The Randymon Bash Blog

Recent Quotes

Without love intelligence is dangerous; without intelligence love is not enough.

– Ashley Montagu

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Boire du cafe empeche de dormir. Par contre, dormir empeche de boire du cafe.

-- Philippe Geluck

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The brighter the stupid burns, the more chance that someone will see the light.

-- D. C. Sessions <dcs@lumbercartel.com> 

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Are you a Masterdebator or a Cunning Linguist?

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Se, nella notte in cui concepi' il If, that night when she conceived duce, Donna Rosa, toccata da divina the Duce (Benito Mussolini), Donna luce, avesse dato al fabbro Rosa (the Duce’s Mother), touched predappiano invece della fica il by a divine inspiration, had given deretano, l'avrebbe presa in culo to the smith from Predappio (Duce’s quella sera Rosa sola e non dad was a smith, Predappio their l'Italia intera. town) instead of her pussy, her arse, who would have taken it up – poesia the butt that night (prendersela in antifascista culo = to be screwed) would have been Rosa only, and not all of Italy.

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The box of animal crackers said “Do not eat if the seal is broken.” I opened it up, and sure enough …

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Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

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If life gives you marmals, make marmalade.

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We live, as we dream – alone….

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(about the Library of Congress archiving all Twitter traffic) - “Sounds like a great (albeit slow) backup plan. Uuencode all your files, break them into short text lines and tweet them with serial numbers and checksums. Let the government be your file storage backup!

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I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.

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In the end, we’re all just water and old stars.

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You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

 -- Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio

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Qt-Gon Jinn: Do you hear that flushing sound? Jar-Jar Nokia: Nod Qt-Gon Jinn: That is the sound of you flushing your business down the toilet. Nemoidian Ballmer: BRING ME NEW ASSMONKEY! Jar-Jar Nokia: My fucked up! My fucked up!

-- Slash sig, regarding Nokia using Microsoft instead of QT

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After a while I walked over toward the gym. I was going to clean out my locker. No more exercising for me. People always talked about the good clean smell of fresh sweat. They had to make excuses for it. They never talked about the good clean smell of fresh shit. There was nothing really as glorious as a good beer shit - I mean after drinking twenty or twenty-five beers the night before. The odor of a beer shit like that spread all around and stayed for a good hour-and-a-half. It made you realize that you were really alive.

-- Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

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Apple Fanboy: Oh wow, look at those shiny new features in this new product I can buy right now but won’t really use and will restrict me in some horrible way.

MS Fanboy: Oh wow, look at those shiny new features MS is claiming will be in its product sometime soon but I’ve got to buy it right now and just take their word for it.

Linux Fanboy: Oh wow, look at those shiny new features that Gnome has taken away, KDE has added with a horrible skin and insane configuration and Enlightenment has had in alpha state for about a decade now!

BSD Fanboy: Oh wow, look at those shiny new features everyone else had for a decade but are really really well tested and secure so nobody can penetrate my system and learn my secret to eternal life!

Apple, MS and Linux fanboys: AAAAH, The undead! Run for your lives!

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A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.

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The three laws of thermodynamics: (1) You can’t win. (2) You can’t break even. (3) You can’t even quit.

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Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.

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Always listen to the experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done, and why. Then do it.

– Heinlein: Time Enough for Love

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“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

–Marshall McLuhan

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Reddit loves meat but hates farming Reddit hates corporations but loves products Reddit wonders why it can’t get girls, but hates everything that girls like and do Reddit loves diversity but hates religion Reddit believes in critical thinking, but is powerfully swayed by top voted comments Reddit is full of people who will argue points they don’t care about or believe in just so they can attempt to be right Reddit will go batshit insane if someone reposts their rage comic, but thinks downloading media from TPB is noble and Reddit has gotten much, much worse in the recent years

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As I see it, get Facebook and you get an unwanted email address. Get a Google email address and you get an unwanted social network with it.

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Firefox is the greatest browser, with advanced features to benefit every user at a profound spiritual level:

• Its memory bloat teaches us to be mindful of our resources, both within the computer, and our use of our resources in everyday outer life.
• Its slowness helps teach us patience.
• When the whole browser freezes up from a bit of incompetent CPU-thrashing javascript code running in one tab, it teaches us to be responsible for our own coding decisions and how they affect others.
• Its slow startup teaches us that wonderful things don’t happen instantly, and that we need to lose our attachment to time

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Stay away from Chrome - it feeds the ego by promoting our addiction to instant gratification

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We’ve seen the same thing in the American Congress and probably for the same reasons: the moderates, seeking consensus and pragmatism, drop out in frustration. The hardnosed radical nutjobs hang on tight to their ridiculous ideologies and scream and threaten until they get their way.

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Google Glass - At last a Segway for your face.

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Usenet: a herd of performing elephants with diarrhoea. Massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.

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Daybreak.

At windward passage, four hundred miles due east, the sun is rising. Wind east-northeast, thirty-eight knots, with gusts to forty-five: a gale.

Black waves, wind-feathered. White birds, dark birds.

The trade winds freshen at first light, and the sea rises in long ridges, rolling west.

    -- Peter Matthiessen, Far Tortuga

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It is far easier to spend a hundred years in jail, to climb a hundred mountains, than to try to persuade a stupid person of the truth.

   -- Pahlavan Mahmoud

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From the beginning it was a silly idea, without the slightest utilitarian purpose or merit. This, of course, I liked.

    -- Stuart Stevens

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The trouble with journeys nowadays is that they are easy to make but difficult to justify.

  -- Peter Fleming (early 1900s)

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We would never travel on the sea if we had no hope of telling about it later.

-- Blaise Pascal

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The temperature has risen to nineteen and the heat has drawn birds into the boughs of trees. The titmouse is the bravest, the wren the most cheerful. Oddly, the small creatures allow me greater proximity before flight. The large ones - deer, fox, the bears from home - all flee at my approach. The same is true of humanity. When we are small, we let others in close, then begin the gradual pushing away that so often leaves the old utterly alone.

– Chris Offutt, The Same River Twice

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The opacity of fresh snowfall unfolds like a silent fan. The wood-pile tarp is welded to the ground. I have begun to see pregnancy everywhere, the curve of a belly, the strain of release. Women give form to the language of life. Without them, men are mute. If fatherhood is compromise, then motherhood is sacrifice, an abandoning for the sacred, an act of heroism. Aztec women who died in childbirth went to the same exalted branch of heaven as warriors slain in battle.

– Chris Offutt, The Same River Twice %

Humans are the underclass of evolution. Every other creature was better equipped.

   -- Robert Pirsig

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When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied that it would be a good idea.

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Happiness is like a butterfly that, when diligently pursued, remains just out of reach, but should you stop chasing, may alight upon you for a moment.

  -- paraphrase of Nathaniel Hawthorn

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Wooten’s law: “The acquisition of uncommon knowledge inhibits the application of common sense.”

Referring, of course, to the computer, Wooten was quick to point out that prior to the computer age, engineers had to rely on such things as engineering judgment and common sense - a requirement which no longer exists. The classic statement which he made is applicable to any complex analysis: “The computer’s rapid solution of stupendous … (analyses) … renders obsolete the necessity of understanding them. No one need feel guilty of using simple solutions when the computer can make them extremely complicated. Anyone can plug a false assumption into an incorrect formula and, in a flash, arrive at a ridiculous answer, inaccurate to ten decimal places. (It has never been clear to how many places an incorrect answer must be carried to make it accurate).

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By channels of coolness the echoes are calling. And down the dim gorges I hear the creek falling: It lives in the mountain where moss and the sedges Touch with their beauty the banks and the ledges.

-- Henry Kendall

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One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict on our enemies.
– Aldous Huxley

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A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of exceticism.
– Aldous Huxley

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So we move down the empty road. I don’t want to own these prairies, or photograph them, or change them, or even stop, or even keep going. We are just going down the empty road. – Robert Pirsig

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It’s not a personality clash between them; it’s something else, for which neither is to blame, but for which neither has any solution, and for which I’m not sure I have any solution either, just ideas. – Robert Pirsig

The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away. I’m looking for the truth.’ – Robert Pirsig %

Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.

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Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. … When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it’s a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again in some other way, and again and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That’s never the way.

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The night was very gentle, and the dark transparent sea was cleft at our stern into two long green curtains of gossamer where our steering oars ignited the bioluminescence. – Ring of Fire %

In that Dragon’s eye which looked into me, as I hung precariously above it, I realized I had seen how old and strong is the Dragon’s history - and how much of its history is mine. For long as we may have been humans, and Tarsoids, and mammals and fish, our longest dream was as reptiles.

Komodo lies there to remind us, right now, wherever we are. – Ring of Fire

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You point to something as having Quality and the Quality tends to go away. Quality is what you see out of the corner of your eye. – Robert Pirsig

% You never gain something but that you lose something.

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The “Dark Ages” were merely the resumption of a natural way of life that had been momentarily interrupted by the Greeks.

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It is possible that this sort of movie fantasy, which is available to the solitary traveler, is one of the chief reasons for travel. She had cast herself in the role of leading lady in her search drama, and I gladly played my part. We were far from home: we could be anyone we wished. Travel offers a great occasion to the amateur actor. – Paul Thereaux

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The Celtic Rune of Hospitality We saw a stranger yesterday. We put food in the eating place, drink in the drinking place, music in the listening place. And with the sacred name of God, the stranger blessed us and our house our cattle and our dear ones. As the lark says in her song, often, often, often goes the Christ in the stranger’s guise.

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The problems were those which arise wherever a stable, collective system and one based on expansion and individual profit collide … To obtain respect in the native world people had to redistribute wealth; for esteem in the white world they had to hoard it. – Richard Wright

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It was a small tropical station in the north of Ceylon, smelling of soaked jungle and erupting drains, and with that decay that passes for charm in equatorial outposts. – Paul Thereaux

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It is ignominious when a person travels a great distance [just] to die.

% His face was grey, waxen with illness, and strained; he looked as if her were painfully swallowing the toad of death.

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Know what I herd? sheep Know what I saw? wood Know who I love? ewe. – miscellaneous personal ad from the Sun.

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To a young woman of an old fashion who loves art not for its own sake but because it enables life, who reads poetry not to kill time but to fill it with beautiful thoughts and who still believes in God and duty and immortal love I dedicate this book. – Henry Van Dyke, “The Poetry of Tennyson”

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You are a poet … not because you write stories, but because you understand and love nature. It doesn’t matter to most people that the wind sings in the trees or that a mountain shimmers in the sunlight. But you find life in all of this, a life you can partake of. – Hermann Hesse

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One night she came back from her daily walk stunned by the revelation that one could be happy not only without love, but despite it. – Love in the Time of Cholera

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Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies.

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Suddenly she sighed: “It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not.”

