;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. -- Galileo Galilei ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; robscjr: The only place to "Engage" is a starship bridge. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Marc Horowitz o emacs is god. EZ is a wart on the hind end of a dead harvard student. o like all CMU code: way cool design, implementation like wet camel shit. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; From: Dude With an Attitude on STEPHEN-KING this is what I sent her (define mleuca-go-away (lambda (annoyance) (define repeatedly (lambda (num annoyance) (if (= num 0) (print "YAY") (repeatedly (1+ num) annoyance)) (repeatedly 1 kill-her))) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; 'Oom papa chaka maka nava sing cow, ting caba lala walee double ching pow heavy caba lulu cama chela sing tee, oom mama chaka mana one is now free' (2NU, 'This is ponderous') ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer. - Fred Brooks, Jr. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Good afternoon. This is the answering machine of Watchmaker Computing. If you wish to speak to Marc Horowitz, press 1. If you wish to speak to Barr3y Jaspan, press 2. If your name is Sarah Connor or Mrs. Horowitz, press 3. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "People are stooopid." Marc Horowitz "People are morons." Eric Muse "People: can't live with 'em; Global Thermonuclear War is just too darn annoying." Me ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; (Jan. 3rd or so, Seattle Times...) This is a partial quote from Bishop Abel Muzorewa, Zimbabwe's first black prime minister. "People are unreasonable, illogical and self-centered. Love them anyway. If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. The biggest people with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest minds. Think big anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway." ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "All you of Earth are idiots." -- Eros (Dudley Manlove) "Plan 9 From Outer Space" (1959) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; [this happened September 8, 1993. I moved out of East Campus in the spring of 1991.] A PERSONAL : yandros From: Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, Viscount Tariq cleaned out the hall freezer today. Found some of your stuff. Orlando's too. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -Lazarus Long ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; 'Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.' -- Alan Turing ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "There is no such thing at this date of the world's history in America as an independent press. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write his honest opinion, and if you did, you know beforehand it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things. and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allow my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before 24 hours, my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it, and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and the vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks. They pull the strings, and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." - John Swinden, 1953, then head of the New York Times, when asked to toast an independent press in a gathering at the National Press Club (at a time when the public was not allowed to attend). ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise." - F. Scott Fitzgerald ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; We ... make the modern error of dignifying the Individual. We do everything we can to butter him up. We give him a name, assure him that he has certain inalienable rights, educate him, let him pass on his name to his brats and when he dies we give him a special hole in the ground... But after all, he's only a seed, a bloom and a withering stalk among pressing billions. Your Individual is a pretty disgusting, vain, lewd little bastard... By God, he has only one right guaranteed to him in Nature, and that is the right to die and stink to Heaven. -- Ross Lockridge, "Short Lives, by Katinka Matson" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Have you ever been in love?" - -You might say that. "Horrible isn't it?" - -In what way? "It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up these defenses. You build up this armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple 'maybe we should just be friends' or 'how perceptive' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-of-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not Love." - from Sandman No. 65, written by Neil Gaiman ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark. - Henri-Frederic Amiel ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; I try to follow the advice that a university president once gave a prospective commencement speaker. "Think of yourself as the body at a Irish wake," he said. "They need you in order to have the party, but nobody expects you to say much." -- National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, addressing students and faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "There are heroes in evil as well as in good." - La Rochefoucauld, Maxims ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." - John F. Kennedy, former U.S. president "It was then that the American authorities turned up the facts about my past as an anarchist activist---the past from which I had already distanced myself mentally. At that time I was working on the final revision of my book, and Proudhon was much in my mind on the day I went down to the consulate in Vancouver for the crucial interview. I imagine that my past as editor of _Freedom_ was enough, under the McCarran Act, to keep me out, but the consul had the air of giving me a last chance when he asked if I was still an anarchist. I thought a moment and, with Proudhon in my mind, answered, 'fundamentally and philosophically, yes.' It was enough for him, and for me. I was excluded in perpetuity from the United States, the only country in the world I have been unable to enter, and I settled down with great satisfaction to be a writer in my own country, which I have in no way regretted." - writer and anarchist George Woodcock, on being denied entry into the United States to take a job at the University of Washington. This was done under the McCarran Act, which allowed U.S. officials to deny entry into the U.S. of those people espousing foreign ideas and alien philosophies. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Theology of Computers (La bustina di Minerva) ------------------------------------------------------------ Umberto Eco "...I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter- reformist and has been influenced by the 'ratio studiorum' of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach--if not the Kingdom of Heaven--the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation. "DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation.... Windows represents an Anglican-style schism,.. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I'm talking about all the order in the natural world," Malcolm said. ... "Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species." "Yes, why is that?" "Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media--it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benneton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity--our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. Oh, that hurts." -- Michael Crichton Author, lastest Top 10 book. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Subject: straczynski@genie.geis.com on elitism And if that makes me an elitist...I couldn't be happier. Because only being an elitist, a perfectionist, striving to be better than the next guy, has given us an Einstein and a Jorge Luis Borges and a Santayana. It has given us Nelson Mandela and the Beatles and Churchill and everyone who has ever won an olympic foot race in the last thousand years. A society is measured by the marks left by the best of us. Any society that forgets this is on the downward slide. Elitism is an evolutionary stance. It's not a bad word. It respects that which is (to that culture or society) best and brightest in all of us, the potential we have for greatness. "An elite squadron" means that they're the best they are at what they do. "An elite few" means the same thing. Elitist? Hey, Jeannette...if it's true, wear it as a badge, because that's what it is. jms ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, next best. fortune cookie ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get." - W. P. Kinsella ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." - Nobel laureate economist Herbert Simon ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling." - Margaret Lee Runbeck ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self." - May Sarton ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Robert Browning, when asked the meaning of one of his poems responded: "When I wrote it God and I knew; now only God knows." ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor." - Ralph Waldo Emerson ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I like to think that when you team up Dennis Ritchie, Rob Pike and Penn & Teller, some people will be terrified," - Penn Gillet ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "...The wordsmiths who serve our imagination are always devoted to communication. Clarity is always their method. Universality is their aim. The wordsmiths who serve established power, on the other hand, are always devoted to obscurity. They castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim. The undoubted sign of a society well under control or in decline is that language has ceased to be a means of communication and has become instead a shield for those who master it." - from John Ralston Saul's _Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West_: ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "to be nobody but yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting" - e.e. cummings ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The fact that stares one in the face is that people of the greatest sincerity and of all levels of intelligence differ and have always differed in their religious beliefs. Since at most one faith can be true, it follows that human beings are extremely liable to believe firmly and honestly in something untrue in the field of revealed religion. One would have expected this obvious fact to lead to some humility, to some thought that however deep one's faith, one may conceivably be mistaken. Nothing is further from the believer, any believer, than this elementary humility. All in his power...must have his faith rammed down their throats. In many cases children are indeed indoctrinated with the disgraceful thought that they belong to the one group with superior knowledge who alone have a private wire to the office of the Almighty, all others being less fortunate than they themselves." - Hermann Bondi, cited by Paul Davies in _God & the New Physics_ ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties." - James Madison, author of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in _Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments_ ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I'm convinced a new kind of social responsibility is emerging - an imperative to be succinct. Just as we've had to curtail our gaseous emissions in an increasingly smoggy world, the information glut demands that we be more economical about what we say, write, and post on-line. With time an ever more valuable commodity, the long-winded are beginning to resemble people who open their car door at a stoplight to dump trash onto the street. "We now have the means to publish virtually anything we wish. If we don't respect our new information ecology, we will increasingly suffer from data anarchy and social dissolution. Technically, we'll have access to a phenomenal vat of information, but in practical terms we'll become so specialized and distracted that we'll share less and less with our fellow citizens. Give a hoot, don't info-pollute." - David Shenk, (from: Wired, July 1996) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Subject: i wonder if they grasp the thrust of these pillars of knowledge [with sincerest apologies to people who have already heard me complain about this article...] "the more systemic violence in mathematics--or at least in our approach to mathematics--runs rampant. one often hears terms like 'manipulate,' 'choose a method to attack the problem,' 'use brute force,' 'grind out the answer,' 'exploit the previous theorem,' 'the numerator dominates the denominator,' and 'if you torture the data, it will confess' at all levels of mathematics." ... "to discount the violence in mathematics is to deny the interdependence of science and society, to ignore the responsibility of science--even the 'pure science' of mathematics--toward society ... one step toward recognizing the implications of mathematics on society is admitting the social violence that lies in mathematics. a feminist mathematician realizes that the direction of violence is toward women both socially and in mathematics." --mary anne campbell and randall k. campbell-wright, "towards a feminist algebra," in "teaching the majority: breaking the gender barrier in science, mathematics, and engineering," edited by sue rosser. ms. campbell is a doctoral candidate in english at purdue who has done research in feminist theory, while prof. campbell-wright is assistant professor of mathematics at university of tampa. ----- dan brown snowman@cs.cornell.edu snowman@orie.cornell.edu "have you smashed your patriarchy today?" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." - H.G. Wells (1866-1946) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If in the midst of an often crass and strident society, we have learned to love this world, if we have managed to control our avarice and learned to give rather than take, and above all to give ourselves to fellow human beings, then we may discover how, with grace, to give ourselves to death." - oceanographer Henry Stommel, 1985 from a column in a local newpaper and reprinted in Discover, April 1996 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted no more than a few minutes in the parade. "When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. "You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?" She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand." - Milan Kundera, in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, He will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees." - Heinrich Heine ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I think of all the things that have ever been done in my country, this is the stupidest." - former U.S. President Jimmy Carter on the Helms-Burton law, which, among other things, bars even infants and children related to foreign business executives doing business in Cuba from entering the United States. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Television, whether it's in Botswana or Newark, N.J., gives people the same idea about poor, rich, male, female, young, old. We spread the lowest level of our culture everywhere through television...and no one seems to understand that the entertainment part is absolute bullshit. They could put on dumber and dumber things, and nobody would say a word as long as they get the commercials. "And here are we, goggle-eyed pawns, sitting there day in and day out, lying to ourselves that we do not watch as much television as we do, when it's something like six hours a day. "What else do you do for six hours a day that rewards you in any way?" - writer Harlan Ellison, in a March 1996 interview with Alex Strachan ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; 'Children make the best theorists, since they have not yet been educated into accepting our routine social practices as "natural", and so insist on posing to those practices the most embarrassingly general and fundmental questions, regarding them with a wondering estrangement which we adults have long forgotten. Since they do not yet grasp our social practices as inevitable, they do not see why we might not do things entirely differently. "Where does capitalism come from, mummy?" is thus the prototypical theoretical question, one which usually receives what one might term a "Wittgensteinian" reply: "This is just the way we do things dear." It is those children who remain discontented with this shabby parental response who grow up to be emancipatory theorists, unable to conquer their amazement at what everyone else seems to take for granted.' - Critical social theorist Terry Eagleton in his 1990 essay, "The Significance of Theory" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "People have been trained to be stupid -- they need a word-checker to spell, they need a titular watch to tell time, and they need a goddamn PC to give them their sex and their community." - writer Harlan Ellison, in a March 1996 interview with Alex Strachan ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing." - Helen Keller ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Today's quote is from _Salon_, in which writer Cintra Wilson describes how the 1996 Olympics proved gymnastics must be stopped: ``The heartwrenching stories were another travesty. "Little Natalia was ripped from her mother's womb with a set of ice tongs by Communists and given to Dimitri, the unfeeling taskmaster who would be her trainer for life. Natalia developed her upper body strength dragging corpses over the harsh terrain of the steppes to the local incinerator, near the ice cave she called home. Dmitri would tell Natalia hourly during her rigorous 17-hour training sessions that if she stopped moving she'd be clubbed by trolls. Sleeping with only a sheet of used aluminum foil for a blanket and a tray of radioactive beef to keep her warm, Natalia dreamed of the day she would be able to fly. And fly she does. Winning is all she knows, this tot-faced little angel, and if she doesn't bring home gold for her country, her little body may be sold and converted to shark chum." Cut to shots of Natalia rubbing rock salt into her bleeding hands, having her head shaved for lice, praying in front of a huge, green, dead Jesus.'' ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation's greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us." - U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Amherst College, Oct. 26, 1963 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "DOS Computers manufactured by companies such as IBM, Compaq, Tandy, and millions of others are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form." - New York Times, November 26, 1991 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "This argument is found often in the American legal literature, principally among people whose political commitments would not otherwise dispose them to heights of cultural sensitivity." - Phil Agre, writing against the claim that privacy legislation is necessarily culturally biased and thus inappropriate. (see http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/tno/october-1994.html#strange) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "There's the intelligent sort of love that makes an intelligent choice. That's the kind you're supposed to get married on. Then there's the kind that's anything but intelligent, that's like a possession. And that's the one, that's the one everybody really values. That's the one nobody wants to have missed out on." - Alice Munro, in "Hard Luck Stories" from the collection, "The Moons of Jupiter" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The seventies was a time when people could do dumb things and nobody gave them a hard time about it. You'd go to see improvisational theater and the actors were climbing naked through piles of tires waving flashlights and reciting numbers at random, and afterward you thought, 'Well, life is like that sometimes, I guess,' and then a few years later there were strict new rules: everything had to Add Up, as if life were a term paper. People kept turning around and explaining themselves, even people for whom there was no explanation -- everyone was seeking plausibility." - Garrison Keillor, _The Book of Guys_ ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It's a strange time: Surrealism has to compete with hyperrealism." - comedian Phil Proctor (best known as a member of The Firesign Theatre) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The Sufis advise us to speak only after our words have managed to pass through three gates. At the first gate, we ask ouselves, 'Are these words true?' If so, we let them pass on; if not, back they go. At the second gate, we ask, 'Are they necessary?' At the last gate, we ask, 'Are they kind?'" - Eknath Easwaran ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "...there