"If you did happen to one of those rare people blessed or cursed - take your
pick - with dependability, there were opportunities everywhere.
- Neil Stephenson, Termination Shock (Neil Stephenson is one of my
favorite authors of fiction)
"The hardest part is going from the chair to the start line"
-
Gary Cantrell, aka Lazarus Lake on the most difficult thing for competitors in a
backyard ultra marathon.
As a commenter on YouTube said "what a life motto." My Dad use to say
a similar thing about exercise in general. "The hardest part is getting out the
door."
On the world moving to taking place in digital locations: "One possibility
here is that this will just be nice and egalitarian: Everyone can find their own
communities and live in the limitless abundance of the internet. The other
possibility is that in an internet world the essential goods will be positional.
Being in the cool internet chat room will be desirable the way living in a fancy
house in a good neighborhood is desirable now. Having a cool online avatar will
be desirable in the way that wearing a nice watch is desirable now. And if
crypto is a way to make those things scarce, to make the desirable avatars a
limited edition available only to trendsetting early adopters and rich people,
then you can make money selling them. This all seems bad to me, BUT WHAT
DO I KNOW?"
- Matt Levine, The Only Crypto
Story You Need
"By bravely enduring our trials, we learn humility, compassion for others,
and a great reliance on God. We also learn that our happiness and progress
depend much less upon what challenges life may bring and infinitely more on how
we face and overcome those challenges."
- Lloyd Newell
"I'm genuinely starting to think the Internet is bad, and not because of
minting or mining or any of those things. I'm starting to think it's bad because
it allows for groups of people to manufacture consensus without any checksum
from external stimuli. Let me put that another way: I think it is bad, bad here
meaning actively dangerous, to construct a wholly local reality. That sort of
thing works well, really well, until it doesn't."
- Jerry
Holkins
Peter Thiel on which
red states
and blue states to be
long and short
on:
"With blue states I would be short New York and long California. With red
states I would be short Virginia [I think it is an open question if Virginia is
a red state.] and long Texas."
"The most improper job of any man ... is bossing other men. Not one in a
million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity."
- J. R. R. Tolkien
"There is a robust literature on the nature of happiness, and in
converges on a pair of observations. Beyond a moderate level of material
comfort, happiness consists of two things: feeling connected to others and
engaging in meaningful work."
-William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The
Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.
"Putting a sticker on your MacBook that says 'I'm an individual' (in what
ever paraphrase) does not make you an individual."
-William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The
Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.
"If you grew up with less, you are much better able to deal with having less.
That is itself a kind of freedom."
-William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep:
The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.
"Inventing your life is not about believing that you can be whatever you
want. That's another myth that kids are fed these days; that if you only work
hard enough, there isn't anything you can't become. Yes, there is. I was never
going to be a center fielder, a rock star, or a concert pianist, no matter how
much I might have wanted to at various times in my life. There's such a
thing as talent, too, not to mention, athleticism, charisma, good looks, big
brains, and everything else that you have to be born with. ... Finally inventing
your life is not about slacking off. You'll need to work as hard as ever, at
least while you're getting established, ... Have I mentioned that it isn't
easy? It's not easy. It's never easy. Life is tragic, which means, among other
things, that you can't have it all."
-William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The
Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.
"We're [the United States] still a very wealthy country by any reasonable
standard, which means you have been presented with a rare and remarkable chance,
one that's far more precious than the opportunity to be rich: the opportunity
not to be. To find your purpose and embrace your vocation, and still to live a
decent life."
-William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The
Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.
[On the men and women who operate
the USS Theodore Roosevelt - CVN-71] "These are supremely dangerous jobs.
