Letters, postcards, notes on the fridge

No day in court for our sense of right and wrong?

2011-04-14T21:41:00.000+01:00

The NY Times headline caught my eye: "In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Figures".

It is a question asked repeatedly across America: why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?

Of the many things about the US that makes me shake my head, these days, this is a symptom of one of my deepest worries: namely, that we seem to have lost our deeply felt allegiance to desire for justice. Instead, we bury justice in an argument about politics, policy, ideology, and partisanship. Or just say that justice is some other bureaucracy's job.

Lying has become ok. Fraud has become ok. Getting away with it has become ok. And not just in the financial mess, but across so many issues.

I wanted the "change I could believe in" to include a Federal Government that took its sense of right and wrong to court.

I'm not seeing it.

..

Hierarchy of Argument on the Internet

2011-03-14T08:23:00.002Z

Royal Grandson Grins

2011-03-06T12:51:00.000Z

I've been pretty bummed, in recent weeks, about the state of the planet, the state of democracy, and the state of the United States.

So, simple, heartwarming moments have been particularly welcome.

...like this photo, of a grandmother and her grandson simply grinning at each other in a circumstance that one might have expected would normally demand more decorum.

Disney workers fight for a living wage

2010-12-04T09:37:00.004Z

Disney's got a long history of being a magical place for its customers and a nightmare for its staff. The videos in this BoingBoing post give the behind-the-scenes Disney "cast members" a chance to share their stories of their working conditions, and the stories are just sad. The vids are part of the PR campaign that Disney's workers' union is waging to try to get what they consider a fair deal.

I find this kind of thing to be an indictment of the way some corporate executive teams practice shareholder capitalism. It's not a system that has to screw workers to succeed, so why is it so often practiced that way?

Getting away with the lowest wage bill you can is economically rational, but it isn't moral, and in the long run it probably isn't good business. Watch these videos and see if it leaves you with a good feeling about Mickey Mouse and Toy Story. That's brand damage you're feeling.

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Pop music for dog lovers

2010-09-27T08:07:00.000+01:00

OK-Go does it again. Fully fabulous.

In case your battle cruiser breaks down

2010-08-08T15:10:00.003+01:00

It is absolutely freaking delightful that San Diego allowed the trolley signs outside the ComicCon venue to be translated into Klingon.

Sexiest Car Ever?

2010-08-07T14:04:00.002+01:00

1935 Alfa Romeo 6C 2300 Jankovits Spider

Hat tip to Surfing With The Alien.

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Overheard after a sumptuous meal

2010-08-01T15:38:00.002+01:00

Flame-Haired Angel: "I will lie in bed tonight like a beached whale."

Hubbin': "And I will nibble on your blubber like an eskimo."

..

I'm just a teenage ukulele player

2010-07-06T14:34:00.001+01:00

How can you not love these guys?

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Gentle, joyful noise

2010-06-27T10:32:00.002+01:00

This strikes me as combining all my favourite elements of bluegrass, jazz and chamber music.

Gawande's Commencement Address at Stanford Medical School

2010-06-27T10:06:00.002+01:00

I've read two of Atul Gawande's books. Both times, I've turned the last page and wished I could pop the book in the post to my oldest friend, Chris, one of the best men I've ever known and a deeply talented surgeon. I know how much he'd enjoy them. I imagine him sharing with Gawande a similar viewpoint on medicine and humanity. It's a perspective we could use more of. Chris hasn't been in this world for years, though, so I'll keep reading Gawande and hoping others do, too.

The original of Gawande's commencement address to Stanford Medical School, delivered earlier this month, is up at The New Yorker.

* * *

Atul Gawande gave the commencement speech at Stanford’s School of Medicine last week. Here is what he told the graduating class.

Many of you have worked for four solid years—or five, or six, or nine—and we are here to declare that, as of today, you officially know enough stuff to be called a graduate of the Stanford School of Medicine. You are Doctors of Medicine, Doctors of Philosophy, Masters of Science. It’s been certified. Each of you is now an expert. Congratulations.

The experience of a medical and scientific education is transformational. It is like moving to a new country. At first, you don’t know the language, let alone the customs and concepts. But then, almost imperceptibly, that changes. Half the words you now routinely use you did not know existed when you started: words like arterial-blood gas, nasogastric tube, microarray, logistic regression, NMDA receptor, velluvial matrix.

O.K., I made that last one up. But the velluvial matrix sounds like something you should know about, doesn’t it? And that’s the problem. I will let you in on a little secret. You never stop wondering if there is a velluvial matrix you should know about.

Since I graduated from medical school, my family and friends have had their share of medical issues, just as you and your family will. And, inevitably, they turn to the medical graduate in the house for advice and explanation.

I remember one time when a friend came with a question. “You’re a doctor now,” he said. “So tell me: where exactly is the solar plexus?”

I was stumped. The information was not anywhere in the textbooks.

“I don’t know,” I finally confessed.

“What kind of doctor are you?” he said.

I didn’t feel much better equipped when my wife had two miscarriages, or when our first child was born with part of his aorta missing, or when my daughter had a fall and dislocated her elbow, and I failed to recognize it, or when my wife tore a ligament in her wrist that I’d never heard of—her velluvial matrix, I think it was.

This is a deeper, more fundamental problem than we acknowledge. The truth is that the volume and complexity of the knowledge that we need to master has grown exponentially beyond our capacity as individuals. Worse, the fear is that the knowledge has grown beyond our capacity as a society. When we talk about the uncontrollable explosion in the costs of health care in America, for instance—about the reality that we in medicine are gradually bankrupting the country—we’re not talking about a problem rooted in economics. We’re talking about a problem rooted in scientific complexity.

Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has combatted our ignorance. It has enumerated and identified, according to the international disease-classification system, more than 13,600 diagnoses—13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we’ve discovered beneficial remedies—remedies that can reduce suffering, extend lives, and sometimes stop a disease altogether. But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we’re struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver.

It should be no wonder that you have not mastered the understanding of them all. No one ever will. That’s why we as doctors and scientists have become ever more finely specialized. If I can’t handle 13,600 diagnoses, well, maybe there are fifty that I can handle—or just one that I might focus on in my research. The result, however, is that we find ourselves to be specialists, worried almost exclusively about our particular niche, and not the larger question of whether we as a group are making the whole system of care better for people. I think we were fooled by penicillin. When penicillin was discovered, in 1929, it suggested that treatment of disease could be simple—an injection that could miraculously cure a breathtaking range of infectious diseases. Maybe there’d be an injection for cancer and another one for heart disease. It made us believe that discovery was the only hard part. Execution would be easy.

