The best laid plans of mice and men...http://homestead.juno.com/joedupont/index.html

Posted by William James Hart on April 30, 2001

In Reply to: The best laid plans of mice and men...homestead.juno.com/ joedupont/index.html posted by my son died because of it. on January 31, 2001

: : Does anyone have any idea how or where this phrase originated?

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"The Best Laid Plans O' Mice and Men Gang Aft Aglay."

The Best Laid Plans O' Mice and Men Gang Aft Aglay."
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ARE WE READY TO START WHINING?
"WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE?"
THAT'S A BOOK TITLE
by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner
"The Best Laid Plans O' Mice and Men Gang Aft Aglay."
Rarely does a book come along that tackles a perennially difficult human issue with such clarity and intelligence as Rabbi Kushner whose work was manditory in my classses of all kinds.
Harold Kushner, a Jewish rabbi facing his own child's fatal illness, deftly guides us through the inadequacies...and failings of human preparation for life. Life matters only as I plan ahead.

"DANTE'S MOD AND OLD INFERNO TRULY INDICATES" The Best Laid Plans O' Mice and Men Gang Aft Aglay ...

The Best Laid Plans...FROM THE TOP OF MY HEAD WITH RESEARCH TO THE BOTTOM OF THE BARRELL INCLUDE:

Truisms liken the best-laid plans of mice and men go oft astray plans are not guaranteed, plans sometimes do not work out are commonplace in English: e.g. If this boat sinks, we'll say, "The best-laid plans of mice and men go oft astray."

What does a Scot do when he feels cold? He sits before a candle. What does a Scot do when he feels very, very cold? He lights the candle. Annoying proverbs are the kind that are repeated with such frequency that they grate on your nerves each time you hear them. These are the people responsible for bell bottom pants. They must be destroyed at all costs. ...

THE BUSINESS ASPECTS OF THIS PROVERB ARE SIMPLE:

The best laid plans of mice and men.....often go awry. Let's face it, the real problem is that the marketing dept. and the game development dept. may work for the same company, but the right hand doesn't always know what the left hand is doing. Release dates are best guesses, and I think people are so excited they are working themselves into a frenzy.

OR EVEN MORE SIGNIFICANT AT COMDEX IN 1998 WHILE I WAS THERE WATCHING:

The Best Laid Plans...

The best laid plans of mice and men...

COMDEX: The Best Laid Plans of Men with Mice and Men
(April 26, 1998)
Microsoft CEO Bill Gates gave PC users around the world reason to chuckle at the COMDEX Spring '98 Show in Chicago. While demonstrating Windows 98 for the crowd during his speech, it crashed leaving Gates to quip, "While we're all very dependent on technology, it doesn't always work. That must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet." The demonstration assistant responded, "We still have a lot of work to do."

The operating system crashed when Gates and his assistant attempted to connect a scanner to a new type of computer connector called a USB port, which allows connections to be made while the computer is on and supposedly will configure the computer to handle the device with little help from the user.

Windows 98, which has been dismissed as a minor upgrade to fix deficiencies in Windows 98, is scheduled to ship June 25th of this year. Among its features is WebTV for Windows, which has little to do with WebTV, except the name. WebTV for Windows is Microsoft's way of integrating television into the PC platform and using television video signals to transmit data.

Robert Burns (1759-1796).
Poems and Songs.
To a Mouse
On turning her up in her nest, with the plough,
November, 1785

We again see how, in the words of Thomas Carlyl, the poet "rises to the high, stoops to the low, and is brother and playmate to all nature." This is, by readers gentle and readers simple, acknowledged to be one of the most perfect little gems that ever human genius produced. One of its couplets has passed into a proverb:- "The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, gang aft agley."

"To a Mouse"
WEE, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!
I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
Has broken nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!
I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!
Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell-
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.
That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!
But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An'lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!
Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!
HEAR BOBBY BURNS PERFORMED IN GAELIC SLANG HERE:
(REAL AUDIO)
www.ibiblio.org/ gaelic/Scots/burns.html

Of Mice and Men, BY JOHN STEINBECK tells the tale of two itinerant farm-workers, George Milton and Lennie Small, in their struggle and ultimate failure to achieve their dreams in a hard and cruel world. George and Lenny are two drifters with delusions of "living off the fat of the land." They have just arrived at a ranch where they plan to earn enough money to buy their own place. It sounds simple enough, but so go the best laid plans "of mice and men."

Of Mice and Men IS ALSO A MODERN OPERA by Composer: Carlisle Floyd Libretto by the composer had a premiere at Seattle Opera Association, Seattle, Washington state, USA January 22, 1970.

"BEST LAID PLANS"
(Alessandro Nivola, Reese Witherspoon is a Suspense/Thriller film: A down on his luck young man, who's in deep trouble with some thugs, hopes that an elaborate plan involving his new girlfriend and an old college buddy will solve his problem.

Nick (ALESSANDRO NIVOLA) is a down-on-his-luck young man whose dreams of leaving his recycling center job have been dashed when the inheritance from his father gets depleted down to nothing. While things look up when he meets Lissa (REESE WITHERSPOON), a pretty girl who works at the local veterinarian's office, Nick digs himself a deep hole when he agrees to be a driver for some nighttime criminal activity with his coworker, Barry (JAMIE MARSH).
Although the police don't get involved, Nick suddenly finds himself owing fifteen thousand dollars to a thug with only a few days to raise the money. Combined, he and Lissa figure they have around five of that, so the two set up a desperate plan that involves Bryce (JOSH BROLIN), an old college buddy of Nick's, the wealthy estate he's house-sitting for, and a lot of deception.

As the clock ticks down toward the thug's financial deadline, Nick and Lissa set into motion their elaborate plan that, as expected, doesn't go as smoothly as they wanted and begins to spiral out of control.

