veronica

Weevil: Uh, yeah, can we stay focused here? 'Cause if we're seen together by the wrong people, that would be bad.
Veronica: So, this is sneaking? I've got a pantomine-horse disguise you could use. Do either of you have any experience being a horse's ass?
------------------------------
Lamb: Still picking winners, huh, Veronica?
Veronica: I told you, when I start picking losers, it's all you.
------------------------------
Keith: I'm thinking about getting you some sort of... giant hamster ball, so you can roll everywhere in this protective sphere.
Veronica: It'd just draw attention to me. Nobody likes a blonde in a hamster ball.
--Veronica Mars

it's just showbiz

Today, Morgan Spurlock introduced a new regular segment on the CBS evening news.

an old truth -- a new way

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

reductionist science

"... once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine."
--Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma

a delightful week in boise

The main event:
The Idaho Shakespeare Festival

And some new and old favorites:
The Bombay Grill
Goldy's
The FlipSide Cafe

pez pundits

"We need anything politically important rationed out like Pez: small, sweet, and coming out of a funny, plastic head."
--Dennis Miller

i love a good storm

Tonight: Windy with isolated thunderstorms this evening, then skies turning partly cloudy after midnight. A few storms may be severe. Low 56F. SW winds at 20 to 30 mph, diminishing to 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%.

ultimate romance

Debi: "OK, you can go now."
Marty: "You want me to leave right now? You don't maybe want to watch CNN, Crossfire, something romantic?"
Debi: "No, airplane was quite enough."
Marty: "OK, I'll go. That's fine. I'll go. But this night, tomorrow night, the reunion, is going to be an important step in our burgeoning relationship."
Debi: "You're a f***ing psycho."
Marty: "Don't rush to judgment on something like that until all the facts are in."
--Minnie Driver and John Cusack, Grosse Pointe Blank

how to preside over a house on fire

Today's headlines:
Lebanon death toll 'reaches 900'
Wave of Rocket Attacks Kill 8 in Israel
U.S. General Says Iraq Could Slide Into a Civil War
Suicide Bomber Kills 21 Civilians in Afghanistan
Marines Charged With Assault in Iraq Case

so ....
Bush previews border efforts before vacation

stop, children, what's that sound

There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware

I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

There's battle lines being drawn
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind

I think it's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side

It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away

We better stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down ...

--Buffalo Springfield, "For What It's Worth"
Stephen Stills, 1966

give 'em hell

"Some 37 years ago, as a bunch of us spent a night in a cozy jail cell for protesting the Vietnam War, we noticed the graffiti on a wall of our cell which said: "What do we ask for? Freedom. What do we get? Bologna sandwiches." The phrase has stuck with me: You have to ask for a lot to get a smidgeon of freedom.

And I dare you to ask for a lot, I dare you to hold fast to your ideals and to expound them as publicly and as fearlessly as Martin Luther King and Bill Coffin and Betty Friedan and those dozens of grandmothers arrested a few weeks ago for protesting the war in Iraq.

Most such paradigms of valor and commitment have been galvanized by the belief that you have to give hell to entrenched power when it violates our notions of human justice. So my final message to you is this: Whether it be on the issue of racial integration or gay rights or sexual equality or the pathetic state of health care in this country or one of the dumbest military excursions ever waged by an American government--the Iraq War--your motto should be: Give 'em hell, give 'em hell, give 'em hell!

There are never enough troublemakers fighting for justice, so go out there and give 'em hell to create a better world for you and your children to grow into. You know one of Barnard's mottoes--say it with me: "Change the world, one woman at a time."
--Francine du Plessix Gray, Commencement Address to the Class of 2006 at Barnard College, May 16, 2006

roth

"Sandy wasn't angry any longer. He wasn't contemptuous. He wasn't superior-acting in any way. It was as though he too had taken a blow to the head, but one that, instead of bringing on amnesia, had rejuvenated the quiet, conscientious boy whose satisfactions emanated not from his being a precocious big shot full of contrary opinions but from that strong, even current of an interior life that carried him steadily along from morning to night and that, in my eyes, had always made him genuinely superior to the other kids his age."
-----------------------
"It's so heartbreaking, violence, when it's in a house -- like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree.
--Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

