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.
Robert Frost On Ragnarok
Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
William Blake On Revenge
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright,
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine, -
And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning, glad, I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
Sting On Divorce
The park is full of Sunday fathers and melted ice cream
A kid should be with his mother
Everybody knows that
What can a father do but baby-sit sometimes?
"I'm So Happy I Can't Stop Crying", EP
Audio Sample: Amazon
Some Smiting Is In Order
A Dutch reality show plans to have three people compete for the kidney of a terminally ill 37-year-old woman.
Frank Herbert On Glory (The Dosadi Experiment)
The Gowachin, a BuSab analysis
For the Gowachin, to stand alone against all adveristy is the most sacred moment of existence.
Enya On Honour (Caribbean Blue)
If every man says all he can,
if every man is true,
do I believe the sky above
is Caribbean blue.
Neil Asher On Trust (Cowl)
Sometime soon the sale would have to be made and in any such transaction there was always a point where one party must, however briefly, be prepared to trust the other party.
And it was in such brief intervals that Tack operated most efficiently.
David Carradine On Humanity (Kill Bill Vol. 2)
Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He's weak... he's unsure of himself... he's a coward.
Clark Kent is Superman's critique on the whole human race.
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.