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Watching bulbous, sodden clouds, those dark sailors of the heavy sky, brush the snowy, veined mountain-tops and shroud the grey landscape below in dancing shadows and veils of wetness – journal, 1993

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It would have been more prudent to leave the day before. Yes, well it would have been prudent to stay at home. You have to let things go their own way, or why be here at all. – Jupiter’s Travels

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All the way I was saying goodbye. – Jupiter’s Travels %

Extreme situations always seem absurd until they happen. – Jupiter’s Travels %

Does it rain because you carry your umbrella, or because you don’t? It’s a personal matter depending on how you remember it. – Jupiter’s Travels

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There had been no awkwardness, no break even in the mood. The episode had seemed quite natural. It went one way, could as easily have gone another. I sat up with my back against a pillar and smoked another cigarette, lost in the mystery of it. – Jupiter’s Travels

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Thoreau: “We are in a great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” If Thoreau were alive today he would find full confirmation of his fears. Instant information is instantly obsolete. Only the most banal ideas can successfully cross great distances at the speed of light. And anything that travels very far very fast is scarcely worth transporting, especially the tourist.

-- Jupiter’s Travels

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I am learning, as I make my way through my first continent, that it is remarkably easy to do things, and much more frightening to contemplate them. – Jupiter’s Travels

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For me this is a landscape and a time to bank up courage in a craven heart, to carry a greater fund of joy into the next cloud of sorrow, to learn even to love the sorrow for the pleasure it divides, like the black notes of a keyboard, or hunger between meals. Perhaps even to discover that pain and pleasure, since they cannot exist without each other, are really the same thing. – Jupiter’s Travels

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Like all strong prejudices they not only prepared me for the worst. They paved the way. – Jupiter’s Travels

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… I felt myself to be the most privileged person on the earth to be able to pass through where others saw only normality, and to think myself in paradise. – Jupiter’s Travels %

… their happiness had an unusual clarity and depth, like a clear pool, that invited others to jump in and share.

-- Jupiter’s Travels

% [the monkeys] seemed so close to enlightenment, as though at any moment they might stumble over it and explode into consciousness. They experiment with any familiar object … just as a human baby does … And nothing comes of it. To be so close, yet never pierce the veil! I looked at myself in the same light, as a monkey given my life to play with, prodding it, trying to stretch it into different shapes, dropping it and picking it up again, suspecting always that it must have some use and meaning, tantalized and frustrated by it but unable to make sense of it. – Jupiter’s Travels %

The vital instrument of change is detachment and traveling alone was an immense advantage. At a time of change the two aspects of a person exist simultaneously; and with a caterpillar turning into a butterfly there is the image of what you were and the image of what you are about to be, but those who know you well see you only as you were. They are unwilling to recognize change. By their actions they will try to draw you back into your familiar ways.

-- Jupiter’s Travels

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The truth obviously does not reveal itself unaided to humans. It has to be uncovered by an effort of consciousness. Or more likely, it exists only in human consciousness. Without man around to recognize it there is no truth, no God. – Jupiter’s Travels %

I smiled to myself at the sight of this money, ‘O drug’ said I aloud, ‘what art thou good for? Thou are not worth to me to me, no, not the taking off of the ground; one of those knives is worth all this heap; I have no manner of use for thee, e’en remain where thou art, and go to the bottom as a creature whose life is not worth saving.’ However, upon second thoughts, I took it away … – Robinson Crusoe %

There is an intense but simple thrill in setting off in the morning on a mountain trail knowing that everything you need is on your back. It is a confidence in having left all inessentials behind and of entering a world of natural beauty which has not been violated, where money has no value, and possessions are a dead weight. The person with the fewest possessions is the freest: Thoreau was right. – Paul Theroux %

From what I have said of the natives of New Holland they may appear to be some of the most wretched people on earth. But in reality they are far happier than we Europeans, being wholly unacquainted not only with the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in Tranquility. The Earth and the Sea of their own accord furnish them with all things necessary in life. – Captain Cook %

And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die.

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Whatever this man is - wanderer or evil monk, or saint or sorcerer - he seems touched by what Tibetans call the “crazy wisdom”: he is free.

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All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow: acquisitions end in dispersion, buildings end in destruction; meetings, in separation; births, in death. Knowing this, one should from the very first renounce acquisition and heaping-up, and building and meeting, and … set about realizing the Truth … Life is short, and the time of death is uncertain; so apply yourselves to meditation … “ – Milarepa %

You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars ….

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When you are ready, the teacher will appear. – Buddhism (from Peter Matthiessen)

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… Followers of trails and of seasons, breakers of camp in the little dawn wind, seekers of watercourses over the wrinkled rind of the world, o seekers, o finders of reasons to be up and gone …” – Saint John Perse

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It was at that moment that I realized that while it is possible to love two people at the same time, in different ways, in the heart, it is not possible to do so in the world. – David Leavitt %

Playfully, absently, without even giving thought to repercussions, she spoke right back to him. A conversation above the spoken words, beyond their meanings. Some folk call it chemistry, some call it lust; some call it honesty.”
– Randall Kenan

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My Sorrow, when she’s here with me, Thinks these dark days of autumn rain Are beautiful as days can be; She loves the bare, the withered tree; She walks the sodden pasture lane …

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There’s two ways of living here now. There’s the old way, look out for your family, die where you was born, fish, cut your wood, keep a garden, make do with what you got. Then there’s the new way - Work out, have a job, somebody tell you what to do, commute, your brother’s in South Africa, your mother’s in Regina, buy every goddamn cockadoodle piece of Japanese crap you can. Leave home. Go off to look for work. And some has a hard time of it. – the Shipping News

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Hard for Bunny, who still measured events on a child’s scale of fair and unfair. – the Shipping News %

How hard it must be to have to appear tougher than you are, and to go round the stray corners of the world with people whose hearts are shallow as far as you are concerned; and to have nothing you wish to be or do that you will risk your life for the reaching of; and to have a face that is pretty only for a time.

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How lucky is a stream, I thought as I lay idly, that has no need to repeat its rounds over the same ground like most of us, looking for something it never finds, but knows its way, and eats through the hills that impede it.

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A very small boy came to drive away the black cows grazing at a distance. Air and water and the busy grass fell silent. In the thickening velvet of the night the moon was soon climbing her steep invisible stair.

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Time and change … [are] visible anywhere and could be seen every morning as one walks to one’s office, since time and space are fluid along Thames as along Euphrates, and everything one looks at is transition. But such basic facts are what the human race, as soon as it has any initiative at all, pathetically smothers out of sight.

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Ever since the tower of Babel was built in the first adventure against space, people have been aware at intervals of the supremacy of Man. It remains perhaps to be proved, but meanwhile the landscape of our age advertises it, regretfully but with success, pushing the more permanent background out of sight. The mountains are there, but the factories take the foreground, and the seaside villa intrudes before the sea; and it is only in untamed corners that one can forget - or possibly remember - to whom the world belongs. The ‘underdeveloped countries’ (the arrogance of this term was almost incredible) - those poor underdeveloped countries may console themselves with the reflection that no great religion was ever born in a landscape whose foregrounds are completely occupied by men.

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The best thing about him was his wife and the best thing about his wife was a girlfriend named Dezi Duz who did whenever she could and had a Wac uniform that Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife put on every weekend and took off every weekend for every cadet in her husband’s squadron who wanted to creep into her.

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… then drew back the coverlet and stretched herself out luxuriously with an expression of feline expectation. She beckoned to him longingly, with a husky laugh.

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Her own body was such a familiar and unremarkable thing to her that she was puzzled by the convulsive ecstasy men could take from it, by the intense and amusing need they had merely to touch it, to reach out urgently and press it, squeeze it, pinch it, rub it. She did not understand Yossarian’s lust; but she was willing to take his word for it.

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… beckoned him into bed beside her with that look of simpering idiocy of a woman in heat.

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Nately had gone clear out of his mind. He wanted them all to fall in love right away and get married … Nately saw it all very clearly. Love had transmogrified him into a romantic idiot.

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It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret.

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… And with his ear to the reed-stems he caught, at intervals, something of what the wind went whispering so constantly among them.

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Conversation was impossible for a long time; and when it was slowly resumed, it was that regrettable sort of conversation that results from talking with your mouth full.

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But it was good to think he had this place to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again, and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.

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To his horror he recollected that he had left both coat and waistcoat behind him in his cell, and with them his pocket-book, money, keys, watch, matches, pencil-case - all that makes life worth living, all that distinguished the many-pocketed from the no-pocketed productions that hop or trip about permissively, unequipped for the real contest.

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It is all very well, when you have a light heart, and a clear conscience, and money in your pocket, and nobody scouring the country for you to drag you off to prison again, to follow where the road beckons and points, not caring wither.

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The Mole was a good listener, and Toad, with no one to check his statements or to criticize in an unfriendly spirit, rather let himself go. Indeed, much that he related belonged more properly to the category of what-might-have-happened- had-I-only-thought-of-it-in-time-instead-of-ten-minutes-afterwards. Those are always the best and raciest adventures: and why should they not be truly ours, as much as the somewhat inadequate things that really come off?

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I remember the old doctor, ‘It would be interesting to watch the mental changes of individuals on the spot.’ I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting. – Heart of Darkness %

Perhaps I had a little fever, too. One can’t live with one’s finger everlastingly on one’s pulse. I had often ‘a little fever,’ or a little touch of other things - the playful paw-strokes of the wilderness, the preliminary trifling before the more serious onslaught which came in due course.

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There was no sign on the face of nature of this amazing tale that was not so much told as suggested to me in desolate exclamations, completed by shrugs, in interrupted phrases, in hints ending in deep sighs.

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It was enough, when you thought it over, to give you the idea of an immense, potent, and invisible hand thrust into the ant-heap of the earth, laying hold of shoulders, knocking heads together, and setting the unconscious faces of the multitude towards inconceivable goals and in undreamt-of directions.

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The seamen were glad to get back into the alleyway. Secretly each of them thought at the last moment he could rush out on deck - and that was a comfort. There is something horribly repugnant in the idea of being drowned under a deck.

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There was an aneroid glass screwed above the couch. He turned that way, struck another match, and discovered the white face of the other instrument looking at him from the bulkhead, meaningly, not to be gain-said, as though the wisdom of men were made unerring by the indifference of matter.

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He [put the box of matches back] now, but before he removed his hand it occurred to him that perhaps he would never have occasion to use that box anymore. The vividness of the thought checked him and for an infinitesimal fraction of a second his fingers closed again on the small object as though it had been the symbol of all these little habits that chain us to the weary round of life. He released it at last, and letting himself fall on the settee, listened for the first sounds of returning wind.

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Environmentalists, naturalists, and conservationists are often asked to defend their concerns for the well-being of other species of living things besides man. The question is, ‘what good are they?’ meaning, of course, what good are they to man, because if one asked what good they were to the planet, one could just as legitimately ask the same question about mankind. – the View from Great Gull

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We are frightened by the power of nature, discomfited by the weather, confused by the unpredictable in our environment; we want to live more comfortably, to enjoy life more and enjoy it longer, to travel faster and more safely. So we invent and construct things that have the effect of putting bulwarks and distances between ourselves and the earth. This gives us a feeling of safety, of mastery over nature, and that feeling tends to separate us spiritually and psychologically from our roots.

