August 2009
1 post
“The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it.”
– Chinese proverb
July 2009
2 posts
“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”
– Dr. Seuss
“All you have to be is ignorant and cocky.”
– Mark Twain on what it takes to be successful. Some things never change.
June 2009
32 posts
“-What makes them interesting to us? asked his editor.
-Stupidity, said Fate....”
– From the novel 2666
“These prophets aren’t necessarily monotheists; they don’t deny the...”
– From a TIME magazine essay taken from The Evolution of God, a new book by Robert Wright.
“A drunk man’s mouth is a sober man’s mind.”
– Possibly a Greek expression. I saw it on the Facebook profile of a Greek acquaintance.
I like smart phones
I just read TIME’s latest article on the Palm Pre, the first major contender to Apple’s iPhone, and I must say that some of the features the Pre possesses make me want to give the Pre a try in the near future. I love the iPhone 3G that I just bought a couple of weeks ago (I can be pretty slow to progress quickly due to financial constraints), but one of its major setbacks seems to be...
“Truth is stranger than fiction… because fiction is obliged to stick with...”
– I’d never heard the rest of this famous quote by Mark Twain until I read it just now in the latest issue of WIRED.
“There is nothing intelligent about torture. If you have to inflict pain, then...”
– Eric Maddox, an Army staff sergeant whose book Mission: Black List #1 chronicles his interrogations in Iraq that ultimately led to the capture of Saddam Hussein
“Wherever the separation of thinking from doing has been achieved, it has been...”
– A statement made by Matthew B. Crawford in his new book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, in which he stresses the importance of the manual trades and the cognitive challenge of working with solid things (preferably grimy, metal ones)
“The owl is to the cat what the angel is to the man.”
– French filmmaker Chris Marker’s favorite slogan
“We all have ways of coping. I use sex and awesomeness.”
– Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock
“The parent who leaves his son great wealth generally deadens the talents and...”
– Andrew Carnegie, who supported the creation of the estate tax
“If you want to know how to play the blues, live beyond your means. It’s...”
– Eric Clapton
I’m thinking about changing my name to The Reblogger because that’s pretty much all I’ve been doing on Tumblr lately! Perhaps this weekend I will contribute something original again.
May 2009
36 posts
“The software also opens up the possibility that brass instruments could be...”
– This statement ends a recent BBC news article on the lituus, a musical instrument that has just been recreated with the help of data run by computer. This statement in particular struck me in a unique way because it automatically gave me a possible idea for a work of fiction with futuristic...
“There’s something I learned long ago: I never learned a thing when I was...”
– Larry King
“I have always known
That at last I would
Take this road, but yesterday
I did...”
– Narahira
“In his heart, Leprince has finally accepted his lot as a bad writer, but he has...”
– This sentence comes from “Henri Simon Leprince,” the second of fourteen short stories in the collection Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolano. Leprince is himself a bad poet and writer who saves the lives of many other literati in France during World War II.
Bolano is obsessed with...
Cinema worth dying for
I was discussing movies with a coworker and for some reason the French-Canadian terrorist organization from Infinite Jest came to mind. All of a sudden a new idea for a possible element to embed into a future work of fiction sprang up inside my head: a global underground terrorist organization that is intent on destroying the major movie industries, like those of Hollywood and Bollywood, in order...
