Xmas in Bedlam

On the corner of 1st Ave & W Market Sts, a yard hanging: 3 towel-headed snowpersons point their carrot-nosed faces at a star cross in the sky; so do their 5 sheep, who are not made of snow. The legend: Believe.
 

And we all shall be changed

• Machines can pool their resources, intelligence, and memories. Two machines or one million machines can join together and then become separate again. Multiple machines can do both at the same time: become one and separate simultaneously. Humans call this falling in love, but our biological ability to do this is fleeting and unreliable.
— Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 26, describing principles of the Singularity (which is Near).

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• As virtual reality from within the nervous system becomes competitive with real reality in terms of resolution and believability, our experiences will increasingly take place in virtual environments.
— Ibid., 29.

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• In virtual reality we can be a different person both physically and emotionally. In fact, other people (such as your romantic partner) will be able to select a different bocdy for you gthan you might select for yourself (and vice versa).
— Ibid., 29.

Let him decide

... Let him decide. Here are the three choices: ...
[] Tear it up.
[] Don't publish it but give me a copy.
[] OK, publish it, on the chance that somewhere someone survives of all those said to die miserably every day for lack of the small clarifications sometimes found in poems.
— Galway Kinnell, "It All Comes Back," Strong Is Your Hold, 7.

Aw, you guys...

Aw, you guys are the best friends a giant dufus could have.
— Homer, The Simpsons, Paul Bunyan episode.

Anything can be settled

Anything can be settled for a few days at a time, though not for longer.
— Mavis Gallant, "Irina," Paris Stories, 49.

Any command

Any command is a release, in a way.
— Mavis Gallant, "The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street," Paris Stories, 23.

Quotes from Capt. Nemo

The Bush Administration reached hypocritical mass when Shrubya declared, "Heckuva job, Rummy."

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Brandanistas, the LogoNazis...

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The famous sputter-but: "But — But — But —!"

The Prophet on Knowledge

"Acquire knowledge," the prophet Muhammad commanded his followers. "... It guideth us to happiness; it sustaineth us in misery; it is an ornament among friends; and an armor against enemies."
— David Shenk, The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, 39.

Who are you, then?

Who are you, then?

A long time ago, he said, I wrote a story that included you. Now that story has grown to include me, and our meeting like this.

We each of us exists, he went on, in a web of stories, that extends through all the dimensions of our life. Not just space & time. Memory is also a dimension. So is what you would call imagination. And then there are dreams, visions, and — well, delusions. That's where we live.
 

For my final script...

Bethlehem Diner

For my final script I will be writing a story about a group [of] people that come together to survive the near end of the world. The world has become infected with a[n] extremelhy contagious virus that reanimates the dead, and turns them into violent cannibals.
— NCC scriptwriter's Final Script Summary

Damn! I hate when the stoodies get there ahead of me!
 

Grissom's wisdom

When you chase two rabbits, you lose 'em both.
— Grissom, on an early CSI.

DrDann's next gig

I've been upstate for a recording session at Mark Dann's Studio-in-the-Woods.

On my way home he calls to ask how the take-away CD sounds on the car stereo.

"Great!" I tell him. "You got a gig tonight?"

"Yeah," he says. "I'm playing in Kingston with the Tweety Birds."
 

Urinetown

Bethlehem Diner

Urinetown: Brecht lite? Blitztein lite? "Not a Happy Musical" — what does that mean, in present culture? Hilarious, sends up many another musical — to what end? Are authors utter skeptics, in [Toril] Moi's sense (see Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism)? Are we?
 

Chair Moves

Advanced Dermatology, Bethlehem

Chair Moves
Physicians Only
— taped to seat of stool Mr. W______ sits on for my examination.

Query: if I sit on it, will it move me? Or would I have to be a (sentimental?) physician?
 

Getting away

We all thought we could get away with everything. No one got away with anything.
— Diary of Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), Russian revolutionary, subject of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia, in New Yorker, October 30, 2006, 96.