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Now fewer and fewer men, using bigger and bigger machines and increasing amounts of chemicals, supply food for more and more people; another force thrusting man away from the reality of the planet - particularly in those nations that have the greatest impact on the planet.

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‘Free as a bird’ is an expression in which a bird might find ironical amusement, especially as coming from man, the only animal who has, in his individual life, succeeded in achieving some measure of independence from the discipline of nature. – Louis J Halle, Jr.

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The cultural upcurve in society hasn’t kept pace with the technological upcurve … our spiritual relation to the planet is not yet scarcely so so sophisticated as our mechanical relation.

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… nibble at the edges of the unknown …

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There has been in recent years excessive emphasis on a citizen’s rights, and inadequate stress upon his duties and responsibilities. – Paxton Blair %

Animals, because they lack opposable thumbs, carry things in their mouths. Animals release their possessions because it’s too difficult to carry them, and so there isn’t any temptation to accumulate. Being able to grasp leads inevitably and naturally to being able to hold and then to being able to keep. And so humans like me fill our holes with what attracts us, and animals continue to be, as they have been for generations, unfettered.

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The secret of Happiness is Freedom, and the secret of Freedom, Courage. – Thucydides %

All our discontents about what we want appeared to me to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have. – Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

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Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I ask, the heaven above And the road below me. – Robert Louis Stevenson %

Travelling in the company of those we love is home in motion. – Leigh Hunt, English writer %

The sea contains many surprises for him who has his floor on a level with the surface and drifts along slowly and noiselessly. A sportsman who breaks his way through the woods may come back and say that no wild life is to be seen. Another may sit down on a stump and wait, and often rustlings and cracklings will begin and curious eyes peer out. So it is on the sea, too. We usually plow across it with roaring engines and piston-strokes, with the water foaming round our bow. Then we come back and say that there is nothing to see far out on the ocean. – Thor Heyerdahl, Kon Tiki

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The closer we came into contact with the sea and what had its home there, the loess stranger it became and the more at home we ourselves felt. And we learned to respect the old primitive peoples who lived in close converse with the Pacific and therefore knew it from a quite different standpoint from our own. True, we have now estimated its salt content and given tunnies and dolphins Latin names. They had not done that. But, nevertheless, I am afraid that the picture the primitive peoples had of the sea was a truer one than ours.

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It is clear that what he hated the most – what all travellers hate - was not being taken seriously. – Paul Thereaux, Happy Isles of Oceania %

Ah, Davidson, woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.“ – J Conrad, Victory %

Had the girl been trusted or mistrusted by that man? Whatever it was, it was bound to be wholly! With women there could be no half-measures. %

Heyst envied the Chinaman’s obedience to his instincts, the powerful simplicity of purpose which made his existence appear almost automatic in the mysterious precision of its facts.

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You don’t take a woman into a desert jungle without being made sorry for it sooner or later, in one way or another, and … being a gentleman only makes it worse. – J Conrad, Victory

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And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die.

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Whatever this man is - wanderer or evil monk, or saint or sorcerer - he seems touched by what Tibetans call the “crazy wisdom”: he is free.

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All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow: acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings end in destruction; meetings, in separation; births, in death. Knowing this, one should from the very first renounce acquisition and heaping-up, and building and meeting, and … set about realizing the Truth … Life is short, and the time of death is uncertain; so apply yourselves to meditation … – Milarepa %

When you are ready, the teacher will appear – Buddhism %

“Ladies of easy virtue are also there professionally” – euphemism of the month, Heinrich Haarer, Seven Years in Tibet

% A relationship, you’ve decided, is not something you need like a drug, but a journey, a circumstance, a choice you might make on a particular day. – Cowboys are My Weakness, Pam Houston %

“You like the sea, captain?” “Yes, I love it! The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the ‘Living Infinite,’ as one of your poets has said … The globe began with the sea, so to speak; and who knows if it will not end with it? In it is supreme tranquility.” – Jules Verne

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The earth does not want new continents but new men.

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Ah! it is a fine death for a sailor!“ said Captain Nemo, at last. "A coral tomb makes a quiet grave; and I trust that I and my comrades will find no other.”

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I never could gamble. I like to work things out in advance, but it bothers me to think of what I might have been missing. I’ve done too much hacking away against the grain of life. Without all that solemn effort, maybe, I could have gone further, faster, easier. Remember what my headmaster said thirty years ago, that tar-stained old walrus: ‘Simon, you think too much.’ “ – Ted Simon

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At the time it seemed to me that what I wanted was to have my problem solved quickly and to get on my way … what happened on the way, who I met, all that was incidental. I had not quite realized that the interruptions were the journey.

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The gods have a great sense of humor, don’t they? If you lack the iron and the fizz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don’t be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked. – Tim Robbins %

‘I knew you would follow me,’ she said, with the kind of confidence some women exude when they sense that they have made a clean capture with the vaginal net.

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To eliminate the agitation and disappointment of desire, we need to awaken to the fact that we have everything we want and need right now.

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Madame Lily Devalier always asked ‘where are you?’ in a way that insinuated that there were only two places on earth that one could be: New Orleans and somewhere ridiculous.

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The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.

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[Their business] did alright. Their marriage did all right, too, which is to say the champagne was far from flat, although there were fewer bubbles per sip than there had been before the arguing started. They argued always about the same thing. It’s best that way. If lovers have to argue, they might as well specialize.

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Like that rarity, the wise husband, it was strong enough to possess its mate, secure enough to allow her her freedom.

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The last man with whom she had lain was a twenty-year-old dishwasher from El Papa Muerta. During a single evening, he had made love to her four times - for three minutes each time. Perhaps it is noteworthy, she thought, that the performance of a young man in bed is roughly the same length as a rock song on AM radio.

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Her vulnerability to Wiggs was opening her up (as voluntary vulnerability often can) in unexpected ways.

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Nostalgia and hope stand equally in the way of authentic experience.

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At birth, we emerge from dream soup. At death, we sink back into dream soup. In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land. Life is a portage.

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The most intense spiritual experiences all seem to involve the suspension of time. It is the feeling of being outside of time, of being timeless, that is the source of ecstasy in meditation, chanting, hypnosis, and psychedelic drug experiences. Although it is briefer and less lucid, a timeless, egoless state (the ego exists in time, not space) is achieved in sexual orgasm, which is precisely why orgasm feels so good.

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Material things anchor one in life much more firmly than the purists would like to believe. – Tom Robbins

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… nor was it that headstrong member with which every conceivable stuffable orifice somewhere sometime has been stuffed.

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South Richmond was a neighborhood of … men who knew more about the carburetor than the clitoris.

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During the week however, [she] used the vaginal wrench to slowly, gently turn her husband’s objections down to a mere trickle.

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[I’m not] altogether certain that there is any such thing as exaggeration. Our brains permit us to use such a wee fraction of their resources that, in a sense, everything we experience is a reduction.

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A lot of life boils down to the question of whether a person is going to be able to realize his fantasies, or else end up surviving only through compromises he can’t face up to. The way I figure it, Heaven and Hell are right here on earth. Heaven is living in your hopes and Hell is living in your fears.

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[Our sex] is always sort of desperate. There’s such need. We cling to each other, like we were holding on with our genitals to keep from falling into emptiness, a kind of lonely void. I have a feeling that it’s like that with a lot of lovers. – Tom Robbins

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He who travels fastest travels alone, but he who travels best travels with a companion, if not always a lover. – Paul Fussell, Abroad

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It is better to travel alone than with a bad companion. – Senegalese proverb

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And as the months passed, sensations sometimes developed into emotions, passions settled down into feelings. – Pico Iyer %

It has been said that the greatest curse to each of the South Sea Islands was the first man who discovered it.

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At sunset they were both out of sight, and we were once more upon the ocean, where sky and water meet.

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There is probably so much of excitement in prolonged expectation that the quiet realizing of it produces a momentary stagnation of feeling as well as effort. – Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

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… if I did not leap at once, I should never leap at all. I bent low on my knees and flung myself forth, with that kind of anger of despair that has sometimes stood me in stead of courage.

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I had become increasingly infuriated by the freedom Muslim men allowed themselves with Western women. To be so oppressive to your own, and so hypocritically free with others, and with apparently no idea of, or attempt to understand, other ways of living, seems common to mankind. I felt no remorse at all for having slammed into Jenny’s attacker. In fact he was lucky that some of the other townspeople separated us, apologizing for his behavior. – Nick Danziger

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The time finally came to depart. At least two hundred mujaheddin gathered to bid me farewell. For the first time in my life I felt as if I had shared contact with a lot of people, but the pleasure this gave me was touched by sadness and even guilt. The westerner’s disease of visiting, doing one’s bit and then leaving. ‘When will you come back?’ they asked me. What could I tell them?

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The mens' faces reflected the hardness of their lives: carrying expressions that looked unable to convey extremes of delight or misery, but which were frozen into resignation. The endurance of the human spirit.

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As I left for the station, she whispered to me, ‘I won’t say goodbye.’ Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing back in England. But perhaps it is as well to recognize that dreams can only ever be dreams. – Nick Danziger %

So many worlds, so much to do, So little done, such things to be. – Alfred Lord Tennyson %

The moon sails overhead, from the tops of the pines to the roof of the hotel, as if it were part of the illumination of the garden. It looks domestic and small among the Afghan mountains: and indeed, before the scientific age that is turning it to its original dust and ashes, what brilliant institution first guessed it to be bigger than any other lamp?

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Lydie, his wife, dipping into the household world where someone has to see about the dinners, made an art of the average life. – Ella Maillart %

As a hot mouth warms a cold spoon, Petal warmed Quoyle.

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But the idea of the north was taking him. He needed something to brace against.

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He liked the rich taste of life so well himself he wished for an entree or two for Quoyle. %

And she was with him again, Petal, like a persistent song phrase, like a few stubborn lines of verse memorized in childhood. The needle was stuck.

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The world was all knots and lashing once - flex and give, that as the way it went before the brute force of nails and screws.

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I knew I had to have a boat. I was in despair. You may think that the equation is ‘boat and water.’ It’s not. It’s ‘money and boat.’ The water is not really necessary. That’s why you see so many boats in boatyards. – the Shipping News

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To my readers young and old - a flowne sheate, a faire winde, a boune voyage.