And most of the flight deck crew members are only nineteen or twenty. Indeed the
whole ship is run by youngsters. The average age, officers and all, is about
twenty-four. 'These are the same kids', a chief petty officer said, 'who, back
on land, have their hats bumped to one side and their pants around their knees,
hanging out on corners. And here they are in charge of
thirty-five-million-dollar airplanes. ... While we were on the Theodore
Roosevelt, a memorial service was held for a crew member who had been swept
overboard. Would there have been an admiral and a captain of an aircraft
carrier and hundreds of the bravest Americans at a memorial service for you when
you were twenty?"
P. J. O'Rourke, Holidays In Hell
"Even the worst of Afghan governments never acquired the special knack of
pitting tribe against tribe that is vital to American politics. - the Squishy
Liberal Tribe versus the Kick-Butt Tribe; the Indignantly Entitled Tribe versus the fed-Up Taxpayer Tribe; the Smug Tribe
versus the Wipe-That-Smirk-off-Your-Face Tribe."
P. J. O'Rourke, Holidays In Hell
"The word 'duty' must seem strange to people not involved in field sports ...
Of course it's tempting to think that the word 'duty' always seems strange to
modern urban elites."
P. J. O'Rourke, Holidays In Hell
"I really enjoyed the boot camp quality of your course."
- CS314 Student, fall 2012
"In other words, Seven will build a
bike around your poor climbing technique. Somehow a big guy with massive power
like Thor Hushovd can
finish in the
top 10 for the entire first week of the
Tour de France on
a plastic
Cervelo, yet
this guy can't find a bike rigid enough to withstand his mighty climbing
style. If he's "Standing and grinding" all the time, my guess is he doesn't need
a Seven; what he needs is a
triple."
- The Bike Snob (Eben Weiss),
Stuck In Customs: Bespoke Rationale
"Wired.com: Any advice for young programmers?
[Bjarne] Stroustrup: I guess giving advice is easy compared to taking it. Know your fundamentals (algorithms, data structures, machine architecture, systems) and know several programming languages to the point where you can use them idiomatically.
Know some non-computer field of study well — math, biology, history, optics,
whatever. Learn to communicate effectively in speech and in writing. Spend an
unreasonable amount of time on some difficult topic to really master it. Try to
do something that might make a difference in the world."
- Professor Stroustrup, creator of C++, on the 25th
anniversary of the release of the first official C++ reference guide. October
14, 2010.
"... I'll relate some of the more amazing tech-bubble facts.
In January 1999, Yahoo! was valued at 150 years' worth of its
expected annual revenues for that year. At the same moment, Yahoo!'s value was
equal to 693 years' worth of its expected 1999 earnings. The point is that if
Yahoo!'s earnings were to stay the same, it would take 693 years for those
earnings to equal what one had spent to buy the stock. That is not really a
great value. And Yahoo!, despite being one of the few companies to truly succeed
in the Internet era, now trades at 25 times its expected earnings."
- David Faber, And Then the Roof Caved In
"[Sheila] Blair is one of those rare officials who give one
confidence in government."
- David Faber, And Then the Roof Caved In
"Don't mess with happy!"
- Jim Valvano
"Dolce embodies the self-made MySpace celebrity. In the age
where the concept of celebrity was defined by negligible accomplishments,
Dolce was among the first to turn her popularity on MySpace into a full-fledged
career." [emphasis added]
- Julia Angwin, Stealing myspace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular
Website in America.
"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the
attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty
of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the
overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
- Herbert Simon
"When we were growing up, our mother had two idols she hoped we
would try to emulate. The first - and there was really no competition here -
was Laura Ingalls
of Little House on the Prairie fame. In our mom's eyes, she was the
picture of perfection. We'd talk back to our mom, and she'd sternly ask, 'Would
Laura Ingalls ever talk that way?' We'd forget to do out homework, leave dirty
dishes in the sink, or generally cause trouble, and Laura Ingalls would travel
from the nineteenth-century American prairie to 1980s Tel Aviv and admonish us
to get with the program."
- Ori and Rom Brafman, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior
"Know how to solve every problem that has been solved."
- Richard Feynman
"What I cannot create I do not understand."
