;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; 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?" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "What is the External World external to?" (Gilbert Ryle) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall." (Alan Bennett) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Microeconomics concerns things that economists are specifically wrong about, while macroeconomics concerns things economists are wrong about generally. Or, to be more technical, microeconomics is about money you don't have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of." - P. J. O'Rourke in EAT THE RICH (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience." (John Locke - An Essay concerning Human Understanding - bk. 2, ch. 1) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them." (E. M. Cioran) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Contempt is the imagination of anything which touches the mind so little that the mind is moved by the presence of that thing to imagine things which are not contained in the thing rather than those which are contained in it." (Baruch Spinoza - Ethics - part III) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "In the same way that a woman becomes a prostitute. First I did it to please myself, then I did it to please my friends, and finally I did it for money." (Ferenc Molnar - asked how he became a writer) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations." (J. L. Austin - Philosophical Papers - "A Plea for Excuses") ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men." (Max Beerbohm) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We're starting to feel guilty about the haves and have-nots. There was a time when it didn't bother us, but the have-nots haven't anything any more. "A time will come when they will kill every rich man, and it's not very far off." - Jim Aghazadeh, a wealthy Pakistani contractor, discussing recent class unrest in Pakistan. (quoted in the August 18, 1998 Globe and Mail) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "You know that look: beneath the logo, a search window. Beneath that, the sum of all human knowledge categorized in the Revised Dewey Decimal System: The Arts, The Natural Sciences, Used Cars, The Physical Sciences, Relationship Advice, Windows Screen Savers, The Humanities, Politics and Law, The X-Files." - Michael Swain on the "Yahoo Look", in the Aug 14, 1998 'Web Review' ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The actual sense-data are neither true nor false. A particular patch of color, which I see, for example, simply exists: it is not the sort of thing which is true or false. It is true that there is such a patch, true that it has a certain shape and a certain degree of brightness, true that it is surrounded by certain other colors. But the patch itself is of a radically different kind from the things that are true or false, and therefore cannot properly be said to be true." (Bertrand Russell - The Problems of Philosophy) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The way to ensure summer in England is to have it framed and glazed in a comfortable room." (Horace Walpole) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The simplicity of the representation of a subject is not eo ipso knowledge of the simplicity of the subject itself, for we abstract altogether from its properties when we designate it solely by the entirely empty expression 'I'." (Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry." (H. L. Mencken) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The medium is the message." (Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "'Nine from eight I can't, you know', Alice replied very readily: 'but -' 'She can't do Subtraction', said the White Queen. 'Can you do Division? Divide a loaf by a knife - what's the answer to that?' 'I suppose' - Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen answered for her. 'Bread-and-butter, of course. Try another Subtraction sum. Take a bone from a dog: what remains?' Alice considered. 'The bone wouldn't remain, of course, if I took it - and the dog wouldn't remain; it would come and bite me - and I'm sure I shouldn't remain!' 'Then you think nothing would remain?' said the Red Queen. 'I think that's the answer.' 'Wrong, as usual', said the Red Queen: 'the dog's temper would remain.' 'But I don't see how -' 'Why, look here!' the Red Queen cried. 'The dog would lose its temper, wouldn't it?' 'Perhaps it would', Alice replied cautiously. 'Then if the dog went away, its temper would remain!' the Queen exclaimed triumphantly. Alice said, as gravely as she could, 'They might go different ways.' But she couldn't help thinking to herself, 'What dreadful nonsense we are talking!'" (Lewis Carroll) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "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') ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make." (G. K. Chesterton) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct." (F. H. Bradley - Appearance and Reality) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts the moment you get up and doesn't stop until you get into the office." (Robert Frost) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies." (Gore Vidal) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I was told that the Chinese said they would bury me by the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret that this did not happen as I might have become a god, which would have been very chic for an atheist." (Bertrand Russell) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Bodies are perceived as having qualities which in reality do not belong to them, qualities which in fact are purely the offspring of the mind. Thus Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent; the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. ... Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless, merely the hurry of material, endless, meaningless." (A. N. Whitehead - Science and the Modern World) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do." (Jerome K. Jerome) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do." (Jerome K. Jerome) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The exercise of one concept is intertwined with the exercise of others; as with a spider's web, some connections may be broken with impunity; but if you break enough the whole web collapses - the concept becomes unusable. Just such a collapse happens, I believe, when we try to think of seeing, hearing, pain, emotion, etc., going on independently of a body." (P. T. Geach - Mental Acts: Their Content and Their Objects) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "There once was a man who said, 'Damn! It is borne in upon me I am An engine that moves In predestinate grooves, I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram.'" (Maurice Evan Hare) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world - and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing - as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself." (Jean-Paul Sartre - L'existentialisme est un humanisme) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together." (Jonathan Swift) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The meaning of a proposition is the method of its verification." (Moritz Schlick - Philosophical Review - vol. 45) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "From politics, it was an easy step to silence." (Jane Austen) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "When men have found some general propositions that could not be doubted of, as soon as understood, it was, I know, a short and easy way to conclude them innate. This being once received, it eased the lazy from the pains of search and stopped the inquiry of the doubtful concerning all that was once styled innate; and it was of no small advantage, to those who affected to be masters and teachers, to make this the principle of principles: that principles must not be questioned." (John Locke - An Essay Concerning Human Understanding) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "What is better than presence of mind in a railway accident? Absence of body." (Punch) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds ... An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much." (Simone Weil - L'Enracinement - 'Les Besoins de l'=E2me') ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior." (David Hume - An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever." (George Orwell) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If you seek counsel - from a priest, for example - you have selected that priest; and at bottom you already know, more or less, what he would advise. In other words, to choose an adviser is nevertheless to commit oneself by that choice." (Jean-Paul Sartre - L'existentialisme est un humanisme) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "To find a friend one must close one eye. To keep him - two." (Norman Douglas) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful, and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous, and loathed because they impose slavery." (Bertrand Russell - Sceptical Essays) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Economy is going without something you do want in case you should, some day, want something you probably won't want." (Anthony Hope) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore, to argue that God exists is to deny him." (Paul Tillich - Systematic Theology) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "ALLIANCE, n. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third." (Ambrose Bierce) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Bah! the thing is not a nose at all, but a bit of primordial chaos clapped on to my face." (H. G. Wells) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It is hard for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs." (Thomas Hardy - Far from the Madding Crowd - ch. 81) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I have long been of the opinion that if work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves." (Bruce Grocott) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I shall certainly admit a system as empirical or scientific only if it is capable of being tested by experience. These considerations suggest that not the verifiability but the falsifiability of a system is to be taken as a criterion of demarcation ... It must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience." (Karl Popper - The Logic of Scientific Discovery - ch. 1, sect. 6) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time." (E. B. White) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us." (Hermann Hesse - Demian - ch. 6) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "In sentencing a man for one crime, we may well be putting him beyond the reach of the law in respect of those crimes which he has not yet had an opportunity to commit. The law, however, is not to be cheated in this way. I shall therefore discharge you." (N. F. Simpson) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The consciousness of the infinite is nothing else than the consciousness of the infinity of the consciousness." (Ludwig Feuerbach - The Essence of Christianity) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "God and the doctor we alike adore But only when in danger, not before; The danger o'er, both are alike requited, God is forgotten, and the Doctor slighted." (John Owen) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses: We read fine things, but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author." (John Keats - Letter to J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818 - Letters of John Keats, vol. 1) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Space is a necessary apriori representation, which underlies all outer intuitions. We can never represent to ourselves the absence of space though we can quite well think it as empty of objects." (Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason - 'The Transcendental Aesthetic' - section I) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Truth is that sort of error without which a particular class of living creatures could not live." (Friedrich Nietzsche - Nachlass) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "New Year Resolutions 1. To refrain from saying witty, unkind things, unless they are really witty and irreparably damaging. 2. To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time." (James Agate) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on." (Dean Martin) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Art is only Nature operating with the aid of the instruments she has made." (Paul Henri - Système de la Nature - pt. 1, ch. 1) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It is proposed to you that you mount a horse, you must absolutely make a choice, for it is quite clear that you either will go or that you will not go. There is no middle way. It is therefore of absolute necessity that you wish yes or no. Up to there it is demonstrated that the will is not free. You wish to mount the horse; why? The reason, an ignoramus will say, is because I wish it. This answer is idiotic, nothing happens or can happen without a reason, a cause; there is one therefore for your wish. What is it? the agreeable idea of going on horseback which presents itself in your brain, the dominant idea, the determinant idea. But, you will say, can I not resist an idea which dominates me? No, for what would be the cause of your resistance? None. By your will you can obey only an idea which will dominate you more. Now you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your wish, you wish therefore necessarily. The word "liberty" does not therefore belong in any way to your will." (Voltaire - The Philosophical Dictionary) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." (Dorothy Parker) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "(The man who says that one can't step twice into the same river says something false; one can step twice into the same river. - And an object sometimes ceases to exist when I cease to look at it, and sometimes not - And we do know, sometimes, what colour another person sees when he observes a given object, and sometimes we do not.) And this is what the solutions to all philosophical difficulties look like. Our answers, if they are correct, must be ordinary and trivial.- For these answers, as it were, make fun of the questions." (Ludwig Wittgenstein - Nachlass) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Speech is the small change of silence." (George Meredith) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "To make judgements about great and lofty things, a soul of the same stature is needed; otherwise we ascribe to them that vice which is our own." (Montaigne - Essais - bk. 1, ch. 14) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The photograph is not quite true to my own notion of my gentleness and sweetness of nature, but neither perhaps is my external appearance." (A. E. Housman) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "There once was an old man of Lyme Who married three wives at a time, When asked 'Why a third?' He replied, 'One's absurd! And bigamy, Sir, is a crime!'" (William Cosmo Monkhouse) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his." (Oscar Wilde) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "When, however, we speak of philosophy as a criticism of knowledge, it is necessary to impose a certain limitation. If we adopt the attitude of the complete sceptic, placing ourselves wholly outside all knowledge, and asking, from this outside position, to be compelled to return within the circle of knowledge, we are demanding what is impossible, and our scepticism can never be refuted. For all refutation must begin with some piece of knowledge which the disputants share; from blank doubt, no argument can begin." (Bertrand Russell - The Problems of Philosophy - Ch. XIV) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The next war will be fought with atom bombs and the one after that with spears." (Harold Urey) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Truth is that sort of error without which a particular class of living creatures could not live." (Friedrich Nietzsche - Nachlass) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "'Good', then, if we mean by it that quality which we assert to belong to a thing, when we say that the thing is good, is incapable of any definition, in the most important sense of that word. The most important sense of 'definition' is that in which a definition states what are the parts which invariably compose a certain whole; and in this sense good has no definition because it is simple and has no parts. It is one of those innumerable objects of thought which are themselves incapable of definition, because they are the ultimate terms by reference to which whatever is capable of definition must be defined." (G. E. Moore - Principia Ethica) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely-read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely." (Hesketh Pearson) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects have an existence natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world; yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question, may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For what are the forementioned objects but the things we perceive by sense, and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations; and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these or any combination of them should exist unperceived?" (George Berkeley - The Principles of Human Knowledge) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Death is always a great pity of course but it's not as though the alternative were immortality." (Tom Stoppard) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it: and so of the other sources of our experience. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it." (John Stuart Mill - Utilitarianism) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy." (P. J. O'Rourke) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth." (Pablo Picasso) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God." (Martin Luther - Large Catechism - 'The First Commandment') ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on the way." (Carl Sandburg) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Thoughts reduced to paper are generally nothing more than the footprints of a man walking in the sand. It is true that we see the path he has taken; but to know what he saw on the way, we must use our own eyes." (Arthur Schopenhauer) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It is better to waste one's youth than to do nothing with it at all." (Georges Courteline) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "True and False are attributes of speech , not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood." (Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan - pt. 1, ch. 4) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I wouldn't say when you've seen one Western you've seen the lot; but when you've seen the lot you get the feeling you've seen one." (Katharine Whitehorn) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "How often misused words generate misleading thoughts." (Herbert Spencer) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then, Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church - and there was nobody left to be concerned." (Martin Niemoller) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The Master said, 'The superior man, in the world, does not set his mind either for anything, or against anything; what is right he will follow.'" (Confucius - Analects) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it." (Dan Quayle) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If I am not for myself who is for me; and being for my own self what am I? If not now when?" (Hillel 'The Elder' - Pirqe Aboth - ch. 1, no. 15) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights." (John Paul Getty) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don't." (Ross F. Papprill) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "'Good', then, if we mean by it that quality which we assert to belong to a thing, when we say that the thing is good, is incapable of any definition, in the most important sense of that word. The most important sense of 'definition' is that in which a definition states what are the parts which invariably compose a certain whole; and in this sense good has no definition because it is simple and has no parts. It is one of those innumerable objects of thought which are themselves incapable of definition, because they are the ultimate terms by reference to which whatever is capable of definition must be defined." (G. E. Moore - Principia Ethica) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "So cryptic as to be almost meaningless. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable." (The British Board of Film Censors - the banning of Jean Cocteau's "The Seashell and the Clergyman") ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I know that it is a hopeless undertaking to debate about fundamental value judgements. For instance, if someone approves, as a goal, the extirpation of the human race from the earth, one cannot refute such a viewpoint on rational grounds. But if there is agreement on certain goals and values, one can argue rationally about the means by which these objectives may be obtained." (Albert Einstein - Out of My Later Years) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Greater love than this, he said, no man hath that a man lay down his wife for his friend. Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius professor of French letters to the university of Oxtail." (James Joyce) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "What experience and history teach is this - that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it." (G. W. F. Hegel - Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Shrouds have no pockets." - Father Oliver McTeirnan, speaking on the topic of excessive working hours and the quest for greater and greater wealth during 'Thought for the Day' on BBC Radio 4's 'Today' Programme. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; In an essay called "Sur la television," the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu lambasted the media-age creature he called "le fast-thinker": the person who grinds out what appears to be intellectual discourse under the glare of the klieg lights. Le fast-thinker is not an intellectual, only the simulation of one; he is adept at the snappy phrase, the blustery and authoritative opinion, and, of course, the unanswerable statistical put-down. In the hurly-burly of talk television, on programs as disparate as Meet the Press and Jenny Jones, the most successful performer is not the person with the truth but the one with the sharpest tongue and the handiest numbers. - philosopher Mark Kingwell, in his essay Fast Forward, in the May 1998 Harper's Magazine ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "You have to hand it to Congress. They somehow managed to accomplish what no one before them has ever accomplished. They made oral sex boring. That may be the true legacy of this scandal. It caused millions of Americans to change the channel whenever someone on television mentioned oral sex. Now, that's an accomplishment." - Joe Lavin, http://joelavin.com, on the President Clinton sex scandal ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Men's novels are about men. Women's novels are about men, too, but from a different point of view. You can have a men's novel with no women in it except possibly the landlady or the horse, but you can't have a women's novel with no men in it. Sometimes men put women in men's novels but leave out some of the parts: the heads, for instance, or the hands. Women's novels leave out parts of men as well. Sometimes it's the stretch between the belly button and the knees, sometimes it's the sense of humour. It's hard to have a sense of humour in a clock, in a high wind, on a moor. "Women do not usually write novels of the type favored by men, but men are known to write novels of the type favored by women. Some people find this odd." - writer Margaret Atwood in "Women's Novels" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "...Plans are one thing and fate another. When they coincide, success results. Yet success musn't be considered the absolute. It is questionable, for that matter, whether success is an adequate response to life. Success can eliminate as many options as failure." - Tom Robbins, "Even Cowgirls Get The Blues" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It should be illegal to yell "Y2K" in a crowded economy." - Larry Wall, creator of the programming language Perl (from http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Creative breakthroughs are experiential. They don't come from intellectual analysis." - Lucia Capacchione ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Nay, even the sins of lying and perjury are nowhere punishable by laws; unless in certain cases, in which the real turpitude of the thing and the offense against God are not considered, but only the injury done unto men's neighbours and to the commonwealth." - John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Fenfluramine (the part of fen-phen you're thinking of) is no mere SSRI. It's a serotonin releaser: it makes neurons ejaculate their serotonin in an insane orgy of exocytosis." - David H. Eden, 9 Nov 1998 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "... [person] said "Well, it seems to have a lot of momentum." Of course it has momentum. You gain momentum very fast when you're rolling downhill out of control. What I want here is not momentum. What I want is progress." - Elizabeth Zwicky ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Professionals tend to fire on the same synapses all the time ... I think it's crucial that you enjoy yourself along the way. I was encouraged to read that a drink a day lessens overall mortality. And I have also declared chocolate a vegetable." - Susan Love, author and adjunct professor of surgery at UCLA, on being asked to describe her approach to life. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Meanwhile, Microsoft just released a Y2K bug fix for Windows 98. In case you didn't catch that, let me say it again, slower. Microsoft released a Y2K patch for an operating system released in 1998." - Craig Cox/AppleWizards ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Of course I believe in free will. Do we have a choice?" - Jewish author Isaac Bashevis Singer as quoted in an Amazon.Com review of his recently translated book "Shadows on the Hudson". ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Everything I did in life that was worthwhile I caught hell for." - former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Even as the nineteenth century had to come to terms with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes." - Terence Mckenna, Food Of The Gods, 1992 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It is remarkable, love," he said, looking at Nell for the first time, "how much money you can make shovelling back the tide. In the end you need to get out while the getting is good. Not very honourable, I suppose, but then, there is no honor among consultants." - Constable Moore from Neal Stephenson's novel "The Diamond Age" p.355 of Bantam paperback edition, March 1996 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "This obsessive, arcane book is an example of everything that is wrong with legal scholarship. Other disciplines have simple, easy-to-understand citation systems, but not law. Someone should do an analysis of the people who have worked on this book to see how many of them have gone mad." - Customer review for _Uniform System of Citation: The Bluebook_ found on Amazon.com. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I think he will be a good father. He may be only 11, but he is quite mature and responsible for his age." - from San Jose Mercury News, Sunday, Aug. 24, 1997. The quote is from Amma Webster, 15, on Sean Stewart, 11, who is on course to become Britain's youngest dad when next-door neighbor Webster gives birth to their kid in January. She thought he was 15. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We did not all come over on the same ship, but we are all in the same boat." - Bernard Baruch ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I still quote Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926), late of Terre Haute, Indiana, five times the Socialists Party's candidate for President, in every speech: 'While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.' "In recent years, I've found it prudent to say before quoting Debs that he is to be taken _seriously_. Otherwise many in the audience will start to laugh. They are being nice, not mean, knowing I like to be funny. But it also a sign of the times that such a moving echo of the Sermon on the Mount can be perceived as outdated, wholly discredited horsecrap. "Which it is not." - Kurt Vonnegut, from his novel "Timequake" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I'd like to summarize really why I think Dave Wolf should stay onboard space station Mir when I leave. Really I think it comes down to the fact that even though during this flight, in particular for me-which has been one of the hardest things I have very attempted in my life-I have to remember what John F. Kennedy said when I was about 4 years old. Forgive me if I get it wrong, he said, "We do not attempt things because they easy, but because they hard, and in that way we achieve greatness." "I believe out of this cooperation of America with Russia, which is not always easy, we are achieving some extremely great things, in sum, and in the big picture. And for these reasons I think I've really valued my time onboard space station MIR. I will always remember the last three or four months with great , great alacrity and nostalgia I'm sure. I really count all that we are doing together, America and Russia, in space and this endeavor to be extremely valuable to future cooperation on the Earth in the future." - taken from transcript of Astronaut Michael Foale's status report, Sept. 18, 1997. For more info, check out http://shuttle-mir.nasa.gov ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad." - Albert Camus, Homage to an Exile (1955) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The idea that people know what they want is wrong. They need to be pulled through the Web." - Laura Jennings, Vice President, Microsoft Network, quoted in http://www.forbes.com/forbes/97/0616/5912114a.htm ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown." - Claude Bernard ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I hung up, collected my passport and took the tube to Heathrow. At Terminal Three I saw that a flight to Auckland, New Zealand, was leaving in two hours. It was a flight to Auckland, New Zealand, via Los Angeles. I was a hysterical adolescent. But I was a hysterical adolescent with a credit card and there was a seat available." - Richard Rayner ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I didn't know anything about making films but I believed I couldn't make them any worse than the majority of films I was seeing. Bad films gave me the courage to try making a movie." - director Stanley Kubrick, 1928-1999 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; In the March 9, 1999, NY Times's Science section, from an interview with U.S. Representative George E. Brown of California, who has served over 30 years on the House Committee on Science: Q: How skilled are scientists and researchers at presenting their case to Congress? A: Very unskilled. They, generally speaking, have too great a faith in the power of common sense and reason. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Anyone rising to the task of performing a comparative analysis of February [1999]'s Canadian and American editions of Hustler magazine will undoubtedly reach the same inescapable conclusion: Larry Flynt's skin guide to modern anatomy and coital execution has been pulling the wool over our eyes. Okay, some of our eyes.... "Simply, the Canuck version of Mr. Flynt's paean to freedom of speech has been studiously offering lies as bona fide Canadian fare. Witness the letters page in the two February issues. "I salute Hustler for saying no to faggotry!" S.M. from Lincoln, Neb. writes in the American edition. Cross the border and we suddenly have S.M. from Tichfield, Sask., offering exactly the same praise: "I salute Hustler for saying no to faggotry!" Coincidence? Hardly. Of the 24 Canadian letters, 21 are actually imposters from the U.S. edition, reprinted verbatim in their glorious entirety. "Then there's the amateur photo gallery, featuring people who look very much like the next-door neighbour who leaves her drapes open. In the American edition, just one of the 17 women who "flash for cash" is identified as living in Canada.... "In the Canadian edition, the same women are again featured, but the poor reader is now led to believe that eight of these exhibitionists live in Canada -- a mendacious CanCon boost of 41 per cent. Terri from L.A., who has a fondness for "phallic fruits" and public sex, for example, is suddenly Terri from Huntington, Que., with exactly the same upstanding predilections.... "So, who's the mastermind behind this shadowy enterprise? Who's responsible for dashing all hope that the girl of many a dream is alive and well and sitting on a banana in Huntington?" - William Shields, in Masthead magazine, which covers the Canadian magazine industry. [Tichfield is an hour's drive from your editor's home town, but I can not attest to how they salute there. - ed.] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?" - William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, to Edward Gibbon, the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "What I had was the flu. And since I have had the flu before, I knew exactly what I needed to make things better: an aggressive regimen of morphine and Viagra." - Robert Kirby, The Salt Lake Tribune, February 11, 1999 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Unless a man has himself abandoned a wife, he will be unable to understand-and-forgive. Instead he'll see those twinned verbs as miniature implements--spade, hoe--on a woman's charm bracelet, fanciful and decorative, and not stop to consider for a minute the immensities of charity they demand." - Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Carol Shields, in her most recent novel, _Larry's Party_ ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I'm not a princess in a royal sense, but I was wronged by a man who said he loved me." - Monica Lewinsky comparing herself to Diana, Princess of Wales, in an interview to promote her new book with London's Sunday Mirror. (Source: CNN's Burden of Proof, Monday, March 1, 1999.) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "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 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Of course it's poetry. It rhymes." - William Burroughs in the introduction to the 1994 edition of "The Wild Party" by Joseph Moncure March, ISBN 0-679-42450-4. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not to be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism and doubt." - Henri Frederic Amiel ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I don't think I'm a weenie. I readily admit that I am a nerd. I think a nerd has a little more gravitas than a weenie." - Washington, DC Mayor Anthony Williams in a _Washington Post_ interview about whether or not he has a sense of humor. (http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/daily/feb99/mayor21.htm) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It tastes just like cold stew. It's very meaty, moist and succulent. If we don't get right in there, tasting, smelling, looking at the product, we're not qualified to judge it. If we don't taste it ourselves, how do we know we are offering the best product we can?" - John Murray, during a tasting session at the Kal-Kan (dog food) plant in Vernon, California. (taken from _The Emperors of Chocolate: The Secret World of Hershey and Mars_) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "E-mail is for nerds and pedophiles -- write a letter." - from the new (and oft-panned) movie Cruel Intentions. [qotd agrees whole-heartedly with this statement. - ed.] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "In a way, these things are like gold nuggets that God left in the forest. If I'm walking along in the forest and I stubbed my toe on it, who's to say I deserve credit for discovering it?" - Martin Hellman, reflecting on his "discovery" of public key cryptography, in a article in the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/122497encrypt.html ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "A day will come when you, France; you Russia; you Italy; you Britain; and you Germany -- all of you, all nations of the Continent will merge tightly, without losing your remarkable originality . . . A day will come when markets, open to trade, and minds, open to ideas, will become the sole battlefields." - Victor Hugo, quoted in Birds of Prey: Boeing vs. Airbus, by Matthew Lynn ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I don't think it's quite fair to condemn the whole program because of a single slip-up, sir." - General "Buck" Turgidson in "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (1964). ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Faced with the prospect of rereading this book, I would rather have my brains ripped out by a plastic fork." - excerpt from a ZDNet Review of Bill Gates' new book, "Business @ the Speed of Thought" (URL: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2230586,00.html) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." - U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, to CNN's Wolf Blitzer in a campaign interview. [http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/politics/story/18390.html?wnpg=all] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "...to grasp what it means to BE also requires being in constant touch with the awareness of nonbeing, of alienation, of nothingness, and ultimately of the inevitability of death, everyone's unavoidable fate. The awareness of this inevitable fate and what that implies produces existential anxiety. The antidote for such anxiety is to face and live our lives responsibly, meaningfully, and with courage and awareness of our potential for continuous choice and growth." - Walter Mischel, "Introduction to Personality" (1993) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It is not enough that you should understand about applied science in order that your work may increase man's blessings. Concern for the man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors; concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations." - Albert Einstein, speech at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, February 16, 1931. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I'll tell you something honestly about drugs. Honestly - and I know it's not a very popular idea. You don't hear it very often any more. But it is the truth: I had a great time doing drugs. Never murdered anyone, never robbed anyone, never raped anyone, never beat anyone, never lost a job, a car, a house, a wife, or kids. Laughed my ass off, and went about my day." - Bill Hicks ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "By the end of Mrs. Thatcher, some terrible things had happened to this country. There was a licensing of greed and the abolition of the mutual caring which should characterize Britain. During that period, some really bad things happened, from which we will take an awfully long time to recover; the elevation of the cultureless oaf as money-earner; the destruction of culture itself because it was a threat to the aims of pure materialism. These are mystical things, not easily quantifiable by the historian." - novelist John le Carre, quoted in The Times of London ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock." - Harry Lime to Holly Martins in "The Third Man" (1949) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it, but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance." - Charles A. Lindbergh (1902-1974) (On May 20, 1927, Lindbergh began his trans-Atlantic solo flight.) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The unconscious is like an attic where all the unused or unusable material of our personal and tribal experience is tossed, higgeldy-piggeldy: old wedding photographs, Grandmother's shawl, Great-Grandfather's diaries. They pop out of the clutter by accident, as when children play there or an inquisitive housemaid begins turning over the dusty relics. "Nature doesn't set out to deceive us. We don't even set out to deceive ourselves. It is simply that we cannot cope, all at once, with the clutter of information and emotion that is delivered to us. So we consign it to the attic of the unconscious." - Morris West, The World is Made of Glass (an interpretation of Jung) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I can not do everything, but I can do something. I must not fail to do the something that I can do." - Helen Keller ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Cryptography restrictions are the USA's Maginot Line. Big, expensive, ultimately routed around regardless, and once the war is over, difficult to get rid of." - Russell Nelson ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I have this horrible empathy thing where I can't even go through the drive-thru at Taco Bell without going, "Oh that poor lady. She's got her eight kids at home, they live in a bedroom and she's getting my burrito. I'm a white capitalist pig." - Rose McGowan, recently affianced to Marilyn Manson. from: http://national.sidewalk.msn.com/entertainment/interview ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; From the Guardian (U.K), Thursday April 1, 1999 Nato hit by Belgrade hackers Nato admitted yesterday that Yugoslav hackers had broken into its Internet home page and jammed its e-mail system with 2,000 messages a day. Nato's spokesman, Jamie Shea, said service on Nato's home page had been 'erratic to say the least' since March 28. 'Some hackers in Belgrade have hacked into our website,' he told a news conference in Brussels. 'At the same time our e-mail system has been saturated by one individual who is currently sending us 2,000 e-mails a day. We are dealing with macro viruses from Yugoslavia in our system.' A senior Nato diplomat said Belgrade's offensive was clearly well-organised and prepared. 'It ranges all the way from organised ethnic cleansing to messing up our website.' ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Owning a PC today is like owning a car in 1910. You had the ability to do a lot of things you couldn't do with a horse and buggy, yet you still had to be a pretty good mechanic." - Chuck Thacker, Microsoft, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, 25 June 1998 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "C'mon, guys, you can do better than that! Security on the Internet is so shoddy that we should have had a whole ecosystem of living, breathing, self-perpetuating, utterly ineradicable worms going by now. What's the problem? You virus authors can redeem yourselves by getting at least one worm thoroughly entrenched in the NT boxes of the world, including the military sites, by Y2K. Maybe then we can finally have the revolution that it is evidently going to take to get ourselves an operating system whose most basic architecture is up to the standards of 1974. Otherwise we'll all start laughing at you." - Phil Agre in the"Red Rock Eater News Service" , April 1st, 1999, on the "Melissa" virus. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Today's quote is from Otto Kiefer's _Sexual Life in Ancient Rome_: "... Nature instructs women to be sexually attractive to men: the existence of the next generation depends on that attraction: and it is not only understandable but right for women to do everything which can produce erotic excitement in men." QOTD discussion groups may wish to consider the following suggested topics: 1) Which is more important, duty or obscure notions of personal dignity? OR 2) This is really treading on thin ice, isn't it? ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The unpredictability of outcome of violent conflict hinges on its being genuinely total in its violence and unmindful of rules." - "Plough, Sword and Book - The Structure of Human History", Ernest Gellner, 1988. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy, and monotony." - Terrence McKenna, from Alien Dreamtime video ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "My grandfather was a painter. He, um, died at age 88. He illustrated Robert Frost's first three books of poetry. And he was lookin' at me and he said, 'Harry. There's two kinds of tired. There's good tired. And there's bad tired.' He said, 'Ironically enough, bad tired can be a day that you won. But you won other people's battles, you lived other people's days, other people's agendas, other people's dreams. And when it was all over, there was very little you in there. And when you hit the hay at night, somehow you toss and turn, you don't settle easy.' He said, 'Good tired, ironically enough, can be a day that you lost. But you don't even have to tell yourself, because you knew you fought your battles, you chased your dreams, you lived your days. And when you hit the hay at night, you settle easy. You sleep the sleep of the just and you can say, take me away.' He said, 'Harry, all my life, I've wanted to be a painter. And I painted. God I would have loved to have been more successful. But I painted and I painted and I am good tired. And they can take me away.' Now if there's a process in your and my lives, in the insecurity that we have about a prior life or an afterlife. God, I hope there is a god, if he is -- if he does exist, he's got a rather weird sense of humor however. But let's just -- but if there's a process that will allow us to live our days, that will allow us that degree of equanimity towards the end, looking at that black implacable wall of death, to allow us that degree of peace, that degree of non-fear, I want in." - Harry Chapin, December 22, 1980 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "A sex-loving monk, you object! Hot-blooded and passionate, totally aroused. But then lust can exhaust all passion, Turning base metal into pure gold. The lotus flower Is not stained by the mud; This dewdrop form; Alone, just as it is, Manifests the real body of truth." - Ikkyu Sojun (1394 - 1481) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Record companies are in a death struggle with the Web," says John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "They're using techniques that have been used in the war on drugs--zero tolerance, ramping up education and enforcement and trying to use the law to preserve something that is no longer supported by public practice." - from Music Without Labels by Christopher John Farley, at Time magazine's web site, Time.com, February 22, 1999 Vol. 153 No. 7 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I think I lost faith in my generation when 'modernism' started to refer to aluminum jump suits." - Pat Haney, on Helmut Lang's fall 1999 fashion show ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Technology ... the knack of so arranging the world that we need not experience it." - Max Frisch, Homo Faber ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If I didn't die yesterday, I'll never die." - Kosovar refugee Qamil Jupaj, 28, after describing Serbian soldiers herding villagers out of their homes, whipping them, and setting the homes on fire. Quoted in Time magazine, April 12, 1999. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The Internet is the greatest time waster of all time...I don't believe the Internet is going to change human nature in the slightest." - writer Tom Wolfe, quoted in Business 2.0 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The issue of when to hold firm as suggestions of factual collapse accumulate, and when to plunge with abandon into the breach, defines the most interesting and important dilemma of intellectual autobiography--for this decision defines the borderline between competence and genius, or between sensibility and crankiness. In some crucial sense, the geniuses of history are people who know when to plunge and how to create the instruments of successful assault and replacement. Most people, including the most polished intellectuals of every generation, never dare to take the plunge." - from Stephen J. Gould's essay "Darwin's American Soulmate: A Bird's Eye View," in Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Oh, what a nation of moralists the Americans are! With what fervor do they relish bringing their sexual misconduct to light! A pity that they do not bring their moral courage to bear on their president's arrogance above the law; a pity that they do not unleash their moral zest on an administration that runs guns to terrorists. But, of course, boudoir morality takes less imagination, and can be indulged in without the effort of keeping up with world affairs--or even bothering to know 'the whole story' behind the sexual adventure." - John Irving in A Prayer for Owen Meany (On the Reagan and Gary Hart "scandals.") ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "You can get rid of a lot of anger by putting your packets of crackers in a plastic bag and throwing them on the floor repeatedly, until they reach the required state of crumb." - Clarissa Dickson Wright, of the Two Fat Ladies, from her clam chowder recipe. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "No place is safe - no place is at peace. There is no place where a woman and her daughter can hide and be at peace. The war comes through the air, bombs drop in the night. Quiet people go out in the morning and see air-fleets passing overhead - dripping death - dripping death - dripping death." - H. G. Wells, London, George Bell and Sons, 1908 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I have a theory about theory: it is far too theoretical. Could this be because of theory's obsession with large words, abstract phrases, and references to specific people and places which are so far away from this location that they become no more than an abstraction anyway? Could theory simply be a hobby of the art academics who are too afraid to observe the work of art, and thus must stand in front of it with a strong drink and find a way to make sure that it has no impact upon them? Or perhaps, the theory bolsters the art's relevance to those who cannot or will not look further into it, and simply want the object as a reasonable investment of money with a guaranteeable return." - Sean Rorison, in Influx magazine, Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design, February 1999 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "There will be an orgy of millennial books, and I hate to follow crowds." - Stephen Jay Gould in `Questioning the Millennium' (1997) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We ought to think that we are one of the leaves of a tree, and the tree is all humanity. We cannot live without the others, without the tree." - Pablo Casals ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Contrary to popular belief, Barnum's great discovery was not how easy it was to deceive the public, but rather, how much the public enjoyed being deceived." - Daniel J. Boorstin ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If Columbine High had been more accepting of the Trench Coat Thugs, or whatever they were called, the boys might not have gone off. That's the lesson for schools. Don't leave anyone out. Welcome everyone, even the pierced misfits with Mohawks. If Dartmouth can ban fraternities, high schools should be able to run snobby cliques off campus." - Logan Jenkins, "Thoughts on the Carnage in Colorado", The San Diego Union-Tribune 23 Apr 1999 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?" - Lillian Hellman ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Decent people cannot sit back and watch systematic, state-directed massacres of other people. Decent people simply cannot tolerate this, and cannot fail to come to the rescue if a rescue action is within their power." - Czech President Vaclav Havel, speaking to the Canadian Parliament April 29, 1999 in support of NATO action in Kosovo against Serbian "ethnic cleansing". ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "This government has learned from the U.S. to camouflage its policy in verbal contortions," he said. "I think the U.K. government is being used as a lubricant to help justify the preferred U.S. policy position." - Simon Davies, spokesman for Privacy International, commenting in a press release on revised U.K. cryptographic policy. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "A plentitude of information leads to a poverty of attention." - from the article "Power and Interdependence in the Information Age" by Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr. in the latest (Sept/Oct 98) edition of Foreign Affairs journal. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; From the well-documented stories of a great many cities and towns and villages, dating back to the cleansing of the Krajina of Croats during 1991 and 1992, one can extract a rough standard operating procedure: 1. Concentration. Surround the area to be cleansed and after warning the resident Serbs---often they are urged to leave or are at least told to mark their houses with white flags---intimidate the target population with artillery fire and arbitrary executions and then bring them out into the streets. 2. Decapitation. Execute political leaders and those capable of taking their places: lawyers, judges, public officials, writers, professors. 3. Separation. Divide women, children, and old men from men of "fighting age"---sixteen years to sixty years old. 4. Evacuation. Transport women, children, and old men to the border, expelling them into a neighboring territory or country. 5. Liquidation. Execute "fighting age" men, dispose of bodies. - Mark Danner, of the University of California, writing in April 1999 on the techniques of "ethnic cleansing" perfected by the Serbian military and police (and copied by other factions) in Yugoslavia. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "My sister was a vegetarian, more or less, before she started working on farms. Now, she won't eat sheep or pig, but cows and chickens are just mobile vegetables to her." - "Christopher R. Maden" in Silent Tristero, April 1st 1999 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "A democratic government, as a reflection of the people, can rarely rise above the self-interest that drives most of the letters, phone calls and e-mail sent to Washington by the people of America. After all, ours is a truly representative government. We think a lot like the people who represent us in Congress, and vice versa. And I don't mean that as a compliment." - Bill Hall, Lewiston, Idaho Tribune, April 11, 1999 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "This government has learned from the U.S. to camouflage its policy in verbal contortions," he said. "I think the U.K. government is being used as a lubricant to help justify the preferred U.S. policy position." - Simon Davies, spokesman for Privacy International, commenting in a press release on revised U.K. cryptographic policy. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see." - John Burroughs ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The Scottish Parliament, adjourned on the 25th of March 1707 is hereby reconvened." - Winnie Ewing MSP, at the opening of the new Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, 12th May, 1999 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Look, I wanted to love The Phantom Menace, too. I was an adolescent boy and would enjoy being one again for a couple of hours. But the movie has a way of deflating all but the most delusional of hopes. If someone had given Ed Wood $115 million to remake Plan Nine From Outer Space it might have looked like this, although Wood's dialogue would surely have been more memorable." - Slate Movies reviews Star Wars Episode I by David Edelstein Wednesday, May 19, 1999, at 10:15 a.m. PT http://www.slate.com/MovieReview/99-05-19/MovieReview.asp ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt." - Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Ancient Sage" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "As a scientist and technical innovator, the man who started Microsoft Corporation at age 19 fails to equal the computer whizzes in this book. His achievement was in the field of salesmanship; his company's MS-DOS and Windows products captured the market for personal computers operating systems. That makes him a modern day Jakob Fugger (ranked #493) or John D. Rockefeller (ranked #486): a mogul, but nothing more. When he starts giving his zillions to charity [as did Rockefeller], we'll consider him for a future edition . . ." - The authors of "1,000 Years, 1,000 People: Ranking the Men and Women Who Shaped the Millenium," in the chapter 10 Who Almost Made It -- as to why one William Gates (b. 1955) was not included in the list. (1,000 Years, 1,000 People: Ranking the Men and Women Who Shaped the Millenium by Gottlieb, Gottlieb, Bowers and Bowers, Published by Kodansha America, 1998) (The submitter notes: For those who are interested, the authors of this book aspired to rank the thousand men and women who did the most to shape the world for better or worse over the past millenium. The ranking system was compiled numerically based upon five factors: 1) Lasting influence; 2) Effect on the sum total of wisdom and beauty in the world; 3) Influence on contemporaries; 4) Significance of contributions; 5) Charisma / Fame. The sum total of these factors are what produced the rankings.) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "There is no compelling reason to find that local legal officials must take a 'hands off' approach just because a crook or a con artist is technologically sophisticated enough to sell on the Internet. Invocation of 'the Internet' is not the equivalent to a cry of 'sanctuary' upon a criminal's entry into a medieval church. It should be sufficient that the laws sought to be applied, even if they might tangentially implicate interstate commerce, are 'media neutral' and otherwise pass constitutional muster. The laws advanced here meet that test, although not every foreseeable statute has or will." - Decision of the SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, NEW YORK COUNTY: I.A.S. PART 8, in the case of New York v. Lipsitz (aka KEVIN JAY LIPSITZ, Individually and d/b/a COLLEGETOWN MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES, d/b/a KRAZY KEVIN'S MAGAZINE CLUB, d/b/a MAGAZINE CLUB INQUIRY CENTER, d/b/a TEMPTING TEAR-OUTS) (on line at http://www.oag.state.ny.us/press/jun97/lebedeff.html) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "To their credit, my new bifocals initially made me feel much younger. Immediately after putting them on, I discovered that moving my head up and down produced the same level of nausea that I once got only at high-school beer parties." - Robert Kirby, The Salt Lake Tribune, September 24, 1998 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The Founder of our faith was the very fount of Simian Kindness. I remember, he once said to me 'I never met an Ape I didn't like'." - Dr. Gay-a, Director of the Science Foundation and Defender of the Faith, Planet of the Apes, 1968 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; [The following quotation contains words that some subscribers may consider vulgar and offensive. -eds.] "As much as I like to rant about creative control and the freedom of the artistic spirit and all that crap, I have to admit that there's something to be said for the Hollywood movie-making system, where some greed-blooded studio hack stands over the director with a meat cleaver saying, 'The pacing is for shit and it's too fucking long by at least a half an hour. I don't give a flying bugger how important they are for character development or how hard you had to blow the producer to keep them in the script -- cut out two-thirds of the teary scenes with the kid and his mom, or we'll cut them out for you.' I love Lucas's creative vision, but he really does need someone standing over him with a meat cleaver. He didn't have it here, and as a result -- well, the pacing is for shit, and it's too fucking long by at least a half an hour." - Greta Christina, San Francisco Frontiers, on the latest Star Wars film from George Lucas. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I'm reminded of the great liberal philosopher Adam Smith, who, more than two hundred years ago, said public monopolies are terrible. They are slow, bureaucratic, inefficient and so on. But he also added, private monopolies are all of this, and in addition, greedy." - Robert Shaw, in Internet governance: herding cats and sacred cows (Version 1.1), based on talk given at INET 98, Geneva, Switzerland, July 22, 1998 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be." - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992). Bantam Spectre, p. 293. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; One thing about excellence, it's an exclusive club. And it's only for those who really want to pay dues to the shit. My daddy told me when I was a boy, "The only way you can be different from other people is to do some shit they don't want to do." - Wynton Marsalis, musician ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I decided, let's try and build something new to replace what was lost. Part of what I wanted was to make another hacker community with the same virtue as the previous one, and that virtue, to me, was the freedom to cooperate. You have a certain way of life when you have freedom in a free society. In a totalitarian, non-free society, every aspect of how you deal with people is shaped by your fear. In proprietary society, your dealings with other people are shaped by fear of the information police, currently in its incarnation of the Software Publishers Association." - free software pioneer Richard Stallman, quoted in http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/08/cov_31feature2.html ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "There's no avoiding it any longer. I don't like any of my friends. I've just flicked through my address book, a thin volume, and was filled with irritation, distaste and an overwhelming sense of boredom. One of the great boons of living in a city is that you don't need friends. There are 11 million people within walking distance, a thousand new people every day for the rest of my life and no need to repeat anyone. Friends are only necessary in the ghastly country, where you have to have them, along with rubber boots and a barometer and secateurs, to put off bucolic idiocy, a wet brain, or eating the 12-bore. Old friends are the worst, people who once shared an office or a dormitory; the ephemeral reason for liking them is lost in the mists of time, but convention and habit insist that you remain interested in their fat wives and unspeakable children and endlessly thwarted careers, while their hair recedes and their jowls and stories proceed with all the excitement of declined German verbs. No, I like acquaintances: a wide circle of faintly familiar people who smile and wave but whose names escape me. An acquaintance has all the expectation, desire to please and vivacity of a first date. They flash wit and compliments and don't expect you to call or go to their children's weddings." - A.A. Gill in "Diary", The Spectator, 1 November 1997 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Sleep, oh babe, for the red bee hums, The silent twilight falls, Eva from the grey rock comes To wrap the world in thralls. And lyin' there, oh my child, my joy, My love and heart's desire, The crickets sing you a lullaby Beside the dyin' fire. Dusk has come and the Green Man's horn Is wreathed in rings of fog; Shivrah sails his boat 'til morn Along the starry bog. And over it all the paley moon Has gleamed her cusp in dew And weeps to hear the sad sleep tune I sing, oh love to you. - from a traditional Irish lullaby, as performed by Nicolette Larson (celebrating the birth of your not-so-humble editor's second child, Daniel Stefan Labach, on January 16, 1999.) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've got to want it bad, because it's going to put up a fight. It's going to say, "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil; who's standing center stage, advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim that this land is the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest." Now show me that. Defend that. Celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free." - "President Andrew Shepard," The American President. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We have forgotten that our only goal is to live and that we live each day and that at every hour of the day we are reaching our true goal if we are living . . . The days are fruits and our role is to eat them." - Jean Giono ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Standing armies threaten government by the people, not because they consciously seek to pervert liberty, but because they relieve the people themselves of the duty of self defense. A people accustomed to let a special class defend them must sooner or later become unfit for liberty." - John McAuley Palmer ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Some protesters assumed the army was using rubber bullets. They held up their jackets. Only after people fell, with gaping wounds, did they comprehend that the soldiers were using live ammunition. I screamed and cursed, in Chinese and English, until I realized I was ruining my BBC colleague's tape. I bit my tongue and forced myself to take notes, timing the volleys, recording the troops and tanks entering from the south, then the west and finally the east. I counted the ambulances. There weren't nearly enough. Cyclists flung limp bodies across bike seats and wheeled them out. Others carried the wounded away on their backs, like sacks of potatoes. Below our balcony, a man was shot. I didn't notice until an ambulance stopped to pick him up. After each murderous volley, the crowds fled past the hotel. Then, to my astonishment, they regrouped as if by unspoken agreement, and crept slowly back, screaming and weeping with rage. By now, I was noting down gunfire every six or seven minutes. It occurred to me that was as much time as it took to run two blocks, calm down and creep back. A bullet struck the base of the balcony above my head. My colleague from The Times of London says she pointed it out at the time. I have no memory of it. What I do remember is feeling famished as dawn broke. We left our BBC colleague covering for us on the balcony. Downstairs, in the hotel dining room, I discovered that many other journalists seemed to have the same surreal craving for scrambled eggs. A CNN cameraman told us that we had just missed a fight. When the waitresses said there was only coffee, no food, because the chef was too upset to cook, a couple of reporters became unhinged. They started yelling that they would cook their own breakfasts. Suddenly, the chef appeared. He was crying. "I've seen too many people killed last night," he said, his shaking hand resting on a doorknob. Everyone stared at the ground in shame. Then everyone began apologizing to everyone else. The chef pulled himself together, and said he would feed the reporters because "you are telling the world what happened." As he said this, the CNN cameraman started to cry. As the waitresses passed out plates of toast and fried eggs, I realized I hadn't shed a single tear all night. No one could eat. I stared at the food, and wept. - journalist Jan Wong, recalling the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, June 4, 1989, in which the Chinese Army murdered hundreds of students and pro-democracy protesters. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I continued to see my therapist during that year, traveling to New Haven one afternoon a week and returning in the evening. I expected that insight would replace illness and waited for self-awareness to flood my brain, disinfecting it like bleach, stripping away all the bugs and glitches, the dirty quirks and habits. But it didn't turn out that way. Understanding, first of all, did not announce itself, but rather snuck in through some back door. And my illness simply moved over to make room for it. The two were entirely compatible." - Deborah Y. Abramson, _For No Good Reason_ ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We might wish that we ourselves owned such a computer to do the work for us. Such a situation would have its disadvantages, however. Electronic computers are bulky, expensive, complicated, and can be handled only by people with special training.... A slide rule doesn't seem as impressive as a giant electronic computer, but it has many advantages. It is small enough to put in your pocket, it need not cost more than a couple of dollars, it can't go out of order, and, best of all, it can solve almost any numerical problem that you meet up with under ordinary circumstances. To add to all that, it is simple to operate." - Isaac Asimov, _An Easy Introduction to the Slide Rule_ (1965) [with Y2K looming, we are glad that one of the qotd staff has held on to his slide rule, with which we intend to rebuild civilization. -eds.] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The theories of chaos and complexity are revealing the future as fundamentally unpredictable. This applies to our economy, the stock market, commodity prices, the weather, animal populations (humans included), and many other phenomena. There are no clear historical patterns that carve well-marked trails into the future. History does not repeat itself. The future remains mostly unknowable." - William A. Sherden, "The Fortune Sellers" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "'The Phantom Menace' raises the spectre of an industry where the parasitic arts of buildup and spinoff will outgrow and choke the product itself. In fact, the true masterstroke would have been never to release the film; Lucas could have milked the anticipation for as long as he pleased." - Anthony Lane, New Yorker Magazine, May 24, 1999 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. "People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years. "Above all -- we were wet." - Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes, (New York: Scribner, 1996) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The southeast of Turkey is not an area where an ethnic group lives. For this reason, there is no reason for an ethnic separatist movement in Turkey." - from a Turkish government publication entitled "The True Face of the PKK Terrorist Organization." The brochure is being distributed at the trial of PKK [Kurdistan Workers' Party] leader Abdullah Ocalan. [How can they try a Kurdish terrorist if Kurds don't exist? -eds.] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If it was necessary to tolerate in other people everything that one permits in oneself, life would be unbearable." - Georges Courteline (quoted in this month's Harper's) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Gather out of star-dust Earth-dust, Cloud-dust, Storm-dust, And splinters of hail, One handful of dream-dust Not for sale. - Langston Hughes ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Only a mediocre writer is always at his best." - W. Somerset Maugham ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Climb the mountains, And get their good tidings. Peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, While cares drop off like autumn leaves. - John Muir ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "When the spiritual teacher and his disciples began their evening meditation, a cat who lived in the monastery made such noise that it distracted them. One day the teacher ordered that the cat be tied up during the evening practice. Years later, when the teacher died, the cat continued to be tied up during the meditation session. And when the cat eventually died, another cat was brought to the monastery and tied up. Centuries later, learned descendants of the spiritual teacher wrote scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up a cat for meditation practice." - from Zen and Taoist Stories http://www.utah.edu/stc/tai-chi/stories.html ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "You've all heard the saying: If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. That's actually a Modernistic saying. The postmodern version is: If all you have is duct tape, everything starts to look like a duct. Right. When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct?" - Larry Wall, from his speech "Perl, the first postmodern computer language" (In answer to Larry, September, 1998. -ed.) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "In "God's Spies," Lewis Lapham's essay on the practice of surveillance and the striving for federal omniscience, he observes that Americans no longer resist governmental invasions of privacy. This can't be surprising. Americans have apparently come to loathe privacy, their own or anybody else's. A week's worth of casual channel surfing gives the proof. Take MTV's Loveline, on which a real young woman -- somebody's daughter or, quite possibly, someday somebody's mother -- voluntarily called in recently to discuss her boyfriend's desire to insert not just his penis but both testicles during intercourse. She wanted, as I recall, to know if this was normal or at all dangerous. Or watch America's Funniest Home Videos, on network television, which never seems to want for homemade tapes of people falling down drunk at their own weddings or getting hit in the groin by flying objects. These tapes are not seized by heartless governmental investigators; people submit them willingly, gleefully. Need I even mention Jerry Springer? "Americans who can't get on television can always turn to the Internet. Millions of them have put up Web pages devoted to themselves. In these bizarre advertisements for Brand Me, they eagerly give away, to a global audience, their names, addresses, birth dates, lists of favorite movies and CDs, and sexual activities, often illuminating any or all of these interests with digitized photos. "So who cares about privacy? The only invasive police that Americans would fear is one that forced them to stop talking about themselves." - A. Kam Napier, from a letter in the May 1999 Harper's Magazine ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It is sad to think that the first few people on earth needed no books, movies, games or music to inspire coldblooded murder. The day that Cain bashed his brother Abel's brains in, the only motivation he needed was his own human disposition to violence. Times have not become more violent. They've just become more televised." - shock rocker Marilyn Manson ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Instead of a commercial lasting 30 seconds, it lasts 30 hours!" - Daniel Bobruff of Microtime Media, on placing commercial products in computer games aimed at children, quoted at http://www.whitedot.org. [Mr. Bobruff is more evil than Slobodan Milosevic. -eds.] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Dear Miss Manners, Why does the Internet need rules of etiquette? Isn't its libertarian spirit part of its appeal? "Gentle Reader, Yes, it was. Freedom is always appealing until you are forced to try to put up with someone else's. " - Miss Manners (Judith Martin) in a column posted on http://underwire.msn.com/Underwire/Itspersonal/miss/mmarch_2.asp ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit." - W. Somerset Maugham ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "None of my peers are impressed by what kind of car I have. They're impressed when I have a T-1 line in my house. This all goes back to evolutionary biology where we're all competing for prestige because we think it will get us babes." After a long pause, an audience member called out: "Is it working for anyone?" There came the resounding unanimous reply: "Nooo!" - Eric Raymond addressing Atlanta Linux Convention, quoted in David Leonard's .signature, on the evolutionary future of computer geeks. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served us nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found." - Calvin Trillin ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all." - composer John Cage ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Among the teachings of Baha'u'llah is one requiring man, under all conditions and circumstances, to be forgiving, to love his enemy and to consider an ill-wisher as a well-wisher. Not that he should consider one as being an enemy and then put up with him, or to simply endure him, or to consider one as inimical and be forebearing towards him. ...Nay, rather, you must see your enemies as friends, ill-wishers as well-wishers and treat them accordingly. That is to say, your love and kindness must be real." - Abdu'l-Baha, quoted in "Star of the West", Vol IV, No.11, p. 191 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "When I first came on board, I thought that the whole world owed me. I was ready to make music, damn it. I was disappointed, angry that so little in my life would stay in tune. But tonight, as I barely heard the sounds we made before they were blown astern, I understood such disappointment to be arrogance. "It is arrogance to expect that our life always be music. It is false pride to demand to know the score. Harmony, like a following breeze at sea, is the exception. In a world where most things wind up broken or lost, our lot is to tack and tune." - Harvey Oxenhorn, _Tuning the Rig: A Journey to the Arctic_ ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "...it is important that we are not drawn into the trap of believing that conditions such as 'road rage,' 'air rage' and and 'computer rage' exist in their own right: they are merely buzz terms used to describe bad behaviour." - British psychiatrist Luke Birmingham, writing in The Times of London ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Those who say that their childhood was the happiest period of their lives must, one suspects, have been the victim of perpetual misfortune in later years. For there is no reason to suppose that the period of childhood is inevitably happier than any other. The only thing for which children are to be envied is their exuberant vitality. This is apt to be mistaken for happiness. For true happiness, however, there must be a certain degree of experience. The ordinary pleasures of childhood are similar to those of a dog when it is given its dinner or taken out for a walk, a behaviouristic, tailwagging business, and, as for childhood being care-free, I know from my own experience, that black care can sit behind us even on our rocking-horses." - Lord Berners, as quoted by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If you have a computer and can fog a mirror, you can post anything on the Internet." - Lars Mahinske, Encyclopaedia Britannica researcher, Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1999. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The Dillettante Police "We sat across the marbled bar at Il Fornaio looking intently at each other, burning holes in each other's eyes; we drank fine white wine in thin Italian goblets. We warmed to our topics. We spoke of Don DeLillo and Robert Mapplethorpe and Barbara Kruger. We evoked the gods of apathy: Warhol. Capote. Updike. Kerouac. We bandied slivers of monologue by Spalding Gray. There was very little that could stop us as we went on to our stories of personal travel, engulfed in a cK cloud of blissful pretense. There should be a police force that will come up to the upwardly mobile and stop them when they get like this; when we start to believe that we are well-read and well-traveled and that knowledge is within reach. They should come up to you just as you're sipping your Pinot Grigio and quoting Nabokov and they should hit you in the face with a bat." - from Suzanne Finnamore's novel "Otherwise Engaged" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; [The following quotation contains words that some subscribers may consider vulgar and offensive. -eds.] "When the weather gets warm it's amazing where people will fuck. It just proves that people are part of the animal kingdom." - Detective Sgt. T. F. O'Connor, quoted in "Home Town" by Tracy Kidder, p. 232. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Turbo Back in the heyday of the IPM PC/AT, personal computers sported a little button marked "turbo". By pressing this button, you re-directed the hot gasses from your computer's exhaust manifold into a turbocharger -- a turbine-powered blower which used the pressurized exhaust to force air from the intake scoop into your PC/AT's cylinders, boosting your power output and thus increasing your processor speed to as much as 11Mhz! Internal-combustion engines proved so effective that new Pentium computers still display a little light marked "TURBO". What's more, turbocharged gas engines are now used to power software, photocopiers, telephone systems, flashlights -- even sailboats. In fact, scientists have successfully grafted tiny gasoline engines onto living organisms! - a definition from Professor Sputnik's Lexicranky Page (http://www.wolfenet.com/~sputnik/gramsquad/gramsquad.html and http://www.wolfenet.com/~sputnik/gramsquad/lexicranky.html) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We are putting our foot down, using the biggest foot we can find." - Dewang Mehta, President of India's National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), after calling in an elephant to stomp on CDs containing pirated software. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Americans have no history and they live wonderfully well." - Radovan Delibasic, a Serb from Kosovo Polje, rejecting Slobodan Milosovic's call for a Greater Serbia based on Serbian history and pride. (Source: The New York Times, July 2, 1999) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch the renewal of life -- this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do." - Charles Dudley Warner, _My Summer in a Garden_ (1870) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "For the folks at home, put your head down on the carpet and run to the kitchen." - CBC Colour Commentator (CFL Toronto vs. Montreal 17 Oct 98) referring to how much it hurts to have your skin rub along the artificial turf at SkyDome. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "...when schedule slippage is recognized, the natural (and traditional) response is to add manpower. Like dowsing a fire with gasoline, this makes matters worse, much worse." - from "The Mythical Man-Month - Essays in Software Enginerering" by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. (1975). ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Here in Irvine, where most domestics are Mexican immigrants -- legal and illegal -- a popular book titled 'How to Communicate With Your Spanish-Speaking Help' offers phrases like 'Don't pour grease down the garbage disposal' and 'How long are you planning to stay in the USA?'" - "Even Leftists Have Servants Now," Wall Street Journal, 23 June 1999 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We cannot say to ourselves, we need this or that sort of technology, therefore we should be doing this or that sort of science... Science is useful, indispensable sometimes, but whenever it moves forward it does so by producing a surprise; you cannot specify the surprise you'd like. Technology should be watched closely, monitored, criticized, even voted in or out by the electorate, but science itself must be given its head if we want it to work." - Lewis Thomas in the essay "Making Science Work" from Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony. New York: Viking Press. 1983, p.28 as quoted in 'Biology' by Neil A. Campbell. 4th ed. The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Copmany, p.20 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "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/ ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Sex is all over the public discourse, to the point where it's becoming like racial prejudice: The harder it gets to find, the more people tend to talk about it." - Christopher Caldwell in his article "Party Line," in the March 8, 1999, edition of The Weekly Standard (at 6): ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Private or semi-private forums, such as Silent-Tristero, allow me to rub electronic shoulders with people from all walks of life, and I am constantly amused and sometimes amazed at the things I have read here. It's nice to find a group of people who are capable of having intelligent and thoughtful conversations/debates, and I feel honored that I have been allowed to stay and listen. I know I don't contribute much, but then that's one more thing that makes Silent-Tristero so attractive, the fact that there isn't a bunch of inane newbies throwing stupid questions around and wasting everyone's time. And since I know you all appreciate that as much as I do, I'm going to shut up now." - David A. Burgess in "Silent-Tristero", March 10th, 1999 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Amazon.com should change its name to Amazon.org. It's like a non-profit organization." - Michael Murphy, editor of the Overpriced Stock Service, on the hotly traded but unprofitable mail-order bookstore. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "As time has passed I've come to understand that the true value of Apollo wasn't the rocks, wasn't the data that we brought back. It was the worldwide sense of participation, of people everywhere recalling where they were at that moment, and how they shared in a human adventure that brought out the best in all of us." - Astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, speaking at the National Press Club. The 30th anniversary of his walk on the moon is next week. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Agrippina's (author's cat) beautifully ringed tail flapping across my copy distracts my attention and imperils the neatness of my penmanship. Even when she is disposed to be affable, turns the light of her countenance upon me, watches with attentive curiosity every stroke I make, and softly, with curved paw, pats my pen as it travels over the paper, even in these halcyon moments, though my self-love is flattered by her condescension, I am aware that I should work better and more rapidly if I denied myself this charming companionship. But, in truth, it is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating little friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more. M. Fee, the naturalist, who has written so admirably about animals, and who understands, as only a Frenchman can understand, the delicate and subtle organization of a cat, frankly admits that the keynote of its character is independence. It dwells under our roofs, sleeps by our fire, endures our blandishments, and apparently enjoys our society, without for one moment forfeiting its sense of absolute freedom, without acknowledging any servile relation to the human creature who shelters it. "Rude and masterful souls resent this fine self-sufficiency in a domestic animal, and require that it shall have no will but theirs, no pleasure that does not emanate from them. "Yet there are people, less magisterial, perhaps, or less exacting, who believe that true friendship, even with an animal, may be built up on mutual esteem and independence; that to demand gratitude is to be unworthy of it: and that obedience is not essential to agreeable and healthy intercourse." - Helen M. Winslow, "Concerning Cats" (first published in 1900) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Stores and web sites both have overhead, but stores don't have to hire computer scientists to redesign themselves every six months." - Holman W. Jenkins Jr., from an article entitled "Here Comes Web War II" in the "Business World" column on _The Wall Street Journal_ editorial page. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "When you leave DeVry, you know what you're doing." - advertisement in the Toronto subway for the "DeVry Institute of Technology", an organization which offers training courses (which genuine technologists like me are snobby about). ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Today is a momentous day for Scotland. We've waited 300 years for this, and it can't be more momentous than that." - actor and Scottish nationalist Sean Connery, speaking to the crowds gathered on the Mound as he and his wife arrived for the opening of the Scottish Parliament. [http://www.freeserve.net/entment/story2.htm] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "And you know, people talk about mass thought control like it's a bad thing." - James Poniewozik in his last "Media" column for Salon.com, June 28, 1999 [We hope this is intended to be humourous. -eds.] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I tell you the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people." - Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; With so many web sites framing and pointing to other sites' content, it has gotten to a point where "the aggregators aggregate each other's content until it looks like an M.C. Escher drawing," says Frost. - "Dethroning the Content King" by Ben Templin, June 30, 1999 [URL:http://webreview.com/wr/pub/1999/06/25/feature/content.html?wwwrrr_19990625.txt] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Trendy restaurants come and go. Burger chains endure and grow." - Peter Huber, quoted in Forbes Magazine, 7/5/99 on investing in fads. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice. These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding. They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown. In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man. In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood. Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts. For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind." - Speech drafted for (but thankfully never delivered by) U.S. President Nixon for use "in the event of moon disaster" during the first lunar landing. The text was found in a memo to H.R. ("Bob") Haldeman from speechwriter William ("Bill") Safire, dated July 18, 1969, recently unearthed in the U.S. National Archives. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I don't get alimony. They talk about 'accustomed' to a certain lifestyle. You go to a restaurant, you're accustomed to eating. You leave, you ain't eating no more. They don't owe you a steak." - comedian Chris Rock ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "A Cuban cross between Thelonious Monk and Felix the Cat." - Ry Cooder, sleeve notes to "Introducing... Ruben Gonzalez" (1997) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Rev. Jesse Jackson speaks spirited words at Harvard U. By Parker R. Conrad Harvard Crimson 06/09/1999 (U-WIRE) CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Joseph S. Nye, dean of the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), introduced the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson as "the most impressive orator of our time" at Tuesday's KSG Class Day speech. "Whatever happens," quipped Nye before Jackson's talk, "it is difficult to sleep through one of his speeches." Indeed, as Jackson spoke, there was nary a shut eye at the ARCO Forum. Jackson, who is president and founder of the Rainbow Coalition, drew large amounts of applause throughout his speech, pausing only to allow for occasional whoops and cheers of approval to die down. Jackson's talk, true to form, was interspersed with biblical analogies and parables. "Jesus was born in the slum," Jackson said, comparing Christ's plight to that of countless disenfranchised groups in the U.S., "to an unmarried mother, who didn't have the right to vote, who didn't have the right pedigree. He was born outside, with the smell of manure. Jesus was born in the slum, but the slum was not born in him." Jackson started off his talk by condemning the growing disparity in wealth between rich and poor Americans. "For the rich there is no ceiling," Jackson said, "for the poor there is no floor." This disparity, according to Jackson, cut across ethnic lines, despite popular stereotypes. "Most poor people are not black or brown; they are white, female, and young....Most poor people are not on welfare; they work everyday. They catch the early bus. They sweep the floors. They clean our soiled sheets when we get sick. And when they get sick, they can't afford to sleep in the beds which they have made," Jackson said. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "When I was young, people called me a gambler. As the scale of my operations increased I became known as a speculator. Now I am called a banker. But I have been doing the same thing all the time." - Sir Ernest Cassell, treasurer to king Edward VII of England, quoted in E. Chancellor, "Devil Take the Hindmost," at ix (1999): ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Newly coined nonce words are often spelled with a hyphen, but the hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people used to write ``non-zero'' and ``soft-ware'' instead of ``nonzero'' and ``software''; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of other words. Thus it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic spelling ``e-mail''. Think of how many keystrokes you will save in your lifetime if you stop now! The form ``email'' has been well established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course, ``email'' has been a familiar word in France much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason.) - undated paragraph by Donald Knuth found at http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If I had to proclaim my philosophy of humor, it would be: Comedy is good, reality better." - comedian Harry Shearer "I did not wash my hair last night because I thought a certain amount of stiffness would probably help it. What do you think? [Unidentified South African-accented female voice says "it looks good today. It looks better."] Okay. Okay. The question is whether to wash it for tomorrow, but we'll make that decision as we go along, I guess." - Dan Rather fretting about his hair, in an unbroadcast satellite feed from Soweto, available in audio format at Harry Shearer's web site: http://www.timecast.com/channels/comedy/shearer/index.html [The site also features "Bill Gates off the air (video): First documented swearing by the nation's richest man." -eds.] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Unlike other mammals, writers are not born into the world knowing how to make their own particular noise. Almost from the beginning, wolves howl, hogs grunt, bears growl. They need no MFA programs in growling, or summer workshops in discovering the grunt within. Even if separated from their families at birth and raised by some other species, they still know the right sound. But writers are different: all too easily they mistake someone else's sound for their own." - Adam Hochschild ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Money is greedy [in Silicon Valley], sure, but it has all sorts of peripheral motives. People give money out here just to be part of the excitement of the deal. They're in because their friend is in. They're in because they think your product is important. They're in because it's spicy to have something at risk. They're in because you asked and they like you and they don't know how to say no. People will invest in your start-up simply because watching you struggle is far more entertaining than going to the symphony." - Po Bronson, _The Nudist on the Late Shift_ ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The smoke from my car towards the end of the race was probably coming from my brain because I had to think about so many things -- the fuel, the brakes, the tyres. " - Eddie Irvine, Formula One race car driver after winning the Austrian Grand Prix. (He is the number two driver for the Ferrari team and has come under huge pressure since the number one driver, Michael Schumacher, crashed and broke his leg at Silverstone two weeks prior.) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "When you think about it, ``beauty'' is a weird concept. "Take noses. A nose is basically a lump of flesh with air holes in it. It enables you to breathe and smell; it also helps protect your eyes. That's what it's for. "Yet for some reason, we have decided, as a culture, that if these flesh lumps have a certain shape, they are attractive; whereas lumps that do not conform to that shape -- despite the fact that they may perform the same biological functions just as well, or even better -- are deemed ugly. The same is true for eyes, eyebrows, ears, mouths, hair, teeth, necks, chins, shoulders, arms, hands, stomachs, thighs, calves, feet and all the other observable body parts. For many of us, how well these body parts do their jobs is secondary; what matters is how closely the parts come to being whatever arbitrary shape and size is considered, in our culture, to be beautiful. We obsess about this; we agonize endlessly. We spend billions of dollars trying to change ourselves. We dye our hair and pluck our eyebrows and religiously smear our faces with expensive products designed to make us look less like ourselves, and more like the ``ideal.'' We pay surgeons to slice into us, to remove or rearrange perfectly good flesh. We eat, God help us, rice cakes." - Dave Barry, Miami Herald columnist, in his article "Queen of the Universe", 6/6/97 http://www.herald.com/content/archive/living/barry/archive/universenew.htm ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The freedom of expression started just before President Suharto's sudden fall. `He had come to Bali, a political move to satisy the Hindus', Dr. Djelantik recalled. `The college was asked to put on a sendratari -- an operatic play -- and 10,000 people packed the Arts Center. The students chose a section of the `Ramayana' in which a young prince asks his minister how to govern. `At this point', Dr. Djelantik said with a smile, `the dalang -- the narrator of the action -- sang out the advice, which was a very blunt critique of corruption, collusion, and nepotism. After every sentence, the audience burst into applause. Suharto looked very depressed. When he left, there was utter silence. It was so serene, so polite. One week later, the storm broke loose.'" - Dr. Anuk Agung Made Djelantik, physician-prince from Karangasem and lecturer at the College of Indonesian Arts, on the recent burst of artistic freedom in Bali. From the July 25, 1999 Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" - Charles Darwin, in a letter to William Graham, Down, July 3rd, 1881. In "The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin Including an Autobiographical Chapter," ed. Francis Darwin (D. Appleton and Company, 1887) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "There are two types of cyclists: those who have crashed and those who will." - John Howard [The submitter notes: This is in honor of my own first crash during the 1997 Seattle to Portland ride.] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "But that wasn't right, either, because to many people, even the concept of God seemed dated in an age in which the universe was being forced to let go of its mysteries on a daily basis. Science, technology, and change were the only gods now, the new Trinity; and while they were not consciously cruel and judgemental, as some of the old gods had been, they were too coldly indifferent to offer any comfort to the sick, the lonely, and the lost." - Dean Koontz, in the novel The Door To December ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course you become dampers, mutes and hooded executioners. As a practical matter a mere failure to speak out upon occasions where no opinion is asked or expected of you, and when the utterance of an uncalled for suspicion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. Try to raise a voice that will be heard from here to Albany and watch what comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father's offering you a place in his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if any of you young gentleman have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well. I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I will use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought. His ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time." - John Jay Chapman, commencement address to the Graduating Class, Hobart College, 1900 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The millennium officially starts on 1 January 2001 at Greenwich. But most people are regarding 1 January 2000 as a good day to start the party!" - found at http://millennium.greenwich2000.com/info/millennium-faq.htm ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "What we literate people perceive as an unquestionable benefit to civilisation has led over time to excesses and dependencies which are detrimental to living at the end of the twentieth century. [...] As the central agent of 'information overload', the print is a causal factor in much social chaos. Our excessive dependence on writing, the print and the programmed machine in social transaction is largely incompatible with an ecological world view and the practice of mutual aid. 'Thinking globally and acting locally' may be a sensible ecological dictum, but overly-literate man has lost the wherewithal to think holistically and co-operate with his neighbour." - from "Literacy and the Myth of Mutual Aid", by Denis Pym, in "The Raven", volume 9, number 2, page 145, 1997. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Most documentation starts as hastily scrawled notes from sleep-deprived developers who weren't necessarily hired for their keen communication skills. Those notes are then fleshed out by recently graduated English majors who have spent their last four years immersed in works of fiction. The results are then passed on to the marketing department whose job it is to make sure that no word or phrase will reflect unfavorably on the product ("I don't think that the word 'Basic' properly communicates the exciting nature of the product. Why don't we call it 'Visual Zesty?!'"). It is then beset by lawyers who finish the job by making sure that they haven't explicitly promised that the product will actually do anything. By the time the documentation gets into your hands, it has been so sanitized for your protection and generalized beyond recognition that you usually have to go out and buy a 3rd-party manual (that was, more likely than not, written by the same non-technical technical writer who wrote the original documentation) in a vain attempt to get an unbiased, unexpurgated, and unfiltered view of just how you're really supposed to use the stuff." - Introduction, About The "@ Novell" Series, November 3, 1998, offering the inside scoop on computer documentation. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Perfect awareness might exist in heaven or hell, but not in the human world." - "The Lake" by Yasunari Kawabata (1954) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin -- real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. "At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life." - Alfred Souza ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Science used to be composed of two endeavors, theory and experiment. Now it has a third component: computer simulation, which links the other two." - U.S. National Science Foundation Director Rita Colwell ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Who'd have thought 20 years ago that people would be nostalgic for the apocalypse?" - George Miller, creator of the film Mad Max ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Several times every year, and always before he went on a trip, Alan's father used to visit his own mother's grave. He never spoke about it, and never took Alan with him -- he wasn't a demonstrative man, except in the courtroom. On a drizzly, dismal-looking day, Alan drove to the little Jewish cemetery in Connecticut where his grandmother was buried. The place contained about three hundred headstones. As he searched for his grandmother's, Alan noticed that the dates on many stones were old, and that no one had left pebbles on them. "There's no one _alive_ who would have known these people _ever_," he thought. "_No_one_alive_ would have known these people." When he found his grandmother's grave, he began to speak out loud to her, to this woman whom he'd never met. He told her that her son had died and wouldn't be coming to visit her anymore. He didn't imagine that she could hear him. He didn't imagine that she couldn't. He simply felt obliged to deliver this news to this place. And once he'd done that, he thought again of all the other people buried there. "No one alive is likely to have ever mentioned their names. Ever said their names." He walked from one stone to the next, in the rain, and read each name aloud. There was no one else around, but he felt as though he were repopulating the place. He felt as if he were shaking dust off all those names. - Tracy Kidder, "Home Town," p. 174. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "You should live gloriously, generously, dangerously. Safety last." - Cecil Lewis, World War I flying hero, first Director of Programmes for BBC Radio and Oscar-winning author of the screenplay for George Bernard Shaw's _Pygmalion_ ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It's one thing to have confidence; it's another thing to aviate." - Thomas Kelly, co-director of the Sienna College Research Institute of Loudonville, New York. Quoted in a Reuters story saying that 41 percent of U.S. computer scientists surveyed said they would not fly commercially on Jan. 1, 2000. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Work is life, you know, and without it, there's nothing but fear and insecurity." - John Lennon (1940-1980) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Why have all the classic furniture pieces been designed by architects? Because there is a clear relation between resolving the problems of a chair and a building." - Nigel James Mac-Fall, Partner at the British design firm Minale Tattersfield ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid." - Dorothy Parker ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "But in hunter-gatherer cultures the larger forms of poetry lack musical accompaniment, both overt (harp or lyre for example) or covert (in the form of embedded metrical pattern).....This does not mean that hunters have no poetry; it means that following the poetry they make is more like moving through a forest or canyon, or waiting in a blind, than like moving through an orchard or field. The language is often highly ordered, rich, compact -- but it is not arranged in neat, symmetrical rows." - Robert Bringhurst, poet, typographer, and student of Haida oral literature, from his beautiful new book _Story sharp as a knife_. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "By the way, If you do believe that a CPU can be melted down by "an nth- complexity infinite binary loop," we'd like to talk to you about some oceanfront property we're selling in Nebraska." - Quoted from "How to Spot a Virus Hoax," by Joe Wells, Senior Editor, antivirus online. January 10, 1997 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Email sent throught Hotmail differs from most others emails because it is routed through the internet." - Victor Keegan, in "G2", The Manchester Guardian, 1 September 1999, explaining the security flaws in Microsoft's Hotmail service. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "One cannot say it is pleasanter to look at a battle than at a merry-go-round, but there can be no question which draws the larger crowd." - George Bernard Shaw ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "When it comes to movie stars, I subscribe to the Ronald Reagan Rule. Reagan used to tell his aide Michael Deaver that if you liked someone on the screen, chances are you would like them in person, too. That's one reason why I think the imprisonment of Robert Downey Jr. is an outrage. From what I've seen on the screen, I think he's a nice guy." - Richard Cohen, The Washington Post, August 10, 1999, p. A-19, on actor and recreational drug user Robert Downey Jr. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It's tempting to say I would insist on world peace and harmony. But I think I would settle for making all women look like Claudia Schiffer and making all men, except for me, look like Jason Alexander." - Washington novelist/humorist Christopher Buckley, speculating on how he'd change the world, quoted from the May 14, 1999 issue of Entertainment Weekly (at 85). [qotd wonders how well casting Schiffer at the zenith of human attractiveness and Alexander at the nadir will play to our international audience. -eds.] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Wealth is a power usurped by the few, to compel the many to labour for their benefit." - Percy Bysshe Shelley, Notes to _Queen Mab_ [qotd wishes readers a happy Labour day. Don't forget to smash the system. -eds.] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "And I answered, `Circe, how can you expect me to be friendly with you when you have just been turning all my men into pigs?'" - Odysseus to Circe, _The Odyssey_ ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy." - Immanuel Kant ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Real futurism means staring directly into your own grave and accepting the slow but thorough obliteration of everyone and everything you know and love." - Bruce Sterling, "The Future?" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Try as we might, Congress can't make space safe from meteors or black holes. But perhaps we can make space safe from lawyers." - Dana Rohrabacher, U.S. House of Representatives Science Subcommittee on Space Chairman ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The Frankenstein legend, where a human being is constructed by sewing parts together, will become a reality early in the 21st century." - neurosurgeon Robert J. White, commenting on the rosy prospects for his research into transplanting human heads onto new bodies ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Friedman's Law: Parents should add one hour per week of quality time with their children each time the speed of their kid's modem doubles." - Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times Columnist, June 1, 1999 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "There is a vague popular belief that lawyers are necessarily dishonest. I say vague, because when we consider to what extent confidence and honors are reposed in and conferred upon lawyers by the people, it appears improbable that their impression of dishonesty is very distinct and vivid. Yet the impression is common, almost universal. Let no young man, choosing the law for a calling, for a moment yield to the popular belief -- resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer." - Abraham Lincoln, July 1, 1850 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Ben remembered that in Italy, he and Rachel had slipped down between rows of apple trees on the plain of the Po, deep into the cool and dark of orchards, and there they had kissed with the sadness of newlyweds who know that their kisses are too poignantly tender and that their good fortune is subject, like all things, to the crush of time, which remorselessly obliterates what is most desired and pervades all that is beautiful." - David Guterson, "East of the Mountains" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The Hell of dead gods is as crowded as the Presbyterian Hell for babies. Damona is there, and Esus, and Drunemeton, and Silvana, and Dervones, and Adsalluta, and Deva, and Belisima, and Uxellimus, and Borvo, and Grannos, and Mogons. All mighty gods in their day, worshipped by millions, full of demands and impositions, able to bind and loose - all gods of the first class. Men labored for generations to build vast temples to them - temples with stones as large as hay-wagons. The business of interpreting their whims occupied thousands of priests, bishops, archbishops. To doubt them was to die, usually at the stake. Armies took to the field to defend them against infidels; villages were burned, women and children butchered, cattle were driven off. Yet in the end they all withered and died, and today there is none so poor to do them reverence. ... "Ask the rector to lend you any good book on comparative religion; you will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest dignity - gods of civilized peoples - worshipped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal. And all are dead." - H.L. Mencken, "Memorial Service," 1922 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself." - Rita Mae Brown ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Predictions of catastrophe, citing the Vietnam example, consistently ignore the fact that NATO forces would operate in Kosovo against a hated Serb invader, with support from the population and the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army]. In Vietnam the United States supported a government actively or passively opposed by most of the South Vietnamese, against the armed opposition of the most dynamic politico-military force in the country. That is a great difference." - William Pfaff, of the International Herald Tribune, describes why a NATO invasion of Kosovo would not necessarily lead to a Vietnam War-style debacle. [qotd readers are reminded once again not to assume that the editors support the views of any person quoted. We only take responsibility for our editorial comments. -eds.] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The great god of unintended consequences never sleeps." - Andrew Sihler ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "In times of peace, a warlike man turns upon himself." - Nietzsche ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; What Jesus Wouldn't Do "We can assume He wouldn't skulk outside an abortion doctor's kitchen window and shoot him. Jesus wouldn't picket a gay man's funeral and shout "God hates fags." Jesus wouldn't vote a straight Republican ticket. He wouldn't give the commencement address of Bob Jones University. He wouldn't picket the play Corpus Christi. He would not feel the need to defend his heterosexuality. And finally, Jesus would not wear a shirt that read "What would the Trinity do?" " - Tony Norman ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; And last, "There's a report in Hollywood that Cybill Shepherd's now considering a run for president," writes syndicated gossip columnist Cindy Adams. "Are we all nuts here? This lady who's only really been successful in a TV sitcom thinks she's on the same level as a movie star like Warren Beatty?" - excerpted from The Federalist Digest, 10 September 1999, on the unfortunate propensity of actors to seek the presidency of the United States. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I knew she was going to get arrested," Toye said. "She got naked, she started dancing, she spit fire, she stopped traffic and she made a spectacle of herself." - from the article Fire-spewing and topless above I-5: Stunt ties up traffic, cuts power to 5,000 in the Seattle Times (http://www.seattletimes.com/news/local/html98/clim_19990908.html) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The purpose of this paper is to discuss a possible mechanism by which the genes of a zygote may determine the anatomical structure of the resulting organism. The theory does not make any new hypotheses; it merely suggests that certain well-known physical laws are sufficient to account for many of the facts. The full understanding of the paper requires a good knowledge of mathematics, some biology, and some elementary chemistry. Since readers cannot be expected to be experts in all of these subjects, a number of elementary facts are explained, which can be found in text-books, but whose omission would make the paper difficult reading." - A. M. Turing, F.R.S., from the abstract to "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis", published 14 August 1952 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Re: Vatican Issues List Of Short Cuts To Heaven -- Sept. 18: "This leaves me very confused! I am a 76-year-old man and a practicing Roman Catholic. I am resigned to the fact that I will go to hell, as I was twice married, not very faithful either time, and once had an affair with a married woman. "However, from 1940 to 1944, I was called "Prisoner 88" in Auschwitz, which was described by the Primate of Poland Jozef Cardinal Glemp as "hell on Earth." I was one of the 130,000 Polish Catholics arbitrarily arrested in German-occupied Poland and shipped to Auschwitz. "As a strong believer in the theological doctrine of death, judgment, heaven and hell, I must write to the Vatican to ask if the 1,642 days in Auschwitz will shorten my time in hell and catapult me sooner to purgatory and eventually to heaven." - Sigmund Sobolewski, in a letter to the Globe and Mail, commenting on the Vatican's new list of indulgences which can shorten one's time in purgatory. (Wednesday, September 22, 1999) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Pain is temporary. Glory is forever. Chicks dig scars." - Ken Grubb, on an email list devoted to the Filipino martial art of Eskrima (stick fighting) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; KANSAS -- Many years ago, in the city of Cochin in South India, I found myself attending the World Understanding Day of the local Rotary Club. The featured speaker was an anti-evolution American creationist, a certain Duane T. Gish, who came armed with a slide show designed to prove, as I recall, that the chief reason for the malaise of Today's Youth was the propagation, by the world's school systems, of the pernicious teachings of poor old Charles Darwin. Today's Youth was being taught that it was descended from monkeys! Consequently, and understandably, it had become alienated from society, and depressed. The rest -- its drift, its criminality, its promiscuity, its drug abuse -- inevitably followed. I was interested to note that a few minutes into the lecture the habitually courteous Indian audience simply stopped listening. The hum of conversation in the room gradually rose until the speaker was all but drowned out. Not that this stopped Duane. Like a dinosaur who hasn't noticed he's extinct, he just went bellowing on. This summer, however, Mr. Gish's lizardy kind will have received cheering news. The Kansas Board of Education's decision to delete evolution from the state's recommended curriculum and from its standardized tests is, in itself, powerful evidence against the veracity of Darwin's great theory. If Charles Darwin were able to visit Kansas in 1999 he would be obliged to concede that here was living proof that natural selection doesn't always work, that the unfittest sometimes survive and that the human race is therefore actually capable of evolving backwards toward, rather than away from, those youth-depressing apes. - Salman Rushdie, in an article entitled "Locking out that disruptive Darwin fellow", reprinted in the Globe and Mail, Thursday, September 2, 1999 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Enterprise JavaBeans technology is that curious meeting of the worlds -- the meeting of the world of big iron and the world of pony tails. And in that meeting point, neither party is terribly comfortable. And so you find that there are people who are doing "Webby" sort of things and discovering for the first time where real data lives, and there are people who have lived in air-conditioned premises for a very long time, discovering what a web server is. So that discomfort is actually the thing that most needs addressing." - from Simon Phipps of IBM, at http://www.javasoft.com/features/1999/08/phipps.html ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Artists are driven to create by a balance of known and unknown forces, and though they may glimpse themselves or their culture through their works, much of why they do what they do remains shrouded in mystery. God has ordained that imagination be stronger than reason in the soul of the artist, which makes the artist build bridges between the possible and the seemingly impossible. How do artists gain insight into their own character and realize their own unique vision? By entering the studio in their heart, all artists have access to a personal yet universal vision that can guide and inspire them and, perhaps, all of us." - "The Mission of Art" by Alex Grey ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The only difference between the women I've dated and Charles Manson is that Manson has the decency to look like a nut case when you first meet him." - Richard Jeni, on the advantages of meeting an insane cult leader. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves." - Anna Quindlen ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Absence diminishes commonplace passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and kindles fire." - La Rochefoucauld ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "To die for an idea is to set a rather high price on conjecture." - Anatole France ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "A major accident resulting in a radioactive leak has happened. We apologize from the bottom of our hearts," Koji Kitani, president of JCO, Co., which operates the plant, said at a news conference in Tokyo. He bowed deeply in apology." - from an Associated Press story on the Sept. 30, 1999 nuclear accident in Tokaimura, Japan. (http://cnn.com/ASIANOW/east/9909/30/japan.nuclear.02.ap/index.html) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Any sensitive intellectual moved by the majesty of a Ted Williams home run is bound to be disturbed that the Williams he meets is not a man to match the deed but an egocentric emotionalist who seems most of all to need a spanking." Roger Kahn, _Games We Used to Play_, Page 31. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The big corporations are suddenly taking notice of the web, and their reactions have been slow. Even the computer industry failed to see the importance of the Internet, but that's not saying much. Let's face it, the computer industry failed to see that the century would end." - Douglas Adams [quotation is from about 00:14:58 into the program: http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/cta/events99/battleground/battleground1. ram] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The Environmental Protection Agency will propose that Congress no longer require oil companies to add an ingredient to gasoline that is meant to make the air cleaner, because it pollutes water." - New York Times, July 27, 1999 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If you're going to do something tonight that you'll be sorry for in the morning, sleep late." - Henny Youngman (1906-1998) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "My first reaction upon seeing [Microsoft Corporation President Steven] Ballmer's picture in the newspaper was surprise at how fat he had grown. Earlier photos show him fighting fit. Now he has the girth of a late-19th century corporate plutocrat, which, come to think of it, is what he is." - Bloomberg News columnist Michael Lewis (http://quote.bloomberg.com/fgcgi.cgi?ptitle=Michael%20Lewis&touch=1&s1=blk&tp=ad_topright_bbco&T=markets_fgcgi_content99.ht&s2=blk&bt=blk&s=6467f1a03f9e604b1880b6b7dee64688) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We are quite the best country in Europe.... In my lifetime all the problems have come from mainland Europe, and all the solutions have come from the English-speaking nations across the world." - Margaret Thatcher, the 73-year-old former prime minister of Great Britain, addressing the Conservative party conference in Blackpool, England, as the current party leader, William Hague, nervously looked on. [Source: The New York Times, October 7, 1999] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Perhaps it would be a good idea, fantastic as it sounds, to muffle every telephone, stop every motor and halt all activity for an hour some day to give people a chance to ponder for a few minutes on what it is all about, why they are living and what they really want." - James Truslow Adams ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We we were talking about deep structure, and the logic of emotion. We were saying, 'Hey, the stuff we're doing here is related to Jung. It's layers.' And they were saying, 'Well, should the windshield be on a 15-percent grade or a 12-percent grade?'" - David Bostwick, director of market research at Daimler Chrysler, describing the difficulties in conveying the results of archetype-based market research to the guys in Engineering. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "You are a wooden board. Intel is a threaded fastener. Microsoft is a tool that drives threaded fasteners into wooden boards. Are you getting the picture yet?" - The Hard Edge, Alice Hill and Bill O'Brien, Computer Shopper, September 1998, p. 448. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If I wanted to cleanse my palate, I would gargle a mouthwash at the table. When I sit down to dinner, I want to clog my palate. I want to flood it with garlic and oregano that is still blooming on my tastebuds four hours later." - Bill Hall, Lewiston Tribune, October 5, 1998 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The other big problem with history textbooks is that they always started with the Dawn of Civilization and ended around 1948. So we'd spend the first three months of the school year reading about the ancient Sumerians at a nice, leisurely pace. Then the teacher would realize that time was running short, and we'd race through the rest of history, covering WWII in a matter of minutes, and getting to [U.S. President] Harry Truman on the last day. Then the next year, we'd go back to the ancient Sumerians. After a few years of this we began to see history as an endlessly repeating, incredibly dull cycle, starting with the Sumerians and leading inexorably to Harry Truman." - Dave Barry on his 1960s elementary school experience ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We're the first generation raised on television, and we've been raised to believe that we should all be millionaires and rock stars and everything, and we're discovering that most of us aren't, and we're getting very upset about that." - Chuck Palahniuk, in his novel "Fight Club" (now a movie) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Living our brief lives between the scales much bigger than an atom, yet much smaller than a galaxy, we forge our tools out of electricity, magnetism, and mathematics, and try to figure out how the whole thing works. We reach deep into the heart of matter for clues about the origin of the universe, and look to energetic messengers from the depths of space for reassurance that our curiosity will do us no harm, puzzling at the wonder and the unity of it all." - Stephen Reucroft and John Swain, Globe Correspondents, 10/11/99 [Stephen Reucroft and John Swain are experimental particle physicists who teach at Northeastern University.] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the more thankless effort to discipline the viewer)." - Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (Routledge, 1990, p. 1). This quotation (the very first sentence of Prof. Jameson's book) is the winner of last year's Bad Writing Contest, sponsored by the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature and its internet discussion group, PHIL-LIT. "It is good of Jameson to let readers know so soon what they're up against." - Dave Roden of Central Queensland University in Australia, who submitted the Jameson quote to the Bad Writing Contest. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "W2K will be a bigger disaster than Y2K" - Scott McNealy, Chairman, Sun Microsystems, referring to Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 2000 operating system and the issue of feared computer failures at the changeover to year 2000. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Now, if the people at Playboy can't take $54 million of cash money and show some bottom-line profits from it by selling sex toys and interactive shots of Pamela Anderson Lee's hooters over the Net, then it is my considered opinion that no one will ever be able to make a dime from the Internet." - Christopher Byron, in The New York Observer, on the IPO market's last, best chance at a profitable Internet company. (My Playboy Fantasy: An Internet I.P.O. That Offers Value, http://www1.observer.com/pages/envelope.htm) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I do not need to dwell on his universally acknowledged qualities as a playwright, as creator of the kind of dialogue that can speak worlds in its smallest phrases, even in its silences, and not least as an issuer of the kind of challenge that every intelligent actor and actress likes to face. In those contexts, this script speaks for itself. But his genius has a further string, and that seems to be his truly remarkable gift for reducing the long and complex without distortion." - John Fowles on Harold Pinter, in "The Filming of the French Lieutenant's Woman" from "Wormholes" (1999). ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they are okay, then it's you." - Rita Mae Brown ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "By almost any measure, East St. Louis represents "the other America," a phrase sociologist Michael Harrington coined in 1962 to describe poverty in the world's wealthiest country. His polemic inspired President Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" and Senator Robert F. Kennedy's highly publicized trips to Appalachia. "But few politicians talk about poverty anymore. Polls show "poverty" is associated with "liberal," a dirty word in the United States. It suggests losers in a society that celebrates winners. For politicians, better to hail the falling welfare rolls, the soaring stock market and record home ownership. "But poverty endures. It thrives in the tumbledown shacks of the Mississippi Delta, in the tenements of Los Angeles, in the Indian reservations of South Dakota, in the hollows of West Virginia and Kentucky. Those people never wait months for a reservation at a tony restaurant in New York; they have never heard of the Dow Jones or the Palm Pilot; they are among the 44.3 million Americans who don't have health insurance; they are unmoved that the budgetary surplus is the highest since 1960." - Andrew Cohen, writing on East St. Louis, a city some call 'America's Soweto.' [The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, October 20, 1999] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The theory that human social behavior is a product of natural engineering for gene propagation came to be known in the 1970s as sociobiology and was summed up by saying that the brain is a fitness maximizer, or that people strive to spread their genes... "But there was one problem with the theory. When we look at human behavior around us, we discover that the brain-as-fitness-maximizer theory is obviously, crashingly, stunningly wrong. Much of human behavior is a recipe for genetic suicide, not propagation. "People us contraception. They adopt children who are unrelated to them. They take vows of celibacy. They watch pornography when they could be seeking a mate. They forgo food to buy heroin. In India some people sell their blood to buy movie tickets. In our culture people postpone childbearing to climb the corporate ladder, and eat themselves into an early grave... "There is a [second] reason that behavior should not and does not maximize fitness. Natural selection operates over thousands of generations. For 99 percent of human existence, people lived as foragers in small nomadic bands. Our brains are adapted to that long-vanished way of life, not to brand-new agricultural and industrial civilizations. They are not wired to cope with anonymous crowds, written language, modern medicine, formal social institutions, high technology, and other newcomers to the human experience. "Since the modern mind is adapted to the Stone Age, not the computer age, there is no need to strain for adaptive explanations for everything we do, such as pornography, drugs, movies, contraception, careerism, and junk food. Before there was photography, it was adaptive to receive visual images of attractive members of the opposite sex because those images arose only from light reflecting off fertile bodies. Before opiates came in syringes, they were synthesized in the brain as natural analgesics. Before there were movies, it as adaptive to witness people's emotional struggles because the only struggles you could witness were among people you had to psych out every day. Before there was effective contraception, children were difficult to postpone, and status and wealth could be converted into more children and healthier ones. Before there was a sugar bowl, saltshaker, and butter dish on every table, and when lean years were never far away, you could never get too much sweet, salty, and fatty food." - Steven Pinker, "Against Nature", Discover, October 1997 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "There are three reasons why the British are superior to Americans: 1. They speak English. 