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Dream dreams then write them aye, but live them first. – Samuel Elito Morison (1887-1976: sailor, historian) %

And I say what and she says I think you’re full of shit And I say baby you understand me. – Raymond Carver %

Keep in mind always the present you are constructing. It should be the future you want. %

And at a lake by Meredith on an August night gone by, a loon called for his lover while stars fell from the sky. He would listen for an answer and only hear the wind. But the stars appeared to like him for quite a few dropped in. – Dean Grodzins in his comic ‘Tangents’

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Usenet is a dinosaur too stupid to know it’s dead. The last ‘evolution’ Usenet had was yEnc. This antique client from 2002 supports that. There’s still some jackhole troll trying to convince people yEnc is a virus. 90% of today’s internet users would look at you like you’d grown a second nose if you asked them what Usenet was. Even the pedophiles have been run off Usenet. All that’s left are pirates, spammers and the few oblivious dinosaurs standing in the swamp watching the pretty light coming down from the heavens to obliterate them.

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“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.” – Carl Bass CEO Autodesk %

The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.

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Putting your data in the cloud is like sending your teenage daughter backpacking in a 3rd world country with a pimp.

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Diplomacy is the art of letting the other party have things your way. – Daniele Vare

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Why do programmers confuse Halloween and Christmas?

Because DEC 25 is OCT 31

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Overheard in New York

Bimbo tourist #1: Anyway, so when he pulled it out of me it made this farting noise, and I know it wasn’t a fart because it didn’t smell, and… It was just really embarrassing. Bimbo tourist #2: Quip. Bimbo tourist #1: What? Bimbo tourist #2: A quip. The farting noise, it’s called a ‘quip.’ Bimbo tourist #1: Oh, they have a name for it? Wow. Bimbo tourist #2: Oh, totally. It happens to a lot of people. Stranger: Um, that’s not right. Bimbo tourist #2: Excuse me, sir? Stranger: No, it’s ‘queef.’ Bimbo tourist #2: Wait, what? Bimbo tourist #1: I think he’s saying his name is ‘Queef’ or something. Bimbo tourist #2: Oh, sorry. Excuse me, Queef? Stranger: No… Oh, lord. The sound, it’s ‘queef.’ Bimbo tourist #2: Who’s a ‘queef?’ What’s going on? Bimbo tourist #1: I think he’s one of those crazy subway guys you hear about. I think he’s telling us he’s gay. Stranger: I can hear you, and I’m not… What? That’s ‘queer,’ you ingrate! Bimbo tourist #1: Here’s some money for you, sir. Buy your boyfriend a nice grocery cart or something. Stranger: What?! Does it look like I’m homeless to you? I’m wearing fucking YSL over here… I ain’t queer and I ain’t homeless. You ignorant, you skinny, Paris Hilton-wannabe whores. All I was saying to you was that when your sleazy-ass friend over here pulled her boyfriend’s dick out of her STD-ridden pussy, the word… Bimbo tourist #1: I’m not following… Is he speaking Cockney or something? Bimbo tourist #2: I don’t know. Are you allowed to mace crazy hobos? Stranger: …I’m not fucking crazy! Bimbo tourist #2: Of course you aren’t, sir. Passenger: Oh, shut your mouth, both of ya, or I’m gonna whoop both your scrawny asses, you hear? Stranger: Thank you. All I was saying was… Old lady: Ah, hell no! Can’t you see this conversation has gone past anyone in this damn subway’s comprehension? Know when to drop it, brother. Know when to drop it. Bimbo tourist #2: [Mouthing] Oh my god. Bimbo tourist #1: I know. That was intense. Stranger, muttering to himself: … Last time I ever take a subway… Unbelievable shit I put up with… Fucking Civics… Unreliable fuckers…

–L train

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Substitute teacher: How do you spell ‘attendance?’ Student: Oh, why? Are you doing a crossword puzzle? Substitute teacher: I’m taking attendance; what the fuck do you think I’m doing?

–Stuyvesant High School

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Mom to a seven-year-old kid on school bus: Fucking animal, I’ll fucking kill you! Seven-year-old bully: Suck my dick, you ugly bitch! Mom to son: Every fucking day! I can’t stand this shit!

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Black customer: Give me a yellow cash card, my brother. Middle Eastern owner: What’d you call me? Black customer: I said ‘my brother.’ Middle Eastern owner: No, no, no. We are different. Black customer: No, we’re not – we all come from the same place. We have the same blood. Middle Eastern owner: No, your blood is black – your blood is shit. Black customer: No, my blood is blue just like yours. Besides, if I don’t come here to your store to spend money, how are you going to afford the bombs to blow up buildings?

% Customer: Do you have pancetta? Deli guy: We have white cetta and orange cetta. [“cheddah”] Customer: Okay. Do you have prosciutto? %

Chick #1: So, Fred* and I got in a fight again last night, but we made up just as fast as it all started. I told him that I would let him fuck me in the ass if we can stop fighting for a month. Chick #2: Oh, yeah, good idea! That’ll work! %

Boyfriend: I’m sorry, I just can’t be with you anymore. You’re too clingy. Girlfriend: I’m not clingy! I fucked, like, ten other guys! Boyfriend: While we were dating? Girlfriend: Whatever, it was because you’re not that good in bed. Oh, yeah, I faked all my orgasms, by the way. And my boobs? –Aren’t water balloons! Boyfriend: Dude. First of all, we’re on a motherfucking-packed subway. Second of all, being a crazy bitch isn’t going to help your case. Girlfriend starts crying hysterically: You can’t break up with me! I love you! I love you! I love you! Stranger, to boyfriend: If you’re thinking of killing yourself after this, I sell knives.

%

Girl: He was wearing a t-shirt that said ‘My Jewish Mother Gave Me Two Options: Law school or Medical school.’ Guy: I like that. I should make a shirt for my friend that says ‘My Irish Catholic Mother Gave Me Two Options: Marry the Asshole Who Knocked Me Up and Live a Life of Alcoholic Domestic Violence or Join the Sisters of Saint Ignatius.’ ‘Cause clearly she chose neither. Girl: What do you mean? Guy: She said, 'To hell with this religious bullshit,’ had an abortion, got her MBA, and is now a Junior VP at a Midtown PR firm. Girl: Are you trying to say that religion is bullshit? Guy, patting girl on head: No, sweetie. You go find yourself that guy wearing the Jewish mother t-shirt and you’ll be fine.

%

Waitress: Hi, sweetie, how are you?! Can I get you some more coffee, sweetie? Sweetie, you look like you’ve had a rough night, can I get you something else? Queer looking up at waitress for a silent minute: Darling, I really hope this is your first day, ‘cause clearly you are not skilled in the art of serving New Yorkers. I don’t know how they do things down South, but here in the city you ask us what we want, you bring it to us, and you walk away. You don’t make small talk, you don’t ask what’s wrong, and you sure as fuck don’t call us 'Sweetie.’ Get it? Waitress: Well, screw you! I don’t need to sit here and listen to some bratty– Queer, clapping: –Yes! Just like that! Except next time, instead of ‘Screw you,’ I’d say ‘Fuck you.’ Much more effective. Now, may I please have a cup of coffee? Thanks, Georgia.

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Chick: Good-bye [departs train]. Guy #1: Good-bye. Guy #2: Eddie*, your sister is really pretty. Guy #3: Don’t call her that – ‘pretty’ is something you say about nice girls, not whores like that. Eddie: What are you talking about? Guy #3: Ed, don’t take it out on me, but at Dave’s birthday party your sister was in the bedroom working for 10 dollars. Eddie: … I’m gonna kill Dave. Why didn’t you tell me about this?! Guy #3: Because she was right there! [Silence, then Eddie departs.] Guy #2: 10 dollars? What’s her phone number? I’ve got 10 dollars. Guy #3: I know, best 10 bucks I ever spent.

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Kid: Dad, what’s a novel? Dad: It’s a story written down in a book. Kid: What’s a short story? Dad, staring at kid: Are you freakin' kidding me?

–Father Demo Square

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Thug #1: Damn, how come every time a nigga tries to ride the subway the damn cops got to search ‘im? Thug #2: Um, I dunno, maybe 'cause every time you see a cop, you yell, 'Oh, shit, the po-lice!’ Fuckin' dumbass. That wasted 10 fuckin' minutes! I’m not ridin' the train wit' you no more. Thug #1: Hey, it ain’t my fault! I’m from the projects. That’s, like, what we do!

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Preppy guy waiting for walk signal: Hi there. Hot girl: Um, do I know you? Preppy guy: No, I was just being friendly… Hot girl: Oh, yeah? Well then why don’t you say hi to her, too? [Points to fat chick nearby.] Preppy guy, to himself: God, I hate New Yorkers…

% Guy #1: Dude, let’s go see Fiddler on the Roof. I heard it’s sick. Guy #2: Oh, that’s the sequel to The Wizard of Oz, right? With the witch of the East… Right? Guy #1: Let’s go get high. Guy #2: Okay.

% Thug #1: Yo, fuck them ‘Free Yayo’ t-shirt whack shits. Thug #2: Them shits should say ‘Free Us from Yayo’ and on the back some ‘Whackness is a Crime’ shit. Cooold blooded! What ya’ll think? Thug #3: Some of you niggas need to get t-shirts that say ‘Free Us from Illiteracy and Ignorance.’

%

Drunk girl, clearly underage: Hahaha… Drunk man, half-carrying her: Come on, let’s go get you pregnant. Drunk girl, gasping happily: I love babies!

–Grand Central

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Lady holding child’s hand: If one more person bumps into me today I am going to fucking kill them. Passerby: Good, lady, teach your child to be an asshole just like you. Kid: Fuck you, asshole! Passerby: See!

–Subway, 86th St

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Arrogant freshman: Well, I find the whole drafting process a little counter-redundant. Writing professor: No, it’s productive. Arrogant freshman: I tend to disagree. I think it’s counter-redundant. Writing professor: No, the word! The phrase is ‘counter-productive.’ [Mumbles] Fucking smartass.

–NYU

%

Woman: I’m sorry, I have to admit, I’ve been reading over your shoulder. I kept seeing the word ‘creepy,’ and I was intrigued. Girl: Oh, yeah, it’s feedback from a writing workshop I’m in. Woman: For a story you wrote? Girl: Yeah. Woman: It sounds so interesting based on what people wrote about it. I’d love to read it some day! What’s it about? Girl: It’s a necrophilia love story…

%

TA: Has anyone ever read Madame Bovary? [Class remains silent.] What the fuck do they have you guys reading these days?! I’m leaving.

–Sociology class, NYU

% Expert conversationalist: I’m just going to sit here and read. You can talk to me while I’m reading if you want.

–Cafe Henri, West Village

% Girl: The stupid freshmen are so irresponsible with their readings that the teacher has to give us a quiz on the readings every week! So now I actually have to have this all read before class.

–Washington Square Park

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Redhead on cell: I spoke to Mom today. She is writing a book! The Jewish Girl’s Guide to Riker’s Island.

–53rd & 3rd

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20-ish girl on cell: I don’t like this Barnes and Noble! All they have are books!

–Barnes & Noble

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Suit: I was up in Toronto last week. It was nice, but it was really cold. Guy: Yeah, it’s beautiful up there, but they get winter really early. It’s like that Shakespeare line, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ Suit: [Befuddled silence.]

