Everything is Sh*t Except You Love, by Espo. This is one of the lots in the Style Wars auction on eBay - all proceeds go to the Style Wars restoration fund.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETRa_tx9c2w]
Love the styling of the TV execs... [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ss-59fi4nM]
(taken from The Guardian's extract of Jon Ronson's new book, The Psychopath Test)
It was visiting hour at Broadmoor psychiatric hospital and patients began drifting in to sit with their loved ones at tables and chairs that had been fixed to the ground. They were mostly overweight, wearing loose, comfortable T-shirts and elasticated sweatpants. There probably wasn't much to do in Broadmoor but eat. I wondered if any of them were famous. Broadmoor was where they sent Ian Brady, the Moors murderer, and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.
A man in his late 20s walked towards me. His arm was outstretched. He wasn't wearing sweatpants. He was wearing a pinstripe jacket and trousers. He looked like a young businessman trying to make his way in the world, someone who wanted to show everyone that he was very, very sane. We shook hands.
"I'm Tony," he said. He sat down.
"So I hear you faked your way in here," I said.
"That's exactly right," Tony said.
He had the voice of a normal, nice, eager-to-help young man.
"I'd committed GBH," he said. "After they arrested me, I sat in my cell and I thought, 'I'm looking at five to seven years.' So I asked the other prisoners what to do. They said, 'Easy! Tell them you're mad! They'll put you in a county hospital. You'll have Sky TV and a PlayStation. Nurses will bring you pizzas.'"
"How long ago was this?" I asked.
"Twelve years ago," Tony said.
Tony said faking madness was the easy part, especially when you're 17 and you take drugs and watch a lot of scary movies. You don't need to know how authentically crazy people behave. You just plagiarise the character Dennis Hopper played in the movie Blue Velvet. That's what Tony did. He told a visiting psychiatrist he liked sending people love letters straight from his heart, and a love letter was a bullet from a gun, and if you received a love letter from him, you'd go straight to hell.
Plagiarising a well-known movie was a gamble, he said, but it paid off. Lots more psychiatrists began visiting his cell. He broadened his repertoire to include bits from Hellraiser, A Clockwork Orange and David Cronenberg's Crash. Tony told the psychiatrists he liked to crash cars into walls for sexual pleasure and also that he wanted to kill women because he thought looking into their eyes as they died would make him feel normal.
"Where did you get that one from?" I asked.
"A biography of Ted Bundy," Tony replied. "I found it in the prison library."
I nodded and thought it probably wasn't a great idea for prison libraries to stock books about Ted Bundy.
"But they didn't send me to some cushy hospital," Tony continued. "They sent me to bloody Broadmoor!"
Tony said the day he arrived at the dangerous and severe personality disorder (DSPD) unit, he took one look at the place and realised he'd made a spectacularly bad decision. He asked to speak urgently to psychiatrists. "I'm not mentally ill," he told them. It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy.
"When you decided to wear pinstripe to meet me," I said, "did you realise the look could go either way?"
"Yes," said Tony, "but I thought I'd take my chances. Plus most of the patients here are disgusting slobs who don't wash or change their clothes for weeks on end and I like to dress well."
I looked around the Wellness Centre at the patients, scoffing chocolate bars with their parents who, in contrast to their children, had made a great effort to dress well.
"I know people are looking out for 'nonverbal clues' to my mental state," Tony continued. "Psychiatrists love 'nonverbal clues'. They love to analyse body movements. But that's really hard for the person who is trying to act sane. How do you sit in a sane way? How do you cross your legs in a sane way?"
I suddenly felt self-conscious. Was I crossing my legs like a journalist?
"So for a while you thought that being normal and polite would be your ticket out of here?" I said.
"Right," he replied. "I volunteered to weed the hospital garden. But they saw how well behaved I was and decided it meant I could behave well only in the environment of a psychiatric hospital and it proved I was mad."
I glanced suspiciously at Tony. I instinctively didn't believe him about this. It seemed too catch-22, too darkly-absurd-by-numbers. But later Tony sent me his files and, sure enough, it was right there. "Tony is cheerful and friendly," one report stated. "His detention in hospital is preventing deterioration of his condition."
After Tony read that, he said, he started a kind of war of non co-operation. This involved staying in his room a lot. On the outside, Tony said, not wanting to spend time with your criminally insane neighbours would be a perfectly understandable position. But on the inside it demonstrates you're withdrawn and have a grandiose sense of your own importance. In Broadmoor, not wanting to hang out with insane killers is a sign of madness.