Of mice and men. The genetic similarity (or homology) of superficially dissimilar species is amply demonstrated here. The full complement of human chromosomes can be cut, schematically at least, into about 150 piece, then reassembled into a reasonable approximation of the mouse genome. The colors of the mouse chromosomes and the numbers alongside indicate the human chromosomes containing homologous segments. This piecewise similarity between the mouse and human genomes means that insights into mouse genetics are likely to illuminate human genetics as well.

OF FLIES, MICE, AND MEN
FRANCOIS JACOB
Translated by Giselle Weiss
Who could have guessed that the lowly fruit fly might hold the key for decoding heredity? Or that the mouse might one day disclose astonishing evolutionary secrets? In a book infused with wisdom, wonder, and a healthy dose of wry skepticism, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Francois Jacob walks us through the surprising ways of science, particularly the science of biology, in this century. Of Flies, Mice, and Men is at once a work of history, a social study of the role of scientists in the modern world, and a cautionary tale of the bumbling and brilliance, imagination and luck, that attend scientific discovery. A book about molecules, reproduction, and evolutionary tinkering, it is also about the way biologists work, and how they contemplate beauty and truth, good and evil.

Animated with anecdotes from Greek mythology, literature, episodes from the history of science, and personal experience, Of Flies, Mice, and Men tells the story of how the marvelous discoveries of molecular and developmental biology are transforming our understanding of who we are and where we came from. In particular, Jacob scrutinizes the place of the scientist in society. Alternately cast as the soothsayer Tiresias, the conscienceless inventor Daedalus, or Prometheus, conveyer of dangerous knowledge, the scientist in our day must instead adopt the role of truthteller, Jacob suggests. And the crucial truth that molecular biology teaches is the one he elaborates with great clarity and grace in this book: that all animals are made of the same building blocks, by a combinatorial system that always rearranges the same elements according to new forms.

Francois Jacob is Professor of Cellular Genetics, Collège de France, and a member of the French Academy. In 1965 he shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work in genetics.

The Best Laid Plans...

We are born into this world, believing in fairy tales. We are told stories by our parents, by our grandparents, aunts, uncles, babysitters, school teachers... By the whole world.

By the whole entire world.

We continue in these myths. We grow up in dysfunctional families, (and be real.... whose isn't?) and then go out on our own.

To have our own.

Really, think about it. How can we be so incredibly nieve to believe that we, modeled by our own parents on how to act as parents, can do it any differently? How can we believe that we really can be better than they were? They were our role models... Why are we so stupid??

We are young. We believe that we can make a difference, we believe that we CAN be different. We go to school, we become educated... we start off different than our predecessors. Then something goes wrong.

We start having a difficult marriage, or it was just a mistake to begin with. We see our lives fall apart. All our hopes, our dreams... they all crumble and fall away. Our entire belief system holds tenaciously to our reality. Then reality falls.

That's when it happens. All the old programming, our parents and our parents' parents mistakes... it takes over. Stressed, and with our esteem at an all time low, auto-pilot takes over. Auto-pilot is all the old programming. What we swore we would never become. We become our parents.

We start out with all the right intentions. People begin life believing they will do good. Do right by their children. There are no courses, no schools to go to to become a parent. The most important job in the universe, raising the next generation, and there are no instruction manuals. You aren't taught. You can't pass a class. You fly by the seat of your pants, hoping to do better, to be the best...You start out with definite plans,"Oh, I'LL never do that, I'll never treat my kids that way..."

The best laid plans of mice and men often fall asunder...

When you become an adult, you really believe you have all the answers. You believe you are smarter than your folks. You hold them in contempt...How could they be so stupid? They don't understand you, They must be idiots because the answers are so blasted obvious. You can't treat kids that way, we're not chattel. We have minds of our own, we are INDIVIDUALS... We have all the answers.

So, when our worlds collapse, and we panic, we regress. We lose our vision. We lose sight of our original good intentions, our goals. We become our parents and we fail. Just like they did. It's a never-ending story, an endless loop of tragedy after tragedy after tragedy.

How can we be so stupid? How can we believe we can be anything but what we are, where we came from? We perpetuate our origins, we facilitate the past.

Our children grow up as we did. With contempt and anger for our parents, they with contempt and anger for us. We become disgruntled mothers, frustrated fathers... with bitter children. They hate us. And so the story goes...

I look at myself as a woman who should never have had kids. I should have stuck with puppies. I perpetuated a gene-pool that never should have been continued. I loved, sacrificed for, and perpetually did for my children...

It is never enough. It never matters what you do or what you don't do. They are never satisfied, and you are always the bad guy. It is a charade from the beginning. It's all make-believe. It's a story. Just like all the stories you've ever been told, by all those people that ever told them.

There are no princes, there are no white horses, and make-believe is still make-believe, no matter how old you are.

I will never have the family get-togethers I dreamed of as a child. During holiday times, with my children all around me... Watching my grandchildren grow up... Birthdays, anniversaries, Yuletide...

I have never belonged, I have never been a part of a group, much less a family. After a lifetime of being apart, the end will be as the beginning. Nothing will change. All that changes remains the same. I do not even belong to my own children.

How can we be so stupid? How could we believe it would ever be any different? The more things change, the more things stay the same. My son is gone, my daughter unreachable. Neither are viable. Alive or dead, they are gone. Only a memory, and not even a good one at that.

I should have stuck with puppies.

NOW ARE WE FINISHED WHINING? "WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE?" THAT'S A BOOK TITLE
Rarely does a book come along that tackles a perennially difficult human issue with such clarity and intelligence. Harold Kushner, a Jewish rabbi facing his own child's fatal illness, deftly guides us through the inadequacies...