jungian reflection

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
--Carl Jung

the flip side

"I am only slightly less astonished by the egotism of the assassins, the inflated self-esteem it requires to kill a president, than I am astonished by the men who run for president. These are people who have the gall to believe they can fix us -- us and our deficit, our fossil fuels, our racism, poverty, our potholes and public schools. The egomania required to be president or a presidential assassin makes the two types brothers of sorts. Presidents and presidential assassins are like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City that way. Even though one city is all about sin and the other is all about salvation, they are identical, one-dimensional company towns built up out of the desert by the sheer will of true believers. The assassins and the presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are?"
--Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

a room (and books) of her own

"... if we cordon off the issue of education for girls in the developing world as a 'women's issue,' we will make far less progress than if we enlist both genders in the drive for full equality. I hope that this is not only a women's issue, but also a men's issue.
...
The United Nations has consistently advocated that educating girls has a larger impact on the developing world than any other initiative. If girls do not have the opportunity to attend school, we cannot hope to make lasting progress in the fight to eliminate global poverty ... there are few better ways to change the course of the world than getting girls into school and keeping them there."
--John Wood, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World
Support Room to Read.

yankee doodle dandy

Guess we're all a little country. How yankee are you?
My score:
"38% Dixie. You are definitely a Yankee."

happy birthday to canada

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!
From far and wide,
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

And I can't think about Canada without fondly remembering poutine in Montreal. Tourtière, too, though I don't remember that quite as fondly.

small minds

"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."
--Eleanor Roosevelt

the difficult kind

the difficult kind
--sheryl crow

I think I was wrong
I think you were right
All my angry words
Will keep me up at night
Through the old screen door
I still hear you say
Honey won't you stop
Treating me that way

If you could only see
What love has made of me
Then I'd no longer be in your mind
The difficult kind
Cause babe I've changed

Tell it to me slow
Tell me with your eyes
If anyone should know
How to let it slide
I swear I can see you
Coming up the drive
There ain't nothing like regret
To remind you you're alive

If you could only see
What love has made of me
Then I'd no longer be in your mind
The difficult kind
Cause babe I've changed

I crossed the canyon a thousand times
But never noticed what was mine
What you'll remember of me tonight
Well, it almost makes me cry
Yeah, it almost makes me cry

Oh ballbreaking moon and ridiculing stars
The older I get, the closer you are
Don't you have somewhere that you need to be
Instead of hanging here making a fool of me

If you could only see
What love has made of me
Then I'd no longer be in your mind
The difficult kind
But you won't see the change in me
If you could only see
What love has made of me
But I'll forever be in your mind
The difficult kind
But you won't see, no you won't see
The good in me
But babe I've changed
Cause babe I've changed

kiss

"When a thought is too weak to be expressed simply, it should be rejected."
--luc, marquis de vauvenargues

fini

"The past is finished. There is nothing to be gained by going over it. Whatever it gave us in the experiences it brought us was something we had to know."
--Rebecca Beard

patriotic duty?

"When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty."
--George Bernard Shaw

i miss the old conservatives

"We establish no religion in this country, we command no worship, we mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are, and must remain, separate. All are free to believe or not believe, all are free to practice a faith or not, and those who believe are free, and should be free, to speak of and act on their belief. At the same time that our Constitution prohibits state establishment of religion, it protects the free exercise of all religions. And walking this fine line requires government to be strictly neutral."
--Ronald Reagan

the sleep cure

"The cure for the blues is to go to sleep and wake up in the morning. A good night's sleep can change everything. Don't base your life on what you think at 3 a.m. Go to bed early and be asleep in your bunk as the train chugs over the Donner Pass of the soul, and awaken fresh and happy in San Francisco."
--Garrison Keillor, Love Me

dean moriarty

"'Sal, think of it, we'll dig Denver together and see what everybody's doing although that matters little to us, the point being that we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE.' Then he whispered, clutching my sleeve, sweating, 'Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there -- and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end.'"
------------------------------
"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
--Jack Kerouac, On the Road

broken delusion

"They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. They didn't know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way. Our broken Ford, old thirties upgoing America Ford, rattled through them and vanished in the dust."
--Jack Kerouac, On the Road

crying to be done

"Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done -- whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was."
--Jack Kerouac, On the Road

searchin'