"The patient's behaviour is getting worse in Broadmoor," a report written during Tony's non co-operation period stated. "He does not engage [with other patients]."
Tony was funny and quite charming for most of my two hours with him, but towards the end he got sadder. "I arrived here when I was 17," he said. "I'm 29 now. I've grown up wandering the wards of Broadmoor. I've got the Stockwell strangler on one side of me and the Tiptoe Through The Tulips rapist on the other. These are supposed to be the best years of your life. I've seen suicides. I saw a man take another man's eye out."
Tony said just being there can be enough to turn someone crazy. Then one of the guards called out a word – "Time" – and with barely a goodbye, Tony shot from the table and across the room. All the patients did the same. It was a display of tremendous, extreme, acute good behaviour.
I didn't know what to think. Unlike the sad-eyed, medicated patients all around us, Tony had seemed perfectly ordinary and sane. But what did I know?
The next day I wrote to Professor Anthony Maden, the head clinician at Tony's unit at Broadmoor – "I'm contacting you in the hope that you may be able to shed some light on how true Tony's story might be."
A few days later a letter arrived from Tony. "This place is awful at night-time, Jon," he wrote. "Words cannot express the atmosphere."
Tony had included in the package copies of his files. So I got to read the exact words he used to convince psychiatrists back in 1998 that he was mentally ill. He'd really gone to town. He said the CIA was following him, that he enjoyed taking things that belonged to other people because he liked the idea of making them suffer, and that hurting people was better than sex.
I felt the ground shift under my feet. Suddenly I was a little on the side of the psychiatrists. Tony must have come over as extremely creepy.
There was also a description of the crime he committed in 1997. The victim was a homeless alcoholic called Graham who apparently made "an inappropriate comment" about the 10-year-old daughter of one of Tony's friends; something to do with the length of her dress. Tony told him to shut up. Graham threw a punch. Tony retaliated by kicking him. Graham fell over. And that would have been it – Tony later said – had Graham stayed silent. But Graham said, "Is that all you've got?"
Tony "flipped". He kicked Graham seven or eight times in the stomach and groin, returning later to kick him again. I remembered that list of movies Tony said he plagiarised to demonstrate he was mentally ill. A Clockwork Orange begins with a gang of thugs kicking a homeless man while he is on the ground.
My phone rang. I recognised the number. It was Tony. I didn't answer.
A week passed and then the email I had been waiting for arrived from Professor Maden.
"Tony," it read, "did get here by faking mental illness because he thought it would be preferable to prison."
"Oh!" I thought, pleasantly surprised. "Good! That's great!"
But then I read Maden's next line: "Most psychiatrists who have assessed him, and there have been a lot, have considered he is not mentally ill, but suffers from psychopathy."
I looked at the email. "Tony's a psychopath?" I thought.
I didn't know very much about psychopaths back then, but I did know this: it sounded worse.
Faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence, Maden explained, is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you'd expect of a psychopath.
A psychologist friend, Essi Viding, agreed. "Classic psychopath!" she said when I described Tony's pinstripe suit.
Tony rang again. I took a breath and picked up the phone.
"Jon?" he said. He sounded small and far away and echoey.
"Yes, hello, Tony," I said, in a no-nonsense way.
"I haven't heard from you in a while," he said.
"Professor Maden says you're a psychopath," I said.
Tony exhaled, impatiently. "I'm not a psychopath," he said.
"How do you know?" I asked.
"They say psychopaths can't feel remorse," said Tony. "I feel lots of remorse. But when I tell them I feel remorse, they say psychopaths pretend to be remorseful when they're not. Trying to prove you're not a psychopath is even harder than trying to prove you're not mentally ill."
"How did they diagnose you?" I asked.
"They give you a psychopath test," said Tony. "The Robert Hare Checklist. They assess you for 20 personality traits. Superficial charm. Proneness to boredom. Lack of empathy. Lack of remorse. Grandiose sense of self-worth. That sort of thing. For each one they score you a 0, 1 or 2. If your total score is 30 or more out of 40, you're a psychopath. That's it. You're doomed. You're labelled a psychopath for life. They say you can't change. You can't be treated. You're a danger to society. And then you're stuck somewhere like this."
It was the French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel who first suggested, early in the 19th century, that there was a madness that didn't involve mania or depression or psychosis. He called it "manie sans délire" – insanity without delusions. He said sufferers appeared normal on the surface, but they lacked impulse controls and were prone to outbursts of violence. It wasn't until 1891, when the German doctor JLA Koch published his book Die Psychopathischen Minderwertigkeiten, that it got its name: psychopathy.
