THE RIVER MERCHANT'S WIFE: A LETTER
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
Played I about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you,
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into fat Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early in autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
by Rihaku [a.k.a. Li Po, Translated by Ezra Pound]
Li Po On Loneliness
SEWilco On Mileage
even better! do you know how many mpg you can get on PURE EVIL?!?
Only 5 MPG. Running over old people and firing the cannon really slows you down.
Jeff Dorchen On Religion
Now, look at it from the secular humanist point of view, which says that you are all either 1) engaging the same numinous forces but dressing them in your respective cultural masks, or 2) all pretty much equally superstitious, getting it more or less equally wrong.
If you can't tell the difference between Secular Humanism and Religion, you have failed the test, and the true God, who is a Secular Humanist, is very disappointed in you. There are no real consequences to you for disappointing God, who has many genders and will therefore be called "it," except that it shakes its many heads in pity and sometimes mocks you to its friends, the Secular Humanists, homosexuals, and Hollywood Jews.
Now, there are those who have faith but do not consider every other style of attempt at placating or connecting with God, the gods, or godhead to be or have been an utter mistake. These are Ecumenical Religious Humanists, and I suppose many Secular Humanists aren't secular at all but rather fall into the Ecumenical Religious category of Humanist.
And that's fine. God, who is a Secular Humanist, admires the Ecumenical Religious Humanists for finding a way toward a reasonable version of the stupid thing all the mutually exclusive religions got wrong.
Seumas On The Danger Of Duplication
[...] like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. Or, if you like another analogy, you go from being Alec Baldwin to Stephen Baldwin to Daniel Baldwin to a pool of primordial goo.
Mooney On Scientific Reporting
A lot of the time, what's prized in [the Washington journalism] world is the ability to make a clever argument--to turn conventional wisdom on its head.
When you apply this approach to science, however, there's an utter mismatch. In science, "conventional wisdom" is a consensus perspective that has withstood repeated expert attempts to unseat it. In this context, being "counterintuitive"--especially when one is doing so well outside of the traditional channels of scientific discourse--usually amounts to little more than being just plain wrong.
ajs318 On Software Licensing (Slashdot)
MS EULA => Sharing is stealing.
BSD => Sharing is not stealing.
GPL => Not sharing is stealing.