"In a Pentecostal town like this, Saturday night's the time you decide who you are and what you're gonna do. When you're poor, and you got very little resources, you can't live up to God's expectations of ya -- it hurts too much. And you're waitin' for that promise of heaven, and you're waitin' and waitin', and it never comes. Pretty soon you think, 'I'm just gonna take what I can get.'"
--Jim White, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus

say yes

Well, you are about to start the greatest improvisation of all. With no script. No idea what’s going to happen, often with people and places you have never seen before. And you are not in control. So say “yes.” And if you’re lucky, you’ll find people who will say “yes” back.

Now will saying “yes” get you in trouble at times? Will saying “yes” lead you to doing some foolish things? Yes it will. But don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying “yes” begins things. Saying “yes” is how things grow. Saying “yes” leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say “yes.”
--Stephen Colbert, Commencement Address at Knox College, 2006

lost bliss

"Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing us all across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death."
--Jack Kerouac, On the Road

if only

"I'd never have believed I'd see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I'm writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.
--Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

an interesting planet

"That mention of Feuerbach and joy reminded me of something I saw early one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church. There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn't. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don't know why I thought of that now, except, perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it."
--Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

bibliophilism

"Now and then Fox feels agitated for reasons unknown. It causes him to throw stones or break tree limbs to no purpose. He runs along the beach to kick up sprays of shell like a mischevious child and he yells until his throat is sore. He still can't believe that he's managed to arrive here without a single book. He revisits every opportunity on the road, considers the poetry volumes crammed into old Bess's caravan. He thinks wistfully of every novel he's ever turned his nose up at or given up on, every hyphenated Englishman and triple-barrelled American who's ever put him to sleep. Come home Gertrude Stein and Jean-Paul Sartre--all is forgiven. Fox would content himself with a phone book, a shopping list."
--Tim Winton, Dirt Music

the reality bias

"Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

So, Mr. President, please, pay no attention to the people that say the glass is half full. 32% means the glass -- it's important to set up your jokes properly, sir. Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, because 32% means it's 2/3 empty. There's still some liquid in that glass is my point, but I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash."
--Stephen Colbert, White House Correspondents Dinner, 2006

crosses

Don't you know that I'll be around to guide you
Through your weakest moments to leave them behind you
Returning nightmares only shadows
We'll cast some light and you'll be alright for now
Crosses all over, heavy on your shoulders
The sirens inside you waiting to step forward
Disturbing silence darkens your sight
We'll cast some light and you'll be alright for now
Crosses all over the boulevard
The streets outside your window overflooded
People staring they know you've been broken
Repeatedly reminded by the looks on their faces
Ignore them tonight and you'll be alright
We'll cast some light and you'll be alright
--Jose Gonzalez, "Crosses" (lyrics)

on 9/11

"... what they do is all sit together and feel really bad, and pray. No one in [this] crew would ever be so nauseous as to try to get everybody to pray aloud or form a prayer circle, but you can still tell what they're all doing.
Make no mistake, this is mostly a good thing. It forces you to think and do things you most likely wouldn't alone, like for instance while watching the address and eyes to pray, silently and fervently, that you're wrong about the president, that your view of him is maybe distorted and he's actually far smarter and more substantial than you believe, not just some soulless golem or nexus of corporate interests dressed up in a suit but a statesman of courage and probity and ... and it's good, this is good to pray this way. It's just a bit lonely to have to. Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around ... part of the horror of the Horror was knowing, deep in my heart, that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my America ... than it was these [people's]."
--David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster

math teachers with an agenda

Calculus Problem Hits Too Close To Home

April 26, 2006 | Issue 42•17

PULLMAN, WA–The analysis of formulae derived from the fundamental theorem of calculus had a profound and seemingly personal impact on Washington State University freshman Barry Feldman on Monday, teaching assistants in Feldman's differential calculus section reported. "There was something about having to consider multiple rates of change and their effect on one another that really struck a nerve with Barry. I've never seen a student flinch so violently at terms like 'increasingly negative curves' or 'derivatives,'" TA Melanie Peppers said. "As uneasy as the unresolved equation seemed to make Barry feel, the prospect of eventually arriving at a solution for it actually appeared to upset him more." Feldman was recently the subject of gossip among the faculty after he interrupted a lecture on increasing-tensor calculus by screaming that "enough is enough" and asking if the professor would "please just change the subject."
--The Onion, April 6, 2006

i hope

Congrats to Ether Hour on a great night at Zoe. I would come to their shows and keep them on the iPod even if they weren't my friends. The more I hear "I Hope," the more I love it.
---------------------------------------
I Hope
By: Jeffrey Anderson

My curiosity has earned me a chance to learn the hard way
Life can be so giving in that way
You there standing with your eyes closed (arms out) expecting all you wanted
You never thought about if you never got it
But now you’re getting older
Now you fear your window is closing on your fingers
And the lock is clicking
And the shades are drawn before your eyes

I should have had you walk out there on your own
I should have had you go out there away all alone

Damn my mind for feeling empty
Why couldn’t I be happy working with my hands or selling something
Keep me entertained with small talk and doing nothin’ fancy
A common occupation, and I’m satisfied
But not me. That’s never gonna stop me
Push me to my limits, expand like I’m elastic
But I’ve got no examples, so open up your eyes

I should have had you walk out there on your own
I should have had you go out there away all alone
Now I’ve got to take some steps out there on my own
Now I’m gonna follow some plan that I designed at home

the first!

Ether Hour releases their first album. Check them out at myspace or their website.

what should i read next?

http://www.whatshouldireadnext.com/

#$*%P@! motor homes

"Boy, do I hate motor homes! ... they clog the streets and block the views -- and all so that some guy and his dumpy wife can eat lunch and empty their bladders without stopping."
--Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

the swell of clear water

"I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portuguese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to the feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that."
--Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

grief

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death ... Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself."
--Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

estrangement

"There is this place deep inside where I feel I am connected to everything, not just trees and grass and dogs but buildings and stairways, rocks and sidewalks. It's a deathly quiet place that I guess I've never shared with anyone and probably shouldn't, a place that is cold sober when my body is stumbling drunk, another consciousness that sits still like an antenna in tune with some other part of the galaxy. It was this part of me that I wanted to bring to our wedding, a centered space from which I could send out my oaths. I imagined that this secret antenna was my connection to whatever eternity might be and was the part of me that Christy alone perceived and loved. It was that same magic timeless part of her that I wanted to marry. But in the dark of the motel room, I realized that whether I was married or not, no one would ever know all of me; my truest self would always be estranged and alone. I was incapable of expressing my limited screwball faith and I knew that, even if I could, I'd box it in so dramatically it would be trivialized. I began to feel the familiar swell of numbing anger."
--Ethan Hawke, Ash Wednesday

glass

"I, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy; it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I've refused to vanquish."
----
"I hate it when people talk about twists of fate ... when it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be."
--Julia Glass, Three Junes

just enjoy

"If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time."
--Edith Wharton

accordian of time

"Time plays like an accordian in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year's pining, one long unfolding note."
--Julia Glass, Three Junes

black and white for a penny

"They know all about it ... they've got it in black and white; they bought it for a penny at the church door. You can get anything there for a penny, in black and white, and nobody to see that you pay ... Put a penny in the box or not, just as you like; take your tract. There you've got it, in black and white."
--Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

girls and dopey guys

"I was way early when I got there, so I just sat down on one of those leather couches right near the clock in the lobby and watched the girls. A lot of schools were home for vacation already, and there were about a million girls sitting and standing around waiting for their dates to show up. Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls, girls that looked like they'd be bitches if you knew them. It was really nice sightseeing, if you know what I mean. In a way, it was sort of depressing, too, because you kept wondering what the hell would happen to all of them. When they got out of school and college, I mean. You figured most of them would probably marry dopey guys. Guys that always talk about how many miles they get to a gallon in their goddam cars. Guys that get sore and childish as hell if you beat them at golf, or even just some stupid game like ping pong. Guys that are very mean. Guys that never read books. Guys that are very boring."
--J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