The consensus from the beginning was that only 1% of humans had it, but the chaos they caused was so far-reaching, it could actually remould society. And so the urgent question became, how could psychopaths be cured?
In the late 1960s, a young Canadian psychiatrist believed he had the answer. His name was Elliott Barker and he had visited radical therapeutic communities around the world, including nude psychotherapy sessions occurring under the tutelage of an American psychotherapist named Paul Bindrim. Clients, mostly California free-thinkers and movie stars, would sit naked in a circle and dive headlong into a 24-hour emotional and mystical rollercoaster during which participants would scream and yell and sob and confess their innermost fears. Barker worked at a unit for psychopaths inside the Oak Ridge hospital for the criminally insane in Ontario. Although the inmates were undoubtedly insane, they seemed perfectly ordinary. This, Barker deduced, was because they were burying their insanity deep beneath a facade of normality. If the madness could only, somehow, be brought to the surface, maybe it would work itself through and they could be reborn as empathetic human beings.
And so he successfully sought permission from the Canadian government to obtain a large batch of LSD, hand-picked a group of psychopaths, led them into what he named the "total encounter capsule", a small room painted bright green, and asked them to remove their clothes. This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world's first ever marathon nude LSD-fuelled psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths.
Barker's sessions lasted for epic 11-day stretches. There were no distractions – no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least 100 hours every week) of their feelings. Much like Bindrim's sessions, the psychopaths were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for each other, even if they were, in the words of an internal Oak Ridge report of the time, "in a state of arousal while doing so".
My guess is that this would have been a more enjoyable experience within the context of a Palm Springs resort hotel than in a secure facility for psychopathic murderers.
Barker watched it all from behind a one-way mirror and his early reports were gloomy. The atmosphere inside the capsule was tense. Psychopaths would stare angrily at each other. Days would go by when nobody would exchange a word. But then, as the weeks turned into months, something unexpected began to happen.
The transformation was captured in an incredibly moving film. These tough young prisoners are, before our eyes, changing. They are learning to care for one another inside the capsule.
We see Barker in his office, and the look of delight on his face is quite heartbreaking. His psychopaths have become gentle. Some are even telling their parole boards not to consider them for release until after they've completed their therapy. The authorities are astonished.
Back home in London, I felt terribly sorry for Tony. So many psychopathic murderers – fortunate to have been under Barker's radical tutelage – had been declared cured and freed. Why couldn't Broadmoor adopt some of his ideas? Of course, they seemed dated and naive and perhaps overly reliant on hallucinogenics, but they were surely preferable to locking someone up for ever because he happened to score badly on some personality checklist.
Then I learned that two researchers had in the early 90s undertaken a detailed study of the long-term recidivism rates of psychopaths who'd been through Barker's programme and let out into society. In regular circumstances, 60% of criminal psychopaths released into the outside world go on to reoffend. What percentage of their psychopaths had? As it turned out: 80%.
The capsule had made the psychopaths worse.
"They had psychopaths naked and talking about their feelings!" Bob Hare laughed, shaking his head at the idealism of it all. It was an August evening and we were drinking in a hotel bar in rural Pembrokeshire, west Wales, at one of Hare's three-day residential courses for psychiatrists, care workers and criminal profilers. It was exciting finally to meet him. While names such as Elliott Barker have all but faded away, Hare is influential. Justice departments and parole boards all over the world have accepted his contention that psychopaths are quite simply incurable and everyone should concentrate their energies instead on learning how to root them out using his PCL-R (Psychopathy Checklist-Revised), which he has spent a lifetime refining.
In the mid-60s, Hare was working as a prison psychologist in Vancouver. He put word around the prison that he was looking for psychopathic and non-psychopathic volunteers for tests. He strapped them up to various EEG and sweat- and blood pressure-measuring machines, and also to an electricity generator, and explained to them that he was going to count backwards from 10 and when he reached one they'd receive a very painful electric shock.
The difference in the responses stunned Hare. The non-psychopathic volunteers (theirs were crimes of passion, usually, or crimes born from terrible poverty or abuse) steeled themselves ruefully, as if a painful electric shock were just the penance they deserved. They were, Hare noted, scared.
"And the psychopaths?" I asked.