Oh-oh, Eli...

My daughter Nelly was showing her boy Eli, who's one and a half, the wind blowing leaves around. Earlier she'd been reading the Disney version of Rockabye Baby, which shows the cradle coming down with a parachute, but Eli's smart enough to be concerned about the coming down part. So Nell opens the window & picks Eli up & shows him the wind, making the sound, pointing out the blowing leaves. Eli says, "Oh-oh, Babies!"
 

Halloween scene, Bethlehem

On Market at Liberty, a hanging flag, black background, Huge Orange crescent moon w/ face gazes indulgently on tiny witch on broomstick silhouetted against small orange disk of the full...?

If Mickey Mouse has a dog named Pluto, Goofy is a...?
 

Life

Life is a process of elimination.
 

Born again

If you were born again, do you have two bellybuttons?
— NY Thruway bumper sticker.

Eric Hoffer say...

I've been meaning to copy these out for weeks; the magazine itself is Harpers July 2005. From Eric Hoffer's notebooks:

Unused Talents Our doubts about ourselves cannot be banished except by working at that which is the one and only thing we know we ought to do. Other people's assertions cannot silence the howling dirge within us. It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream. — 1955.

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The Academy Universities are an example of organizations dominated wholly by intellectuals; yet, outside pure science, they have not been an optimal milieu for the unfolding of creative talents. In neither art, music, literature, technology & social theory, nor planning have Universities figured as originators or as seedbeds of new talents and energies. — 1956.

I'm not sure this assertion holds true, 50 years later. Where else is there for new talents & energies to come from?

Still...

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Schadenfreude The man of words feels better when the man of action comes to grief. There is not the least doubt that depressions have been good for the intellectual's soul. — 1957.

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Underestimating To overestimate the originality of one's thoughts is perhaps a less serious defect than being unaware of their newness. There is a more pronounced lack of sensitivity in underestimating (our selves and others) than in overestimating. — 1957.

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Lies that preview truth Why is it so hard to tell the truth? Because more often than not the truth is meager and stale. By lying we, as it were, reform the world — arrange things as we would like them to be. And often indeed the lie is a preview of a new truth.

Interlude: a single black loafer on the shoulder of Catasaqua Rd, right where it curves past Applebees — what's the story there?

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Back to Eric:

Philosophy I could never figure out — or probably did not take the trouble to figure out — what the great philosophical problems are about. The momentous statements I come across are at best a storm in a teacup. There are quite a number of people who have a vested interest in the stuff, make a noble liviing out of it, and they conspire with one another to keep it alive. — 1977.

And from earlier (pages stuck together when I first opened the mag to start copying out):

Polemics give warmth Perhaps people throw thenselves into heated polemics to give content to their lives, to warm their hearts. What Luther said of hatred is true of all quarreling. There is nothing like a feud to make life seem full and interesting. — 1950.

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Brooding I am more and more convinced that taking life over-seriously is a frivolous thing. There is an affected self-dramatizing in the brooding over one's prospects and destiny. The trifling attitude of Ecclesiastes is essentially sober and serious. It is in closer touch with the so-called eternal truths than are the most penetrating metaphysical probing and the most sensitive poetic insights. — 1952.

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The desire for praise This food-and-shelter theory concerning man's efforts is without insight. Our most persistent and spectacular efforts are concerned not with the preservationof what we are but with the building up of an imaginary conception of ourselves in the opinion of others. The desire for praise is more imperative than the desire for food and shelter. — 1952.

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Little to say If writing gives us satisfaction, we are likely to end up writing for definite periods each day when we have little to say. The hanging on to an empty form is almost natural since it is the form only that we can control and stage. There is, of course, also the unconscious assumption that once you stage the form, the content will come to nest in it of itself. All ritual is perhaps based on this assumption: you stage the gesture and words that go with fervor and faith and you assume that the latter will somehow materialize. — 1952.