And one to read out loud... "may i feel said he"

A glorious poem by E. E. Cummings - great fun to read out loud. Originally published in Cumming's 1935 No Thanks collection, may i feel said he is one of the poet's most original and best loved works. The punctuation is like that on purpose. Watch out for the single capital letter that makes the whole thing. may i feel said he

may i feel said he (i'll squeal said she just once said he) it's fun said she

(may i touch said he how much said she a lot said he) why not said she

(let's go said he not too far said she what's too far said he where you are said she)

may i stay said he (which way said she like this said he if you kiss said she

may i move said he is it love said she) if you're willing said he (but you're killing said she

but it's life said he but your wife said she now said he) ow said she

(tiptop said he don't stop said she oh no said he) go slow said she

(cccome?said he ummm said she) you're divine!said he (you are Mine said she)

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Joseph "Le Pétomane" Pujol: The Flatulist.

Farting, guffing, trumping, parping, letting loose the goose, opening the fridge, looking for ducks, carpet bombing, the silent but violent, the deadly cushion creeper, the brompton, the ripple, the rapple, the bandecoot...the names we give to the act of breaking wind tell you everything you need to know about their place in our sense of humour. Around the turn of the last century a Frenchman,, Joseph Pujol, took it to another level. He'd developed (or maybe just been born with) exceptional control of his abdominal and rectal muscles, and used them to great effect. Known as Le Pétomane (which combined the French verb péter, "to fart", with the -mane, "-maniac" suffix, which translates to "fartomaniac") he became the wolrd's most famous flatulist, farteur du jour, chief fartiste at the Moulin Rouge night club in Paris. He wasn't farting, incidentally, as it wasn't intestinal gas. Here's a fascinating extract from his bio on Wikipedia:

Soon after he left school he had a strange experience while swimming in the sea. He put his head under the water and held his breath, whereupon he felt an icy cold penetrating his rear. He ran ashore in fright and was amazed to sense water pouring from his anus. A doctor assured him that there was nothing to worry about.

When he joined the army he told his fellow soldiers about his special ability, and repeated it for their amusement, sucking up water from a pan into his rectum and then projecting it through his anus up to several yards. He then found that he could suck in air as well. Although a baker by profession, Pujol would entertain his customers by imitating musical instruments, and claim to be playing them behind the counter. Pujol decided to try his talent on the stage, and debuted in Marseille in 1887. After his act proved successful, he proceeded to Paris, where he took the act to the Moulin Rouge in 1892.

Some of the highlights of his stage act involved sound effects of cannon fire and thunderstorms, as well as playing "'O Sole Mio" and "La Marseillaise" on an ocarina through a rubber tube in his anus. He could also blow out a candle from several yards away. His audience included Edward, Prince of Wales, King Leopold II of the Belgians and Sigmund Freud.

In 1894, the managers of the Moulin Rouge sued Pujol for an impromptu exhibition he gave to aid a friend struggling with economic difficulties. For the measly sum of 3,000 francs (Pujol's usual fee being 20,000 francs per show), the Moulin Rouge lost their star attraction, who proceeded to set up his own travelling show called the Theatre Pompadour.

In the following decade Pujol tried to 'refine' and make his acts 'gentler'; one of his favourite numbers became a rhyme about a farm which he himself composed, and which he punctuated with the usual anal renditions of the animals' sounds. The climax of his act, however, involved him farting his impression of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

With the outbreak of World War I, Pujol, horrified by the inhumanity of the conflict, retired from the stage and returned to his bakery in Marseille. Later he opened a biscuit factory in Toulon. He died in 1945, aged 88, and was buried in the cemetery of La Valette-du-Var, where his grave can still be seen today. The Sorbonne offered his family a large sum of money to study his body after his death, but they refused the offer.

This recording is by a Monsieur Lefires, a Pujol imitator: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tixKopGjn5s&w=700]

Josh T. Pearson takes to the streets of Paris. Beautiful.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/907ye_fnjW8&w=700] La Blogotheque presents Josh T. Pearson (Sweetheart I Aint Your Christ, Thou Art Loosed) | A Take Away Show

"He had a giant beard, giving the feeling of being wise beyond his years. He barely moved as he sang, lips, fingers. His sadness was infinite, his music brought tears to your eyes, it never stopped. Follow Josh T. Pearson's eternal laments through Belleville's bustling streets."

Read the full story (in French, English) http://www.blogotheque.net/Josh-T-Pearson,5985

Directed by Colin Solal Cardo Sound & Mix by François Clos Production management by Chryde

How Martin Luther's message went viral

This is a fascinating article from The Economist about how Lutheranism spread through 16th century social networks & media.