is no reward for love except the experience of loving, and nothing to be learned by it except humility." - novelist John le Carre ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The message of the cross is a message of love; it's a message of reconciliation. But it is not a message without absolutes; and we believe that the Scripture is absolute on this issue, and that homosexuality is a wrong... We didn't say that Jesus didn't love homosexuals; we said the message of the cross *is* a message of love and reconciliation. Jesus loves alcoholics, but don't you want us to speak out against alcoholism?" - Rev. Tom Elliff, President of the Southern Baptist Convention, on CNN's 6/13/96 edition of "Crossfire," responding to questioning of the Baptist boycott of the Disney Corporation "We find it curious that a group that claims to espouse family values would vote to boycott the world's largest producer of wholesome family entertainment." - Disney's written response to the boycott [they declined to have a representative present on "Crossfire"] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It struck most of us that the biggest harm reduction we could see would be to stop putting people in jail for drug use." - Dr. John Morgan, who was commissioned by the American Medical Association (AMA) to draft a report on harm reduction, commonly defined as helping drug users minimize the consequences of their behavior. The conclusion rattled the AMA, which subsequently shelved the report. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "How does the fact that I love another man and live in a committed relationship with him threaten your marriage? Are your relations with your spouses of such fragility that the fact that I have a committed, loving relationship with another man jeopardizes them? My God, what do you do when the lights go out?" - MA Rep. the Honorable Mr. Barney Frank, speaking in the U.S. House of Representatives in opposition to the ban on gay marriages ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We must choose between a party that neglects the poor and one that savages them, between a party that defers to the rich and one that deifies them, between a party that abjectly apologizes for government and one that demonizes it. One party signs a Faustian contract with the devil. The other party offers the contract. Better Faustus than Mephistopheles." - historian Garry Wills on the choice offered in the 1996 U.S. Presidential elections - between the Faustus of the Democratic Party and the Mephistopheles of the Republican Party. (October 3, 1996 issue of The New York Review of Books.) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?" - Dick Cavett, mocking the television violence debate ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The wilderness once offered men a plausable way of life. Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness. Soon there will be no place to go. Then the madness becomes universal. And the universe goes mad." - Edward Abbey, in The Monkey Wrench Gang ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Never judge someone by who he's in love with; judge him by his friends. People fall in love with the most appalling people." - Cynthia Heimel ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed." - Ernest Hemingway, _A Farewell to Arms_ ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I have been persuaded time and time again that a huge potential of good will is slumbering within our society. It is just that it's incoherent, suppressed, confused, crippled, and perplexed - as though it does not know what to rely on, where or how to find meaningful outlets. "In such a state of affairs, politicians have a duty to awaken this slumbering potential, to offer it direction and ease its passage, to encourage it and give it room, or simply hope. It is largely up to the politicians which social forces they choose to liberate and which they choose to suppress, whether they rely on the good in each citizen or the bad." - Czech president and playwright Vaclav Havel %% "By substituting dogma and abstraction for coherent narrative and historical fact, the judge [Robert H. Bork] can imagine the wreck of American civilization, that once noble work of Christian conscience, having been caused by a small band of traitorous intellectuals who, on or about the same day that the Beatles first showed up in America, bludgeoned the security guards surrounding the nations top disc jockeys, gained access to the control booths, destroyed the Perry Como records, and broadcast "All You Need Is Love" to thirty million teenagers, all of them ripe with sexual yearning, who heard the song on their portable radios and so began to dance, naked and tumescent and unashamed, on the grave of Ralph Waldo Emerson. " - Lewis H. Lapham in Harper's (December 1996), commenting on Robert Bork's odd view of American history. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. ... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." - U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 (letter to Col. William F. Elkins) Ref: "The Lincoln Encyclopedia", Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Thought, I love thought. But not the jiggling and twisting of already existent ideas. I despise that self-important game. Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness, Thought is the testing of statements on the touchstone of the conscience, Thought is gazing on to the face of life, and reading what can be read, Thought is pondering over experience, and coming to a conclusion. Thought is not a trlck, or an exercise, or a set of dodges, Thought is a man in his wholeness wholly attending. - D.H. Lawrence [forwarder notes: Apologies for the "man" in the last line. Lawrence died in 1930.] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "And as for penance, there had been no crime for which I should do it. My only crime was being a man and living in the world of men, and you don't have to do special penance for that. The crime and the penance, in that case, coincide perfectly. They are identical." - Robert Penn Warren, in All the King's Men, first published in 1946. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "An army with no war to fight is a constant source of headaches. That is why the founders of the United States originally intended that their country should have no standing army but rely on popular militias. The United States wound up with the worst of both worlds - an expensive standing army and an armed populace who, for want of invaders, shoot each other." - Terence Moore, writing in the _Winnipeg Free Press_ ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Responsibility is a unique concept: it can only reside and inhere within a single individual. You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. You may disclaim it, but you cannot divest youself of it. Even if you do not recognize it or admit its presence, you cannot escape it. If the responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible." - U.S. Admiral Hyman G. Rickover ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "(T)he International Standards Organization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) designated Oct. 14 as World Standards Day to recognize those volunteers who have worked hard to define international standards ... The United States celebrated World Standards Day on Oct. 11; Finland celebrated on Oct. 13; and Italy celebrated on Oct. 18." - Open Systems Today, 10/31/94 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted." - British comedian & satirist Eric Idle (of Monty Python's Flying Circus). ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "When it comes to the population of Britain being invited by a multi-national to wipe their bottoms on the work of a Knight of the Realm, then a last stand must be made." - David Bradley, director of Pentaplex, which has exclusive rights to license mathematical patterns known as Penrose tilings. Sir Roger Penrose, who developed the patterns, discovered a license infringement accidentally when his wife brought home a pack of Kleenex Quilted toilet paper which was embossed with Penrose tilings. (quoted in the April 22, 1997 Globe and Mail) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If discrimination based on race is constitutionally permissible when those who hold the reins can come up with 'compelling' reasons to justify it, then constitutional guarantees acquire an accordion-like quality." -- Justice William O. Douglas "The proponents [of the Civil Rights Act of 1964] have carefully stated on numerous occasions that Title VII does not require an employer to achieve any sort of racial balance in his work force by giving preferential treatment to any individual or group." -- Senator Hubert Humphrey, June 4, 1964 110 Congressional Record Part 10, p. 12723. "Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society. They are contrary to our constitution and laws..." -- Thurgood Marshall "So far as race is concerned, any state-sponsored preference to one race over another in that competition is, in my view, 'invidious' and violative of the Equal Protection Clause." "The Equal Protection Clause commands the elimination of racial barriers, not their creation in order to satisfy our theory as to how society ought to be organized." -- Justice William O. Douglas ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "There is no reason to suppose that most human beings are engaged in maximizing anything unless it be unhappiness, and even this with incomplete success." - Ronald Coase, Nobel Laureate in Economics, in _The Firm, the Market, and the Law_ ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We astronomers really can be spherical bastards," said one scientist. Not having heard the term before, I leaned over and inquired what he meant, "Spherical bastard" he repeated, "a term left over from Edwin Hubbble's day to describe a malcontent from any angle." - Eric J. Chaisson, "The Hubble Wars" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We're in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it's all gone." - Robert M. Pirsig ("Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance") ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The best description I ever found of what it's like to be a political reporter appeared, curiously enough, in Natural History magazine, deftly sandwiched into an article by a female biologist who studies the diet of the muriqui monkey. Anyone who has ever chased a politician around trying to get a usable quote will be stunned by the accuracy of this scientific account of the procedure: 'Occasionally the feces land neatly in my glove, but more often they splatter uselessly in the tangled vegetation--or else fall alongside another muriqui's feces, so that I cannot tell whose is whose. So even though the muriquis defecate often and, in the case of adults abundantly each time, getting a clean sample sometimes means tailing one muriqui for up to six hours without pause.' - Molly Ivins in Nothing But Good Times Ahead, 1994 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "... man's power of conception will sooner be exhausted than nature's power to supply material for conception." - Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 43 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Political journalism in America has always been more akin to stenography than inquiry." - John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine, in an article printed in the Globe & Mail, Friday, December 13, 1996 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Late in 1843 young Mendel entered the Augustinian monastery in Altbrunn, at which time, as a novice, he adopted the name Gregor to replace his christened Johann. After four years of clerical training, he was ordained a priest, in 1848. At that time. the Augustinian order staffed elementary schools in the Austrian empire, and Mendel was assigned a position as a substitute teacher in high school. To become a regular teacher, however, he had to take a state examination for certificatioon. He took such an examination in 1850, and failed. "About 50 years later, another young German, A. Einstein took a similar examination and he too failed. From these incidents, I have concluded that the German examination system is a remarkably effective device for detecting geniuses." - I. H. Klein, "Diamond Dealers and Feather Merchants" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "What makes this even messier is that masturbation is very strongly tied to education levels. People with graduate degrees are the most likely to masturbate." - sociologist Edward Laumann, author of a new study of the effects of male circumcision on sexual behaviour ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It struck me that I'd heard a lot of engineers say they wished they hadn't worked so hard on a start-up company, a lot of professors say it was a shame that they'd put their research ahead of their marriage, a lot of lawyers question their value to society, but I'd never heard anyone say he or she regretted time spent raising children. What would happen to my friends if they didn't realize their goals? Even worse, what would happen if they did realize those goals then came to see them as not sufficient?" - Philip Greenspun, in _Travels with Samantha_ (http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/samantha/index.html) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "... it is worth noticing that the heart of market ideology beats in the United States, and that the believers preach two contradictory visions: (1) a return to the American small-town ideal; (2) the achievement of a magic balance that will be created by the freeing of the capitalist mechanism. Most sensible people would be surprised by the suggestion of such a strange cohabitation. The global economy and the small-town ideal are not simply nonsequiturs. They are direct enemies. But there is no need for the sensible in a utopia." - John Ralston