"They didn't break a sweat," said Hare. "Nothing." The tests seemed to indicate that the amygdala, the part of the brain that should have anticipated the unpleasantness and sent the requisite signals of fear to the central nervous system, wasn't functioning as it should. It was an enormous breakthrough for Hare, his first clue that the brains of psychopaths were different from regular brains.
He was even more astonished when he repeated the test. This time, the psychopaths knew exactly how much pain they'd be in, and still: nothing. Hare learned something that others wouldn't for years: psychopaths were likely to reoffend. "They had no memory of the pain of the electric shock, even when the pain had occurred just moments before," Hare said. "So what's the point in threatening them with imprisonment if they break the terms of their parole? The threat has no meaning for them."
He did another experiment, the startle reflex test, in which psychopaths and non-psychopaths were invited to look at grotesque images, such as crime-scene photographs of blown-apart faces, and when they least expected it Hare would let off an incredibly loud noise in their ear. The non-psychopaths would leap with astonishment. The psychopaths would remain comparatively serene.
Hare knew that we tend to jump a lot higher when startled if we're on the edge of our seats anyway. But if we're engrossed by something, a crossword puzzle, say, and someone startles us, our leap is less pronounced. From this Hare deduced that when psychopaths see grotesque images of blown-apart faces they aren't horrified. They're absorbed.
Thrilled by his findings, Hare sent them to Science magazine.
"The editor returned them unpublished," he said. "He wrote, 'Frankly we found some of the brain wave patterns depicted in your paper very odd. Those EEGs couldn't have come from real people.'"
Then, disastrously for Hare, electric shocks were outlawed in the early 70s. He was forced to change tack. How could psychopaths be rooted out in a more hands-off way? In 1975 he organised a conference on the subject, so experts could pool their observations on the minutiae of psychopaths' behaviour, the verbal and non-verbal tics. Were there patterns? Did they involuntarily use giveaway turns of phrase? Their conclusions became the basis for his now-famous 20-point Hare PCL-R . Which was this:
Item 1 Glibness/superficial charm
Item 2 Grandiose sense of self-worth
Item 3 Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
Item 4 Pathological lying
Item 5 Cunning/manipulative
Item 6 Lack of remorse or guilt
Item 7 Shallow affect
Item 8 Callous/lack of empathy
Item 9 Parasitic lifestyle
Item 10 Poor behavioural controls
Item 11 Promiscuous sexual behaviour
Item 12 Early behaviour problems
Item 13 Lack of realistic long-term goals
Item 14 Impulsivity
Item 15 Irresponsibility
Item 16 Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
Item 17 Many short-term marital relationships
Item 18 Juvenile delinquency
Item 19 Revocation of conditional release
Item 20 Criminal versatility
Hare said if he were to score himself either 0, 1 or 2 on each item of his checklist, he'd probably get a four or a five out of the possible 40. Tony in Broadmoor had told me that on the three occasions they scored him, he got around a 29 or a 30.
Over the three-day course in Wales, my scepticism drained away entirely and I became a Hare devotee. I think the other sceptics felt the same. He was very convincing. I was attaining a new power, like a secret weapon. I felt like a different person, a hardliner, not confused or out of my depth as I had been when I'd been hanging around with Tony in Broadmoor. Instead, I was contemptuous of those naive people who allowed themselves to be taken in by slick-tongued psychopaths.
My mind drifted to what I could do with my new powers. If I'm being honest, it didn't cross my mind to become some kind of great crime fighter, philanthropically dedicated to making society a safer place. Instead, I made a mental list of all the people who over the years had crossed me and wondered which of them I might be able to expose as having psychopathic character traits. Top of the list was AA Gill, who had always been very rude about my television documentaries and had written a restaurant column in which he admitted to killing a baboon on safari.
"Item 8 Callous/lack of empathy," I thought, and smiled to myself.
After the conference, though, Hare seemed introspective. He said, almost to himself, "I shouldn't have done my research just in prisons. I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well."
"But surely stock-market psychopaths can't be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths," I said.
"Serial killers ruin families," shrugged Hare. "Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies."
It wasn't only Hare who believed that a disproportionate number of psychopaths can be found in high places. Over the following months, I spoke to scores of psychologists who all said the same. Everyone in the field seemed to regard psychopaths in this same way: inhuman, relentlessly wicked forces, whirlwinds of malevolence, forever harming society but impossible to identify unless you're trained in the subtle art of spotting them, as I now was.
