Random Assortment

Bertrand Russell quotes:

- The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people are full of doubts.

- Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

- I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

- The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

Also, listen to this: Palebluedot. Immediately. Over and over again.

Sometimes

Ideas

It is worth remembering that the output per man in this country has increased on the average about two percent a year during this century. Mere continuation of this trend will mean a future full of better things for people. But it is my own feeling that the tremendous gains which have been achieved by machine techniques may be substantially matched when we learn to make better use if ourselves as people.

-Henry Ford

The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance.

-Peter Drucker

Never shrink from doing anything which your business calls you to do. the man who is above his business may one day find his business above you.

-John Drew

Adoption and continuation of policies that incorporate a maximum of forward thinking should be the most valuable single consideration of all executives.

-Charles Presbrey

In modern business it is not the crook who is to be feared most, it is the honest man who doesn't know what he is doing.

-Owen D. Young

Chronic City

These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I'm helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don't. Yet I go around forming sentences.

Such a great quote. Jonathan Lethem, you always make me love you, for you describe how I always think.

Night of Other Thoughts

“So come with me, where dreams are born, and time is never planned. Just think of happy things, and your heart will fly on wings, forever.” ~Peter Pan

Up and Coming

I have a new philosophy. I'm only going to dread one day at a time.

Charles M. Schulz (1922 - 2000)



Expect the worst, not disappointed, right?

Yup

"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."

-Alan Moore

I Jumped

Pretend it is a year ago. And pretend that it was cold. Pretend I had any idea what would happen.

Advice of the Day

to avoid confusion you should configure your confusion not to accept configuration other than disabling the confusion.. to avoid further confusing anyone configuring your confusion

not to be confused with confusing configuration

Things I Forgot Today

Option #1
Option #2


Variety is the spice of life. "It is by will alone I set my mind in motion"

Re-found

Excuse the handwriting, found this recently. Not one for letting go, but trying desperately.
I have recently been reminded of things of the past I had forgotten. Significant things that I determined at one time to be worth discarding because I thought i was the past that was done and gone. I keep coming up against that past lately and have found myself wanting for evidence of the evolution that is me.

Elsewhere, 1.0 was a bad protoype. I think this new version non-1.0 is much better, I just have not determined what version this really is, or if it is really in the period of flux to something else.

Either way, still, despite everything, there are parts of the world that make you wake daily with a smile.

Looking Back...Conversations Had

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.” --William Hutchinson Murray

Tapped #2, World Water Day

World Water Day March 22, 2010. Or, as Tapped the movie would have it, World Water Week, because one day isn't enough. I have to agree.

"The wars of the 21st century will be fought over water." —Ismail Serageldin, former vice president of the World Bank

Rum

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn.

- Charles Bukowski

Pearl of Wisdom

"But the thing is...you know when you're a kid and they tell you 'let's all grow up, get a job, get married, get a house, have a kid' and that's it. Ah, but the truth is the world is so much stranger than that. So much darker and so much madder. And so much better."

--Dr. Who, episode Love and Monsters

I Don't Belive in Resolutions

"Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past." ~Henry Ward Beecher

Art by Kate MacDowell

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words--to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. – C.S. Lewis.

Recession

Unemployment 2007-2009 by county

"But years later, when we saw the lights going out, one after another, in the great factories that had stood like mountains for generations, when we saw the gates closing and the conveyer belts turning still, when we saw the roads growing empty and the streams of cars draining off, when it began to look as if some silent power were stopping the generators of the world and the world was crumbling quietly....

"The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly, with the abruptness of a shudder, as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city had disappeared from the face of the earth. It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations - and the lights of New York had gone out."

- Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

..via Nag on the Lake

Never Lets Me Down

"Do not let your spark go out, spark by irreplaceable spark. In the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all, do not let the hero in your soul perish and leave only frustration for the life you deserved, but never have been able to reach. The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours."

-Ayn Rand


She knew me before I knew me. Or life at all.

Without Question

"The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought."
-Sir Thomas Beecham