But this could not be further from the truth. Diagnosis and treatment of most conditions require complex steps and considerations, and often multiple people and technologies. The result is that more than forty per cent of patients with common conditions like coronary artery disease, stroke, or asthma receive incomplete or inappropriate care in our communities. And the country is also struggling mightily with the costs. By the end of the decade, at the present rate of cost growth, the price of a family insurance plan will rise to $27,000. Health care will go from ten per cent to seventeen per cent of labor costs for business, and workers’ wages will have to fall. State budgets will have to double to maintain current health programs. And then there is the frightening federal debt we will face. By 2025, we will owe more money than our economy produces. One side says war spending is the problem, the other says it’s the economic bailout plan. But take both away and you’ve made almost no difference. Our deficit problem—far and away—is the soaring and seemingly unstoppable cost of health care.

We in medicine have watched all this mainly with bafflement, even indifference. This is just what good medicine is like, we’re tempted to say. But we’d be ignoring the evidence. For health care is not practiced the same way across the country. There is remarkable variability in the cost and quality of care. Two communities in the same state with the same levels of poverty and health can differ by more than fifty per cent in their Medicare costs. There is a bell curve for cost and quality, and it is frustrating—but also hopeful. For those getting the best results—the hospitals and doctors measured at the top of the curve for patient outcomes—are not the most expensive. They are sometimes among the least.

Like politics, all medicine is local. Medicine requires the successful function of systems—of people and of technologies. Among our most profound difficulties is making them work together. If I want to give my patients the best care possible, not only must I do a good job, but a whole collection of diverse components must somehow mesh effectively.

Having great components is not enough. We’ve been obsessed in medicine with having the best drugs, the best devices, the best specialists—but we’ve paid little attention to how to make them fit together well. Don Berwick, of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, has noted how wrongheaded this is. “Anyone who understands systems will know immediately that optimizing parts is not a good route to system excellence,” he says. He gives the example of a famous thought experiment in which an attempt is made to build the world’s greatest car by assembling the world’s greatest car parts. We connect the engine of a Ferrari, the brakes of a Porsche, the suspension of a BMW, the body of a Volvo: “What we get, of course, is nothing close to a great car; we get a pile of very expensive junk.” Nonetheless, in medicine, that’s exactly what we have done.

Earlier this year, I received a letter from a patient named Duane Smith. He was a thirty-four-year-old assistant grocery-store manager when he had a terrible head-on car collision that left him with a broken leg, a broken pelvis, and a broken arm, two collapsed lungs, and uncontrolled internal bleeding. The members of his hospital’s trauma team went swiftly into action. They stabilized his fractured leg and pelvis. They put tubes in both sides of his chest to reëxpand his lungs. They gave him blood and got him to an operating room fast enough to remove the ruptured spleen that was the source of his bleeding. He required intensive care and three weeks of hospital recovery to get through all this. The clinicians did almost every single thing right. Smith told me that to this day he remains deeply grateful to the people who saved him.

But they missed one small step. They forgot to give him the vaccines that every patient who has his spleen removed requires, vaccines against three bacteria that the spleen usually fights off. Maybe the surgeons thought the critical-care doctors were going to give the vaccines, and maybe the critical-care doctors thought the primary-care physician was going to give them, and maybe the primary-care physician thought the surgeons already had. Or maybe they all forgot. Whatever the case, two years later, Duane Smith was on a beach vacation when he picked up an ordinary strep infection. Because he hadn’t had those vaccines, the infection spread rapidly throughout his body. He survived—but it cost him all his fingers and all his toes. It was, as he summed it up in his note, the worst vacation ever.

When Duane Smith’s car crashed, he was cared for by good, hardworking people. They had every technology available, but they did not have an actual system of care. And the most damning thing is that no one learned a thing from Duane Smith. For we have since had the exact same story occur in Boston, with an even worse outcome. Indeed, I would bet you that, across this country, we miss the basic, unglamorous step of vaccination in probably half of emergency splenectomy patients.

Why does anyone receive suboptimal care? After all, society could not have given us people with more talent, more dedication, and more training than the people in medical science have—than you have. I think the answer is that we have not grappled with the fact that the complexity of science has changed medicine fundamentally. This can no longer be a profession of craftsmen individually brewing plans for whatever patient comes through the door. We have to be more like engineers building a mechanism whose parts actually fit together, whose workings are ever more finely tuned and tweaked for ever better performance in providing aid and comfort to human beings.

You come into medicine and science at a time of radical transition. You have met the older doctors and scientists who tell the pollsters that they wouldn’t choose their profession if they were given the choice all over again. But you are the generation that was wise enough to ignore them: for what you are hearing is the pain of people experiencing an utter transformation of their world. Doctors and scientists are now being asked to accept a new understanding of what great medicine requires. It is not just the focus of an individual artisan-specialist, however skilled and caring. And it is not just the discovery of a new drug or operation, however effective it may seem in an isolated trial. Great medicine requires the innovation of entire packages of care—with medicines and technologies and clinicians designed to fit together seamlessly, monitored carefully, adjusted perpetually, and shown to produce ever better service and results for people at the lowest possible cost for society.

When you are sick, this is what you want from medicine. When you are a taxpayer, this is what you want from medicine. And when you are a doctor or a medical scientist this is the work you want to do. It is work with a different set of values from the ones that medicine traditionally has had: values of teamwork instead of individual autonomy, ambition for the right process rather than the right technology, and, perhaps above all, humility—for we need the humility to recognize that, under conditions of complexity, no technology will be infallible. No individual will be, either. There is always a velluvial matrix to know about.

You are joining a special profession. Doctors and scientists, we are all in the survival business, but we are also in the mortality business. Our successes will always be restricted by the limits of knowledge and human capability, by the inevitability of suffering and death. Meaning comes from each of us finding ways to help people and communities make the most of what is known and cope with what is not.

This will take science. It will take art. It will take innovation. It will take ambition. And it will take humility. But the fantastic thing is: This is what you get to do.