open minders

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices."
--Edward R. Murrow

what i'm reading now

The Pleasure of My Company, Steve Martin
Breathing Lessons, Anne Tyler
Maybe Baby, Lori Leibovich

broken heart mountain

"There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it."
--Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain

the mailman ran over my head

"If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing else comes close; my careening, zigzag existence, my wounded brain and faith in God, my collisions with joy and affliction, all of it has come, in one way or another, out of that moment on a summer morning when the left rear tire of a United States postal jeep ground my tiny head into the hot gravel of the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation."
--Brady Udall, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

what i'm reading now

Bachelor Brothers' Bed and Breakfast Pillow Book, Bill Richardson
The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, Brady Udall
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome

It's good when there's nothing to watch on TV!

butt out

"There is a sacred realm of privacy for every man and woman where he makes his choices and decisions -- a realm of his own essential rights and liberties into which the law, generally speaking, must not intrude."
-- Geoffrey Fisher

what i'm reading

The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (#5), J. K. Rowling

still a good one

"Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either, but love don't make things nice -- it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and *die*. The storybooks are *bullshit*. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and *get* in my bed!"
--Ronny Cammareri (Nicolas Cage), Moonstruck

my latest addiction

Sudoku!

red and blue

"Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative."
--Kurt Vonnegut

mirabelle

"Mirabelle replaces the absent friends with books and television mysteries of the PBS kind. The books are mostly nineteenth-century novels in which women are poisoned or doing the poisoning. She does not read these books as a romantic lonely heart turning pages in the isolation of her room, not at all. She is instead an educated spirit with a sense of irony. She loves the gloom of these period novels, especially as kitsch, but beneath it all she finds that a part of her identifies with all that darkness."
--Steve Martin, Shopgirl

happy halloween

Fair is foul, and foul is fair;
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
--Shakespeare, Macbeth

i love book lists

Time Magazine book critics made a list of the top 100 novels since 1923. I've only read 20, so I love having another list to work through (another incentive to read many of these books, many of which are already sitting on the shelf).

I'm also working on the Modern Library 100 list. I've only read 19 of these. Many of the same books are on both lists.

riding dinosaurs to church

"A new poll this week revealed that 66% of Americans think that President Bush is doing a poor job with the war in Iraq. And the remaining 34% percent think Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church."
--Tina Fey, Weekend Update, SNL

to rosa parks

Thanks for not staying in "your place," even when everything and everyone in the world told you to shut up and go to the back of the bus.

the priceless moment

"If I could have looked down the years then and seen everything from beginning to end -- the good times, the best times, the bad times, the bad decisions, the indecision, and then finally the divorce -- I still would not have traded anything for that moment."
--Kingbird Highway, Kenn Kaufmann

unbelievable

"Also, it is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner. Gievn (sic) that Baton Rouge is back to normal, restaurants are getting busy. He needs much more that (sic) 20 or 30 minutes. We now have traffic to encounter to get to and from a location of his choise (sic), followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc."
--Sharon Worthy, Michael Brown's press secretary, in an email to Cindy Taylor, FEMA deputy director of public affairs, and others, Aug. 31, 2 p.m. via

reckless

"Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with those who are reckless with yours."
--Mary Schmich

what i'm reading

Kingbird Highway, Kenn Kaufman
Sex Wars, Marge Piercy
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (#4), J. K. Rowling

thinking in herds

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
--Charles Mackay

Case in point.

i failed the allegiance test

"The George W. Bush Loyalty Quiz
10 Questions to Test Your Allegiance to President Bush

Your score is 0 on a scale of 1 to 10. You hate Bush with a writhing passion. You think he is an idiot, a liar, and a warmonger who has been a miserable failure as president. Nothing would give you greater pleasure than seeing him run out of the White House, except maybe seeing him dragged away in handcuffs."