I met an American CEO, Al Dunlap, formerly of the Sunbeam Corporation, who redefined a great many of the psychopath traits to me as "business positives": Grandiose sense of self-worth? "You've got to believe in yourself." (As he told me this, he was standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself.) Cunning/manipulative? "That's leadership."
But I became incredibly disappointed whenever Dunlap said things to me that were reasonable. There had been – he swore – no early behavioural problems or juvenile delinquency: "I was a focused, serious kid. In school I was always trying to achieve." And he had a loyal wife of 41 years. There were no rumours of affairs. This would score him a zero on items 17 and 11: many short-term marital relationships, and promiscuous sexual behaviour.
Becoming a psychopath-spotter had turned me power-crazed and a bit psychopathic. I was starting to see the checklist as an intoxicating weapon that was capable of inflicting terrible damage if placed in the wrong hands. And I was beginning to suspect that my hands might be the wrong hands.
I met up with Hare again. "It's quite a power you bestow upon people," I said. "What if you've created armies of people who spot psychopaths where there are none, witchfinder generals of the psychopath-spotting world?"
There was a silence.
"I do worry about the checklist being misused," Hare said.
"Who misuses it?" I asked.
"Over here, you have your DSPD programme," he said.
"That's where my friend Tony is," I said. "The DSPD unit at Broadmoor."
Two years had passed since I'd first met Tony in Broadmoor. I hadn't heard from him in months, and then out of the blue he called.
"Jon!" he said. He sounded excited. "There's going to be a tribunal. I want you to come. As my guest."
"Ah," I said, trying to sound pleased for him. Tony was forever pushing for tribunals, year after year, for the 14 years he had been inside Broadmoor's DSPD unit. His optimism was tireless. But the outcome was always the same. They'd come to nothing.
Journalists hardly ever made it to a DSPD unit and I was curious to see inside. According to Maden, the chief clinician at Tony's unit, it wouldn't exist without Hare's psychopath check-list. Tony was there because he had scored high on it, as had all 300 DSPD patients. The official line was that these were places to treat psychopaths with a view to one day sending them back out into the world. But the widespread theory was the whole thing was in fact a scheme to keep psychopaths locked up for life.
The unit was a clean, bland, modern, calmingly pine-coloured fortress. Nurses and security guards came over to ask me who I was. I said I was a friend of Tony's.
"Oh, Tony," one nurse said. "I know Tony."
"What do you think of Tony?" I asked him.
"I do have strong thoughts about Tony," he said, "but it would not be appropriate for me to tell you what they are."
"Are your thoughts about Tony strongly positive or strongly negative?" I asked.
He looked at me as if to say, "I am not telling you."
And then it was time. We entered the tribunal room.
The hearing lasted all of five minutes, one of which involved the magistrates telling me that if I reported the details of what happened inside the room, I would be imprisoned. So I won't. But the upshot – Tony was to be free.
He looked as if he'd been hit by a bus. In the corridor his barrister congratulated him. The process would take three months – either to find him a bed for a transitional period in a medium-secure unit, or to get him straight out on to the street – but there was no doubt. He smiled, hobbled over to me, and handed me a sheaf of papers.
They were independent reports, written for the tribunal by various psychiatrists who'd been invited to assess him. They told me things I didn't know about Tony: how his mother had been an alcoholic and used regularly to beat him up and kick him out of the house; how most of her boyfriends were drug addicts and criminals; how he was expelled from school for threatening his dinner lady with a knife; how he was sent to special schools but ran away because he missed his mother.
I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.
I spotted Professor Maden. I thought he might seem disappointed, but in fact he looked delighted. I wandered over.
"Ever since I went on a Bob Hare course, I've believed that psychopaths are monsters," I said. "They're just psychopaths – it's what defines them, it's what they are." I paused. "But isn't Tony kind of a semi-psychopath? A grey area? Doesn't his story prove that people in the middle shouldn't necessarily be defined by their maddest edges?"
"I think that's right," he replied. "Personally, I don't like the way Bob Hare talks about psychopaths almost as if they are a different species."
Tony was standing alone now, staring at the wall.
"He does have a very high level of some psychopathic traits," Maden said. "He never takes responsibility, everything is somebody else's fault. But he's not a serious, predatory offender. He can be a bully in the right circumstances, but doesn't set out to do serious harm for its own sake. I would also say you can never reduce any person to a diagnostic label. Tony has many endearing qualities when you look beyond the label."
"The thing is, Jon," Tony said as I looked up from the papers, "what you've got to realise is, everyone is a bit psychopathic. You are. I am." He paused. "Well, obviously I am," he said.