Saul, from his best-seller _The Unconscious Civilization_ ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "God said to Saint Peter. Peter I'm going to make a beautiful country. Fertile lowlands, beautiful mountains with graceful waterfalls down their sides. Sheltered glens that glow purple in the summer. I'm going to make the people of this country strong, brave and noble. I'm going to give them a drink that glows like gold, called whisky. This noble country of handsome men and the prettiest girls will be called Scotland. What do you think Peter? Saint Peter said, Well God that's all very well but do you not think you're being too lavish in the gifts you're bestowing to this country? It sounds like heaven on Earth. God replied to this: Oh there's no possibility of that, wait till you see who I'm going to give them as fucking neighbors!" - Alan Warner, from an unpublished novel called "After the Vision", quoted in The Economist ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballet et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon he world. The white race is the cancer of human history. It is the white race and it alone -- its ideologies and inventions -- which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself." - Susan Sontag, Partisan Review, Winter 1967, p. 57. (Source: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/quotes.html, John McCarthy's web page of extremist views) [I believe that Sontag's views have moderated quite a bit in the past 30 years. -ed.] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If you take the highest view of marriage, as a Divine relation, which love alone can constitute and sanctify, then of course human legislation can only recognize it.--Man can neither bind or loose its ties, for that prerogative belongs to God alone, who makes man and woman, and the laws of attraction by which they are united. But if you regard marriage as a civil contract, then let it be subject to the same laws which control all other contracts. Do not make it a kind of half-human, half-divine institution which you may build up but cannot regulate. Do not, by your special legislation for this kind of contract, involve yourselves in the grossest absurdities and contradictions." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1854 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Oh, sure. Absolutely. I absolutely believe every artist is in the position of the scop [the Anglo-Saxon bard in his novel GRENDEL]. As I tried to make plain in ON MORAL FICTION, I think the difference right now between good art and bad art is that the good artists are the people now who are, in one way or another, creating, out of deep and honest concern, a vision of life-in-the-twentieth-century that is worth pursuing. And the bad artists, of whom there are many, are whining or moaning or staring, because it's fashionable, into the dark abyss. If you believe that life is fundamentally a volcano full of baby skulls, you've got two main choices as an artist: you can either stare into the volcano and count the skulls for the thousandth time and tell everybody, "There are the skulls; that's your baby, Mrs. Miller." Or you can try to build walls so that fewer baby skulls go in. It seems to me that the artist ought to hunt for positive ways of surviving, of living. And you shouldn't lie. If there aren't any, so far as you can see, you should say so...But I think the world is not all merde. I think it's possible to make walls around at least some of the smoking holes... - John Gardner, from an interview in 1978. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; WHAT KIND OF WEB ANIMAL ARE YOU? Columnist Peter Huber says there are three types of people on the Web: the cheetah, the hippo and the cow: "The cheetah hunts. He pursues a single, specific target, selected before the chase begins. He runs in a straight line and, despite his great speed, covers little ground. He is a narrow-bandwidth beast... The hippo is a different beast entirely. You won't spot him sprinting across the Serengeti Plain. Instead, he lumbers from here to there, browsing on bushes and shrubs as he finds them. He covers a good bit of real estate because he craves variety in his greens. A medium-band beast... Cows graze. They inhale their grass, uncritically, in massive quantities, in the blandest of pastures. They are high-bandwidth, low-cal beasts. They are bred for television. The Web doesn't yet interest bovine herbivores at all. It won't until bandwidth goes up another hundredfold at least... The leading indicator for prosperity on the Web is bandwidth -- the speed at which Web connections transmit. And bandwidth is now increasing fast. There's enough to feed the cheetahs already. The hippos will follow before long. Even the cows will come home, just as soon as the trail to home.com gets broad enough." (Forbes 19 May 97) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "All the voices of the right, which covers a wide swath today, pay homage to the inevitability of "change." But they don't mean change as [Allan] Ginsberg meant it: something we _make_ to improve the world and our lot. They talk about it as something we must submit to. In an odd way, their kind of change is the same as the status quo: a given, about which nothing can be done. They are reassuring in the way [Michael] Coren is: All is well, and you're out of the loop anyway. There's something inhuman about this acquiescence." - Rick Salutin, in the Globe and Mail's Media column, May 16, 1997, responding to an obituary of poet Allan Ginsberg by biographer Michael Coren ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C.S. Lewis, _God in the Dock_ ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "How long will it be before ... the man sitting in London will see all things passing in Asia, or whenever it pleases him or an agent to turn a mirror on a view? It will be. Or how long before the discovery of cheap and perfect aerial navigation will change society and annihilate national distinctions? That, too, will be. These and a thousand stranger discoveries will during the ensuing century burst upon the world, changing it utterly." - Charles Godfrey Leland, Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling (1891) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it ..." - Learned Hand [via Charles H. Steen ] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Trading on the NYSE is suspended right now, and will be resuming momentarily. This is because the DJIA dropped 350 points, triggering a trading suspension. (This rule was created after the 1987 crash.) Digital's price has lost nearly 10%, for example. This is caused by the market disaster in Hong Kong, which is caused by lack of confidence about Hong Kong's economic future, which is caused by the PRC take over, which was caused by Margaret Thatcher. And she claimed to be pro-business. Humph. From: thomas@gnu.org (Thomas Bushnell, n/BSG) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; A PERSONAL : yandros From: "Very Few Winners Use