The media environment that Luther had shown himself so adept at managing had much in common with today's online ecosystem of blogs, social networks and discussion threads. It was a decentralised system whose participants took care of distribution, deciding collectively which messages to amplify through sharing and recommendation. Modern media theorists refer to participants in such systems as a "networked public", rather than an "audience", since they do more than just consume information. Luther would pass the text of a new pamphlet to a friendly printer (no money changed hands) and then wait for it to ripple through the network of printing centres across Germany.

Unlike larger books, which took weeks or months to produce, a pamphlet could be printed in a day or two. Copies of the initial edition, which cost about the same as a chicken, would first spread throughout the town where it was printed. Luther's sympathisers recommended it to their friends. Booksellers promoted it and itinerant colporteurs hawked it. Travelling merchants, traders and preachers would then carry copies to other towns, and if they sparked sufficient interest, local printers would quickly produce their own editions, in batches of 1,000 or so, in the hope of cashing in on the buzz. A popular pamphlet would thus spread quickly without its author's involvement.

And the bit on news ballads is especially interesting:

The news ballad, like the pamphlet, was a relatively new form of media. It set a poetic and often exaggerated description of contemporary events to a familiar tune so that it could be easily learned, sung and taught to others. News ballads were often "contrafacta" that deliberately mashed up a pious melody with secular or even profane lyrics. They were distributed in the form of printed lyric sheets, with a note to indicate which tune they should be sung to. Once learned they could spread even among the illiterate through the practice of communal singing.

Auto-tune the News anyone? And I thought this sounded an awful lot like Tom Standage (The Economist doesn't use bylines)...turns out this article was adaptedfrom a chapter of his upcoming book on the history of social media.

 

(via Kottke)

On this day...(22 December)

69 – Emperor Vitellius is captured and murdered at the Gemonian stairs in Rome. 1716 Lincoln's Inn Theatre in London put on England's first pantomime which included the characters Harlequin, Columbine and Pantaloon.

1790 – The Turkish fortress of Izmail is stormed and captured by Suvorov and his Russian armies.

1807 – The Embargo Act, forbidding trade with all foreign countries, is passed by the U.S. Congress, at the urging of President Thomas Jefferson.

1809 – The Non-Intercourse Act, lifting the Embargo Act except for the United Kingdom and France, is passed by the U.S. Congress.

1851 – The first freight train is operated in Roorkee, India.

1942 – World War II: Adolf Hitler signs the order to develop the V-2 rocket as a weapon.

1944 – World War II: Battle of the Bulge – German troops demand the surrender of United States troops at Bastogne, Belgium, prompting the famous one word reply by General Anthony McAuliffe: "Nuts!"

1956 – Colo is born, the first gorilla to be bred in captivity.

1964 – First flight of the SR-71 (Blackbird).

1965 – In the United Kingdom, a 70 mph speed limit is applied to all rural roads including motorways for the first time. Previously, there had been no speed limit.

1972 - Survivors found 10 weeks after plane crash in the Argentine Andes. The first news that anyone had survived came when two of the passengers reached civilisation yesterday after a 10 day trek to get help. The group later confirmed that they had eaten human flesh in order to survive.

1978 – The pivotal Third Plenum of the 11th National Congress of the Communist Party of China is held in Beijing, with Deng Xiaoping reversing Mao-era policies to pursue a program for Chinese economic reform.

1989 – After a week of bloody demonstrations, Ion Iliescu takes over as president of Romania, ending Nicolae Ceauşescu's Communist authoritarian regime.

1989 – Berlin's Brandenburg Gate re-opens after nearly 30 years, effectively ending the division of East and West Germany.

1990 – The Parliament of Croatia adopts the current Constitution of Croatia.

1997 – Acteal massacre: Attendees at a prayer meeting of Roman Catholic activists for indigenous causes in the small village of Acteal in the Mexican state of Chiapas are massacred by paramilitary forces.

2000 The American singer Madonna married British film maker Guy Ritchie at an exclusive ceremony in Skibo Castle near Dornoch in Sutherland, hours after their son was christened.

2001 – Richard Reid attempts to destroy a passenger airliner by igniting explosives hidden in his shoes aboard American Airlines Flight 63.

2010 – The repeal of the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy, the 17-year-old policy banning on homosexuals serving openly in the United States military, is signed into law by President Barack Obama.