"What will you do now?" I asked.
"Maybe move to Belgium," he said. "There's this woman I fancy. But she's married. I'll have to get her divorced."
"Well, you know what they say about psychopaths," I said.
"We're manipulative!" said Tony .
• This is an edited extract from The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, published by Picador on 3 June.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6aCir5bu-c]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8x-v6FlIbU&feature=player_embedded] The UK's highest mountain railway journey offers spectacular views of an ancient Scottish mountain landscape and the viewing terrace at the top offers you the best weather watching opportunity in Britain. All seasons in 1 hour or less......The mountain is the most popular visitor attraction with the Cairngorms National Park.
Visitors travel in safety and comfort on a 2km journey from the Base Station at car park level (635m) to the Ptarmigan Top Station 1097m above sea level and just below the summit of Cairn Gorm mountain - Britain's 6th highest mountain.
Due to the fragile nature of the mountain landscape CairnGorm Mountain operates a visitor management system that assists in protecting the site. It is not normally possible to go up on the railway and then walk out onto the mountain from the Top Station in the non skiing months. However between 17th July and 31st October 2010 they run guided walks to the summit from the Top Station.
(Video via)
It might not look like much at first, but this is a very cool little web toy. Draw lines at different angles and the speed at which the balls bounce off them makes different noises. No, this won't make people think you're any sort of musician, but it is at least mildly diverting. Click the image to get to the site.
...and indeed, with all things popularised by "real" experts on telly.
Scene: Café de la Concha, 1 Mira Concha, San Sebastián, Spain. It is nighttime, and DAVID CHANG, TONY BOURDAIN, and WYLIE DUFRESNE are gathered around a table. A January storm rages outside and keeps the café nearly empty. The three Americans—in town to speak at a conference—are catching up over hard cider and pintxos, and talking, at CHANG’s behest, about culinary mediocrity back in their homeland.
TONY: So what about all these kids rolling out of culinary school now, with their $80,000 in debt? They’re totally jacked there.
DAVID: We’re all their f–king problem. We’re sort of a catalyst for them.
TONY: We’re inspiring generations of kids to go to culinary school.
DAVID: Could you have achieved your career without having gone to culinary school?
WYLIE: Sure. Of course I could have. I went to college, too.
DAVID: But now, what percentage of kids going to culinary school are actually going to contribute to a real kitchen? Like a two-Michelin-star, one-Michelin-star, whatever, a real f–king kitchen. Zero.
TONY: Man, that’s such a dark worldview. I just spoke to a kid today who came up to me and said, “You came up to the Culinary Institute of America five years ago and gave a commencement address.” I have no recollection of meeting this person. She asked me then, “What should I do after school?” And I said, “Do what I didn’t do. Acknowledge the fact that you’re not going to make any money at all, you’re not going to get paid for two years, and go work for the best. I would suggest Spain, some place like Mugaritz.” She’s at Mugaritz now. Come on, man, that’s a f–king awesome start.
DAVID: And if you didn’t talk to her, she’d probably—
TONY: Oh no, don’t do that. My point is that there are actually people who come rolling out of culinary school—maybe it’s a tiny, tiny number, but probably proportionally more than during my time—who don’t see the Hilton as a fantastic gig, or a cruise ship or a country club, and understand that if they wanna be great, if they want to be really good, then they have to start looking at places like Mugaritz or Arzak.
WYLIE: I disagree with that. I think unfortunately there is more of a mediocritizing of the average culinary-school graduate now than there was way back when. I think to a certain extent schools are selling them a bill of goods. “Come to culinary school, go through our program, and in six to eight months you could be the chef of this or that.” Not “Come to our schools and we’ll give you the absolute basics so you can go out into the world and work for pennies.” But that’s the truth. Today it’s, “You could end up on TV.”
TONY: F–k, you’re right. So we’re part of the problem.
DAVID: We’re part of the problem.
TONY: We suck. We are destroying what we love.
WYLIE: You more than me.
___________________________________
(via)
So I guess when you get too creaky to risk a skateboard or a BMX, this is the next step... Now, a little slow to start, doesn't really get going 'til what, 1.28 or so? But when the music kicks in, that man shows his paddle has a soul, straight up. Beautiful. It's all there, the grace, the showmanship. Fantastic. And crank the volume too - you won't want to miss the music. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofq_nl366VM]
"American Freestyle canoeing is the art of paddling a canoe on flat water with perfect control of its movements. The canoe is usually leaned over to the side to help the boat turn sharply and efficiently and paddle strokes are taken on either side of the canoe depending on the individual move. Balance, paddle placement and turn initiation are a few keys to this control. Since the movements seem dance-like, some practice this art timed to music, which is the ultimate in control."