–LIRR into Penn Station

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Teen girl #1: I have to write an expository essay on something that has impacted my life. Teen girl #2: Has anyone in your family ever died? Teen girl #1: Yeah, but no one, like, close to me. Teen girl #2: Do you have any, like, retards in your family? Teen girl #1: No, but I did meet a retard one time… He was, like, really retarded, too. Maybe I’ll write about that…

–F train

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Five-year-old boy: Daddy, why is Mommy crying? Unemotional father: Son, your mother is crying because you are an asshole.

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Woman: Do you have a non-fiction section? Book guy: Well, everything that’s not fiction is non-fiction. [Over] there’s cooking, and there’s history. Woman: No, that’s not what I asked. Do you have a section for non-fiction? Book guy: Well, there are no non-fiction novels. Everything here that’s not a novel is non-fiction. Woman: But you don’t have a non-fiction section? Book guy: No. Everything that isn’t fiction is non-fiction.

–Barnes & Noble, Staten Island

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Girl #1: Did you hook up with Josh last weekend? Girl #2: Yeah, we got really drunk and I blew him and we did anal. I dunno if I want to lose my virginity with him, though.

–86th St, Bay Ridge

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Now there’s a good start for your morning. Aren’t you glad you aren’t the father of a future 17 year old girl?

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Mom: So, you’re gay, right? Son: No, Mom, I’m not gay. Mom: Yes, you are. I’ve seen your clothes. Son: All the guys wear these. Mom: All the gay ones, maybe. Son: Go away. Mom: If you were straight, you wouldn’t have cried so much after you were pushed out of my vagina. Son: Actually, I think that proves my straightness. No straight guy could look at your cunt and not cry.

%

Ghetto mama: Gimme some of yo' Skittles, boy. Little boy: No, they be my Skittles. Ghetto papa: Boy, you best to give yo' mama some Skittles or yo' ass is nevah gonna taste that rainbow again.

%

Man: Do you wanna ride in the sidecar of my motorbike? My son does that all the time. We go really fast! Teen girl: Yeah, sure, I’d love to go in your pre-war sidecar. With a bit of luck all my friends will see me with some crazy bald man and that will be the end of my life. No, thanks!

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Little girl singing in stall: It’s okay that Mommy is a man, Mommy is a man, Mommy is a man! It’s okay that… Mom: Brooke! Jesus Christ! Little girl: Oh, Mommy is a man la la la la la! Can we get tacos?

%

Lesbo: I’m just sick of everyone stereotyping and treating people based on race, sexual orientation, or whatever. Staight woman: Yeah, it’s hard to avoid. Lesbo: I know! And it’s like 2007! Everyone’s gay or lesbian. The stereotyping is everywhere – school, the gym, work. Straight woman: Oh, where do you work? Lesbo: Home Depot.

%

Hoochie #1: Wait, he has a kid? Hoochie #2: Yeah! Crazy, right? Hoochie #1: So, are you going to be a step-mommy? Hoochie #2: No, no, no… Not a step-mommy. I’m the slutty, hot, 25-year-old that fucks Daddy.

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Hipster girl #1: I was blowing him and it was taking, like, 20 minutes, so I finally told him to hurry up since my jaw was hurting. Hipster girl #2: I hate that! How can they take that long to just finish? Suit nearby: If you would do it right, it would only take two minutes.

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Coworker #1: So what’ve you been up to? Coworker #2: The usual. Just whacked off. Coworker #1: Dude, you’re on speakerphone.

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Schoolgirl #1: You know that tall short blond girl? Schoolgirl #2: You just described about 250 girls in our school. Schoolgirl #1: Um… the one who isn’t a whore. Schoolboy: That narrows it down to about five.

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Suit: Hey, do you have a light? Polite Englishman: Sorry, I don’t smoke. Suit: I asked for a light, not your fucking life story.

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Black guy: Why would a young black girl dye her hair blonde? Looks terrible, y'know. Whitey: Um, yeah. Bad idea. Black guy: Bitch looked like a burnt grilled cheese sandwich.

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Fat guy: I love you. Cute girl: Do you really mean what you say, or are you just saying it? Fat guy: Of course I mean it. [They make out, then chick leaves.] What a dumb bitch.

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Italian conductor over loudspeaker: Everyone, get the fuck away from the doors and get on this fucking train. Every fucking day the same shit. You’re only hurting yourselves, morons! Fucking inconsiderate assholes. You either get on or get the fuck off! Conductor #2: Mike, man, come on. Italian conductor: Fuck this, man. We’re going express!

–7 train, Junction Blvd

Man, slamming on hood of taxi inching forward: Hey! I’m walkin' here! [Turns to people behind him] Where’s that from? Lady passerby: Midnight Cowboy!

–50th & Broadway

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Teen girl #1: How many guys have you slept with? Teen girl #2: Let’s see… There was the rape – haha, remember that? I don’t count him. Then there were the two guys I had butt sex with. Let’s not count that either. I’d say about nine? I can’t remember the exact number. Teen girl #1: Oh, you’re fine, then.

%

Toddler in stroller: Fuck you! Hahaha! Fuck you! Hahaha! Tourist mom: Did that baby just say ‘fuck you’? This is the tenth time we’ve been to the city, and I’ve never seen anything that odd. Tourist daughter: We are on Canal Street, Mom. Tourist mom: This is very true. Way to go, stroller kid! Yeah!

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White mom: Which kitty is your favorite? Little girl holding book of baby animals: The black one! Mom: The black one? He sure is a cute kitty. Little girl, loudly: Once you go black, you never go back! Passing thug, flashing her a thumbs-up: Word! White mom: I don’t care what your father says, we are so moving to Westchester.

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Man #1: What is going on here? Man #2: They are filming the new Sex in the City movie with Sarah Jessica Parker. They have the entrance to the subway blocked off. Man #1: Wonderful. I wouldn’t even know what Sarah Jessica Parker looks like. Woman nearby: Hi. I’m Sarah Jessica Parker. Man #1: Nice to meet you. Can I go home now? Sarah Jessica Parker: Sure, go ahead.

–Outside 6 train entrance

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Effeminate thug: Look at all the couples around us! They’re happy! Why can’t we be like that?! Bimbette: I’m happy! Effeminate thug: Well, I’m not. I don’t understand why you have to keep lying to me and acting like it’s all a joke. Bimbette: Because I’m happy! Effeminate thug: That’s it, I’m leaving. Bimbette: Want a blowjob? Effeminate thug: … Okay.

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Teen guy #1: Yo, I was Christmas shopping with Julia and her other friend at Sephora, and they got the weirdest fuckin' gift for Anne. Teen girl: What was it? Teen guy #1: Well, we walked into the store, and Julia asked if they sold this cream that you put on your ass that takes away, like, stretch marks and pimples on your ass and shit. It was fuckin' nasty. They got her ass cream. Teen guy #2: That’s fuckin' weird, yo. It’s like, ‘Oh, Anne, I was thinking of getting you this really nice sweater for Christmas–’ ‘–Forget the sweater! All I want is some Grade A ass cream!’

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LI girl: Wait, where’s the milk for the coffee? Cashier: The sugar’s right here. LI girl: No, I want milk. Don’t you have any milk in this whole place? For coffee? Cashier: No, because you said you want regular. LI girl: Yeah, regular – like ‘not decaf.’ Cashier: No. Regular is ‘no milk.’ LI girl: No. Black is like this – ‘no milk.’ Cashier: No. Black is ‘not hazelnut.’ Onlooker: Learn how to order or get out of the way.

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Man #1: It seems my first wife put my name down on a job application as a reference. Man #2: Oh, yeah? How do you know? Man #1: Somebody called me yesterday and asked, ‘Can you tell us something about her?’ Man #2: What did you say? Man #1: I said, ‘She can’t cook and she’s lousy in bed! As long as the job don’t require that, I guess she’d be good.’ Man #2: What an idiot!

–LIRR % Girl to friend: I think I just saw the guy I was with last night. Friend: You gonna go say something to him? Girl: No way! First he made me give him a handjob for like an hour, then he shot right in my eye. I think it’s still red. Friend: Your eye or his cock? Girl: Either way, no second date. %

Bruce Chatwin

In the 1860s W.H. Hudson came to the Rio Negro looking for the migrant birds that wintered around his home in La Plata. Years later he remembered the trip through the filter of his Notting Hill boarding house and wrote a book so quiet and sane it makes Thoreau seem a ranter. Hudson devotes a whole chapter of Idle Days in Patagonia to answering Mr Darwin’s question [of why such arid wastes could take such possession of one’s mind], and he concludes that desert wanderers discover in themselves a primaeval calmness (known also to the simplest savage), which is perhaps the same as the Peace of God.

-- Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia

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‘Funny, you remind me of Bobby Dawes. Young Englishman, same as yourself, wandering about Patagonia. One day he walks up to an estancia and says to the owner: “If you give me work, you’re a saint, and your wife’s a saint, and your children are angels, and that dog’s the best dog in the world.” But the owner says, “There is no work.” “In which case,” Bobby says, “you’re the son of a whore, your wife is a whore, your children are monkeys, and if I catch that dog, I’ll kick its arse until its nose bleeds.” ’

-- Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia

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The second story was about a cure for scab. The punch line was ‘Put a lump of sugar in the sheep’s mouth and suck its arse till it tastes sweet.’ He repeated the story twice to make sure I’d get the point. I lied. I couldn’t face it a third time. Finding in ‘primitive’ languages a dearth of words for moral ideas, many people assumed these ideas did not exist. But the concepts of ‘good’ or ‘beautiful,’ so essential to Western thought, are meaningless unless they are rooted to things. The first speakers of language took the raw material of their surroundings and pressed it into metaphor to suggest abstract ideas.

-- Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia

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[Henri Grien] did come to England aboard the ‘Waikato’ - and seems to have cursed her as well. (Shortly after, her propeller shaft broke off the Cape of Good Hope, and she was sucked south by the Agulhas Current, drifting for four months, the longest steamer drift on record. Conrad used it for his story ‘Falk.’)

-- Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia

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In the weeks that followed Lieutenant da Silva worked in heat that would have driven most whites to their hammocks or their graves. Even on quivering afternoons, when the sun sucked out the colour of earth and leaves, he would strip to the waist, bark orders, and shoulder the heaviest loads himself. The blacks were amazed to see a white man work.

-- Bruce Chatwin, The Viceroy of Ouidah

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It was the usual suffocating afternoon in March…the Cathedral … glared across an expanse of red dirt at the walls, the mud huts and trees of the Python Fetish. Turkey buzzards drifted in a milky sky. The metallic din of crickets made the heat seem worse. Banana leaves hung in limp ribbons. There was no wind.