Drugs." "Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates correction is stupid." Proverbs 12:1 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Before enlightenment, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. With enlightenment, mountains are no longer mountains and rivers are no longer rivers. After enlightenment, mountains are again mountains and rivers are again rivers. - Zen saying ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious." (W. Somerset Maugham) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature." - Wallace Stevens ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; tv is the paintbrush of the escape artist ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time." Thomas Carlyle - Critical and Miscellaneous Essays - 'Sir Walter Scott' ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other." -Jane Austen, Emma ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "A society that puts equality -- in the sense of equality of outcome -- ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests." - Milton Friedman ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; If the Catholic church couldn't stop Galileo, then governments won't be able to stop things now. - Carlo de Benedetti of Olivetti on the folly of trying to regulate information technology ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; It is impossible to know any man-- I mean his soul, intelligence, and judgement-- until he shows his skill in rule and law. I think that a man supreme ruler of a whole city, if he does not reach for the best counsel for her, but through some fear, keeps his tongue under lock and key, him I judge the worst of any; I have always judged so; and anyone thinking another man more a friend than his own country, I rate him nowhere. - Creon, in Sophocles' Antigone ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The mass media is supported and sustained by commercial entities. And corn flakes and Shakespeare are simply not kissing cousins. Leonard Bernstein and living bras are incompatible. And you cannot sustain adult, probing, meaningful drama when the proceedings are interrupted every twelve minutes by a dozen dancing rabbits with toilet paper. -- Rod Serling ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them. - Frederick Douglass ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base." - Dave Barry ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; A programmer from a very large computer company went to a software conference and then returned to report to his manager, saying "What sort of programmers work for other computer companies? They behaved badly and were unconcerned with appearances. Their hair was long and unkempt, and their clothes were wrinkled and old. They crashed our hospitality suite and made rude noises during my presentation." The manager said "I should never have sent you to the conference. Those programmers live beyond the physical world. They consider life absurd, an accidental coincidence. They come and go without knowing limitations. Without a care, they live only for their programs. Why should they bother with social conventions? "They are alive within the Tao." _The Tao of Programming_, Geoffrey James ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; When it comes to the practical issue of whether I shall go to a picture gallery or go home, I invariably find myself mounting a bus and going home. Theoretically, I still haunt Museums and galleries and concert halls. If they were closed I should feel an infinitely poorer man, as though my income of possible pleasures had been cut down. I love the National Gallery and the British Museum, indeed, as noble reserves of pleasure on which I can draw at need. I can bear not visiting them, but I could not bear so easily not having them to visit. Hence I join ardently in every protest against closing a museum or charging admission for it. I do not like the potential I who visits such places to be hampered. It is not that I myself mind paying sixpence, but the potential I (who, as I have said, frequents museums much more than I do) might not have a sixpence. And after all, the museums and art galleries exist for potential visitors as well as actual visitors. They are a part of the rich surroundings of our lives. They make London almost worth living in, whereas without them it would be a wilderness. I like to feel that somewhere or other in the neighbourhood troops of people are shuffling round in high rooms, peering at pictures and staring at statues and paying a puzzled reference to antiquity. They are our representatives in the public appreciation of the arts just as the people who attend political meetings are our representatives in keeping alive the flame of democratic government. Robert Lynd, from "On Never Going to the British Museum" The Portable Irish Reader, Viking, 1946. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Today's quote is from Patrick O'Brian's _Post Captain_: (Dr. Maturin reflects in his diary:) Smell is of all senses by far the most evocative: perhaps because we have no vocabulary for it - nothing but a few povery-stricken approximations to describe the whole vast complexity of odour - and therefore the scent, unnamed and unnamable, remains pure of association; it cannot be called upon again and again, and blunted, by the use of a word; and so it strikes afresh every time, bringing with it all the circumstances of its first perception. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; (from a qoute-of-the-day mailing list that I'm on) ...In her speech accepting the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm, Sweden, the author Toni Morrison said this: "Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence." It is not violence.... It is no solution to define words as violence or prejudice as oppression, and then by cracking down on words or thoughts pretend that we are doing something about violence and oppression. No doubt it is easier to pass a speech code or hate-crimes law and proclaim the streets safer than actually to make the streets safer, but the one must never be confused with the other.... Indeed, equating "verbal violence" with physical violence is a treacherous, mischievous business. Not long ago a writer was charged with viciously and gratuitously wounding the feelings and dignity of millions of people. He was charged, in effect, with exhibiting flagrant prejudice against Muslims and outrageously slandering their beliefs. "What is freedom of expression?" mused Salman Rushdie a year after the ayatollahs sentenced him to death and put a price on his head. "Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." I can think of nothing sadder than that minority activists, in their haste to make the world better, should be the ones to forget the lesson of Rushdie's plight: for minorities, pluralism, not purism, is the answer. The campaigns to eradicate prejudice --- all of them, the speech codes and workplace restrictions and mandatory therapy for accused bigots and all