Collapsible Cool

2010-06-27T09:48:00.003+01:00

You see a lot of cool, crazy, wacky, beautiful stuff on the web.

But how's this for genius design, in the form of a "Why didn't I think of that!?" idea, delivered as a save-the-world-and-make-money-at-the-same-time proposition.

When industrial designers get it right, it can be awe-inspiring. Geekily awe-inspiring, but still awe-inspiring.

I hope this guy gets really, really rich.

* * *

Collapsible Shipping Container

It's made of a fiberglass composite and weighs 75% as much as a standard metal container.

It folds down to 25% of its expanded size.

The composite is more resistant to corrosion than the steel it replaces, is easier to clean and it floats.

Making it results in 25% of the carbon dioxide generated by manufacture of its steel counterpart.

Collapsed containers can be bundled together in groups of four, allowing ships to load far more quickly and cutting time spent in port.

The Cargoshell, invented by Rene Giesbers, a heating-systems engineer from the Netherlands, "can be collapsed or opened in 30 seconds by a single person using a forklift truck," according to an article in the March 6, 2010 Economist Technology Quarterly.

Hat tip to Book Of Joe.

Astounding reunion with an old friend

2010-06-12T07:20:00.001+01:00

This makes me feel an estraordinarily diverse range of emotions.

MBAs and Entrepreneurs

2010-05-22T08:01:00.002+01:00

A month ago, I blogged an article and a clip about why MBAs often make crappy entrepreneurs. Here's another great article, with a fantastic catch-line:

“The top third of the class works for the middle third of the class at companies started by the bottom third of the class.”

Are MBAs necessary for start-ups or VC?

..

What makes a leader? A lone nut.

2010-04-18T22:23:00.001+01:00

“The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.” Derek Sivers

Why MBAs often make crappy entrepreneurs

2010-04-17T15:53:00.003+01:00

"VCs don't give a shit about your PowerPoint deck."

...from Stu Wall's excellent, brief article on why MBAs often fail at entrepreneurship.

Then, once you've read it, if you find yourself yelling "Yeah!" at the screen, you might also enjoy watching this:

I'm 42. I think I need to get out and do something this good.

2010-04-04T13:55:00.000+01:00

Wonderful, beautiful, stupid, ingenious, giddy...

2010-03-02T21:07:00.003Z

OK Go does it again.

Now look at your man, now back to me...

2010-02-26T09:28:00.000Z

Everything I Ever Needed To Know About Iggy Pop

2010-01-16T09:04:00.002Z

"Hang on, my love, and grow big and strong..."

Courtesy of the consistently astounding Letters Of Note.

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Flame-Haired Angel a few years ago

2010-01-12T21:22:00.003Z

...hard at work in the Conservation Lab at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, sometime in the 90s.

Amazing what treasures turn up when you're rummaging through old boxes at Mum & Dad's.

..

The Amen Break: A history

2009-12-20T22:55:00.004Z

This is one of my favourite things ever discovered online. Just came across it again, by accident, and it mesmerised me anew.

Drummer or no, music geek or no... This is great history, and a great portrait of the decontextualising process that manufactures pop culture and reinvents experience into something new, and makes us question notions of authenticity, originality, piracy and creativity.

Legion of Extraordinary Dancers

2009-12-12T04:25:00.001Z

There's a moment at about 1:26 that just takes my breath away.

Just because it brings me a little giddy joy

2009-12-08T07:13:00.000Z

It's hard for me to imagine a childhood that doesn't involve these numpties.

Like happy lovemaking

2009-10-25T19:09:00.002Z

I was already having a good day. This made it even better.

Hat tip to Wilful Damage (NSFW).

What the billions actually look like

2009-10-03T07:39:00.003+01:00

This is the best illustration I've seen, to date, that puts all our spending in perspective. (Click the pic for bigger version.)

From Information Is Beautiful.

Butterfly Tattoo rocks!

2009-09-26T13:46:00.002+01:00

Flame-Haired Angel's most recent feature film, The Butterfly Tattoo, opens this week in the UK. Here's a great music video taken from the movie. Note how verily the costumes rock!

Bill & Houston's (Chocolate, Cinnamon, Coconut) Banana Bread

2009-08-31T15:00:00.003+01:00

Gigi, a friend in Oz, was asking about banana bread recipes, over on Facebook.

It's the end of winter in Oz, and it's the end of summer, here in the UK. So, it may be a perfect time for Gigi to make one last winter warmer, it's definitely a perfect time for me to dust off my comfort-food recipes.

This recipe is originally from one of Bill Granger's books. (I think it's this one.) As good as Bill's banana bread was, though, I though it was missing a little oomph. So, I played around with a few warm flavours, modified it significantly, and this bread is now one of my favourite winter recipes.

It is *not* low-cal, and it is not for those who are banana purists.

And for those of you who need clear delineation between what can be called breakfast and what can be called dessert, this bread is *not* for you.

Bill & Houston’s Chocolate Banana Bread
Original by Bill Granger, modified by Houston Spencer

Ingredients:

275 g (roughly 2 ¼ cups) plain, all-purpose flour. (For a full-on flavour explosion, I substitute about one third of the flour with dried, grated coconut.)
2 teaspoons baking powder
125 g (4 ½ oz) unsalted butter, softened
250 g (1 cup) caster (superfine) sugar
4 over-ripe bananas, mashed
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 teaspoons cinnamon
250 g (1 ½ cups) good-quality dark or milk chocolate chips. (...but, go on, use the dark!)

Method:
Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F / Gas 4).

Mix the flour, baking powder, and cinnamon in a large bowl.

Mix the butter, sugar, banana, eggs, vanilla extract and chocolate chips in a separate bowl.

Add the dry ingredients and stir to combine. Do not over mix. A looser mixture is best.

Pour the batter into a non-stick, or lightly greased and floured, 19 x 11 cm
(71/2 x 41/2 inch) loaf tin and bake for 1 hour 20 minutes, or until the bread is cooked when tested with a skewer.

Leave to cool in the tin for 5 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack to cool. Serve in thick slices.

Makes 8 to 10 slices.

Baking times for this bread vary a lot for different ovens.

Also, as with many breads like this, the relative moistness is a matter of personal taste. More flour can create a firmer, slightly drier bread with shorter cooking times.

..

