside-in” approach and role modeling. In other words, this doesn’t give you an excuse to spend more time on the computer. You could also draw a healthier, happier you and hang it above your desk!