2. When they host a world championship they invite other countries. 3. Visitors to the head of state are only expected to go down on one knee." - British comedian John Cleese ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Adults are nothing but used up children." - writer Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We should not be building surveillance technology into standards. Law enforcement was not supposed to be easy. Where it is easy, it's called a police state." - Jeff Schiller, Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) member and MIT network manager, on the subject of building wiretapping capabilities into network standards to allow law enforcement agencies the ability to easily wiretap digital data communications. See also: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0%2C1283%2C31895%2C00.html ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Like a show with an opening number you can't get right, the launch is everything. I usually do umpteen versions of the opening number for a show I'm directing. It's so important to set the tone for an evening, to define the rules for which the audience can sense the strange world they're going to inhabit for the next two hours. I say strange world because it truly is if you dissect it. Just consider how the house lights seem to "brown-out" and no one panics; a large velvety curtain mysteriously rises, seemingly of its own accord; a large group of musicians led by a man with a stick strikes up harmonies and rhythms from a vast pit in front of the stage; people in costumes and makeup in impossibly bright lights enter and speak louder than necessary and act like we're not watching them, then when they can't shout anymore at each other, they start singing as if this were a natural thing to do, and then when they can't sing anymore, they start to dance uninhibitedly. The number comes to a halt--we, the audience, clap as the artists stand in tableau, pending; the applause dies, and the troupe continues its story like nothing has happened. Giant painted trees and rocks slide offstage as a golden staircase whirls onstage; a window unit backed by a show-covered vista flies in apparently from heaven, and we sit there accepting this foolishness; and if we're lucky we believe it, and we laugh and cry with the characters and are entertained and enlightened. When it works, time passes in an instant, we're transported, and we leave the proceedings enriched for the rest of our lives. That's musical theater. However, it all begins with the opening number." - Tommy Tune, "Footnotes" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Sex isn't the answer. Sex is a question. The answer is 'Yes'". - former talk show host Johnny Carson ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Still, Leroux was unfailingly cheerful, and his humour never deserted him, as those who knew him in his last years were quick to testify. One story which he recounted to an interviewer who came to see him only a few months before his death will affirm this: "'Before the First World War', he said, 'I lived in a little villa at Cimiers above Nice. And whenever I had put the final touches to a novel, I would leap out onto the balcony and fire a volley of revolver shots into the air. This was a signal for my wife, daughter, and son, and they would immediately grab hold of items of crockery such as glasses and plates and hurl them across the garden. They would even get hold of saucepans and walk about the garden banging them. It was a real orgy of celebration! "'One day this happened when a friend was staying in the house. He knew nothing about the custom - indeed, I deliberately hadn't told him. You can imagine his reaction! The shots undoubtedly surprised him - but when he saw everyone hurtling the crockery about, he thought we had all gone mad!' "And then Leroux added with a smile, 'It's all quite true - but to tell the truth I think that after a few occasions my wife only brought out the chipped crockery to be thrown around!'" - from the foreword by Peter Haining to 'The Phantom of the Opera' by Gaston Leroux. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The Vice President has two functions -- to inquire daily about the President's health and to attend the funerals of Third World leaders. I'm not interested." - U.S. Senator John McCain, appearing on The Diane Rehm Show on NPR [National Public Radio] (October 19, 1999). McCain had been asked whether he would accept nomination as the candidate for Vice President on the Republican ticket should he not win the Republican Presidential nomination for the 2000 U.S. election. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "A college is a corner of men's hearts where hope has not died. Here the prison house has not closed; here no battle is yet quite lost. Here, we assert, endow, and defend as final reality the best of our dream as men. Here lies our sense of community." - Howard Lowry ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Actually our work depends on how much we can appropriate from other people's work! Painting, music, films, literature . . . it's all grist for the mill. We think of our work not as individual creativity but like a lifelong baton relay. Your work passes through your body and your life; you transform it into something, and then you pass it on to the next generation." - Hayao Miyazaki, director of "Princess Mononoke", in an interview with Roger Ebery ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; {The United States] Congress wants to require television manufacturers to install a V-Chip which would keep children from viewing violent or explicit programming. The chip would cost about $500 and would replace the current device known as the on-off switch. - comedian Dennis Miller ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We don't make these investments to get a return," said [Arthur] Andersen spokesman Andrew Giangola. "We make them because we want to be involved in a hot and exciting online business." - from an article on management consulting firms investing in start-up companies. [http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1008-200-922493.html?tag=st.cn.1002newsfd] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Although complaints about Microsoft Word's eagerness to correct what it sees as mistakes are not new in RISKS, I think it is still useful to protest vehemently the way Word 97 promotes the dumbing down of English writing by flagging (when you use its default options) any sentence which, according to some mysterious criterion, it deems too long, even if the sentence is made of several semicolon-separated clauses, and even though it is perfectly obvious to anyone, fan of Proust or not, that clarity is not a direct function of length, since it is just as easy to write obscurely with short sentences as with longish ones and, conversely, quite possible to produce an absolutely limpid sentence that is very, very long." - Bertrand Meyer, Interactive Software Engineering, Santa Barbara, [[http://eiffel.com]] in RISKS Digest, Volume 20, Issue 7, Saturday 14 November 1998 (http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.07.html) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors, concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods--in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to Mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations." - Albert Einstein, 1931 address to Caltech. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I'm really upset because magic mushrooms grow in England at this time of year and we're missing the first crop. That's a great drug because it comes straight out of the earth." - musician Joe Strummer, co-founder of The Clash, on the sacrifices he's making on his 1999 tour ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "There's something deliciously daffy about the thought of the very ledger of Microsoft's jumbo profits being composed on a Mac -- and some kind of poetic justice in that fact coming to light thanks to the idiosyncrasies of Microsoft's own software." - Scott Rosenberg, Salon.com, on Microsoft's annual report being made with a Macintosh, and not with a PC using the company's flagship OS Windows. (http://www.salon.com/tech/log/1999/10/12/microsoft_report/index.html) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I forgot that I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment . . . Now, however, I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of everyone." - Helen Keller, quoted in `Lies My Teacher Told Me'. (Helen had overcome blindness and deafness, but had benefited from being in a relatively high social class.) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Before we dig into Microsoft, I've got to get this off my chest: Bill Gates is the absolute stone-cold worst businessman of the entire millennium. Yeah, yeah, I know he's the richest boy in the solar system. But consider this - Mr Gates tried again and again to get rid of his company, offering to merge it into Lotus Corporation, for gosh sakes, then floating away 80 per cent of his ownership through share offers. "In other words, he couldn't wait to trade bars of gold for a bag of peanuts. The man had no concept of his own product, no faith in it, no vision of it. Gates is an accidental bazillionaire. Like the character in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who tripped over a balcony and found himself flying, so Gates found himself, despite his best efforts, the Midas of the Microchip." - Gregory Palast, UK Guardian (http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/microsoft/Story/0,2763,74076,00.html) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "You can't hurry compost for the same reason you can't hurry love and you can't hurry a souffle. The biochemistry has its own inherent pace. That doesn't mean you won't try." - James Gleick, "Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything", 1999. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Hieronymus and I, together, arrived at Woodstock with $12 in our pockets, which we spent immediately on Sugar Smacks and Pixie Stix. We 'camped out,' which meant we slept in the mud, in a tent constructed from a clear plastic drop cloth. We hung it from a tree and fastened the corners to the ground with forks we stole from our college cafeteria. The tent was airless and it concentrated the August heat like a convectionoven. I remember crawling out into the driving rain in my underwear at one point on the theory that if I did not do so, I would actually die. Our tent was among the finest accommodations available. ". . . I am sorry. This is cruel. But I would like to reiterate that while my Woodstock ended with naked exhaustion, your Woodstock ended with police in riot gear. The 'Peace Fence' was torn down and fed to the rioters' bonfire. "I would like to point out that you have recently made fun of my tendency to raise the volume on the television to a level you contend, without foundation, is evidence of advancing deafness. This plants within me a small carbuncle of fear that you then maliciously prod at the dinner table by moving your lips in speech but remaining soundless. "OK, kids. Read my lips: My generation may be old and slow. But we're not lame." - Gene Weingarten, The Washington Post, Commentary: At Least Our Woodstock Didn't Have Riots, July 28, 1999 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Our language betrays us. No one is "crazy" anymore; they suffer from "mental illness." There are no criminals, just people outwardly expressing the natural hostility born from being raised as part of a disadvantaged underclass. We bury ourselves under a sea of technical jargon so as not to be confronted by the sad, ugly reality. If we can't understand the problem then it doesn't need to be dealt with. A high school student from blood soaked Columbine High recently wrote that she took offense to People Magazines calling the two gunmen who shot up her high school as the "monsters next door." "They weren't monsters, Eric and Dale were my friends" she said. Well, if they weren't monsters then what were they? Maladjusted teens suffering from an exaggerated alienation typical amongst suburban youth? " - Tzvi Gluckin, student and teacher at Aish H'Torah in Jerusalem ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest [of America] is real." - critic Jean Baudrillard, quoted by Kyla Wazana in the November 13 Globe and Mail. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "This government has learned from the U.S. to camouflage its policy in verbal contortions," he said. "I think the U.K. government is being used as a lubricant to help justify the preferred U.S. policy position." - Simon Davies, spokesman for Privacy International, commenting in a press release on revised U.K. cryptographic policy. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If I regret anything at all, it's the way we wasted our time and skills. All the false alleys, and bogus friends, the misapplication of our energies. All the delusions we had about who we were." - John Le Carre, The Secret Pilgrim ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "A man is already halfway in love with a woman who listens to him." - Brendan Francis ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "According to a new survey, women say they feel more comfortable undressing in front of men than they do undressing in front of other women. They say that women are too judgmental, where, of course men, are just grateful." - comedian Jay Leno ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Parents should take this moment to ask what else they can do to shield our children from violent images and experiences that warp young perceptions and obscure the consequences of violence." - U.S. President Bill Clinton (who, as the submitter notes, has warplanes currently bombing Serbia.) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see." - John Burroughs ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "You've all heard the saying: If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. That's actually a Modernistic saying. The postmodern version is: If all you have is duct tape, everything starts to look like a duct. Right. When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct?" - Larry Wall, from his speech "Perl, the first postmodern computer language" (In answer to Larry, September, 1998. -ed.) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The theories of chaos and complexity are revealing the future as fundamentally unpredictable. This applies to our economy, the stock market, commodity prices, the weather, animal populations (humans included), and many other phenomena. There are no clear historical patterns that carve well-marked trails into the future. History does not repeat itself. The future remains mostly unknowable." - William A. Sherden, "The Fortune Sellers" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I can't tell you how encouraging a thing like this is!" - Ruth Gordon, age 72, accepting Academy Award in 1969 for Best Supporting Actress for "Rosemary's Baby." ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I think the only difference between me and the other candidates is that I'm more honest and my women are more beautiful." - Donald Trump describing his qualifications for President of the United States. (Source: The New York Times, November 17, 1999) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The Master said, ``Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application? Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quarters?''" - Confucius (551-479 BCE), Legge, James (trans.), 1971, Confucius: Confucian Analects, The Great Learning and The Doctrine of the Mean" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Sex the night before a game helps athletes, magazine says Associated Press Thursday, November 25, 1999 London -- Here's a scientific finding certain to send athletes partying into the night: Sex on the eve of a game probably will improve, not hurt, an athlete's performance. The theory comes from New Scientist magazine. According to its report, levels of the male hormone testosterone rise with sexual activity. Therefore, an athlete retains strong feelings of aggression the following day. "If he needs to be more aggressive, he needs to have sex," Emmanuele Jannin of the University of L'Aquila, in Italy, told the magazine. "It's an adaptive mechanism. If a man has sexual intercourse, testosterone causes him to desire the next sexual intercourse." Jannin's comments about male athletes conflict with a commonly held notion that men should abstain from sex before sports to conserve energy. - reprinted in the Globe and Mail, Nov. 25, 1999 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; So, friends, every day do something that won't compute . . . Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head in her lap . . . Practice resurrection. - Wendell Berry ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We will keep marching until the process is open and until they let the people in the door when the decisions are made." - Bill Simpich, a lawyer from San Francisco. Simpich is one of the protestors at the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "People deciding the dispute are trade experts, and the focus is on facilitating trade, and that means when there's another concern, like the environment or human health, trade trumps." - Martin Wagner of EarthJustice Legal Defense Fund, on the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO meetings in Seattle have been accompanied by mass protests. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Dear Miss Manners, Why does the Internet need rules of etiquette? Isn't its libertarian spirit part of its appeal? "Gentle Reader, Yes, it was. Freedom is always appealing until you are forced to try to put up with someone else's. " - Miss Manners (Judith Martin) in a column posted on http://underwire.msn.com/Underwire/Itspersonal/miss/mmarch_2.asp ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I've raised children, lived around children, tended other people's children, and even been a child myself. I know that children are evil. Children are to a peaceful and enjoyable life what the Goths were to Roman social order." - Robert Kirby, The Salt Lake Tribune, March 4, 1995 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Work aside, I've also realized that personal incidents that have weighted heavily on me throughout my lifetime don't seem very important right now. In fact, nothing seems very important to me right now except one thing--kindness. Simple basic kindness, whether it's toward the cab driver who answers your hail and takes you to your destination, or toward your nearest neighbor by not playing your music too loudly, or to a friend by quietly understanding and responding to their silent cry for solace, or to an ex-lover by just forgiving him or her for hurting you, or to your dog by making sure he has fresh water before you to out on the town for the evening. Kindness is really important to me right now. Isn't that corny? And yet, one of our greatest songwriters, Irving Berlin, said, "There is an element of truth in any idea that lasts long enough to be called corny." I hope kindness lasts. It's the corniest of all." - Tommy Tune, "Footnotes" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I was attracted to anarchism as a young teenager, as soon as I began to think about the world beyond a pretty narrow range, and haven't seen much reason to revise those early attitudes since. I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom. That includes political power, ownership and management, relations among men and women, parents and children, our control over the fate of future generations (the basic moral imperative behind the environmental movement, in my view), and much else. Naturally this means a challenge to the huge institutions of coercion and control: the state, the unaccountable private tyrannies that control most of the domestic and international economy, and so on. But not only these. That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met. Sometimes the burden can be met. If I'm taking a walk with my grandchildren and they dart out into a busy street, I will use not only authority but also physical coercion to stop them. The act should be challenged, but I think it can readily meet the challenge. And there are other cases; life is a complex affair, we understand very little about humans and society, and grand pronouncements are generally more a source of harm than of benefit. But the perspective is a valid one, I think, and can lead us quite a long way." - Noam Chomsky, American linguist, scholar, and dissident, on anarchism. (http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/rbr/noamrbr2.html) [Happy 71th birthday today to Dr. Chomsky from qotd and fellow birthday boy, your humble editor.] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; So, friends, every day do something that won't compute . . . Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head in her lap . . . Practice resurrection. - Wendell Berry ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Humanity's ancient enemies are, after all, microbes. They didn't go away just because science invented drugs, antibiotics, and vaccines (with the notable exception of smallpox). They didn't disappear from the planet when Americans and Europeans cleaned up their towns and cities in the post-industrial era. And they certainly won't become extinct simply because human beings choose to ignore their existence." - Laurie Garrett, "The Coming Plague", Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 1994. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Playing sports doesn't build character, it reveals it." - Marc Ibanez, San Francisco area TV and radio sports broadcaster [Submitter notes: This year's baseball season has been the most positive example of this in some time.] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Kingwell: Do you ever watch television? Eco: When I need it. I use my car when I need it. I watch television when I need it. I navigate on the Internet when I need it. When I don't, I drink Scotch. Which is far, far better. - from an interview with Umberto Eco conducted by Mark Kingwell, printed in the Globe and Mail, October 24, 1998 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Our Philosophy: It's not a single idea, but many ideas and attitudes, including a reverence for nature and a preference for country life; a desire for maximum personal self-reliance and creative leisure; a concern for family nurture and community cohesion; a certain hostility toward luxury; a belief that the primary reward of work should be well-being rather than money; a certain nostalgia for the supposed simplicities of the past and an anxiety about the technological and bureaucratic complexities of the present and the future; and a taste for the plain and functional. _Countryside_ reflects and supports the simple Life, and calls its practitioners *homesteaders*." - from the masthead of _Countryside & Small Stock Journal_, Withee, WI, 54498, USA ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure." - Mark Twain (1835-1910) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "No subject is ever too serious for humour. I think many people have a basic misunderstanding: There's a difference between being serious and being solemn. "We could be talking about things that are extremely serious -- our marriages, the education of our children, politics, even the meaning of life -- and laughing quite a lot and that wouldn't make what we were talking about one bit less serious. "But solemnity, on the other hand; I don't know what it's for. Solemnity serves pomposity, self-importance, and egotism. And the pompous and the self-important always know at some level that their egotism is going to be punctured by humour. That's why they always see humour as negative, as a threat to them personally. And so they dishonestly criticize it as frivolous and light-minded." - John Cleese ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I do note with interest that old women in my books become young women on the covers... this is discrimination against the chronologically gifted." - Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The toilet is flushing. It's not one of those fast, power toilets. It's one of those slow, old-fashioned toilets." - Scott Bleier, chief investment strategist at Prime Charter Ltd., describing recent declines in the U.S. stock market (Reported by CBS MarketWatch at , 12:51pm update, 8 Oct 1998) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The moment this love comes to rest in me, many beings in one being. In one wheat grain, a thousand sheaf stacks. Inside the needle's eye, a turning night of stars." - Jelauddin Rumi, 13th century Sufi poet ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors with nuclear weapons, poison gas or biological weapons." - Bill Clinton, immediately after initiating the bombing in Baghdad, Dec. 16, 1998. (Yes, only the U.S. is allowed to threaten other countries. -ed.) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "TV Update: Two weeks ago budding analyst Boomer Esiason used the expression 'you know' 54 times on ABC's "Monday Night Football." Last week Esiason used 'you know' 88 times. That's 142 'you knows,' believed to be the highest two-game total in football broadcast history. Note: 'You know' stats were not kept prior to 1982." - Norman Chad, Boston Globe correspondent ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If you act recklessly, you will pay a heavy price." - U.S. President Bill Clinton, addressing the nation to describe why the United States had ordered an attack on Iraq (during the middle of the debate in the House of Representatives on whether the President should be impeached) [Washington Post 12/17, A33] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Kingwell: But what do you see in the future? What about universities, for example? Eco: As we enter the virtual era, higher education becomes more and more important. The new class struggle will no more be as in the times of Marx, between workers and owners, but between those who know how to deal critically and actively with the new media and those who will use them passively. I am thinking, as the worst possibility, of a sort of Orwell-like 1984 scenario. There wil be: a nomenklatura, a ruling class able to use all the new instruments; a middle class using them passively, like bank clerks or airline employees; and proletarians, watching TV. The real revolution would be that everybody has the right to have a higher education. And such an education should be mainly humanistic. To make software, and even to make hardware, able to anticipate new software, you must be humanistically oriented, not technologically. - from an interview with Umberto Eco conducted by Mark Kingwell, printed in the Globe and Mail, October 24, 1998 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "He [Bill Clinton] is the Willy Loman of Generation X, a traveling salesman who has the loyalty of a lizard with his tail broken off and the midnight tastes of a man who'd double date with the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart." - Hunter S. Thompson in "Better than Sex" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Yet FORTRAN gallops on, warts and all, more transportable than syphilis, fired by a bottomless pit of working subprograms." - Stan Kelly-Bootle, _The Devil's DP Dictionary_ (1981), on the ancient but apparently immortal programming language FORTRAN. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "When I model I pretty much blank. You can't think too much or it doesn't work." - model Paulina Porizkova ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I am for a market economy, but not for a market society." - French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin during a visit to Canada, December 17, 1998 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The chimes were ringing the three quarters past eleven at that moment. "Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask," said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit's robe, "but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?" "It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it," was the Spirit's sorrowful reply. "Look here." From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment. "Oh, Man, look here! Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost. They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread. Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude. "Spirit, are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more. "They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end." "Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge. "Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?" The bell struck twelve. - Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (Stave 3: The Second of the Three Spirits) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "America believes in education: The average professor earns more money in a year than the professional athlete earns in a whole week." - Evan Esar ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Lisa, if you don't like your job you don't strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That's the American way." - Homer Simpson, on the animated series The Simpsons ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Writers, like teeth, are divided into grinders and incisors." - Walter Bagehot ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Allman, who is gay himself, places weight on the importance of protecting people's privacy while at the same time facilitating their ability to communicate. (He also told the Advocate earlier this year that he takes a "sort of perverse pleasure in knowing that it's basically impossible to send a piece of hate mail through the Internet without its being touched by a gay program.")" - Andrew Leonard, in an article in Salon Magazine about Eric Allman, creator of sendmail. (http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/12/cov_11feature2.html) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We were at Show World in New York, one of the last holdouts of 42nd Street, once renowned for its live sex shows and sexual debauchery. A city clampdown left a barren strip of shut down XXX theatres and sex clubs. In a wonderful twist of irony, Disney has bought up a healthy chunk of the street for development. Family-oriented exploitation. Much better. "Show World has survived because, according to an article posted outside, it's a law-abiding (more likely, it obliges law officials), clean operation. The McDonald's of sex, the write-up boasts. That would explain why we left feeling ripped off, unsatisfied and a little queasy." - Josey Vogels, writing in SEE Magazine, Oct. 1, 1998 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The man who doesn't relax and hoot a few hoots voluntarily, now and then, is in great danger of hooting hoots and standing on his head for the edification of the pathologist and trained nurse, a little later on." - philosopher Elbert Hubbard ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII -- and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure." - Douglas Adams ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I do not know whether it ought to be so, but certainly silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way. Wickedness is always wickedness, but folly is not always folly. -- It depends upon the character of those who handle it." - Jane Austen, _Emma_ (1816) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, speed and forgetting." - Milan Kundera ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Americans are so benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States." - J. Bartlet Brebner, quoted from the anti-Canada page http://www.neptunenet.com/antican/default.htm ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "A drug person can learn to cope with things like seeing their dead grandmother crawling up their leg with a knife in her teeth - but nobody should be asked to handle *this* trip. Bazooko Circus was what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This was the sixth reich." - Hunter S. Thompson's description of an acid trip in Las Vegas from "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "There is more that one way of getting close to your ancestors. "Follow the Old Road and as you do, think of them; they climbed Chillingbourne Hill just as you did. They sweated and paused for breath just as you did today. "And when you see the bluebells in the spring and the wild thyme, and the broom and the heather, you're seeing what their eyes saw. You ford the same rivers, the same birds singing. And when you lie flat on your back and rest, and watch the clouds sailing as I often do, you're so close to those other people, that you can hear the thrumming of the hoofs of their horses, and the sound of the wheels on the road, and their laughter, and talk, and the music of the instruments they carried. "And they turned the bend in the road, where they too saw the towers of Canterbury. I feel I have only to turn my head to see them on the road behind me." - Thomas Colpepper in "A Canterbury Tale", by "The Archers", aka Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Humans discussing ownership of wonders this vast are like bird lice discussing ownership of their host eagle in flight. "Who owns the right wing, and who the left?" The eagle just soars on." - David James Duncan, in a lecture on "Who Owns the West?" excerpted in the Dec 98 issue of The Sun ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Neil, we missed the whole thing." - Buzz Aldrin to fellow astronaut Neil Armstrong, reacting to videotapes of the Apollo 11 news coverage and the world's reaction to the first lunar landing. Quoted in Andrew Chaikin, _A Man On The Moon_, Penguin Books, 1994. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk down an open sewer-hole and die." - comedian Mel Brooks ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The poets, writers, the sages and voices of their time, they are a chorus, the anthem they share is the same: the great and small are joined, the beautiful lives, the other dies, and all is foolish except honor, love, and what little is known by the heart." - James Salter from his autobiography, "Burning the Days" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park." - Jim Moran, in 7 Dec. 1998 issue of TIME ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "He who knows nothing, loves nothing. He who can do nothing, understands nothing. He who understands nothing is worthless. But he who understands also loves, notices, sees.....The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love......Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as the strawberries knows nothing about the grapes." - Paracelsus ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power." - P. J. O'Rourke (who ironically enough, has given up himself on drugs and given himself over to love of power in recent years. -ed.) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "You can usually tell when I'm happy by the fact that I've gained weight." - model Christy Turlington ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "In the end, it is in the technology itself that the real danger lies." - Amitav Ghosh, writing in the New Yorker about the South Asian nuclear arms race. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "'I solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of President Clinton, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help me God.' "We get the exact language each senator will utter as the Chief Justice swears them in as trial jurors. We laugh about 'impartial justice.' Is anyone in Congress impartial? Are they going to lie under oath? And doesn't the fact that 100 senators take an oath they know to be untrue make them perjurers? Does that mean we'll have to face 100 more impeachment trials?" - "Impeachment Diary" by Anonymous (purportedly a Senate staff member) at http://www.salonmagazine.com "newsreal" section for January 7, 1999, on the impeachment of U.S. President Bill Clinton. [Before I get MORE email from the pro- or anti-Clinton subscribers, please reread the number of senators (100) accused above. -ed.] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The very commonness of the pencil, the characteristic of it that renders it all but invisible and seemingly valueless, is really the first feature of successful engineering. Good engineering blends into the environment, becomes a part of society and culture so naturallly that a special effort is required to notice it. By looking closely at the origins and development of something so ubiquitous as the pencil, we are better able to appreciate the achievement of a great bridge or efficient automobile. And we can do so without having to needing the detailed esoteric knowledge of the structural or automotive engineer. We can know that the bridge or the automobile was conceived first by a human mind and given its first embodiment as a concept in a human mind or in a sketch done by a human hand and not as a bunch of numbers given by equations in a computer. We can know that a natural gas supply system or a can of soda delivers energy or refreshment on demand without exploding in our faces because some engineers worried about how their design might go wrong. But we can also know that these things are not perfect, because no artifact is perfect." - Henry Petroski, "The Pencil", page 334, Knopf 1990 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing." - Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Dear John Don't be hard on yourself Give yourself a break Life wasn't meant to be run The race is over You won - the complete lyrics to John Lennon's "Dear John," a previously unreleased post-Beatle demo included in a new box set ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbled with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born." - Henry David Thoreau, "Walden" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Apple Jelly No sense in all this picking, peeling & simmering if sheer food is all you want; you can buy it cheaper. Why then do we burn our hours & muscles in this stove, cut our thumbs to get these tiny glass pots of clear jelly? Hoarded in winter: the sun on that noon, your awkward leap down from the tree, licked fingers, sweet pink juice, what we keep the taste of the act, taste of this day. - Margaret Atwood ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "He didn't see her face, not then. The view was strictly from the rear. But, oh, what a rear that was! It rolled in five directions. Ted had been married and faithful for seven years - but he wasn't blind. And even though he was a scientist, he never once tried to estimate the relevant equations and boundary conditions for that rolling gait. (A quartic polynomial, since you ask, but there were transcendent elements in there, as well; and the complex and irrational. Unsolvable - as Galois proved. But that's women for you.)" - Michael F. Flynn, "House of Dreams", Asimov's Science Fiction, October/November 1997 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We were reminded that software engineering was not about right and wrong but only better and worse, solutions that solved some problems while ignoring or exacerbating others. That the machine that all the world seems to want to see as possessing some supreme power and intelligence was indeed intelligent, but only as we humans are: full of hedge and error, brilliance and backtrack and compromise." - software engineer Ellen Ullman, in http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/05/13feature2.html ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "You got the pig on the spit and all these cowboys drinking way too much. You got to look away when you pass the garbage cans, though, 'cause they're full of pig's heads. It's really gross. Those are the days when I think I am going to become a vegetarian." - Canadian musician Fred Eaglesmith (talking about what he did after performing ten shows in Alberta.) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." - James Joyce, "The Dead" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "At times Frederick's of Hollywood did her wardrobe, but there were moments when only nurse's shoes and see through whites would do. And, of course, in moments of extreme emergency there was the old standby, the knee socks, plaid skirts and middy blouses of the Catholic school succubi of my adolescence -- the girls from Our Lady of the Spilled Seed. Yet no fantasy she abetted was more intriguing than her own persona: the sinister virgin on the make, the woman whose head, heart and hymen are ineffably linked and will remain intact until all three are simultaneously vanquished." - Heywood Gould, from his novel "Glitterburn" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "To experience conflicts knowingly, though it may be distressing, can be an invaluable asset. The more we face our own conflicts and seek out our own solutions, the more inner freedom and strength we will gain. Only when we are willing to bear the brunt can we approximate the ideal of being the captain of our ship. A spurious tranquility rooted in inner dullness is anything but enviable. It is bound to make us weak and an easy prey to any kind of influence." - Karen Horney, "Our Inner Conflicts" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has assaulted me from the pages of our most public journals. This number assumes a variety of disguises, being sometimes a little larger and sometimes a little smaller than usual, but never changing so much as to be unrecognizable. The persistence with which this number plagues me is far more than a random accident. There is, to quote a famous senator, a design behind it, some pattern governing its appearances. Either there really is something unusual about the number or else I am suffering from delusions of persecution." - George A. Miller, The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97. "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We are all looking at how we have to shift, because you look at the good and you look at what's not working, and I think people -- God bless it -- are working in the consciousness -- God bless it -- that with all the problems out there in the world, how are we going to shift the consciousness?" - Designer Donna Karan, expressing her spiritual beliefs. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Praise everybody, I say; never be squeamish, but speak out your compliment both point-blank in a man's face, and behind his back, when you know there is a reasonable chance of his hearing it again. Never lose a chance of saying a kind word. As Collingwood never saw a vacant place in his estate but he took an acorn out of his pocket and popped it in; so deal with your compliments through life. An acorn costs nothing; but it may sprout into a prodigious bit of timber." - W. M. Thackeray: Vanity Fair, chapter XIX ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Modern America, however, is a hugely unequal society in which anyone can achieve awesome success, but not many people do. The result is that many - perhaps even most - people feel that they have failed to make the cut, no matter how comfortable their lives. (In a land where anyone can become president, anyone who doesn't become president is a failure.) My European friends always marvel at how hard Americans work, even those who already have plenty of money. Why don't we take more time to enjoy what we have? The answer, of course, is that we work so hard because we are determined to get ahead - an effort that (for Americans as a society) is doomed to failure, because competition for status is a zero-sum game. We can't all "get ahead." No matter how fast we all run, someone must be behind." - Paul Krugman in "The Accidental Theorist" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Time is the purest and cheapest form of doom." - Jack Kerouac, "Visions of Cody" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Australia launched itself early from disintegrating Pangaea...There was a huge continent for the marsupials to experiment upon. They are often considered rather a dim kind of mammal, and it is true that philosophical discussion of any kind is wasted upon a koala." - Richard Fortey in "Life" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Amid all the fuss about the impeachment proceedings, a friend who fled here from a country without democracy raised a truly amazing thought the other day: In the entire year the Monica thing has been going on -- or in all the years Ken Starr has been searching for something indictable -- not once has it occurred to any of us to look at a Potomac River bridge and wonder if tanks are going to roll across. As my friend said, there are a LOT of places where, with the civilian government this weakened or ridiculed, and the legislature this paralyzed by politics, the army would roll on in and take over. And it never occurs to us to wonder that it doesn't happen. Maybe that says more about America than anything else." - Margaret Ryan ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules." - Anthony Trollope ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; In an essay called "Sur la television," the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu lambasted the media-age creature he called "le fast-thinker": the person who grinds out what appears to be intellectual discourse under the glare of the klieg lights. Le fast-thinker is not an intellectual, only the simulation of one; he is adept at the snappy phrase, the blustery and authoritative opinion, and, of course, the unanswerable statistical put-down. In the hurly-burly of talk television, on programs as disparate as Meet the Press and Jenny Jones, the most successful performer is not the person with the truth but the one with the sharpest tongue and the handiest numbers. - philosopher Mark Kingwell, in his essay Fast Forward, in the May 1998 Harper's Magazine ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The mob reads confessions and notes, etc, so avidly because in their baseness they rejoice at the humiliations of the high and the weaknesses of the mighty. Upon discovering any kind of vileness they are delighted. "He's little, like us! He's vile, like us!" You lie, scoundrels: he is little and vile, but differently, not like you. - Alexander Pushkin ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time." - P.G. Wodehouse's dedication in "The Heart of a Goof" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Y2K is the chance for a non-religious world to still undergo millennial anxiety. In the 20th C it's not God and a heavenly host but a missing two digits that bring about the apocalypse..." - Robert Moldenhauer, in a post to Baha'i Discuss, February 4, 1999 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If you do not agree to the terms of this EULA, PC Manufacturer and Microsoft are unwilling to license the SOFTWARE PRODUCT to you. In such event, you may not use or copy the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, and you should promptly contact PC Manufacturer for instructions on return of the unused products(s) for a refund." - from the Microsoft Windows EULA [End-User License Agreement] supplied with a Toshiba laptop computer purchased by Geoffrey Bennett. Bennett installed another operating system without ever using Windows, and was able to obtain a refund for $110 (Australian). Computing activists are encouraging other computer users who received unwanted and unused copies of Microsoft Windows to request refunds on Feb. 15, 1999. (http://www.netcraft.com.au/geoffrey/toshiba.html; http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/refunds990208.html) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Pain is only weakness leaving the body." - Ski guide Roko Koell, of the CMH Bugaboo Lodge near Golden, British Columbia ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Lundberg's faux pas was to publish in JAMA's Jan. 20 issue a brief report by Drs. Stephanie Sanders and June Reinisch of the Kinsey Institute on their 1991 questionnaire survey of almost 600 college students. The objective of the study was to determine what behaviours were thought by respondents to constitute "having sex." The provoking question was "Would you say you 'had sex' with someone if the most intimate behaviour you engaged in was ..." followed by a list of possibilities. The finding that roughly 60% of the respondents did not consider that engaging in oral sex amounted to "having sex" was evidently even more provoking, and Lundberg was fired. The executive vice-president did not dispute the study's methods or findings, but objected to the timing of its publication. President Clinton has maintained that his sexual activities with Monica Lewinsky did not constitute "having sex." It is partly on this point of semantics that he is accused of lying, at least by the Republicans in the House of Representatives. The authors of the study have been forthright in their view that their study is relevant to the "current public debate," which, they argue, reflects "a lack of empirical data on how Americans as a population define these terms." - John Hoey, Caralee Caplan, Tom Elmslie, Ken Flegel, K.S. Joseph, Anita Palepu, Anne Marie Todkill, in a forthcoming editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal on the firing of George Lundberg from the position of editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. (http://www.cma.ca/cmaj/news.htm) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "You have zero privacy now. Get used to it." - Sun CEO Scott McNealy, answering a reporter's question on Jini failing to protect a consumer from being tracked while connected to a network. (From PC Week, 2/1/99) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "For love is as fierce as death, its jealousy bitter as the grave. Even its sparks are a raging fire, a devouring flame. "Great seas cannot extinguish love, no river can sweep it away." - from The Song of Songs (8:6-7) in the Bible, translated by Ariel and Chana Bloch ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I don't eat fast food. That's like doing drugs. I don't do drugs." - master chef and TV star Emeril Lagasse ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The early bird who catches the worm works for someone who comes in late and owns the worm farm." - Travis McGee ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God. --Henry Kissinger ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Guilt is the mafia of the mind. --Bob Mandel ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. --Aldous Huxley ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The only people who make love all the time are liars. --Telly Savalas ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The spiritual life becomes very simple when you're sick. --Wilfrid Sheed ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; In order to find the edge, you must risk going over the edge. --Dennis Dugan ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Every successful revolution puts on in time the robe of the tyrant it has deposed. --Barbara Tuchman ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man. --Bucy's Law ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. --Bill Cosby ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; In Maine we have a saying that there's no point in speaking unless you can improve on silence. --Edmund Muskie ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. --Octavio Paz ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility. --Joseph Conrad ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he is. --Karl Kraus ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Follow me if I advance! Kill me if I retreat! Revenge me if I die! --Ngo Dinh Diem ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health. --Carl Jung ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Difficulty, my brethren, is the nurse of greatness--a harsh nurse, who roughly rocks her foster-children into strength and athletic proportion. --William Cullen Bryant ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; There is never enough time, unless you're serving it. --Malcolm Forbes ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; A man can know nothing of mankind without knowing something of himself. --Benjamin Disraeli ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; You can't shake hands with a clenched fist. --Indira Gandhi ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that it is everything. --Anatole France ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Don't be afraid to give up the good to go for the great. --Kenny Rogers ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Concentrated effort along a single line of endeavor is boring, but it makes people rich. --Lee Winkler ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; If you find a good solution and become attached to it, the solution may become your next problem. --Dr. Robert Anthony ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Expecting the world to treat your fairly because you're a good person is like expecting a bull not to attack you because you're a vegetarian. -Dennis Wholey. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The characters in these books, and plays, and so on, and in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up." - Tom Lehrer ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love." - Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience, 1967. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I think role models should be extremely flawed. So then people who are striving, they don't have to strive for perfection." - Christina Ricci (Rolling Stone, December 1999) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away. -Dorothy Parker- ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Everybody who tells you how to act has whisky on their breath." - John Updike ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Can you imagine working at the following company? It has a little over 500 employees with the following statistics: *29 have been accused of spousal abuse *7 have been arrested for fraud *19 have been accused of writing bad checks *117 have bankrupted at least two businesses *3 have been arrested for assault *71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit *14 have been arrested on drug-related charges *8 have been arrested for shoplifting *21 are current defendants in lawsuits *In 1998 alone, 84 were stopped for drunk driving Can you guess which organization this is? * * * * Give up? * * * * It's the 535 members of your United States Congress. The same group that perpetually cranks out hundreds upon hundreds of new laws designed to keep the rest of us in line. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "By all rights I should be driving a cab or waiting tables in a restaurant - that's what my education prepared me for. I know I don't deserve it, but I don't know who would deserve it. Does Bill Gates deserve his money? Does Michael Jackson? I've worked hard and honorably, and so I deserve to be comfortable." - Anonymous Microsoft employee, worth approximately 10 million, quoted in the November 29, 1999 issue of The Standard, an Internet industry magazine. It's estimated that Microsoft has produced over 2,000 millionaires. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Beware the lollipop of mediocrity. Lick once and you suck forever." -- Anonymous ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. -Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Mother Night- ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I learned three important things in college--to use a library, to memorize quickly and visually, to drop asleep at any time given a horizontal surface. What I could not learn was to think creatively and on schedule." - Agnes De Mille ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again." - Andri Gide ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If one does not reflect, one thinks oneself master of everything; but when one does reflect, one realizes that one is master of nothing." - Voltaire , Philosophical Dictionary ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "No wonder nobody is making money on the Internet, when we spend so much time torturing and antagonizing the customers." - Lucy Lockwood, Dec. 3, 1999 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "People think I watch TV too much, but they are wrong. There is a huge difference between merely "watching" TV and learning to respond aggressively to it. The difference, for most people, is the difference between the living and dying of their own brains." - Hunter S. Thompson in "Better than Sex" (1994). ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "It is easy when we are in prosperity to give advice to the afflicted." - Aeschylus ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Keep away from the people that belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. -Mark Twain- ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The happy have their days, and those they choose; The unhappy have but hours, and those they lose." - Don Quixote's advice to Sancho Panza in Cervantes' "Don Quixote" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Time is the only coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you." - Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "In the daily press we find a fierce epistolary battle raging between those who believe that the year 1899 marks the close of the nineteenth century and those who hold that not until 1901 shall we cross the threshold to the new era. It seems so difficult to understand that 1800, 1900, 2000, designates not the beginning, but the end of a century. It is evident that there never was a year 0, that the century must begin with a 1. A hundred years ago the same wordy war was waged; a hundred years hence it will be renewed." - _Scientific American_, January 1900 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The funniest thing you can say about it all is that in the year 1000, insofar as people were aware of the millennium, their fears were grander. They feared the apocalyptic revelations of Revelations. They really thought that Jesus would come again, that Satan would be bound and the world, as we know it, would end. I think it's so amusing that in a secular age the main fear that people have is caused by a technical glitch caused by a computer misreading a date because of poor anticipation by some programmers 30 years ago." - Stephen Jay Gould (from Primordial Beasts, Creationists and the Mighty Yankees, A CONVERSATION WITH / Stephen Jay Gould by Claudia Dreifus, New York Times, December 21, 1999) http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/122199sci-paleo-gould.html ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems." - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it. -George Bernard Shaw- ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The idea that just one more dollar, one more dalliance, one more rung on the ladder will leave us feeling sated reflects a misunderstanding about human nature--a misunderstanding, moreover, that is built into human nature; we are designed to feel that the next great goal will bring bliss, and the bliss is designed to evaporate shortly after we get there. Natural selection has a malicious sense of humor; it leads us along with a series of promises and then keeps saying 'Just kidding.' As the Bible put it, 'All the labour of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled.' Remarkably, we go our whole lives without ever really catching on." - from Robert Wright's The Moral Animal (1994) (at p. 369) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. -Theodore Roosevelt- ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Which of all the technological innovations has most profoundly changed human life in the twentieth century? The German engineer Gottlieb Daimler's invention in 1885 of the first small, high-speed internal-combustion engine. Daimler's engine made possible the car, the truck, the airplane -- the tank, the ballistic missile and the rocket. Without Daimler's engine, there would have been no world wars, no atomic bombings, no threat of worldwide nuclear destruction, no space exploration, nor, for that matter, any Vietnam War. "Such were the minor byproducts of the man's genius. "The serious business has been the explosion of families, communities, entire populations. Just about everyone who wants to now ups and leaves, gets in the car, the truck, the bus, the airplane and says goodbye to home, hometown, hometown restrictions and that old-time religion. More than all the ideologues, philosophers and cynics combined, it has been Daimler's engine that has led to people discarding religion so casually and blithely you can't even give them any such somber, knit-brow name as "atheists." Thanks to Gottlieb Daimler ... you're outta there! Nobody can any longer look over your shoulder. After all, which did more to get the sexual carnival rolling, the pill or the drive-straight-to-the-room motel?" - Tom Wolfe, _Rolling Stone_, December 30, 1999 - January 6, 2000 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. -Plato- ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Charles Schulz leaves a wife, two sons, three daughters, and a little round-headed boy with an extraordinary pet dog." - from The Times of London's obituary for Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz, 1922 - 2000 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; I think we are drawn to dogs because they are the unhibited creatures we might be if we weren't certain we knew better. -George Bird Evans- ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The difference with being in a relationship and being in prison is that in prison they let you play softball on the weekends. -Bobby Kelton- ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. -Ralph Waldo Emerson- ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Believe those who are seeking the truth, doubt those who find it. -Andre Gide- ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it." - Ernest Hemingway ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war other, in order that the people may require a leader." - Plato, The Republic ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The holiest of all holidays are those Kept by ourselves in silence and apart, The secret anniversaries of the heart. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others." - Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The gentleman helps others to realize what is good in them; he does not help them to realize what is bad in them. The small man does the opposite." "The gentleman is at ease without being arrogant; the small man is arrogant without being at ease." "What the gentleman seeks, he seeks within himself; what the small man seeks, he seeks in others." "Men are close to each other by nature. They diverge as a result of repeated practice." "It is only the most intelligent and the most stupid who are not susceptible to change." - Confucius (551-479 BC), The Analects ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; spirit of Christmas - 25 December 1999 Son, put down Harry Potter And The Cards Of Pokemon. We need to talk for a minute, because there's more to Christmas than getting stuff. See, the spirit of Christmas is cultural assimilation. Way back, some pagan types had a Yule festival celebrating the birth of the sun at the winter solstice. Then those Christians came along and changed it to the birth of the son. Of course you get better gifts than frankincense and myrrh. That's because later on, capitalism became top religion and changed the holiday again, to the growth of the sum, and that's what it is today. Son, here's what I'm trying to tell you. If you always follow the latest trend, no matter what it is, then Christmas will always be there for you. The Daily Whale, copyright 1999 Jay J.P. Scott http://forum.swarthmore.edu/~jay/whale/ ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "In a democracy, it is dangerous to have The Few control what The Many will see and read. The electorate is able to come to the best decisions when they are presented with ALL the alternatives and ALL the information available to them. Less knowledge -- i.e. ignorance -- insures that bad decisions will be made. The strength of a free society is maintained by the diversity of voices and the free flow of information. If you limit that flow, if you restrict that access to knowledge and ideas and points of view, then you make the society less free. " ... A few weeks after Kael's review [of Michael Moore's movie "Roger and Me"], I decided I had to respond. I called The New Yorker to say I would like to submit a letter to the editor to correct her mistakes. I was told, "We don't print letters to the editor." Huh? I had never heard of such a thing. How does a reader have a chance to respond to something that isn't true? "I guess you don't," was the reply. A few years later The New Yorker started printing their first-ever letters to the editor. And I guess that's what scares me about this Time Warner AOL deal. If just a few people end up owning all the ways for us to communicate with each other, and they decide what will be communicated and what won't, then we are all in deep trouble. The incredible beauty of this Internet is that you and I can bypass all of them and talk to each other directly. They hate that! They hate the fact that we are participating in a leisure-time activity that they make little or no money from. And, by God, they are going to see that those days are over. - film-maker Michael Moore, www.michaelmoore.com ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We have uniformly rejected all letters and declined all discussion upon the question of when the present century ends, as it is one of the most absurd that can engage the public attention, and we are astonished to find it has been the subject of so much dispute, since it appears plain. The present century will not terminate till January 1, 1801, unless it can be made out that 99 are 100... It is a silly, childish discussion, and only exposes the want of brains of those who maintain a contrary opinion to that we have stated." - The London Times, 26 December 1799 "The Post is open to conviction. We are not bigoted or intolerant. If anyone will show us how a century can be completed with less than 100 years, and how nineteen centuries can be completed with less than 1900 years, and how the twentieth century can begin before the nineteenth century ends, we shall joyfully put ashes in our hair and hail him as a wizard." - Washington Post, 28 December 1899 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. -Mark Twain- ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; From: Andy Valencia To: ... ipv6-haters@precision.guesswork.com IPv6 is like the DoD completing the design of a gigaton nuclear bomb in the year 2000; everybody's thinking that it would've been cool to have this in 1963, but who the hell wants to spend all the bucks on it 37 years late? ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "For the past forty years, and for the past 400, we as a nation have been eerily 'not vocal' about the deep structure of racism. And so some measure of white America's prejudice has lived on, just quietly. It would be better to feel ourselves unsettled by the full truth of these historical horrors before we commend ourselves for having buried the past. As we peer into the unmarked graves of the ghosts that haunt America still, perhaps the path to peace lies not only in dreaming a better future for black children but in awakening white Americans to their own history, and to what historian Michael Harris has called 'the past we are creating now.'" - Patricia J. William's commentary on this year's Black History Month in _The Nation_, Feb. 28, 2000, p. 9. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "In enforcing a truth we need severity rather than efflorescence of language. We must be simple, precise, terse." (Edgar Allan Poe, "The Poetic Principle") ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Opinion is that exercise of the human will which helps us to make a decision without information." - John Erskine (1879-1951) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Strong reasons make strong actions." - William Shakespeare (1564-1616), in King John, Act III, Scene IV ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Open-minded students everywhere owe a debt of gratitude to Abercrombie & Fitch. Not since Hester Prynne has an embroidered "A" been such a clear indication of whom to avoid. - Michael Daniels, in a letter to Rolling Stone, 99-11-25 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong. -David Fasold- ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about." - Charles Kingsley ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish--where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source--where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials--and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all." - John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Indeed, one of the most depressing things about the Clinton crisis is that it legitimized a raw and ugly strain in American life, the worship of sheer power. If we can just destroy this guy, the Clinton-haters believed, no one will care later how we did it: The facts on the ground will become the new reality. For his part, Clinton let a lie fester for eight months, calculating whether he should tell the truth by watching the polls. The scary thing is that in an age of hate-spewing talk radio, buccaneer capitalism and I've-got-mine-Jack online libertarianism, they both had it right." - Gary Kamiya in salon.com, on U.S. President Bill Clinton and his critics. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "You might wonder why a company that actually does something would care to merge with one that does nothing, even if it has a gift for doing nothing. You are naive." - Michael Lewis, author of _Liar's Poker_ and _The New New Thing_, in ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." - Eric Hoffer ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness." - Niels Bohr (1885-1962) Danish physicist ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy." - Ivan Illich ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Well, because it creates a huge political scene, I mean, that this is all. I am someone who is a uniter, not a divider. I don't believe in group thought, pitting one group of people against another. And all that does is create kind of a huge political, you know, nightmare for people. I mean, it's as if an individual doesn't count, but the group that the individual belongs to is more important." --noted political theorist and grammarian George W. Bush, on why he won't meet with the gay Log Cabin Republicans, 21 Nov 1999. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "I pretended to be a boy and studied in the boys' school. It was the only way for me [to receive an education]." - Lali, a 10 year old girl in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. (Source: The New York Times, 09 March 2000) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Actors are more than just cultural luxuries, aesthetic appendages or up-market entertainers. On the contrary, actors are essential for maintaining our vital links with the imaginal world, our universal self, the part of us that unites with the rest of humankind." - Brian Bates, from "The Way of the Actor" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; It is with love as with ghosts; everyone talks about it, but very few have seen it. -Francois de la Rouchefoucald- ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Our activities and interests center around greenhouse gases. Why? Because Malaysia and Indonesia and Mexico were all on fire this summer, that's why. An area the size of Europe has been flooded in Asia this summer, including 300 million people in fifteen countries. I don't think I have to lecture San Franciscans about the effects of this year's El Nino. Of course, many people claim not to be convinced by this so-called climate change evidence. That is because they are shortsighted sociopathic morons who don't want to lose any money." - Bruce Sterling, on the Viridian Movement, http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/viridian/ ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; So live that you can look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James D. Nicoll ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The opposite of bravery is not cowardice, but conformity. -Robert Anthony- ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs. -Anonymous- ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; History, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools. - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries. -- Descartes ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Women still remember the first kiss after men have forgotten the last." - Remy de Gourmant ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; I don't think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday. -Abraham Lincoln ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Gregoire mercilessly lampooned the technology industry, noting that "It's difficult to conceive of a harder job" than selling software. "Imagine making your living selling broken stuff -- routinely promising features that don't exist," he said. "Only a bunch of nincompoops like us would let them get away with it." - Jerry Gregoire, former CIO at Dell Computer Corp. and PepsiCo Inc. [http://computerworld.com/cwi/story/0,1199,NAV47_STO46488,00.html?pm] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame." - Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744) ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The world is full of abundance and opportunity, but far too many people come to the fountain of life with a sieve instead of a tank car...a teaspoon instead of a steam shovel. They expect little and as a result they get little. -Ben Sweetland ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The youth of a nation are the trustees of posterity. -- Benjamin Disraeli ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; From: Nick Papadakis Subject: A Highly-Evolved Bureaucrat "The mobile larval form [of the sea-squirt] has a brain-like ganglion that receives information about the surrounding environment. As an adult, the sea-squirt attaches itself to some stationary object and then digests most of its own brain." ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it. -- Samuel Johnson ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; For most people denial is just a vacation. I've built a condo and taken up residency. -- Stacey Leigh Lansing ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools. George Chapman ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. -Franklin D. Roosevelt ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The point to remember is that what the government gives it must first take away. -- John S. Coleman ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; As we grow old, our sense of the value of time becomes vivid. Nothing else, indeed, seems of any consequence. William Hazlitt ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved. Victor Hugo ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "A man who believes in nothing will fall for anything." - Malcolm X ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants. -- Isaac Newton In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand. -- Gerald Holton If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders. -- Hal Abelson In computer science, we stand on each other's feet. -- Brian K. Reid ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The mind covers more ground than the heart but goes less far. -- Chinese Proverb ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; My own mind is my own church. -- Thomas Paine ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ``Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad''. -- rob, circa 1992 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear a hundred battles. -- Tzu-Sun ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "If a sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on top of each other, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance." - Norman Augustine, author, business executive. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Fairy Tails start "Once upon a time." Army/Sea stories start "This is no shit." Software proposals start "1.0." ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer. -Henry Kissinger- ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will. -Ghandi- ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The greatest success is successful self-acceptance. -- Ben Sweet ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; "English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment, and education--sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street." - E. B. White ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it. -- James Baldwin ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else. -- Tennessee Williams ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; A jury consists of twelve people chosen to decide who has a better lawyer -- Robert Frost ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; To sit alone with my conscience will be judgement enough for me. -Charles William Stubbs- ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; come play disc today huck, layout, run, swat, catch, laugh beware the tourists -Lukas ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; From: Jed Goldstone sailing through the air summer disk, summer player softly landing in ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; hey you lame bastards come play disc at killian or chad will beat you -Lukas ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;