-- Bruce Chatwin, The Viceroy of Ouidah

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Twenty years of mission work in Angola had given Father de Lessa the appearance of a bird of prey and biblical convictions on the subject of Blacks. He had the habit of conducting scripture lessons in the form of rhetorical questions: ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin?’ he would shout. ‘Or the leopard his spots?’ Was not black the colour of night? Of the devil? Was not black skin the very mark of Cain? Dom Francisco guessed what was wrong and, one morning, sat outside the schoolroom and listened to the padre’s peroration. Then he poked his head through the window and said, ‘But blacks believe the Devil is white.’

-- Bruce Chatwin, The Viceroy of Ouidah

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I had a presentiment that the ‘travelling’ phase of my life might be passing. I felt, before the malaise of settlement crept over me, that I should reopen those notebooks. I should set down on paper a resume of the ideas, quotations and encounters which had amused and obsessed me; and which I hoped would shed light on what is, for me, the question of questions: the nature of human restlessness.

-- Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

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Pascal, in one of his gloomier pensees, gave it as his opinion that all our miseries stemmed from a single cause: our inability to remain quietly in a room.

-- Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

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Ib'n Khaldun based his system on the intuition that men decline, morally and physically, as they drift toward cities. The rigors of the desert, he suggested, had preceded the softness of cities. The desert was thus a reservoir of civilisation, and desert peoples had the advantage over settlers because they were less abstemious, freer, braver, healthier, less bloated, less craven, less liable to submit to rotten laws, and altogether easier to cure.

-- Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

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As a man [Che] Guevara, for all his charm, strikes one as a ruthless and unpleasant personality. As a Hero, he never put a foot wrong - and the world chose to see him as a hero.

-- Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

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SlashSigs, Greatest Hits

Giving angry mobs something to do since 1998!

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“Smokey, this is not ‘Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.” -Walter Sobchak

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When blondes have more fun, do they know it?

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Telepathetic (adj.); Being such a loser that you can be spotted a mile away.

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Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It’s just that yours is stupid.

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If you were me, you’d be good lookin'. - six string samurai

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“Remove wrapper, open mouth, insert muffin, eat.” – Instructions on the packaging for a muffin at a 7-11.

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“Provided by the management for your protection.”

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Death to all who oppose–oh, look! A bunny!

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What does not kill me just postpones the inevitable.

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It’s survival of the fittest…and we got the fucking guns!!!

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“Son, in a sporting event, it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how drunk you get” - Homer J. Simpson

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Always remember to pillage before you burn.

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I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy

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This space unintentionally left unblank.

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All fumbs and no thingers.

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“Then eMpTyVee came along, and gave me the attention span of a ferret, and I didn’t care any more.” - Wil Wheaton

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start of tether [—————-|–] end of tether

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He who laughs last thinks slowest!

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I take your 2c, now you senseless!!! HA! HA! HA! Old Hong Kong Joke!

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“The trouble with the global village are all the global village idiots”

• Paul Ginsparg

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“The only way to make music that cannot be copied is to make music that cannot be heard.” - Gene Kan

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Canadian Bred with American Buttering

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The entertainment industry has been brought to you by the letters F and U

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The copyright on this (pseudonymous) post will expire on January 1st 2099, unless copyright gets extended again.

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I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I’d know when to duck.

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Shoes. The other white meat.

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Frito Lay. Proud sponsor of the munchies since 1932.

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Reunite Pangea!

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To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target

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It’s a poodle. Put it on delicate.

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I have a dream! That one day, a pizza WILL BE delivered that IS cut all the way through! Free at last!

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Cantankerous old coot since 1964

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Value: the part of a product that’s manufactured by the marketing department.

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Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?

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“Legs feed the wolf.” – Russian proverb

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The trouble with being punctual is that nobody’s there to appreciate it.

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All you really need us WD40 and duct tape. If it should move and it doesn’t use WD40; If it moves and it shouldn’t use duct tape.

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You’re too stupid to be offended by this.

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“Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?”

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Who’s got the whiteout?

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I have come to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum. - Roddy Piper, “They Live”

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Repeat after me, we are all individuals

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If unsure, say Y

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“We’re not french kissing, we’re freedom kissing.”

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If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you

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What do Monkeys Spank?

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Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It’s what separates us from the animals… ‘cept the weasel.

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“I may be superficial, but you’re fat.”

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This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed

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Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.

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“Lawyers are for sucks.” - Doug McKenzie

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I no longer fear Hell, because I know Satan will just put me in my office and unleash an unending barrage of stupidity.

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Hard work often pays off after time. But laziness always pays off now.

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“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” - Oscar Wilde

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“I’m tired of all this ‘Aren’t humanity great’ bullshit. We’re a virus with shoes” - Bill Hicks

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Fact: Beginning a statement with “Fact:” does not itself, in fact, make the statement fact

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If you’re not on somebody’s shit list, you’re not doing anything worthwhile.

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When life gives you crap, Make Crapade

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Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don’t know him.-Lord Kano

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“Which way do I leave from?” “Here at Harvard, we don’t use prepositions to end our sentences.” “Alright. Which way do I leave from, asshole?”

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deputy dog dog a ding dang dipa dipa dee

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Marge, get me my address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.

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When I die I want to go just like my grandfather, in his sleep, not screaming like the other people in the car

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If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf

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“When the atomic bomb goes off there’s devastation…but when the atomic bong goes off there’s celebraaaaation!”

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i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer

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Nothing says “unprofessional job” like wrinkles in your duct tape.

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A woman is like your shadow; follow her, she flies; fly from her, she follows. – Chamfort

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Be Alert! The internet needs more lerts.

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Remember: Silly is a state of Mind, Stupid is a way of Life. – Dave Butler

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Behind every great woman… Is a man checking out her ass

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‘I think it’s wrong that the game Monopoly is made by only one company.’ - Steven Wright

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Prepare for a pride obliterating bitch slap

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Lysdexics of the world Untie!!!!

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They don’t grade fathers, but if your daughter’s a stripper, you fucked up. –Chris Rock

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Ditzy Chinese chick: So, I went on this job interview with this law firm, right? And this lawyer who was interviewing me was really cute, ya know? So at the end of the interview he stood up, and I wasn’t sure what to say so I said, ‘Well, I don’t know whether you’re going to hire me or not, but I’d really like to fuck you.’ So he came to my apartment after work and fucked me. Then I get a letter two days later telling me I didn’t get the fucking job! Do you think that’s sexual harassment?

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I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.

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Verbogeny is one of the pleasurettes of a creatific thinkerizer. (Peter da Silva)

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If wishes were ponies beggars would ride

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If you aren’t part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem

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“Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!”

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A rose by any other name would smell as sweet; A chrysanthemum by any other name would be easier to spell

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Black holes are where God divided by zero - Steven Wright

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Cult: (n) a small, unpopular religion./Religion: (n) a large, popular cult

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“That which we win cheaply, we esteem lightly.” - Thomas Paine

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Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.

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Go, trade liberty for safety, but you might not have needed the safety if you’d shared your liberty to begin with.

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Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.

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Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.–Henry David Thoreau

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Anyone can act smart, but it takes a smart person to act stupid.

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The world is run by idiots because they’re more efficient than hamsters.

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“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act” – George Orwell

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All articles that coruscate with resplendence are not truly auriferous.

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“The truth is that men are tired of liberty.” – Benito Mussolini.

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“Enlightenment is your ego’s biggest disappointment.” –Yoginanda

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A crank is a little thing that makes revolutions

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“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe.” – Albert Einstein

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Diplomacy is the art of saying “nice doggie” whilst looking for a rock

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The easiest way to get shot is to carry a gun – Atticus Finch

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I do not know what WW3 will be fought with,but I know what WW4 will be fought with: sticks and stones - Einstein

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Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.

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The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Albert Einstein

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I swear to God I am an Atheist.

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“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” - Albert Einstein

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“Power corrupts and absolute power is actually pretty neat.” (Tom Clancy. The Bear And The Dragon.)

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Your brain is not just a blood cooling system

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“It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law.” - James Fenimore Cooper

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Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken- Tyler Durden

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For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. – H L Mencken

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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. –Edmund Burke

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Wit is educated insolence. – Aristotle

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Give a man a fish, he owes you one fish./ Teach a man to fish, you give up your monopoly on fisheries.

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“Who’s more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?”

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Creativity - The sudden cessation of stupidity.

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Consume! Obey! We love the USA!!!

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“Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.” – Vince Lombardi, football coach

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I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest. – Alexandre Dumas, fils

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The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. -Jefferson

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Don’t be afraid to try something yourself. Remember amateurs built the Ark, professionals built the Titanic

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Less Warring! More Whoring!

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Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. -Blaise Pascal, philosopher

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cheezus_es_lard

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The years of peak mental activity are undoubtedly between the ages of four and eighteen. At four we know all the questions, at eighteen all the answers.

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Capitalism: unequal distribution of wealth / Socialism: equal distribution of poverty

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“Freedom Fries” isn’t patriotism, it’s jingoism

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War is God’s way of teaching Americans about geography. – Ambrose Bierce

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A chess master once told me: “Never neglect the obvious. Usually it’s obvious because it’s right.”

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After the game the king and the pawn go in the same box. – Italian proverb

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Fascism:Extreme right-wing dictatorial government,belligerently nationalist,that merges state and business leadership

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I have often regretted my speech, never my silence. -Xenocrates

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Cole’s Axiom: The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant. The population is growing.

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The world is watching America, and America is watching TV

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If I wanted easy I wouldn’t be an engineer or a patriot.

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A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. – William James

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“Satan for president – why settle for the lesser of two evils.”

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Economics: the overeducated in pursuit of the unknowable" (Robert Solow).

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Politicians, like diapers, have to be changed frequently - and for the very same reason. Anonymous

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Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.

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A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election

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History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill

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There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.

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If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. -Chomsky

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Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner."

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I’ve found the loophole in democracy. It’s stupid people. Vast masses of stupid people.

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God was my copilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.

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“There is no reason to attempt such a feat of idiocy, other than the fact that some people, which is to say some people like me, have a need to search the depths of their stamina for self-definition. It’s a contest in purposeless suffering.” –Lance Armstrong

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Computer are useless: they can only give you answers. - Pablo Picasso

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We sleep peaceably in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf.

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If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets

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When in Rome we shall do as the Romans, when in Hell we do shots at the bar. –ETID

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All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.

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Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses

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No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill

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Record oil profits reported. Luckily I can warm my house with the smoldering remains of the Constitution

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No country is more than three meals away from a revolution.

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life, n: The whim of several billion cells to be you for a while

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When God hates all the same people you do, its a sign you’ve created Him in your own image.

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Life is just nature’s way of keeping meat fresh.

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“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

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Old Chinese Proverb: The man who does not make mistakes usually does not make anything.

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Civil Disobedience, it’s not just a good idea, it’s illegal.

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To be is to do = Immanuel Kant To do is to be = Descartes. Do be do be do = Frank Sinatra

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Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

      -- Seneca

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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

– H.L. Mencken %

Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d' encule de ta mere

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fundamentalism (n.): fund = give cash to; amentalism = brainlessness

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Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn’t solve the problem, you didn’t use enough

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A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read. – Mark Twain

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I knew it was getting fucking cold in here. –Satan

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People who need govt to enforce their religion must not have much faith in the power of its message.

