“There is nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.” -Lon Chaney
Got that? They’ll be a quiz. Originally from Little Pet’s Picture Alphabet, 1850’s. (via Nonist Annex)
Look, a lot of people out there write editorials and try to persuade you to change an opinion based on “evidence”. All I’m saying is this – I don’t need that phony shit. When I say something, you can believe it. Turn off that thing in your brain that questions things, and just listen to the truth in front of you. This is how America was made. (Fact.). ((Fun fact – Things in parentheses – always fact.))
Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Frank Herbert, Dune
Here’s some advice for successfully reading a book: You need to stay focused, so try to avoid distractions. Avoid multitasking. Avoid task switching. Turn off the TV. Shift positions occasionally so you don’t get cramps or backaches. Don’t get too comfortable or you might fall asleep. (Interestingly, many of these same rules apply to having sex, except that you can read a book with a cat in your lap.)
Declining books sales have led some publishers into thinking that the way to revive books is to make them more like an online experience. That is truly a mistake! It’s like trying to get people to exercise by making it more like napping.
America’s battle is yet to fight; and we, sorrowful though nothing doubting, will wish her strength for it. New Spiritual Pythons, plenty of them; enormous Megatherions, as ugly as were ever born of mud, loom huge and hideous out of the twilight Future on America; and she will have her own agony, and her own victory, but on other terms than she is yet quite aware of. — Thomas Carlyle, 1850.
Make of it what you will.
The longer I do this, the more I suspect that a good part of the “information overload” story is a myth cooked up by folks who don’t know how to use the internet well in order to demonize something they don’t understand.
Stephen Fry on arguments between cousins
My previous post on winning arguments unfairly reminded me of a blog posting by the actor, writer, wit, and all-around bon vivant Stephen Fry.
In this post, (scroll down to “Getting Overheated”) Fry discusses how Englishers and Americans differ when having an argument. While he and his fellow Englishmen love a good hearty tussle of ideas, he finds Americans discomfited by the idea of argument or debate of any kind.
I was warned many, many years ago by the great Jonathan Lynn, co-creator of “Yes Minister” and director of the comic masterpiece “My Cousin Vinnie”, that Americans are not raised in a tradition of debate and that the adversarial ferocity common around a dinner table in Britain is more or less unheard of in America. When Jonathan first went to live in LA he couldn’t understand the terrible silences that would fall when he trashed an statement he disagreed with and said something like “yes, but that’s just arrant nonsense, isn’t it? It doesn’t make sense. It’s self-contradictory.” To a Briton pointing out that something is nonsense, rubbish, tosh or logically impossible in its own terms is not an attack on the person saying it – it’s often no more than a salvo in what one hopes might become an enjoyable intellectual tussle. Jonathan soon found that most Americans responded with offence, hurt or anger to this order of cut and thrust. Yes, one hesitates ever to make generalizations, but let’s be honest the cultures are different, if they weren’t how much poorer the world would be and Americans really don’t seem to be very good at or very used to the idea of a good no-holds barred verbal scrap. I’m not talking about inter-family ‘discussions’ here, I don’t doubt that within American families and amongst close friends, all kinds of liveliness and hoo-hah is possible, I’m talking about what for good or ill one might as well call dinner-party conversation. Disagreement and energetic debate appears to leave a loud smell in the air.
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