2012 - Winter Solstice. At 5.30 this morning the northern hemisphere reached it's maximum tilt away from the sun, which now passes directly over the tropic of capricorn. The days are now getting longer. This is a good thing.

The Guy Quote - Carl Jung

Founder of analytical psychiatry, Jung was the first to view the human psyche as "by nature religious". He is also famous for his research into dream analysis. As well as his own clinic, he also explored Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. Many psychological concepts were first proposed by the Swiss-born doctor, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. He collaborated - and then had a massive falling out - with Freud (more here, and pictures of the two of them hanging about in the slideshow below come from here) and was fascinated by Nietzche. While doing all of that, he also studied masonry, to balance out his thinking. All in all an amazing guy.

One of my favourite things about him is that, for someone who is such a star in a field often pigeonholed as the very definition of sober analysis and the pursuit of the rational, he was fascinated by mysticism (and saw spirits as a child, as well as having shaman-y leanings) and had a crazy episode in his late 30s which inspired him to write The Red Book. When he and Freud had a massive barney, Jung found the end of their father-son relationship so traumatic he had prophetic(?) dreams about a mighty flood washing over Europe - this just before the First World War broke out.

It would do too great a disservice to him to attempt to summarise his core beliefs myself - and I'd be way out of my depth - but use this page and this one to find out more and get to other links (this page is fun too). In the mean time... enjoy The Guy Quotes.

ps - if you like this sort of thing, I've done other similar posts which you can find listed here.

[slideshow]

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain. (on being 36 yrs old) The time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs.

An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child. Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk. Image is psyche.

One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games. I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.

The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself -- that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness -- that I myself am the enemy who must be loved -- what then? As a rule, the Christian's attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us "Raca," and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves. Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

You are what you do, not what you say you'll do. Astrology is assured of recognition from psychology, without further restrictions, because astrology represents the summation of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.

A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon. Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.

Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool. I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are. There's no coming to consciousness without pain.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions - not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation or something I do not know.

Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries. I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense— he is "collective man"— one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind. It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.

Deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, "There is something not right," no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or moral code. If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others. It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how things are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

Words are animals, alive with a will of their own. The true leader is always led.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. Sensation tell us a thing is. Thinking tell us what it is this thing is. Feeling tells us what this thing is to us.

The personality is seldom, in the beginning, what it will be later on. For this reason the possibility of enlarging it exists, at least during the first half of life. The enlargement may be affected through an accretion from without, by new vital contents finding their way into the personality from outside and being assimilated. In this way a considerable increase in personality may be experienced. We therefore tend to assume that this increase comes only from without, thus justifying the prejudice that one becomes a personality by stuffing into oneself as much as possible from outside. But the more assiduously we follow this recipe, and the more stubbornly we believe that all increase has to come from without, the greater becomes our inner poverty. Therefore, if some great idea takes hold of us from outside, we must understand that it takes hold of us only because something in us responds to it and goes out to meet it. Richness of mind consists in mental receptivity, not in the accumulation of possessions. What comes to us from outside, and, for that matter, everything that rises up from within, can only be made our own if we are capable of an inner amplitude equal to that of the incoming content. Real increase of personality means consciousness of an enlargement that flows from inner sources. Without psychic depth we can never be adequately related to the magnitude of our object. It has therefore been said quite truly that a man grows with the greatness of his task. But he must have within himself the capacity to grow; otherwise even the most difficult task is of no benefit to him. More likely he will be shattered by it.

Sonnet 97

How like a winter hath my absence beenFrom thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen! What old December’s bareness every where! And yet this time removed was summer’s time, The teeming autumn, big with rich increase, Bearing the wanton burden of the prime, Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease: Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me But hope of orphans and unfather’d fruit; For summer and his pleasures wait on thee, And, thou away, the very birds are mute; Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.

By William Shakespeare.

Intelligence Squared debate - "The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world"

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z5Yk8uMdJ8&w=700] Archbishop John Onaiyeken, Christopher Hitchens, Anne Widdecombe MP and Stephen Fry squared off in 2009 to discuss: "The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world".

Supporters of the Church say it stands up for the oppressed and offers spiritual succour to billions. Detractors question its teachings on condoms, gay sex and women priests. Compelling arguments - and strong rebuttals - by all participants. Very very good. Hitchens in particular nailed it, to my mind, but you make up your own.