- Richard Feynman
"They seem mentally fit, mentally scrubbed; I've never seen less
depressed kids. It turns out that dressing like everyone else, sharing identical
experiences, and being told you're on a mission of importance to the whole
country does wonders for the teenage soul."
- David Lipsky, Absolutely American" Four Years at West Point
"When I heard another administrator's speech about values,
how being a leader 'means having the moral courage to do what's right,' I
thought how reassuring this must be for cadets, since every other educational
institution has basically concluded that "what's right" doesn't exist, beyond
the grim rule of not teasing anyone else.
West
Point is almost entirely without irony ... This makes sense: irony is the
comic presentation of doubt, and there's not much room for doubt at West Point.
... Cadets entering West Point step into an irony-free zone, a place where
sarcasm has been fought to a standstill. And an irony-free zone turns out to be
an immense relief for human beings: a relief not to have to worry about sounding
foolish or whether somebody's statement has a subtext; a relief to accept the
apparent meaning and move on."
- David Lipsky, Absolutely American" Four Years at West Point
" 'You got tenure early? What's your secret?'
Call me in my office at 10 pm on Friday evening and I'll tell you."
-Randy Pausch, Commenting on the
value of hard work. Randy got tenure early at University of Virginia. If you
ever need inspiration I strongly recommend you download and view
Randy's Last Lecture.
You can view it
online at this page.
Winners Train, Losers Complain
-Unknown
"No one slept for another week. On January 16, when the finished
floppies we to be sent out for production, a frantic software team had worked
all night, but at 9:00 A.M. the software was still crashing. A few hours later,
the bleary-eyed programmers produced a new version of MacWrite that seemed, if
not robust, sturdy enough to perform its basic tasks without generated bomb
boxes. Good enough to ship."
- Steven Levy, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of
Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything
And here I thought Microsoft was the only company to
ship buggy software.
"In Csikszentmihalyi's analysis, what this man regularly
experiences at work is a condition called "flow" - an exhilarating and uniquely
fulfilling convergence of attention and purpose. "An activity that produces such
experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake,"
he writes, "with little concern for what they get out of it, even when it is
difficult or dangerous."
- Julian Dibbell, Play Money
(Gertrude) Himmelfarb says "Look at our divorce rates, our
illegitimacy rates, our rates of teen suicide and drug addiction. We have come
to accept these as normal because we have become use to them. But they are not
normal. They are deeply pathological. But we have become demoralized, and I mean
that in both sense. We have lost our will to resist. And even more important,
we've lost our ability as a society to tell the difference between right and
wrong."
-Dinesh D'Souza, The Virtue of Prosperity
"Edmonds is playing shallow. He likes to play shallow, a
reflection of his confidence and penchant for drama. He takes two steps in and
catches the ball high in the glove, glancing for a split second in the stitch of
the webbing to make sure he caught it. He has his momentum going for him, and
he's going to need it because Glanville is tagging up from third and trying to
score and here comes the best craziness in all of sports.
He's running full bore and he's quick and Matheny moves two
steps up the line, awaiting the throw, and Edmonds makes an over-the-top throw
with beautiful carry and La Russa can see it and so can Duncan and so can Morris
as he leaps off the back bench because it's gonna be close, it's gonna be really
close, and while it's all happening fast, very fast, there's also a slow-motion
quality to it as Edmonds throws the ball and Matheny awaits the ball and
Glanville comes down the line, hoping he gets there before the ball and who will
intersect with what when?
The throw is dead solid perfect. It gives Matheny time to
take those two steps up the third-base line and set up in a stoic crouch. It's
going to be a wreck at home plate, a serious wreck. Sosa, due up next, leaves
the on-deck circle and, like a bystander vainly trying to ward off a car crash,
motions to Glanville with his hands to get down, get down. But the throw
is too far ahead of Glanville, his only choice is to go for the high-impact
head-on collision. He barrels into Matheny, using his forearm to hit him in the
face. He uses the rest of his body to try to flatten him. Matheny does a full
360-degree pirouette. His glove goes flying, and if the ball is still in there,
Glanville is safe, and the Cubs will win because there's no way you lose after a
play like this.