An unexpectedly poignant tribute to John Hughes

2009-08-08T12:14:00.003+01:00

Flame-Haired Angel and I reckon The Breakfast Club was the most broadly embraced statement of our teen generation. For good or ill.

It's creator, John Hughes -- once a name associated with a whole genre of film -- died last week.

On a random web walk, this morning, I came across this tribute written by a woman who, as a teenager, had an extended pen-pal relationship with Hughes.

It's humbly extraordinary.

Sincerely, John Hughes

Beginning to get Brigitte Bardot

2009-08-08T12:05:00.002+01:00

All my adult life, I've seen photos of Brigitte Bardot. Beyond being another vintage (to me) beauty, I never really got the mystique. Apart from Marilyn, perhaps no other pinup of her generation had the same lasting impact on the pop culture zeitgeist.

But out of so many beautiful idealised women of the 50s and 60s, why did a generation fixate on Bardot?

My own reaction to Bardot was mostly "meh".

Then I saw this photo.

And I think I begin, just a little, to get it.

One of the very best things I've ever seen.

2009-08-04T21:42:00.002+01:00

Bar none. It just gets better and better. Be sure to stay through all the way to the end.

Thanks to Jon Taplin for pointing it out.

Quite a quote

2009-06-22T07:58:00.001+01:00

Women would be amazed if they knew what men desire about them. Yes, of course, they want to see women naked and supine and melting, but male desire is far more readily stimulated by what the oblique glance discovers: the parted lips, the micron of eyelash which the mascara brush missed, the changing angle and shadow of cleavage, the bra-strap alternately displayed and covered up, the ripe-camembert plumpness at the edge of hips. There is, inside every adult man, a relentless Peeping Tom, a perennial 14-year-old boy, still amazed by the phenomenon of women on display, flagging their sexuality, their availability, with every square inch of visible flesh, clothing, make-up and curve.
…
We desire the personality that we discern in the walk, the clothes, the laugh … We look, and sigh, and wish to do certain things to her, first urgently, then luxuriantly, and keep doing it indefinitely; but we also hunger to have her do certain things to us, unimaginable though it may seem – we want her to want us. We don’t just want her surrender, like a slave captured in battle; we want her approbation, her adoration; we want to enchant her to desire us back. For, no matter how humble we feel before the dizzying fact of female beauty, men are just as narcissistic as women.

— John Walsh

via Nightmare Brunette (via gauntlet) (via mandalay)

Passion, moldy browser tabs, and infographics that make the world more real

2009-06-20T10:47:00.003+01:00

I'm one of those people who lets tabs build up in my web browser. I open pages that I promise myself I'll return to when I have a few minutes to squeeze in some reading. They stay open, sometimes, for months.

The number of things I'm keen to read so dwarfs the number of minutes set aside for reading them, I occasionally have to go on a browser-tag-killing rampage. No telling what extraordinary pieces of prose and video I have zapped into oblivion, never to touch my mind, my heart, my life.

Oh, well. It's just a part of being in the flowing river of content that is the privilege of our times.

But sometimes I'll hang on to a piece for no good reason I know of, its browser tab opening every time Firefox fires up, for months on end. And then, eventually, in some interstitial moment, I'll start reading. ...and I'll be grabbed by my chest hair and pulled toward the screen.

I was just about to delete this piece, from Rolling Stone, way back in mid March. But decided I should scan the opening sentence or two before obliterating this piece of months-old ancient history.

Scanning those first words compelled me to the end of the first paragraph, and I was super-glued until the closing full-stop.

Topic: Financial crisis and the US bailout of the banks. Not exciting, and we all think we've heard e-freakin'-nuff about it, by now. I know the facts. I can explain what a credit default swap is. I'm already angry. So, I was pretty sure I didn't really need to read this. Well, screw it. I needed to read it. Highly recommended.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream.

And if that ain't enough to get you there, have a look at this masterpiece of inforgraphics on the same topic. I am awed by great infographics -- the art of representing data/information in a visual mode so that the clarity and impact of the data is increased. This is a great infographic. Not 3d. Not in colour. Just monochromatic boxes. And yet...

Simple task: compare the "total outlay for all the bailouts to date" with "every major one time expenditure of the USA, including ... the moon shot, the New Deal, Iraq, Viet Nam and Korean wars. (Omitted from the graphic are WW1&2 and the total of all NASA budgets, but when included the bailout is still bigger.) All historical figures are inflation adjusted.

The article from which this comes is here.

2009-06-17T18:56:00.000+01:00

“Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway”

- John Wayne

via Surfing With The Alien.

2009-06-16T18:35:00.000+01:00

"They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea." -- Sir Francis Bacon

(ripped off from Lawrence Wilkinson)

Wow.

2009-06-15T19:24:00.000+01:00

His thesis project at art school.

2009-06-15T19:11:00.001+01:00

Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands.

Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, 1986

(Hat tip to the Truck Man.)

That's how I roll.

2009-06-14T16:12:00.002+01:00

A letter to his young self

2009-06-14T08:56:00.002+01:00

Readers outside the UK are unlikely to have seen this piece (excerpted below) from Stephen Fry, which was published in The Guardian some weeks back.

(...and, moreover, are perhaps unfamiliar with the profound cultural treasure Stephen Fry is.)

The piece is, ultimately, a state of the union on gay rights in the UK.

But it is so much more than that.

It is a letter to his 16-year old self.

Dearest Absurd Child:
I hope you are well. I know you are not. As it happens you wrote in 1973 a letter to your future self and it is high time that your future self had the decency to write back. You declared in that letter that "everything I feel now as an adolescent is true". You went on to affirm that if ever you dared in later life to repudiate, deny or mock your 16-year-old self it would be a lie, a traducing, treasonable lie, a crime against adolescence. "This is who I am," you wrote. "Each day that passes I grow away from my true self. Every inch I take towards adulthood is a betrayal."
Oh, lord love you, Stephen. How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence. How filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on to my keyboard now. I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognise that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul.
I finally know now, as I easily knew then, that the most important thing is love.

The rest is here.

The Good, The Bad and The Ukelele

2009-06-14T08:24:00.001+01:00

Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain

via The Rumpus

2009-06-14T08:03:00.000+01:00

We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.