The Guy Quote - Christopher Hitchens (RIP)

Woke to the sad news that Christopher Hitchens has passed away. Since his diagnosis with oesophageal cancer he wrote fearlessly and frankly about what he faced. But never, ever forget that before he "passed into the land of malady" (and also after) he was a fabulous polemicist and one of the leading voices of secularism. So as well as the quotes I suggest you read a tribute to him by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, for whom he wrote for many years. Do take time to discover the rest of his career though, because you should be defined by how you live, not what kills you, and if you don't happen to agree with what he says, he'll at least make you think. There's an excellent obituary from The Guardian here and a full profile on Wikipedia - get stuck in. “Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eyeretrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frankgraceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.

“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly. (VanityFair.com)

[slideshow]

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.”

“[O]wners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.”

“The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.”

“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”

“Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.”

“[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”

“The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that 'if English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me.”

“What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.”

“To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.”

“What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.”

“Organised religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.”

“Nothing optional--from homosexuality to adultery--is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate. As Shakespeare put it in 'King Lear', the policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offense for which he plies the lash.”

“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.” “Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.”

“You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favoured boy. 'He has no friends.' This, I realised with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it.”

“She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.”

“Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of 'the flock.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQorzOS-F6w&w=700]

“Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.”

“Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.”

“How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.”

“There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.”

“What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.”

“The finest fury is the most controlled.”

“Cheap booze is a false economy.”

“The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.”

“My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.”

“How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?”

“As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden's carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street.”

“Where would you like to live? In a state of conflict or a conflicted state.”

“I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.”

“Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.”

“How ya doin'?' I always think, What kind of a question is that?, and I always reply, 'A bit early to tell.”

“There either is a god or there is not; there is a 'design' or not.”

“Forget it. Never explain; never apologise. You can either write posthumously or you can't.”

“Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.”

“There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.”

“I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.”

“A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.”

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? (Just to give you an idea, Proust's reply was 'To be separated from Mama.') I think that the lowest depth of misery ought to be distinguished from the highest pitch of anguish. In the lower depths come enforced idleness, sexual boredom, and/or impotence. At the highest pitch, the death of a friend or even the fear of the death of a child.”

“In a Pyongyang restaurant, don't ever ask for a doggie bag.”

“My little ankle-strap sandals curled with embarrassment for her.”

“And now behold what this pious old trout hath wrought.”

“The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.”

“Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.”

What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps.”

“I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator - that's beyond my conceit.”

“So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.”

==

Add-ons:

"Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner, rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed on by some Apache transvestite".

Seven "walks into a bar" jokes involving grammar and punctuation

1. A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves. 2. A dangling modifier walks into a bar. After finishing a drink, the bartender asks it to leave.

3. A question mark walks into a bar?

4. Two quotation marks “walk into” a bar.

5. A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to drink.

6. The bar was walked into by the passive voice.

7. Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They drink. They leave.

==

By Eric K. Auld on McSweeny's.

Skinemax - because sometimes the internet just rocks

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/29999445 w=700&h=400] STARRING KURT RUSSELL

Skinemax is Koyaanisqatsi for a generation raised on late night television and B-movie VHS tapes. It's long form entertainment for short attention spans. An hour long VJ odyssey, it will move your body and warp your mind.

A nostalgic look back at a half remembered childhood growing up in the 80s and early 90s, Skinemax takes a close look at the culture of that era. The images that motivated, delighted, and terrified us on the silver screen, set to propulsive modern music that pines for a simpler time.

Please support the original works, these are film makers and musicians that have upheld the values of originality and creativity.

This video is protected under fair use copyright law. It is presented for the purposes of entertainment, education, and criticism/commentary only. No infringement is intended.

Tracklist:

Com Truise - Norkuy Depakote - Tummler Martial Canterel - For Us Fulgeance - Glamoure Daedelus - Penny Loafers Teebs - Why Like This Laurel Halo - Embassy Games - Strawberry Skies d'Eon - Transparency FOE - A Handsome Stranger Called Death (Com Truise Remix) Games - Shadows In Bloom White Car - No Better Gatekeeper - Forgotten The Hasbeens - You And Me Ford & Lopatin - Emergency Room Rainbow Arabia - Mechanical oOoOO - Burnout Eyess VHS Head - Motions Outer Limits Recordings - Plastik Child

Download higher quality MP3 here.

Stop motion paper magic - PROTEIGON

Nice spot Adam! [vimeo http://vimeo.com/33480080 w=700&h=400]

"My new short film, directed at partizan during a two month intership. With Luca Fiore. Music by Nodey & Omar, sound design by Moritz Reichwith the help of Nathalie Lapicorey, Zeynep Gizem De Loecker, Benoit Masson, Vincent Nguyen, François Colou et Fabien Chambert."