It takes a second, maybe two, the crowd goes berserk and two
entire dugouts up on their toes and the home plate umpire bending his neck into
this Bill Gallo cartoon swirl of arms and legs and what belongs to whom and who
belongs to what, charged with answering everybody's question: Where is the
ball?
Where is the ball? It's in Matheny's bare
hand. He switched it from his glove right before impact. Glanville is out.
HE'S OUT!!!"
- Buzz Bissinger, 3 Nights in August
"My little boy has just turned two, and he is trying toy figure
out a music box. It is a baseball music box, on which a small figure pivots with
a tiny bat, swinging at a white cloth marble while the tinny sounds of Take
Me Out to the Ball Game leak from below.
The music box has two operating mechanisms, an on/off switch
which one pushes and pulls, bust also a handle which must be wound to provide
power. This is too much for a two year old boy to deal with at first. He pulls
the switch and the must starts; he pushes it and the music stops-but then, when
the tension winds down, he pulls the switch and nothing happens. Isaac is
frustrated. 'Broke,' he says, handing me the worthless machine. 'Ball player
broke.'
He will, of course, soon figure out the concept of two
switches. But I am struck by this: that ideas are harder than machines, and many
people will never master the two-switch concept as it applies to a logical
inference. find this to be an undeniable lesson of sports talk shows. A
caller argues that a baseball manager makes no difference. Look at Whitey
Herzog, ne says; he was supposed to be such a genius a few years ago, but why
can't he win now? The caller has not mastered the two-switch concept; the on/off
switch must be turned on, but the energy must also be there.
... If only one could hold an idea in one's hand and play
with the switches, I think, how quickly the arguments would advance. In the real
world, arguments go around and around, advancing almost imperceptibly from
generation to generation, and this is another way of explaining why I stopped
writing the Baseball Abstract. After ten years, I realized the
impossibility of advancing complex ideas in a world that only wanted to know
where the switch was."
- Bill James
"The main thing that you are struck with in the process of
learning about a computer is how totally, incredibly stupid it is. The machine
simulates intelligence so well that when you accidentally slip through a crack
in its simulations and fall to the floor of its true intelligence, you are awed
by the depth of the fall. You give it a series of a hundred or a thousand
sensible commands, and it executes each of them in turn, and then you press a
wrong key and accidentally give it a command which goes counter to everything
that you have been trying to do, and it will execute that command in a
millisecond, just as if you had accidentally hit the wrong button on your vacuum
cleaner at the end of your cleaning, and it had instantly and to your great
surprise sprayed the dirt that you had collected back into the room. And you
feel like, 'Jeez, machine, you ought to know I didn't mean that. What do you
think I've been doing here for the last hour?' And then you realize that that
machine has not the foggiest notion of what you are trying to do, any more than
your vacuum cleaner does."
- Bill James
"Whites' alienation from the Establishment began, of course, as
a genuine and concrete opposition to the Vietnam War, as well as Racism. The
counterculture movement effected profound transformations in American society,
which all of is are thankful for today. However, there was, amid the
constructive efforts, always a certain gut-level thrill in the sheer
rebelliousness in itself. As such, it was not surprising that after the smoke
cleared, a mood was left in the air, finding pleasure in rebellion for its own
sake. Action devolved into gesture, as the Cheshire Cat in Alice in
Wonderland disappeared and left just his smile.
That legacy lives on in mainstream American culture today, in
the form of a spontaneous embrace of anti-Establishment sentiment in a great
many people, expected in particular of the educated and/or thinking person.