the rest --- should stop, now. The whole objective of eradicating prejudice, as opposed to correcting and criticizing it, should be repudiated as a fool's errand. Salman Rushdie is right, Toni Morrison wrong, and minorities belong at his side, not hers. - Jonathon Rauch, in an essay in the May 1995 issue of Harper's Magazine ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Olber's Paradox Why, he asks, is the sky dark at night? An infinity of stars, without the sun, spread thickly overhead, should shine as one and cast a gently blended constant light. Instead: this jewel-punctuated void; black shelter of wolves and lovers; womb of dreams and nightmares; vault of candles, mutters, screams, warm beds, street lamps, frightened glances back. Why? The stars are not, so we now hear, an endless army wheeling overhead, regular, measured; no, a mob in rout, retreating, many dying, others dead, the furthest outracing vision -- sphere after finite sphere, wind-scattered, going out. -- Tom Grey ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ``To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.'' Emily Dickinson ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne. Chaucer ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; E.B. White, in the introduction to _The Elements of Style_ "From every line there peers out at me the puckish face of my professor, his short hair parted neatly in the middle and combed down over his forehead, his eyes blinking incessantly behind steel-rimmed spectacles as though he had just emerged into the strong light, his lips nibbling each other like nervous horses, his smile shuttling to and from under a carefully edged mustache. "'Omit needless words!' cries the author on page 23, and into that imperative Will Strunk really put his heart and soul. In the days when I was sitting in his class, he omitted so many needless words, and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he often seemed in the position of having short-changed himself -- a man left with nothing more to say yet with time to fill, a radio prophet who had outdistanced the clock. Will Strunk got out of this predicament by a simple trick: he uttered every sentence three times. When he delivered his oration on brevity to the class, he leaned forward over his desk, grasped his coat lapels in his hands, and, in a husky, conspiratorial voice, said, 'Rule Seventeen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!' "He was a memorable man, friendly and funny. Under the remembered sting of his kindly lash, I have been trying to omit needless words since 1919, and although there are still many words that cry of omission and the huge task will never be accomplished, it is exciting to me to reread the masterly Strunkian elaboration of this noble theme. It goes: Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. "There you have a short, valuable essay on the nature and beauty of brevity -- sixty-three words that could change the world." ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; This is how we complicate things. During the heat of the space race in the 1960's, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) decided it needed a ball point pen to write in the zero gravity confines of its space capsules. After considerable research and development, the Astronaut Pen was developed at a cost of about US $1 million. The pen worked and also enjoyed some modest success as a novelty item back here on earth. The Soviet Union, faced with the same problem, used a pencil ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "How can we trust our leaders to manage impeachment when they can't even manage their hair? ... "Take, if you dare, Trent Lott. What the hell is happening on the top of our majority leader's head? Is it a wig? It's gotta be a wig the way it perches there in its rigid glory, right? If so, it's a cheap one, and we can congratulate our leader on his thrift. But what if it isn't? What if it's real and therefore an actual hairdo choice? Can we trust a man who chooses to look as if he's wearing a greased cat?" --from an article on congressional hair in today's _salon_, by cynthia heimel ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so that it will stay split." - Raymond Chandler, in a letter to Edward Weeks, editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_, 18 Jan. 1947, quoted in _World Wide Words_, Number 106, http://www.clever.net/quinion/words/ ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The world is full of people that have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are that they should be living for." - Joseph Campbell ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; From: Daily Whale Fiction is the art of painting the truth with a brush of lies. Photography is lying with a camera that can only render the truth. So the highest art is making movies, where you tell the truth by lying by telling the truth. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Choose Pulp Fiction. Choose the Rodney King trial. Choose repeating bad paraphrases of the speech from the opening of Trainspotting until it's clear that Danny Boyle's 15 minutes were pretty fucking influential on the 1990's. Choose OJ. Choose Kurt Cobain, Shannon Hoon as influenced by Kurt Cobain, and the second half of the decade's shift in musical taste as the zeitgeist finally getting over Kurt Cobain. Choose Star Wars 1977, Star Wars 1997, Star Wars 1999, and not forgetting whenever Star Wars as directed by Ronald Reagan was slated for release. Choose the X-Files, because Men in Black, Independence Day and countless others did. Choose the Internet because we all did. Choose getting sick to death, if you will, of Quentin fucking white-man small-dick Tarantino, but remember that too is a cultural influence. Choose teen movies. Choose CNN, NBC, ESPN, HSN and, just for the hell of it, Fox. Choose the fact that there's no definitive cultural object with which to end this strange little rant. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; I bargained with Life for a penny, And Life would pay no more, However I begged at evening When I counted my scanty store; For Life is a just employer, He gives you what you ask, But once you have set the wages, Why, you must bear the task. I worked for a menial's hire, Only to learn, dismayed, That any wage I had asked of Life, Life would have paid! -Jessie Rittenhouse ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Important Press Release: The manufacturers of KY Jelly have announced that their product is now fully Year 2000 compliant. In the light of this they have now renamed it as: 'Y2KY Jelly'. Said a spokesman: "The main benefit of this revision to our product, is that you can now insert four digits into your date instead of two" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Is there another word for synonym? ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Isn't it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do "practice?" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;