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqT1lCqQyh0]
Start at the beginning. Turn it up. Stay with it. And pretend you're bombing down the motorway in a tiny car at night on your way to crash the world's best house party. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f7cylz6tl4&w=700]
He got in trouble with the Hells Angels, called his house a fortified compound, pioneered Gonzo journalism, ran for sheriff (and nearly won), wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, loved guns, usually had coke and a few sticks of dynamite lying around his house, was brilliant, irascible, mercurial. Pissed a lot of people off but inspired more than one generation. On 2005, aged 67, he shot himself. At his funeral, a private ceremony, Thompson's ashes were fired from a cannon atop a 153-foot tower of his own design (in the shape of a double-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button) to the tune of Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" and Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man." Red, white, blue, and green fireworks were launched along with his ashes. Now THAT is how you go out (the cannon and fireworks, I mean) "Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."
Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak arabic, love music, and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers, and warriors.
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.
So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
Hopes rise and dreams flicker and die. Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday. Life is beautiful and living is pain. The sound of music floats down a dark street.
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.
I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes.
America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
Some people will tell you that slow is good – but I’m here to tell you that fast is better. I’ve always believed this, in spite of the trouble it’s caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba…
THE EDGE– there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.
A word to the wise is infuriating.
If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.
Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish—a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow—to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested . . . Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.
My concept of death for a long time was to come down that mountain road at 120 and just keep going straight right there, burst out through the barrier and hang out above all that . . . and there I'd be, sitting in the front seat, stark naked, with a case of whiskey next to me and a case of dynamite in the trunk . . . honking the horn, and the lights on, and just sit there in space for an instant, a human bomb, and fall down into that mess of steel mills. It'd be a tremendous goddam explosion. No pain. No one would get hurt. I'm pretty sure, unless they've changed the highway, that launching place is still there. As soon as I get home, I ought to take the drive just to check it out.
There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.
It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.
You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.
The Sixties were an era of extreme reality. I miss the smell of tear gas. I miss the fear of getting beaten.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
You better take care of me Lord, if you don't you're gonna have me on your hands.
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[[ps - please check out some of my other quote collections here - The Guy Quote]]
Straight up, no messing around. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbmNcYH52eo]
Vertigo is not, actually, fear of heights. It's a type of dizziness, a feeling of motion when one is stationary.[The symptoms are due to a dysfunction of the vestibular system in the inner ear. It is often associated with nausea and vomiting as well as difficulties standing or walking. The most common causes are benign paroxysmal positional vertigo and vestibular migraine while less common causes include Ménière's disease and vestibular neuritis. Excessive consumption of ethanol (alcoholic beverages) can also cause notorious symptoms of vertigo. You can manifest it through thoughts, but it really any cause of inflammation such as common cold, influenza, and bacterial infections can cause transient vertigo if they involve the inner ear, as may chemical insults (e.g., aminoglycosides) or physical trauma (e.g., skull fractures). Motion sickness is sometimes classified as a cause of peripheral vertigo. Motion sickness is one of the biggest symptoms of vertigo and it develops most often in persons with inner ear problems. The feeling of dizziness and lightheadedness is often accompanied by nystagmus. This is when the eyes rapidly jerk to one side and then slowly find their way back to the original position. During a single episode of vertigo, this action will occur repeatedly. Symptoms can fade while sitting still with the eyes closed.
This photo makes me feel a bit sick.
Right, well that's that done then.
The Black Keys - Everlasting Light[audio http://dysonology.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/the-black-keys-everlasting_light.mp3]
Florence & The Machine ft. Kid Harpoon “I’m Goin’ Down“ (B. Springsteen cover)[audio http://dysonology.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/florencedown.mp3]
Bedouin Soundclash “Brutal Hearts”[audio http://dysonology.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/bedouin-soundclash-brutal-hearts.mp3]
Andre 3000 -”All Together Now” (Beatles Cover)[audio http://dysonology.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/andre-3000-all-together-now-_the-beatles-cover.mp3]
Ben L’Oncle Soul – “Seven Nation Army”[audio http://dysonology.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/01-seven-nation-army.mp3]
Prince – I Wanna Be Your Lober Dimitri From Paris Re-Edit [audio http://dysonology.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/qigrn5hgmt6e-128-1.mp3]
If you like these songs, find them and buy them.
