I've said my piece and counted to three.
Dale On Killer Clowns
The Travolta-Jackson pairing is at the heart of Pulp Fiction. They make a beautiful team: Vincent, who takes things as they are, is at times slow almost to the point of slurring, whereas Jules is excitable, florid.
Jules is the straight man but gets fantastically showy punchlines, while Vincent gets his laughs from his stoner’s lack of compression. When you add that Vincent is prone to accidents and exasperates Jules, they start to seem like Laurel and Hardy, who never got dialogue as funny as Tarantino’s.
And Tarantino directs their exchanges in a loose enough style that the characters (and actors) can even laugh at themselves during a discussion of whether pigs are filthy animals. The dialogue casts around them a bubble in which killer clowns can exist.
Zengotita On Judo (Huffington Post)
Judo is all about falling backwards after pretending to shove forward. Judo is all about flipping the opponent by virtue of his own weight as he leans into the emptiness of your caving.
Atwater On The Southern Strategy
"You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say 'nigger'--that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me--because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."
Seamus McCauley On Openness
The idea - the myth - of an open web to which anyone can contribute seems hugely compelling for many people.
Yet the reality seems to be that the new media is practically no more participative than the old: it remains that there were more major contributors to the 1911 Britannica than there are to Wikipedia and the front page of Digg is controlled by fewer people than the front page of the New York Times.
On Crooked Houses
English Nursery Rhyme There was a Crooked Man
There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.
And they all lived together in a little crooked house
Heinlein's -And He Built A Crooked House-
Neil Asher, Cowl:
Tack nodded, too weary to ask anything further. Folding his arms and bowing his head, he closed his eyes and fell into a dream world, where Klein bottles endlessly filled themselves, and hollow people built terreract houses.
jupiterinleo On Wikipedia
For the longest time, the Wikipedia entry for vegetarian included the sentence,
the word 'vegetarian' is Native American for 'bad hunter.'I fixed it, several times. Somebody else kept "fixing" it back. Eventually I stopped bothering.
Philip Slater On War
The third characteristic of agrarian societies is that they are warlike.
War as we know it, with standing armies, pitched battles, the taking of land by force, etc. was an invention of the agrarian era. Hunter-gatherers had occasional skirmishes, but land ownership was a meaningless concept to them, and without herds and crops there was no need for armies.
As Robert O'Connell observes in his definitive book on war, we were free of war for most of our existence on this planet, and "its onset and continuation were dependent on levels of ecological adaptation that were inherently transitory".
Today, when corporations are global, the economy is global, environmental issues are global, and all major problems faced by humans are global, when the nation-state is rapidly becoming obsolete, warfare between armies is increasingly meaningless.
Terrorists are not national. They are not armies. They are utterly decentralized international networks of murderers. Europeans, who have lived with terrorism a long time, actually capture and arrest terrorists, through efficient intelligence and police work, while our clueless president--still living in the past--makes war on Iraq, creating a bloody catastrophe in the Middle East while destroying democracy at home.
Ellis Weiner On Dennis Miller
What kind of person is still able to get a sincere laugh from Dennis Miller, and not see him as a talented opportunist who outsmarted himself and has ended up like a character from an old Twilight Zone, stranded (by his own scheming) forever on a planet of idiots?
Ken On Contribution
Donald: Thank you for the discussion yesterday - I've been thinking a lot about it.
Ken: I feel specifically catalytic about it.
Donald: "Specifically catalytic"?
Ken: I remain completely unchanged.
Your Editor On Joy
They say that Marines are equivalent to twice as many infantry, that Spartans held against thousandfold odds, and that men in defence of a homeland cannot be defeated.
Apathy cedes to passion in all endeavors. In conflict, in business, in love. Match your battles with your desires and forever dance on the tail of the curve.
And what is your desire? What is worth the battle? All but the basest desires are weak without purpose.
Existential depression visits purposeless children too keen to sleep – to simply be is not enough. Yet, those children persist. Become purposeless adults. Did notions of universality come to them too young, and as they grew, uncover as too subjective the absolutes? In God’s absence, order is a poor father figure.
Is faith a prerequisite of desire persued and fulfilled, of joy?
Sara's Tooth
Upon reminding that she needed to prepare for the Tooth Fairy's nighttime visit, Sara enthusiastically replied, "I'm going to get her!" and rushed to bed, newly departed tooth in hand.
-Apr 16, 2007.
Adam Off The Bottle
With almost no effort at all, little Adam is off the bottle as of March '07. He is so little trouble, and is more handsome than a son of mine could hope to be.
Harold Pinter, "The Guardian"
Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America's God.
The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn't join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who've forgotten the tune.
The riders have whips which cut.
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America's God.
Porn Portal Notice (Red Way)
A Message from the Sandman and Team Red
This Message goes out to every adult Webmaster we aren't Friends with: Fuck You. We don't care who you are, who you work for, or who you know. Your site will collapse like unhealthy flowers in the Wind; we will take you down without a care in the World; you mean nothing to us. Our only concern is the Great Men and Women that use this Fantastic Site now known as Red Way; for they know that you are nothing but losers, and that you will do anything for a quick American Dollar, and that you are pathetic. Once again: Fuck You Mother Fuckers; you have no idea what you're up against, or what you are dealing with.
Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Alfred North Whitehead On Thinking
By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and, in effect, increases the mental power of the race.
Before the introduction of the Arabic notation, multiplication was difficult, and the division even of integers called into play the highest mathematical faculties. Probably nothing in the modern world would have more astonished a Greek mathematician than to learn that ... a large proportion of the population of Western Europe could perform the operation of division for the largest numbers. This fact would have seemed to him a sheer impossibility [...] Our modern power of easy reckoning with decimal fractions is the almost miraculous result of the gradual discovery of a perfect notation.
[...] By the aid of symbolism, we can make transitions in reasoning almost mechanically, by the eye, which otherwise would call into play the higher faculties of the brain. [...] It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case.
Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle -- they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
--An Introduction to Mathematics, 1911
Frank Herbert On Tyranny
If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain the you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.
"The Dosadi Lesson: A Gowachin Assessment"
The Dosadi Experiment
Frank Herbert On Zealots
Justice belongs to those who claim it, but let the claimant beware lest he create new injustice by his claim and thus set the bloody pendulum of revenge into its inexorable motion.
Gowachin Aphorism
The Dosadi Experiment
Frank Herbert On Perseverance
The day is short and the the work is great, and the workers are lasy, but the reward is large and our Master urges us to make haste.
"Writings of the Abbod Halmyrach"
The God Makers
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