— W. H. Auden

via Nightmare Brunette

God's love of silly stories

2009-06-14T07:31:00.002+01:00

A few things from Simple Space Annex (which is not safe for work).

God invented mankind because he loved silly stories. - Ralph Steadman

There’s no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow. - Fay Weldon

First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do. - Epictetus

Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting. - Alan Dean Foster

No, you never get any fun out of the things you haven’t done. - Thomas Nash

Patience is a tree with bitter roots that bears sweet fruit. - Chinese proverb

You have to go through the falling down in order to learn to walk. It helps to know that you can survive it. That’s an education in itself. - Carol Burnett

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money. - Jules Renard

2009-06-13T08:11:00.001+01:00

“The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”

via Surfing with the Alien

How did I not know about this???

2009-06-13T07:59:00.001+01:00

Old Jews Telling Jokes

2009-06-13T07:22:00.001+01:00

“You can’t give your photograph soul with technique. I want my photos to be fresh and urgent. A good photograph should be a call to arms. It should say, ‘Fucking now. The time is ripe. Come on.'"

Terry Richardson

via That Obscure Object.

Two lovers celebrating his birthday

2009-06-09T21:18:00.003+01:00

Walking along the Seine, in Paris, with my Flame-Haired Angel.

Photo by Gabe Vizzard.

The Champagne stopper

2009-06-06T22:25:00.003+01:00

I remember one of the tiny thrills of setting up house in Paris, years ago, was buying a Champagne stopper. Just the idea that we were likely to have Champagne in the house often enough, casually enough, to open bottles and not finish them, was thrilling. It felt as grown up as getting a mortgage.

Then, when we had to replace the Champagne stopper, because we'd worn it out from use, I felt I had truly arrived in the world of presumptively casual glamour. And a little like a lush.

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Music for the Flame-Haired Angel

2009-06-06T10:05:00.003+01:00

We've been groovin' to the music at this juke joint.

It's *made* for Flame-Haired Angel in party mode. ...but I think I caught my mom dancing to it, too...

Nyle: "Let the Beat Build"

2009-06-06T10:00:00.002+01:00

From the vimeo site: "This video was filmed in one take, with audio being recorded simultaneously with the film."

Pretty stunning.

Nyle "Let The Beat Build" from Nyle on Vimeo.

Dedicated to my friend Bill Stuart, who recently became a dad

2009-06-06T09:47:00.002+01:00

Spent a wonderful stretch with 1001 Rules For My Unborn Son, the other night. I like the lede mightily: "Let's get some things straight before I get old and uncool."

As I was reading the whole damn thing, I became increasingly convinced that the author and I are very nearly the same person. The advice about white Oxford shirts and facial hair, aside, pretty much every line got me nodding or laughing. Every musical reference was a touchstone.

And then it struck me that my old friend Bill Stuart is pretty much the one man in my life who actually lives by all these rules, rather than just aspiring to them. He may not like the New York Dolls, but that's forgivable.

Here's to young Keane Stuart growing up to be just as fine a man as his daddy. A tall order.

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days with my father

2009-06-06T08:16:00.004+01:00

One of my guilty web pleasures is the blog Le Love. The folk recently tipped me off about this extraordinarily beautiful work. To say that it's moving doesn't begin to capture it's power. Le Love called it "insanely touching". That creeps in the right direction, but the experience of the work is its only appropriate summation. Have the experience.

days with my father

One small note for the anal retentive (like me): The navigation of the site is quite innovative, but also non-intuitive. You can scroll up, down, sideways. Don't worry about linearity. Just immerse yourself. It's part of the beauty.

Things I've been meaning to jot down...

2009-06-06T08:09:00.006+01:00

The next in what will hopefully be a short-lived series. Some more serendipitously accumulated stuff I've been meaning to share. Enjoy. Some of these are a little bit sexy. So, if that bothers you, avert your tender eyes.

For me, what’s compelling about sexuality is the way that desire transforms what we take in through our senses, the ways in which our bodies betray us or rescue us by insisting on their own non-negotiable truths.

— Catherine Brady
via Nightmare Brunette

She’s aware of her power but she isn’t sure yet how to use it, what to do with it, how much she even wants it. That body is still new to her, she’s still trying it out, thinking it through, a bit like a kid walking the streets with a loaded gun and deciding whether he’s packing it to protect himself or to begin a life of crime.

— Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
via Nightmare Brunette

Here's one I don't agree with, but found catalytically provocative. A good brain push.

Some people labor under the delusion that happiness is mankind’s natural state of being. But happiness has never been our birthright; anger, sadness, and death are our birthrights. Sleepless nights and haunted days are our birthrights. Heartbreak, anxiety, and self-doubt are our birthrights. Death, decay, mourning, failure, and rejection are our birthrights. Happiness is more like a pleasant surprise we get every once in a while, like a rainbow. Or a blowjob.

via For Her Eyes Only -- which is WAY not safe for work.

People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it. To be so struck by a face sometimes that one wants to devour it feature by feature. Even making love to the body beneath it gives no surcease, no rest. What is to be done with people like us?

— Lawrence Durrell, Justine
via Nightmare Brunette

We can deny everything, except that we have the possibility of being better.

— His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama
via Nightmare Brunette

via Big Fun

Move away from home, get a menial job, fall for as many untrustworthy men as it takes to get all that nonsense out of your system. Don’t even think about college until your mind is parched and you are frantic to learn. Don’t marry in your twenties. Don’t be kind to yourself. Keep in touch.

— Jincy Willett, The Best Of Betty
via Nightmare Brunette

You were born an original. Don’t die a copy

— John Mason
via Big Fun

I’m as confused as a baby in a topless bar.

- Anonymous
via Unpolitically Correct

Lastly: I'm sure lots of folks know this history, but I sure as hell didn't. If you've ever grooved to Lou Reed's iconic "Walk on the Wild Side", then you've heard these words:

“Holly came from miami f.l.a.
Hitch-hiked her way across the u.s.a.”

and...

“Candy came from out on the island
In the backroom she was everybodys darling”

What I never realised, until Bohemia clued me in, was that those aren't fictional characters. They're Reeds buddies from Andy Warhol's Factory. And here they are. Holly (Woodlawn) and Candy (Darling) are bottom and right, respectively.

Oz "Great Firewall" crumbles. Houston's faith restored.