--------------------------

They said it. Take the quiz yourself.

surely canst go, girl

The Hokey Pokey Written by Shakespeare

"O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe.
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.
Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke,
A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
To spin! A wilde release from Heavens yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl.
The Hoke, the poke -- banish now thy doubt
Verily, I say, 'tis what it's all about."

ether hour

Some friends of mine started a new band, and they are very talented. Check out their website to get free music.

the power of forgetting

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
--The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera

liquidation

"You begin to liquidate a people ... by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write books for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was. The world at large forgets it still faster."
--The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera

cyborg name

I am "Wireless Electronic Neohuman Designed for Yelling."
Oddly ... very appropriate.
What are you?

adrift

"For Tamina is adrift on a raft and looking back, looking only back. Her entire being contains only what she sees there, far behind her. Just as her past contracts, disintegrates, dissolves, so Tamina is shrinking and losing her contours.
She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death."
--The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera

forbidden

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
--Voltaire

much-needed comic relief

For Napoleon fans everywhere.

what i'm reading now

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (#3), J. K. Rowling
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
Executive Intelligence, Justin Menkes

president "the buck doesn't stop here" bush

Jon Stewart on Hurricane Katrina

blame the victims?

"Disaster sociology according to Bill O'Reilly. Or, Two views on who didn't get out.

From today's Times: "Brian Wolshon, an engineering professor at Louisiana State University who served as a consultant on the state's evacuation plan, said little attention was paid to moving out New Orleans's 'low-mobility" population - the elderly, the infirm and the poor without cars or other means of fleeing the city, about 100,000 people.'"

O'Reilly, on his show last night: "A lot of the people -- a lot of the people who stayed wanted to do this destruction. They figured it out. And that's -- I'm not surprised."
-- Josh Marshall via

hurricane housing

Check out this website and this website for connecting people dislocated by Hurricane Katrina with people able to open their homes.

1000 questions

New Orleans Time-Picayune Blog: Open Letter to the President

Dear Mr. President:

We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we’re going to make it right."

Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It’s accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.

How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks?
Read More >>
Via

trust no man

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."
-- John Adams

shattered balance

"Then everything began to reel before my eyes, a fiery gust came from the sea, while the sky cracked in two, from end to end, and a great sheet of flame poured down through the rift. Every nerve in my body was a steel spring, and my grip closed on the revolver. The trigger gave, and the smooth underbelly of the butt jogged my palm. And so, with that crisp, whipcrack sound, it all began. I shook off my sweat and the clinging veil of light. I knew I'd shattered the balance of the day, the spacious calm of this beach on which I had been happy. But I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing."
--The Stranger, Albert Camus

why he'll never go away

"'Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind."
--King Lear, William Shakespeare

why?

"I want to ask the president, why did he kill my son? He said my son died in a noble cause, and I want to ask him what that noble cause is."

"I want him to honor my son by bringing the troops home immediately ... I don't want him to use my son's name or my name to justify any more killing."

--Cindy Sheehan, mother of 24-year-old son -- Army Spc. Casey Sheehan of Vacaville, California -- who was killed in Baghdad's Sadr City on April 4, 2004.

preposterous assumptions

"Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed."
--Herman Melville

no cognitive dissonance, please

"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you."
--Don Marquis

live and let live

"... it came to me how some Christians seemed to always need to have something or somebody to be against. If it wasn't desegregation, it was women's lib. If it wasn't sex education, it was secular humanism. And if it wasn't one-worlders, it was just plain Democrats. Now it was abortionists and homosexuals who were ruining the country and destroying Christianity. Well, I had more faith in the Lord of Calvin and Knox than to get carried away over that unlikely possibility. He'd been running things since the beginning, and I didn't figure He'd have much trouble keeping a lid on things this day and age."
-- Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind, Ann B. Ross

help!