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Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me forty three times, shame on your strategy guide ($14.99+tax).

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The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.

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Disclaimer: This poster rides the short bus AND wears the helmet.

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When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.

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Science flies people to the moon, but religion flies them into buildings.

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Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines.

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(((:~(> – The Prophet Mohammed. Ha, an image of him at last!

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Ankh is you love Isis

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When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist

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Everybody gets what the majority deserves.

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Toddlers are the Storm Troopers of the Lord of Entropy

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“Don’t worry,” said the trees when they saw the axe coming, “The handle is one of us.”

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1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.

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Brawndo – It mutilates your thirst, buries it in the crawlspace, and tells the neighbors it left town.

Brawndo – If you’re not drinking it, the guy banging your wife probably is.

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You’ll never have experience until after you needed it.

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Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder aloud what the country could do under first-class management.

                -- Senator Soaper

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 (   )

( ) ( ) _ ) ( _ (\ ) (_))

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You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.

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I’ll see your senator and raise you two judges.

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Ignorance is innocence–stupidity comes with experience.

               -- Amos Bronson

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You’re Special forces then? That’s great! I just love your Olympics!

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Keep your god out of our government and I’ll keep my unicorns out of your church.

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Give a man a mask and he will show his true face. - Oscar Wilde

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I’ve got poopheimers. That’s where you forget shit.

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Reasonable men adapt to the world around them; unreasonable men make the world adapt to them. The world is changed by unreasonable men.

-- Edwin Louis Cole

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You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I’d have to disagree about the tired bit.

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Success is relative: It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.

-- T.S. Eliot, "The Family Reunion"

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The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club

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In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.

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The mind just boggles at how incredibly futile it is going to be googling for help on an app called ‘Software’. I think the gnome guys have gone from mild contempt for the user to rabid hate and fury. Amazing.

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I am a lawyer and this constitutes legal advice and I shall indemnify you against any losses arising from taking it.

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Let’s see: a white cat on a white, fur blanket. Too much luxury in this photo. I feel like I’m wearing silk panties just looking at it.

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If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders.

-- George Carlin

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Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.

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By the way, I think you might be the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen outside the pages of a really filthy magazine

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The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

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It’s a dog eat dog world out there, and I’m wearing MilkBone underwear. – Norm Peterson, Cheers

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Be circumspect in your liaisons with women. It is better to be seen at the opera with a man than at mass with a woman. – De Maintenon

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Goldbonds: You’ve never enjoyed the luxury of dusting your nuts with this? Just rub a little on the sides of your balls and leg where they rub together, and give the taint a pat. No swassy balls, ever. Feel the breeze of a thousand hot girls breathing cool mountain air on your balls all day, my friends.

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I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.

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It’s the good girls who keep the diaries, the bad girls never have the time.

    -- Tallulah Bankhead

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Wisdom

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
– George Bernard Shaw

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Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
– Douglas Casey (1992)

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Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
– P.J. O'Rourke

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Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
– Frederic Bastiat

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Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
– Ronald Reagan (1986)

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I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts. –Will Rogers

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If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.
– P.J. O'Rourke

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Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.
– Pericles (430 B.C.)

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No man’s life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.
– Mark Twain (1866)

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Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
– Mark Twain

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Talk is cheap-except when Congress does it. The government is like a baby’s alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.
– Ronald Reagan

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The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. –Winston Churchill

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The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin. – Mark Twain

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We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. –Winston Churchill

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What this country needs are more unemployed politicians. –an unknown but Wise Man

Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost

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A journalist, [Morton] Stanley wrote with the self-importance that had now become part of his public persona, is “like a gladiator in the arena … Any flinching, any cowardice, and he is lost. The gladiator meets the sword that is sharpened for his bosom – the … roving correspondent meets the command that may send him to his doom.” He dashed to Paris to meet his publisher at the Grand Hotel. There, a dramatic conversation about Livingstone climaxed with Bennett’s saying, “I mean that you shall go, and find him wherever you may hear he is, and to get what news you can of him, and perhaps … the old man may be in want: – take enough with you to help him should her require it … do what you think best – BUT FIND LIVINGSTONE!”

This scene provided a splendid introduction for Stanley’s first book, How I Found Livingstone … but nothing like this conversation seems to have happened.…

However inflated, Stanley’s story of Bennett’s dramatic summons to Paris sold plenty of books, and to Stanley that mattered. He was after more than fame as an explorer; his melodramatic flair made him, as one historian has remarked, “the progenitor of all the subsequent professional travel writers.” … With every step he took in Africa, Stanley planned how to tell the story once he got home. In a twentieth-century way, he was always sculpting the details of his own celebrity.

-- by Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost(1999)

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“What means have I to convey my heart’s load of love to you,” Stanley had written Alice Pike from the middle of the continent, “but this letter which must go through a thousand miles of savages, exposed to all dangers of flood and fire and battle until it reaches the sea? … Grant then that my love towards you is unchanged, that you are in my dream, my stay and my hope, and my beacon, and believe that I shall still cherish you in this light until I meet you.”

When he brought his remaining porters and soldiers by sea back to their jumping-off point in Zanzibar, Stanley had a shock. Amid two years’ worth of mail waiting for him was a newspaper clipping eighteen months old, announcing that Alice Pike had married an Ohio railway heir named Albert Barney. Stanley fell into a deep depression and never saw her again. The explorer never knew that, as she watched his fame grow, the new Mrs. Barney spent much of her life regretting that she had not become Mrs. Stanley. Long after his death, in a highly romanticized unpublished novel-memoir, she claimed credit for his great Congo journey: “She made it possible for him. Without her spirit animating him, he would never have accomplished it, not even had the desire to penetrate those abysmal darknesses again. … ‘Lady Alice’ had conquered Africa!”

-- by Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost(1999)

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Except for [Stanislaus] Lefranc, few Europeans working for the regime left records of their shock at the sight of officially sanctioned terror. The white men who passed through the territory as military officers, steamboat captains, or state or concession company officials generally accepted the use of the chicotte as unthinkingly as hundreds of thousands of other men in uniform would accept their assignments, a half-century later, to staff the Nazi and Soviet concentration camps. “Monsters exist,” wrote Primo Levi of his experience at Auschswitz. “But they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are … the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

-- by Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost(1999)

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There were years when, to the distress of many a young male European, Europe was at peace. For a young man looking for battle, especially battle against a poorly armed enemy, the Congo was the place to go. For a white man, the Congo was also a place to get rich and to wield power. As a district commissioner, you might be running a district as big as all of Holland or Belgium. As a station chief, you might be a hundred miles away from the next white official; you could levy whatever taxes you chose in labor, ivory, or anything else, collect them however you wanted, and impose whatever punishments you liked. If you got carried away, the penalty, if any, was a slap on the wrist. A station chief at Manyanga, on the big rapids, who beat two of his personal servants to death in 1890 was only fined five hundred francs. What mattered was keeping the ivory flowing back to Belgium. The more you sent, the more you earned. “Vive le Congo, there is no place like it!” one young officer wrote to his family in 1894, “We have liberty, independence, and life with wide horizons. Here you are free and not a mere slave of society … Here one is everything! Warrior, diplomat, trader!! Why not!” For such people, just as for the humbly born Stanley, the Congo offered a chance for a great rise in status. Someone fated for a life as a small-town bank clerk or plumber in Europe could instead become a warlord, ivory merchant, big game hunter, and possessor of a harem.

-- by Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost(1999)

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Whether [the inference that Stanley was impotent] is right or wrong, the inhibitions that caused Stanley so much pain are a reminder that the explorers and soldiers who carried out the European seizure of Africa were often not the bold, bluff, hardy men of legend, but restless, unhappy, driven men, in flight from something in their past or in themselves. The economic explanations of imperial expansion – the search for raw materials, labor, and markets – are all valid but there was psychological fuel as well. Like any system that gives some human beings total power over others, slavery in Africa could be vicious. … In other ways, African slavery was more flexible and benign than the system European would soon establish in the New World. … Nonetheless, the fact that trading in human beings existed in any form turned out to be catastrophic for Africa, for when Europeans showed up, ready to buy endless shiploads of slaves, they found African chiefs willing to sell.

-- by Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost(1999)

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Post-Pandemic Post

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not, but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter. – Mark Twain

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To Huff, this transformation helped explain the resurgent nostalgia for the Confederacy he sensed across the South, even among his mostly affluent students. “The South - the white South - has always had this powerful sense of loss,” he said, as we chatted in his office between classes. First, it was the loss of the War and antebellum wealth. Later, as millions of Southerners migrated to cities, it was the loss of a close-knit agrarian society. Now, with the region’s new prosperity and clout, Southerners wondered if they were losing the dignity and distinctiveness they’d clung to through generations of poverty and isolation.“ – Confederates in the Attic

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The boy watched him. You aint got no business smokin them things, he said.

His father pursed his lips and drummed his fingers on the table and looked up. When I come around askin you what I’m supposed to do you’ll know you’re big enough to tell me, he said. – Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

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Rawlins took a cigarette out of his shirtpocket and sat up and took a coal from the fire and lit the cigarette. He sat smoking. I wouldnt let her get the best of me, he said.
He tipped the ash from the end of the cigarette against the heel of his boot.
She aint worth it. None of em are. He didnt answer for a while. Then he said: Yes they are. – Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

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I’m goin to tell you somethin, cousin. John Grady leaned and spat. All right. Every dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I’d made before it. You understand what I’m sayin? – Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses %

In the Spaniard’s heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A great love of truth and honor in all its forms, but not in its substance. And a deep conviction that nothing can be proven except that it be made to bleed. Virgins, bulls, men. Ultimately God himself. When I look at my grandniece I see a child. – Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

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He sat and smoked with them and told all that had happened. They were concerned about Rawlins, more a friend to them than he. They were saddened that he was not coming back but they said that a man leaves much when he leaves his own country. They said it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country and not some other and they said that the weathers and seasons that form a land form also the inner fortunes of men in their generations and are passed on to their children and are not so easily come by otherwise. – Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

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In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I dont believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God - who knows all that can be known - seems powerless to change. – Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

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He saw very clearly how all his life had led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe it would ever leave. – Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

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STRESS MANAGEMENT

Picture yourself near a stream. Birds are singing in the crisp, cool mountain air. Nothing can bother you here. No one knows this secret place. You are in total seclusion from that place called the world. The soothing sound of a gentle waterfall fills the air with a cascade of serenity. The water is crystal clear. You can easily make out the face of the person whose head you’re holding under the water. – KevinT

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The Desert Road to Turkestan, by Owen Lattimore

In early August the little market gardens that fringe the mile of road between Old City and New bloomed with the noble splendor of opium poppies, and it seemed that we might live forever bone-idle among the languorous white and luxuriant pink and purple colors, and the sweet heavy scents that permeated with Oriental indifference the sour stink of Oriental backyards.