2009-06-06T07:48:00.002+01:00

I haven't been writing about it much (or about anything much, recently), but I've been passionately following the debate about the Australian government's attempts to put a national "great firewall" in place to monitor and censor *all* internet traffic going into and out of Oz.

After so many years of the ridiculously imperious John Howard government (non-Aussies: think of a short, unattractive ideological copy of George W Bush), one would have hoped that a policy as anti-populist as this would never have gotten up under current Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. I wondered about Rudd's motivations on this issue in a previous post.

Packaged under a cynical and false ribbon of protecting us all from child porn and terrorists, the proposal was, in essence, to give the Aussie government the same powers over internet content that the Chinese government has (and uses).

Well, it appears to be over. About a week ago, this was in my industry's trade press:

Oz telecoms minister backtracks on mandatory Internet censorship proposals

After all the macho posturing and endlessly-repeated bloodly-minded determination to ignore outraged public opinion, the Australian government is now suddenly back-tracking on its much-vaunted and virulently-criticised plan to pass legislation that would impose Orwellian levels of censorship on the Internet browsing habits of its citizens...

Read the rest HERE, and have a beer.

(And on a side note, that is some damn fine writing for an industry trade rag. It's got snap and real pace. Kudos to Martyn Warwick of TelecomTV.)
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Big Fun

2009-06-05T06:25:00.002+01:00

I haven't blogged in a while, but that doesn't stop the stockpile of stuff I *want* to blog about from growing and growing and growing.

Here's a whole mess of stuff Big Fun has been pointing me to. I've been meaning to write a little about each of these, but that's just keeping me from posting them, at all.

"...Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods."

Kevin Kelly in Wired, “The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online” (via somethingchanged)

“ This is why our problem is not just economic; it’s spiritual. We have mistaken consuming for living."

Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, in the Atlantic

“ I want to remind you that financial success is not the only goal or the only measure of success. It’s easy to get caught up in the heady buzz of making money. You should regard money as fuel for what you really want to do, not as a goal in and of itself. Money is like gas in the car — you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road — but a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations!"

Tim O’Reilly
(via poortaste, via wreckandsalvage, via klaatu)

“ I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does."

Jorge Luis Borges
(via affremblequotes)

“ The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."

Friedrich Nietzsche

For lovers

2009-05-18T07:17:00.002+01:00

Just waved goodbye to the Flame-Haired Angel for a couple of days. So, here are a few topical vids from the good folks at Le Love.

Ten Things I Hate About Commandments

2009-05-05T20:33:00.001+01:00

In my little world of giddy mischief, I'm not sure the brilliance of this can be overstated.

The same sentiment...

2009-05-04T08:59:00.001+01:00

...as Suzuki-roshi's "beginner's mind".

The more opinions you have, the less you see.

Wim Wenders

Hat tip to Big Fun.

Middle-aged thought for the day

2009-04-26T19:50:00.003+01:00

I bet orthopedic surgeons love these guys.

David Brooks on Obama's first 100 days

2009-04-25T10:19:00.002+01:00

Charlie Rose, delivers an exceptionally good interview with conservative NY Times columnist David Brooks. There's some incredibly insightful stuff, here.

This is not a sound-bite, but a conversation with real depth.

500 Days of Summer

2009-04-25T08:07:00.000+01:00

I think I might like this. A lot.

Hat tip to Le Love.

2009-04-25T08:04:00.000+01:00

If I were to wish for anything I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of what can be, for the eye, which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.

Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Hat tip to Nightmare Brunette.

2009-04-25T07:59:00.001+01:00

Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.
Mark Twain

(via BigFun)
(via poortaste)
(via figuremeout)

Dude Tango!

2009-04-20T22:45:00.001+01:00

I really like posting things I have no particular reason to post...they're just cool.

Dumb, but compelled

2009-04-20T20:48:00.002+01:00

“ One of the biggest wake-up calls of my career was when I saw a record contract. I said, ‘Wait — you sell it for $18.98 and I make 80 cents? And I have to pay you back the money you lent me to make it and then you own it? Who the fuck made that rule? Oh! The record labels made it because artists are dumb and they’ll sign anything’ — like I did."
Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails

Found on Big Fun, but originally at Underwire.

Vale Glass-Steagall !

2009-04-16T22:21:00.002+01:00

The below ripped directly from BoingBoing. I haven't heard any pundit say, simply, "Reinstate Glass Steagall." I wonder why not?

And I'm still finding it scary that Larry Summers continues to have such a prominent voice.

New York Times warns that new financial rules could "wreak havoc" -- 1999

From the 11/5/99 New York Times: "CONGRESS PASSES WIDE-RANGING BILL EASING BANK LAWS By STEPHEN LABATON":

''Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,'' Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said. ''This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.''
The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation's financial system

CONGRESS PASSES WIDE-RANGING BILL EASING BANK LAWS (11/5/99)

Getting concerned about Obama's approach to individuals' rights

2009-04-16T21:39:00.003+01:00

A string of not very happy appointments, decisions and court interventions is making me nervous about just how much change Obama will be bringing to the fight for civil liberties, which has been under assault for years.

In the last week alone, the Obama DOJ (a) attempted to shield Bush's illegal spying programs from judicial review by (yet again) invoking the very "state secrets" argument that Democrats spent years condemning and by inventing a brand new "sovereign immunity" claim that not even the Bush administration espoused, and (b) argued that individuals abducted outside of Afghanistan by the U.S. and then "rendered" to and imprisoned in Bagram have no rights of any kind -- not even to have a hearing to contest the accusations against them -- even if they are not Afghans and were captured far away from any "battlefield." These were merely the latest -- and among the most disturbing -- in a string of episodes in which the Obama administration has explicitly claimed to possess the very presidential powers that Bush critics spent years condemning as radical, lawless and authoritarian.

Glenn Greenwald, on CommonDreams.org.
(Hat tip to OneGoodMove.)

This is happening at the same time that incidents of overzealous and over-reaching law enforcement continue to mount across America. Here, just the most recent of dozens of examples of someone having his rights trampled by badge-bedecked boys in blue, who clearly felt they could act with impunity.

Border patrol alleged to have beat up and tazed pastor, smashed his car, on US soil, because he insisted on 4th Amendment rights

Respect for civil liberties is fostered by example. Preferably examples from on high. But disrespect for civil liberties is bred in exactly the same way: by example.