"The graduating class of 2005 can claim, with perhaps more credibility than any other class in history, that during its four years of college the world went crazy. In the fall of 2001, our planet earth and the United States of America were different sorts of places – in tone, in tolerance, in peace and war, in ideas and in ideals - than they are on this spring day in 2005. These past years have been extraordinary in the express rate of change, well beyond the usual standards of culture, well above the personal watermarks you have stamped as college students. As college graduates, you now live in a brand new world, with new versions of political upheaval, global pandemic, world war and religious polarization, the likes of which have rarely visited our planet all at once – and thank God for that.
...
We need help. Your help. You must help. Please help. Please provide Help. Please be willing to help. Help… and you will make a huge impact in the life of the street, the town, the country, and our planet. If only one out of four of each one hundred of you choose to help on any given day, in any given cause – incredible things will happen in the world you live in.
Help publicly. Help privately. Help in your actions by recycling and conserving and protecting, but help also in your attitude. Help make sense where sense has gone missing. Help bring reason and respect to discourse and debate. Help science to solve and faith to soothe. Help law bring justice, until justice is commonplace. Help and you will abolish apathy – the void that is so quickly filled by ignorance and evil."

--Tom Hanks, Vassar College Commencement Speech, 2005

bird buddies

"Please don't feed the birds."
--Sign in Steamers, Seattle seafood eatery -- I wondered why this sign was inside the restaurant, until I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a bird casually walking by my table.

blue plans for happiness

"We had collected in our years together a sizable library of books and a large set of record albums, neither of which were readily available in those days. Guests had brought us gifts discreetly, knowing our tastes ... We were very proud of our home: books in Hungarian, English, German, French, recordings of classical and jazz music ... We could never, and certainly not at this late date, hope to carry our treasures out of the country with us. Hungary was closing its every border, every gap in its skin, with terrible speed. We had to accept this fate, that our treasure would be stolen from us, and there was terrible regret over this. But my beautiful husband was clever to the very end. He had an idea, you see, because ... he saw me weeping -- it is ridiculous to say now -- over Alice in Wonderland. Not the Bible, not Petofi or Arany or Kis, not even Tolstoy. I could not bear to lose my Alice. He saw me on the floor, holding it like a baby ... he did not scold me for wasting time. He understood at once why I was crying, and he told me what we would do, and we did it. We spent one long night making a catalog of our literature and music. Of our life and pleasures. We took turns with the pen. One of us recited; one of us wrote. You must think of this beautiful scene ... There are tanks rolling up the streets of your home. Where you grew up ... And behind a blackened window, by candlelight, my husband and I scribble and whisper ... We knew there was a risk, of course, we were not fools, we were merely excited and sure that this was worth it and that we would survive and have this tale to tell later, elsewhere, to very impressed admirers like you and that we would have the pleasure of rebuilding this collection ... We were laughing because we were escaping with the blue plans, the design for our happiness, and if they exploded our building, if they burned our books, if they melted our records with their flame-shooters, if they fouled my piano, they will still not hurt us.
--Prague, Arthur Phillips

superficiality of days

"I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless passe move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends."
--The End of the Affair, Graham Greene

graham greene

"I have never been able to describe even my fictitious characters except by their actions. It has always seemed to me that in a novel the reader should be allowed to imagine a character in any way he chooses: I do not want to supply him with ready-made illustrations. Now I am betrayed by my own technique, for I do not want any other woman substituted for Sarah, I want the reader to see the one broad forehead and bold mouth, the conformation of the skull, but all I can convey is an indeterminate figure turning in the dripping macintosh, saying 'Yes, Henry?' and then 'You?'"
...........................
"I had no idea whatever of falling in love with her. For one thing, she was beautiful, and beautiful women, esepcially if they are intelligent also, stir some deep feeling of inferiority in me. I don't know whether psychologists have yet named the Cophetua complex, but I have always found it hard to feel sexual desire without some sense of superiority, mental or physical."
--The End of the Affair, Graham Greene

discomfort

"We prefer to do things comfortably."
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
--Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

the only truth that matters

"Art is not cosy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing."
--The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch

married bliss?

"Marriage is a curious institution ... I cannot quite see how it can be possible. People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars. The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement. There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together. Those outside the cage can, to their own taste, satisfy their need for society by more or less organized dashes in the direction of other human beings. But the unit of two can scarcely communicate with others, and is fortunate, as the years go by, if it can communicate within itself."
--The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch

flagrant violations of reality

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."
--1984, George Orwell

then and now

"If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population ... could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated ... the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it. And yet -- !"
-----------------
"To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumors and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice."
--1984, George Orwell