-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan

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As I was dozing … I caught the drift of a whispered conversation … I was being set down as a Soviet officer in the service of the Christian Army, making an early get-away to Urga. It annoyed me, but it was not worth denial, since denial would only strengthen conviction. But how silly! Didn’t I have enough worries, what with leaving my wife in a silly place like Kuei-hua and starting off for a silly place like Mongolia, with a lot of silly camels, without being taken for a spy or a soldier of fortune or something fantastic of a kind that is found more often in the newspapers than on a journey?

-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan

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There is nothing a camel man likes better than to score off one of the officials who pop out at awkward corners of the road, where there is no dodging, to ask him questions that must be answered with money.

-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan

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I had yet to learn the knack of wandering through a labyrinth of dreams and memories and lazy half-thoughts, through the endless but sedately witching marching hours. The mingled ache and eagerness of final departure, mixed with the thrill of being free of houses and wheeled things, died slowly in me. I could see the ground shifting vaguely beneath me, and hear the soft impact of the camel’s feet on the coarse sandy soil. All about was the whispering hush of a night of ceaseless rain. Now and again, far away to the side, Mongol dogs clamored at our passing. Once the dim shape of a wolf crossed fifteen yards in front of us, and my camel, which was in the lead, snorted with fear. The smell of the grasslands was damp and sweet. The night was not so much an interval of time as an overflow of eternity, which did not bother one with beginning or end.

-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan

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When the Christian Army took over the northwest, they also took over the troops of Ma Fu-hsiang. Weighing their exchequer and their principles in a balance of expediency, the exchequer was found too light, so that a few principles had to be dropped.

-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan

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The rest of the time I spent in reading Yule’s Marco Polo and making a catalogue of my deficiencies from the Hints to Travellers of the Royal Geographical Society. I think I had bought it with the idea that it would be something in the same sort as a fascinating book, Galton’s Art of Travel, frequently referred to in Shaw’s High Tartary and Yarkand, which seems to have been full of Swiss Family Robinson tricks. I was sure that the Hints would at least tell me how to find the north from the hands of a watch, like a Boy Scout, and perhaps, like Galton, how to make gunpowder and such graver marvels. Instead, I found Isobaric Maps and the Minimum Requirements for Weather Observation. I learned also with chagrin that my cameras were inadequate and my armory of all the wrong calibres.

-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan

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Sometimes, I think, what draws me more than anything else to travel is the melancholy of it, a winelike melancholy, tenuous but soft, like the delicate, plangent, muted syllables of Verlaine, fortuitously remembered in a Mongolian sunset.

-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan

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…Pei-tai Ho, that shoddy Simla-cum-Kendal-Revival by the Gulf of Pei Chih-li. There Ministers of Legation from Peking hoist their flags for the summer, and the Diplomatic Body in partibus infidelium resting from the strict routine of dancing, scandal, and gambling, refreshes itself with swimming, gambling, and scandal.

-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan

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They began to accept me without reserve as an understandable person of their own kind. This was in part because I had smoothed out my own awkwardnesses. I had fallen into the way of gossiping with them, instead of asking questions point-blank about things I did not understand. There is nothing that shuts off the speech of simple men like the suspicion that they are being pumped for information; while if they get over the feeling of strangeness they will yarn as they do among themselves. Then in their talk there comes out the rich rough ore of what they themselves accept as the truth about their lives and beliefs, not spoiled in trying to refine it unskillfully by suiting the words to the listener.

-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan

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The mixture of superstition, reverence, and mocking blasphemy with which they treat this little makeshift tabernacle of tamarisk and camp wreckage, made by themselves and tended by no priest, is delightful. There is a spirit about their observances that has been almost lost to Europe since the Middle Ages – the free and adventuring spirit that got a stunning whack on the head at the Reformation, when a desolate and cranky kind of prophet rose up, thinking to ensure salvation by unfettering dogma and shackling emotion instead; a spirit in which there is a fine realization, without any articulate opinion, that piety has nothing to do with sinlessness. And now, I wonder – did I discover a Great Truth in the Desert and Make a Note of it in my Journal? How like a Traveler!

-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan

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Soon there will be little trace … to stand for a monument of one of the strangest episodes of that period, so recent and yet so remote, when history was swiftly acted and never written down.

-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan

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In No Man’s Land your law is in your own right hand. Elsewhere in Mongolia a man does not ride armed as a matter of course unless he is hunting. Here no man who has arms would think of riding without them.

-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan

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Also all the folk, when they heard that I made no charge, began to court me for my medicines; but as there was nothing in the world wrong with most of them except opium (that, the usual boils and bowel troubles, and a tendency to tuberculosis and secondary venereal disease) I did little good. It is poor practice putting drugs into a man the whole tone of whose system is set by opium. Both men and women were notable smokers; but then, as Moses put it, “What amusements do they have all winter in a place like this, except opium and women? And look at the women!” – for they were a skinny lot of shrews, the young with the old.

-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan

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Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

– by Annie Dillard

Night is rising in the valley; the creek has been extinguished for an
hour, and now only the naked tips of trees fire tapers into the sky
like trails of sparks.

 -- Anne Diller, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek

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Nature is, above all, profligate. Don’t believe them wen they tell
you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the
soil. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first
place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the
brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital.
Extravagance! Nature will try anything once.

– Anne Diller, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek

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I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its
tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person
who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond
nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret
astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories.

– Anne Diller, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek

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It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as
separating us from our creator – our very self-consciousness – is
also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was
a biter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends.

– Anne Diller, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek

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I have to look at the landscape of the blue-green world again. Just
think: in all the clean beautiful reaches of the solar system, our
planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death. I have to
acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death and the land is a stained
altar stone. We the living are survivors huddled on flotsam, living
on jetsam. We are escapees. We wake in terror, eat in hunger, sleep
with a mouthful of blood.

– Anne Diller, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek

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Our excessive emotions are so patently painful and harmful to us as a
species that I can hardly believe that they evolved. Other creatures
manage to have effective matings and even stable societies without
great emotions, and they have a bonus in that they need not ever
mourn. (But some higher animals have emotions that we think are
similar to ours: dogs, elephants, otters, and the sea mammals mourn
their dead. Why do that to an otter? What creator could be so
cruel, not to kill otters, but to let them care?) It would seem that
emotions are the curse, not death – emotions that appear to have
devolved upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence.

– Anne Diller, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek

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The muskrat never twitched - he never knew I was there. I never knew
I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as
purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate. I received
impressions, but I did not print out captions - And I have often
noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is
tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our
energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to
ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, “When
you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from
all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks
of their soul come out and cling to you, and then they are purified
and become a holy fire in you.”

– Anne Diller, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek

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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible
earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and
fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.

– Anne Diller, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek

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And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever
you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who
carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a
live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will
not part.

– Anne Diller, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek

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Cold Mountain

by Charles Frazier

The window apparently wanted only to take his thoughts back. Which was fine with him, for he had seen the metal face of the age and had been so stunned by it that when he thought into the future, all he could vision was a world from which everything he counted important had been banished or had willingly fled.

-- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

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He had no talent in the world but his recently discovered ability to play the banjo, unless one counted as talent the fact that he was gentle and kind and looked on everything that passed before him with soft wide eyes.

– Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

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Were she to decide fully to live here in Black Cove unto death, she believed she would erect towers on the ridge marking the south and north points of the sun’s annual swing. She owned the entire span of ridge where the sun set through the year, and that was a thing to savor. One had then just to mark the points in December and June when the sun wrenched itself from its course and doubled back for another set of seasons. Though upon reflection, she decided a tower was not entirely needed. Only clear some trees to notch the ridge at the turning point. It would be a great pleasure year after year to watch with anticipation as the sun grew nigh to the notch and then on a specified day fell into it and then rose out of it and retraced its path. Over time, watching that happen again and again might make the years seem not such an awful linear progress but instead a looping and a return. Keeping track of such a thing would place a person, would be a way of saying, You are here, in this one station, now. It would be an answer to the question, Where am I?

– Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

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She marked her place with a yarrow stem and closed the book and set it in her lap. She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.

– Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

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His playing was easy as a man drawing breath, yet with utter conviction in its centrality to a life worth claiming.

– Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

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This business of carrying hats halfway around the world to sell made no sense to her. It marked a lack of seriousness in a person that they could think about such matters. There was not one thing in a place like France or New York or Charleston that Ruby wanted. And little she even needed that she couldn’t make or grow or find on Cold Mountain. She held a deep distrust of travel, whether to Europe or anywhere else. Her view was that a world properly put together would yield inhabitants so suited to their lives in their assigned place that they would have neighter need nor wish to travel.

– Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

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Like the vast bulk of people, the captives would pass from the earth without hardly making any mark more lasting than plowing a furrow. You could bury them and knife their names into an oak plank and stand it up in the dirt, and not one thing - not their acts of meanness or kindess or cowardice or courage, not their fears or hopes, not the features of their faces - would be remembered even as long as it would take the gouged characters in the plank to weather away. They walked therefore bent, as if bearing the burden of lives lived beyond recollection.

– Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

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Others sobbed and begged to be freed, calling upon some imagined force of kindness resident in men’s hearts to advance their interests.

– Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

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Ada left the porch and walked down past the barn into the pasture. The sun was long gone below the ridgelines, the light falling fast. The mountains stood grey in the dusk, as pale and insubstantial as breath blown on glass. The place seemed inhabited by a great force of loneliness. Even the old-timers talked of the weight that bears down on a person alone in the mountains at that time of day, worse even than full dark on a moonless night, for it is at twilight that the threat of dark makes itself felt most strongly.

– Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

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Ruby seemed to feel the approach of winter as urgently as a bear in autumn, eating all night and half the day to pack on the fat necessary to feed it through hibernation. All Ruby’s talk was of exertion. The work it would take to build a momentum of survival to carry them through the winter. To Ada, Ruby’s monologues seemed composed mainly of verbs, all of them tiring. Plow, plant, hoe, cut, can, feed, kill.

– Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

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He thought on homeland, the big timber, the air thin and chill all the year long. Tulip poplars so big through the trunk they put you in mind of locomotives set on end. He thought of getting home and building him a cabin on Cold Mountain so high that not a soul but the nighthawks passing across the clouds in autumn could hear his sad cry. Of living a life so quiet he would not need ears. And if Ada would go with him, there might be the hope, so far off in the distance he did not even really see it, that in time his despair might be honed off to a point so fine and thin that it would be nearly the same as vanishing.

– Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

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The mountains were just becoming visible as the morning fog burned away. Their pale outlines stood at the horizon more like the ghosts of mountains than the actual things.

– Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

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Swimmer knew a few ways to kill the soul of an enemy and many ways to protect your own. His spells portrayed the spirit as a frail thing, constantly under attack and in need of strength, always threatening to die inside you. Inman found this notion dismal indeed, since he had been taught by sermon and hymn to hold as truth that the soul of man never dies.

– Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

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