Listen to this version. If you like it, buy it. [audio http://dysonology.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/a-case-of-you-joni-mitchell-cover.mp3]
Just before our love got lost you said "I am as constant as a northern star" And I said "Constantly in the darkness Where's that at? If you want me I'll be in the bar"
On the back of a cartoon coaster In the blue TV screen light I drew a map of Canada Oh Canada With your face sketched on it twice Oh you're in my blood like holy wine You taste so bitter and so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you darling Still I'd be on my feet oh I would still be on my feet
Oh I am a lonely painter I live in a box of paints I'm frightened by the devil And I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid
I remember that time you told me you said "Love is touching souls" Surely you touched mine 'Cause part of you pours out of me In these lines from time to time Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine You taste so bitter and so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you darling And I would still be on my feet I would still be on my feet
I met a woman She had a mouth like yours She knew your life She knew your devils and your deeds And she said "Go to him, stay with him if you can But be prepared to bleed"
Oh but you are in my blood You're my holy wine You're so bitter, bitter and so sweet
Oh, I could drink a case of you darling Still I'd be on my feet I would still be on my feet
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noSo5io0JLI] Tim "Wild Thang" Lepard delivers a rousing showcase of oration at a Peoria Chiefs minor league baseball game.
(via)
...or maybe they're analogies. Either way, funny. 1. Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center. 2. He was as tall as a 6′3″ tree. 3. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master. 4. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30. 5. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met. 6. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up. 7. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant. 8. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something. 9. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever. 10. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef. 11. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM. 12. The lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object. 13. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup. 14. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free. 15. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it. 16. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph. 17. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do. 18. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t. 19. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze. 20. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease. 21. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth. 22. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River. 23. Even in his last years, Grand pappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut. 24. He felt like he was being hunted down like a dog, in a place that hunts dogs, I suppose. 25. She was as easy as the TV Guide crossword. 26. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs. 27. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work. 28. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while. 29. “Oh, Jason, take me!” she panted, her breasts heaving like a college freshman on $1-a-beer night. 30. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall. 31. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools. 32. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up. 33. The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can. 34. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser. 35. Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie this guy would be buried in the credits as something like “Second Tall Man.” 36. The thunder was ominous-sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play. 37. The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon. 38. She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again. 39. Her pants fit her like a glove, well, maybe more like a mitten, actually. 40. Fishing is like waiting for something that does not happen very often. 41. They were as good friends as the people on “Friends.” 42. Oooo, he smells bad, she thought, as bad as Calvin Klein’s Obsession would smell if it were called Enema and was made from spoiled Spamburgers instead of natural floral fragrances. 43. The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton. 44. He was as bald as one of the Three Stooges, either Curly or Larry, you know, the one who goes woo woo woo. 45. The sardines were packed as tight as the coach section of a 747. 46. Her eyes were shining like two marbles that someone dropped in mucus and then held up to catch the light. 47. The baseball player stepped out of the box and spit like a fountain statue of a Greek god that scratches itself a lot and spits brown, rusty tobacco water and refuses to sign autographs for all the little Greek kids unless they pay him lots of drachmas. 48. I felt a nameless dread. Well, there probably is a long German name for it, like Geschpooklichkeit or something, but I don’t speak German. Anyway, it’s a dread that nobody knows the name for, like those little square plastic gizmos that close your bread bags. I don’t know the name for those either. 49. She was as unhappy as when someone puts your cake out in the rain, and all the sweet green icing flows down and then you lose the recipe, and on top of that you can’t sing worth a damn. 50. Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. 51. It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one had ever seen before. 52. Bob was as perplexed as a hacker who means to access T:flw.quid55328.com\aaakk/ch@ung but gets T:\flw.quidaaakk/ch@ung by mistake. 53. You know how in “Rocky” he prepares for the fight by punching sides of raw beef? Well, yesterday it was as cold as that meat locker he was in. 54. The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium. 55. Her lips were red and full, like tubes of blood drawn by an inattentive phlebotomist. 56. The sunset displayed rich, spectacular hues like a .jpeg file at 10 percent cyan, 10 percent magenta, 60 percent yellow and 10 percent black.
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If you liked this, don't miss the Fumblerules of grammar.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfnW4WLQV-I&w=700] The guy is a genius. I love him.
