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
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
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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The Great Gatsby
For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam digger and a salmon fisher or in any other capacity that brought him food and bed. His brown, hardening body lived naturally through the half fierce, half lazy work of the bracing days. He knew women early and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented “place” that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village – appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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Human sympathy has its limits and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind. Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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When they met again two days later it was Gatsby who was breathless, who was somehow betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She had caught a cold and it made her voice huskier and more charming than ever and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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No telephone message arrived but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock – until long after there was anyone to give it to if he came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,” he suggested. “After that my own rule is to let everything alone.”
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand. Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferry boat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes – a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Twenty-Eighteen
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A weird side-effect of living in SF is cities in movies start to look fake: where is all the feces and shattered glass and tent cities? I’ve always assumed the city govt was just disfunctional, but the speed with which they removed the menace of convenient, ecofriendly scooters makes me wonder if they’re actually malevolent, somehow.
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government is the entertainment division of the industrial-military complex – Frank Zappa
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Up and up the bitcoin goes, beats dollar and the rouble. All at once it drops like shit - Pop goes the bouble!
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“Nothing is cheaper than someone else’s time.” – Charlie Gibb
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The only thing that can’t be solved by another layer of indirection is too many layers of indirection.
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Can someone explain like I have a degree in computer science from a good university, but opted for a career as a software engineer in some relatively high level languages?
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I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a Trolls “R” Us kid There are a million sites on the web where I can post shit I don’t wanna grow up, cause maybe if I did I couldn’t be a Trolls “R” Us kid
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What’s the difference between Sarah Palin’s mouth and her vagina? Only half the stuff that comes out of her vagina is retarded.
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A man walks into a pharmacy, and heads to the birth control section. He is looking at condoms when an employee approaches him and asks if he needs help.
“No, I’m just buying condoms for my teenage daughter” he says. “Oh, so she’s sexually active?” the employee asks. “No, she just sort of lays there like her mother does”
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20 years ago I wrote my dissertation using LaTeX. Two years ago I found it in old backups and immediately stuck it into a git repo, built a LaTeX hosting docker container and built the whole ~120 page doc using the makefile I made at the time. I then proceeded to marvel at the ingenuity of people, the hubris of a young man and the futility of it all. I then quenched the rising tide of existential angst with a few craft beers I purchased using proceeds from my day job building silly web-apps in JavaScript for a big multinational mining company.
Had I written it in word I would have tossed the disk into the trash, and watched a movie.
LaTeX, the gift that keeps on giving.
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The Boss, however, is maintaining his reserve.
There are five main exercises undertaken by managers who don’t have the wherewithal to do their job but want to look like they’re contributing:
- A Review of “lessons from the past”,
- The big push for documentation,
- An anal-gazing “Look-to-the-future” exercise,
- Team building and/or Group Dynamics, or,
- A comprehensive review of something to reach the conclusion they’ve already thought of.
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“But you must have thought about things,” I said. “About your life, about the human condition.”
Chris became surprisingly introspective. “I did examine myself,” he said. “Solitude did increase my perception. But here’s the tricky thing — when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn’t even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.”
“What I miss most,” he eventually continued, “is somewhere between quiet and solitude. What I miss most is stillness.” He said he’d watched for years as a shelf mushroom grew on the trunk of a Douglas fir in his camp. I’d noticed the mushroom when I visited—it was enormous—and he asked me with evident concern if anyone had knocked it down. I assured him it was still there. In the height of summer, he said, he’d sometimes sneak down to the lake at night. “I’d stretch out in the water, float on my back, and look at the stars.”
– Christopher Thomas Knight, the the North Pond Hermit of Maine
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The Internet used to be SMART PEOPLE in front of DUMB TERMINALS. Now, the reverse situation prevails.
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The Internet - the mother-ship of people who don’t know much and aren’t afraid to go public
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I doubt that it will get better. There’s a whole generation starting to fill the FAANG bullpens that never saw anything beyond the cordoned appscapes of their indistinguishable mobile devices. Maybe someone will notice that “hey, I’m using this insanely clever federated way of connecting my microservices with <rpc-du-jour>, what if…”. Probably will end up on something like the suckless/unixpr*n pages and go a few steps too far, banging ASCII rocks together to summon the holy gopher.
-- seen on Hacker News
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There is Pleasure in the Pathless Woods
There is pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
– Lord Byron, Childe Harold Vanto iv. Verse 178
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Ginsberg’s Theorem: 1. You can’t win. 2. You can’t break even. 3. You can’t even quit the game.
Freeman’s Commentary on Ginsberg’s theorem:
Every major philosophy that attempts to make life seem meaningful is based on the negation of one part of Ginsberg’s Theorem. To wit:
- Capitalism is based on the assumption that you can win.
- Socialism is based on the assumption that you can break even.
- Mysticism is based on the assumption that you can quit the game.
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Why I Wake Early:
Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.
– From Mary Oliver’s collection Why I Wake Early.