If the President -- or his appointed agents -- can beat people up without pesky due process, why can't I?

America is no longer a beacon of respect for individuals' civil rights. Not even within its own borders.

And, to add to all of that, the Recording Industry Association of America -- the RIAA, that record industry trade group that enforces intellectual property rights by extorting money from downloaders by threatening law suits -- seems to be in favour in the Obama White House, as well.

Obama adds yet another RIAA attorney to Justice Department roster (now there are 5)

Nervous. I had hoped for better than this.

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An oldy but a goody. And a Tar Heel.

2009-04-14T22:02:00.002+01:00

Hadn't seen this in a mighty long time, but tripped across it over the weekend.

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Evening Reading: Reversal of Fortune

2009-04-14T19:41:00.003+01:00

Read this, from Vanity Fair, during my evening stroll around the village.

It's a few months old, but it's a fine, compelling rant by a Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph E Stiglitz.

Ideology proclaimed that markets were always good and government always bad. While George W. Bush has done as much as he can to ensure that government lives up to that reputation—it is the one area where he has overperformed—the fact is that key problems facing our society cannot be addressed without an effective government, whether it’s maintaining national security or protecting the environment. Our economy rests on public investments in technology, such as the Internet. While Bush’s ideology led him to underestimate the importance of government, it also led him to underestimate the limitations of markets.

A touch of post-Easter fun

2009-04-13T14:00:00.003+01:00

Tickled my funny bits.

If you don't get it, you need to eat more sushi.

Hat tip to That Obscure Object.

Heck, I'd watch her eat a hamburger.

2009-04-11T08:23:00.002+01:00

Is it just me going on a jag missing Flame-Haired Angel, or it this as dead brilliant as I think it is?

Oh, hell. Why choose?

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Dorothy Parker to an editor

2009-04-10T10:18:00.002+01:00

“I’ve been too fucking busy. And vice versa.”

Except, sadly, the "vice versa" part just ain't so, as Flame-Haired Angel is still playing in the sand.

Hat tip to Carnal Knowledge
for the quote.

I bet he can dance, too.

2009-04-04T09:50:00.001+01:00

Was surfing around for more info on the Iowa Supreme Court decision, and this little photographic blessing popped up.

Re-blogged from here.

Iowa Supremes: Gay marriage is a no-brainer.

2009-04-04T09:38:00.005+01:00

We are firmly convinced the exclusion of gay and lesbian people from the institution of civil marriage does not substantially further any important governmental objective. The legislature has excluded a historically disfavored class of persons from a supremely important civil institution without a constitutionally sufficient justification.

Iowa Supreme Court, in their unanimous decision, legalising gay marriage.

My first reaction was "Iowa?!?!" But, then, Wikipedia tells me I shouldn't be surprised:

Iowa has always been a leader in the area of civil rights. In 1839, the Iowa Supreme Court rejected slavery in a decision that found that a slave named Ralph became free when he stepped on Iowa soil, 26 years before the end of the Civil War decided the issue. In 1868, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated “separate but equal” schools had no place in Iowa, 85 years before the U.S. Supreme Court reached the same decision. In 1873, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled against racial discrimination in public accommodations, 91 years before the U.S. Supreme Court reached the same decision.

In 1869, Iowa became the first state in the union to admit women to the practice of law.

Go, you corn-eatin' hog-raisin' heroes of the heartland!

And, hey, look, it's right there on their flag!

Hat tip to Bohemea's blog for the tip-off.

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How did Kevin Rudd get his government associated with such inane policy?

2009-03-29T22:00:00.002+01:00

A Blacklist for Websites Backfires in Australia.

This is one issue on which Oz ought to look across the water at the Land of the Long White Cloud. Citizens in New Zealand have told the Kiwi government exactly where it can stick its 'net censorship.

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What it feels like to fall in love

2009-03-28T07:01:00.002Z

I love this representation of how the feeling of falling in love changes everything about the way life feels.

Watching it while Flame-Haired Angel is thousands of miles away, however, may not have been the best idea.

(Note to self: Might want to put off re-watching Once.)

Found thanks to Le Love.

I think I may watch this daily for a while

2009-03-27T12:48:00.000Z

Flame-Haired Costume Design

2009-03-24T22:14:00.002Z

One of my true love's professional triumphs is being released in the US soon.

The Butterfly Tattoo.

Novel by Philip Pullman.

Costume design by Geri Spencer.

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The case for righteous anger as a force for good

2009-03-23T20:23:00.004Z

I felt like this a whole lot during the Bush era. I wish I had been this articulate about it, then.

The Virtues of Public Anger and the Need for More, by Glenn Greenwald, in Salon.

"The public rage we're finally seeing is long, long overdue, and appears to be the only force with both the ability and will to impose meaningful checks on continued kleptocratic pillaging and deep-seated corruption in virtually every branch of our establishment institutions.
Obviously, mass rage can entail its own excesses and, and if unchecked, can lead to mob rule, a form of majoritarian tyranny. ... But we are far, far, far away from the point where unchecked public sentiment plays too great of a role in how our political institutions function. Rather: we're a country that, for the last decade, acquiesced meekly and quietly as our Government transferred huge amounts of national wealth to a tiny elite; launched a devastating war based on purely false pretenses; tortured, spied on us and literally claimed the right to invalidate law and the Constitution; and turned itself over to the highest bidders.

The overarching question is not: why is there so much public rage? The overarching question is: why has there been so little? A political establishment that can function without any fear of the citizenry will inevitably trample on its interests.

The only thing that disappoints me about the current public outrage over the AIG (and other) bonuses is that we would choose, as a people, to let the amorality of the Bush administration cruise by for eight years without getting our hackles well and truly up. We'd only get really, really ticked off only when we was our pocket money stolen by bullies.

Better late, and even petty, than never.

...

Now, there's a voice you don't hear every day

2009-03-22T23:23:00.002Z

A long while back, I bookmarked this article, after it came up in some google search about something or other. It looked like an interesting read, but too long to digest quickly, so I thought I'd come back to it.

Tonight, cleaning up my bookmarks, I happed upon it again and finally read it.

That is one interesting man.

A black Baptist preacher in Colorado writes about pictures of women in bathing suits and feminism and the role of women in the black church and... And, toward the end of his long, wandering jeremiad, throws in:

Please don't let Jerry Fallwell or Ralph Reed fool you: God wants you to have sex. God wants you to have glorious, mind-wrenching, sweaty, fall on the floor, neighbors banging on the wall, call-the-cops, bruised in the morning unforgettable sex. Ladies, God wants you to have mind-wrenching, pass-out from the ecstasy of it orgasms.

Got your attention?

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Notte Sento

2009-03-22T22:15:00.001Z

Notte Sento (English subtitles)

A short film, made with 4500+ still photographs, shot on a Canon EOS 30D camera.

...which makes this the most beautiful flip-book ever.

Notte Sento (English subtitles) from napdan on Vimeo.

Hat tip to Le Love.

Power Law Distributions and the art of the chaotic long view

2009-03-22T10:17:00.002Z

I'm addicted to TED. Sometimes I go for weeks without listening to a TED Talk. Then, for whatever reason, I'll seek out a new one, or I'll re-experience an old one, and I'll be transported.

My most recent mind-altering TED experience was with this talk, by Clay Shirky. It's a little high on the wonk factor, but so worth it. The talk is a couple of years old, now, but never more relevant.

...

X-ray Specs

2009-03-21T09:10:00.001Z

“Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot."

Groucho Marx

Via Big Fun.

Dante Bucci is well Hang*

2009-03-21T07:38:00.000Z

* The instrument is a "hang".

Elections have consequences

2009-03-21T07:05:00.001Z

From the almost always screamingly wonderful blog of John Taplin:

Elections Have Consequences

March 19, 2009 · 39 Comments

At the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Wednesday that, over two years, he would all but eliminate an unpopular practice that has prevented tens of thousands of active-duty soldiers and reservists from leaving military service on time if they were scheduled to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan.

At the Justice Department.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Wednesday outlined a shift in the enforcement of federal drug laws, saying the administration would effectively end the Bush administration’s frequent raids on distributors of medical marijuana.

In Congress.

The House voted Wednesday to approve the largest expansion of government-sponsored service programs since President John F. Kennedy first called for the creation of a national community service corps in 1963.

Before you give yourself a heart attack over the AIG mess, take a deep breath and know that Obama’s election in November really mattered.

Fortune cookie zen

2009-03-21T06:56:00.001Z

"If you don’t enjoy what you have, how could you be happier with more?"

— My Fortune Cookie just dropped some deep shit on me.

via Dopezombie.

Tedious or charming?

2009-03-21T06:53:00.000Z

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."

Oscar Wilde is one of the few people who didn’t underestimate the value of charm.

Via Beautiful & Depraved.

The Magic of Clint Eastwood

2009-03-21T06:52:00.001Z

“I like Clint Eastwood because he has only two facial expressions: one with the hat, and one without it.

Sergio Leone

2009-03-21T06:48:00.000Z

“ The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."

Tom Clancy

Note to self: Don't forget.

2009-03-12T19:28:00.000Z

Bush scandals list.

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Just freaking beautiful.

2009-03-12T19:11:00.003Z

Slices of Life.

Hat tip to Nightmare Brunette, which is sometimes NSFW.

The Mother of All Funk Chords

2009-03-11T22:18:00.001Z

...might actually be the mother of all mash-ups.

Hat tip to Mash-up Town.

"America, you are getting played."

2009-03-11T10:07:00.001Z

Jon Taplin loses his shit, just a little, and writes one of the best short diatribes I've seen about the current financial crisis / media gore-fest.

His article: Bipolar Media.

...

Sexiest Car Ever redux redux

2009-03-11T08:45:00.001Z

Oh, why did I get started on this?

The 1938 Phantom Corsair.

From the Truck Man

2009-03-10T22:09:00.003Z

I loved this response, from an old friend, to the post about the Anais Nin quote, yesterday:

Marginally cute in teens, though worrisome (rationally) to their parents. Adults who feel this way, and act on it, are no longer romantic or cute – they become:

-- wards of . . . someone – the state, dominating partners, etc.

-- drug addicts

-- dead early

The brass ring is grasped neither by those who feel/act as Nin outlines, nor by those, like Mary Poppins’ employer, who dismiss Nin’s sensibility full cloth, but by those who can balance the below with the need to feed/clothe/shelter/nurture oneself –

Not sure this is an aspiration, but, holy crap, what an inspiration!

2009-03-09T19:37:00.002Z

"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."

Anaïs Nin

Hat tip to Beautiful & Depraved (which is sometimes NSFW)

Brilliant.

2009-03-08T08:21:00.002Z

Hat tip to Big Fun, which is sometimes NSFW.

Best Bathtub Drain Plug Ever

2009-03-08T08:19:00.000Z

Have been a bit quiet. Will have to get this jalopy moving again.

2009-03-08T08:18:00.001Z

The Fire Next Time

2009-02-15T12:17:00.003Z

Our thoughts have been with all our compatriots in Oz, in the last couple of weeks.

Lives lost: more than 100.

Bush fires are nothing new. But these are the worst in 25 years. Some set deliberately.

Most Australian bush fire fighters are volunteers.

Thank god for stories like the one below, just to keep us sane.

"Mirboo North volunteer CFA firefighter David Tree gives water to a distressed koala in burnt-out country in Mirboo North, Gippsland, in Victoria's east.

David had been out fighting fires and whilst in the fire truck saw this koala on the side of the road. He stopped the truck and got out thinking the koala would run off. David approached the koala and it started pawing at his leg. David then got a bottle of water out of the truck, and started feeding the koala the water. Each time he stopped feeding the koala it pawed at David’s hand. Other crew then got the camera out of the truck and took this picture just after the koala had put its paw in David’s hand.

David was interviewed on a radio station this morning, and was bought to tears describing what happened between him and the koala."

He had noticed the koala moving gingerly on scorched paws as his fire patrol passed. Clearly in pain, the animal stopped when it saw Tree.

"It was amazing, he turned around, sat on his bum and sort of looked at me with (a look) like, put me out of my misery," Tree told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "I yelled out for a bottle of water. I unscrewed the bottle, tipped it up on his lips and he just took it naturally.

"He kept reaching for the bottle, almost like a baby."

(The Associated Press story HERE.)

2009-02-15T11:49:00.001Z

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

Kierkegaard

via Beautiful & Depraved