Certainly plenty of active, committed political activism remains. But there is
also a general psychological legacy that expresses itself not in outright
rejection of the Establishment or concentrated efforts to change it, but in
quiet attitudes now taken as normal that would throw most people brought to our
America from as recently as 1960."
- John McWhorter, Winning the Race - Beyond the Crisis in
Black America
"To depart for a moment into a philosophical blind alley ...
simplifying the universe is a necessary but dangerous habit of thought. It is
necessary to simplify the universe, because the external universe is vastly more
complicated than any image of it that we are capable of holding our minds -
therefore, it is necessary to reduce and eliminate the complications of the real
world to form and understanding of it.
But simplifying the universe is also dangerous, because some
of what is left out of our image is nonetheless real and significant. This is
the essential problem problem of political parties: that both parties, both
"bents" of political philosophy, simplify the universe in order to make sense of
it. Republicans believe we must all be responsible for ourselves and those near
us; Democrats believe that we must all help to take care of one another. Both
principles are absolutely true, but both are simplifications of a more
complicated universe. Democrats defend their simplification by labeling
individual responsibility as selfishness; Republicans defend their
simplification by labeling sharing s irresponsibility. Both parties thus trundle
happily along with political philosophies that manifestly fail to explain the
real world. ... It is a complicated world. A statistical system which
understands this is better than a system which denies it."
- Bill James
"Football is a mistake. It combines the two worst elements of
American life: violence and committee meetings"
- George Will
"There's nothing between Wichita Falls and the North Pole except barbed
wire."
- Anonymous
I did the
Hotter than Hell 100 in Wichita Falls this year. And it was hot. 102 the day
of the ride, but that was at the every end of the ride. I went on a solo ride
two days before the actual tour at 2:30 in the afternoon and it was 109. That
was hot.
"We can describe a computer scientist as someone who doesn't
distinguish between a checkerboard and a topographical map...."
-Doug Cooper and Michael Clancy, Oh! Pascal!
"One of the efficient byproducts of plebe-year stress is what's
called unit-cohesion, the bond that cadets form. In battle, what often drives
soldiers isn't simple courage but a complicated version of crisis loyalty, the
desire not to let down their friends."
- David Lipsky, Absolutely American
"In Fargo [North Dakota], one sensed that everything was just a
tad different from the rest of the world - and this coming from someone who
spent each day with the [St. Paul] Saints."
-Neal Karlen, Slouching Towards Fargo
"All good stories come out of unhappiness. People who are happy
and successful don't have any good stories to tell. I know this because I use to
be successful. And it was a confusing time. When you think you have everything
you want it drives you crazy trying to think of what you forgot."
- Garrison Keillor
"And then something happened: the more he (Scott Hatteberg) went out to play first
base, the more comfortable he felt there. ...Wash (Ron Washington) got inside
your head because - well, you wanted Wash inside your head. His coach was creating an
alternative scale on which Hatty could judge his performance. He might be an
absolute D but on Wash's curve he felt like a B, and rising. 'He knew what
looked like a routine play wasn't a routine play for me,' said Hatty. Wash was
helping him to fool himself, to make him fell better than he was, until he
actually became better than he was. At the Coliseum it was a long way from the
A's dugout to first base, but every time Hatty picked a throw out of the dirt -
a play most first baseman made with their eyes closed - he'd hear Wash shout
from the dugout:
'Pickin' Machine!'
He'd look over and see Wash with his fighting face on:
'Pickin' Machine!'
- Michael Lewis, Moneyball. On the conversion of Scott
Hatteberg from a catcher to a first baseman after being acquired by the Oakland
A's in 2002, for his penchant for getting on base. Wash, is Ron Washington,
infield coach of the Oakland A's at the time.
"Only a psychological freak could approach a 100-mph fastball
aimed not all that far from his head with total confidence."
- Michael Lewis, Moneyball
"Who the gods with to destroy first they call promising."
-Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise. Quoted in
Moneyball, by Michael Lewis
"All of science and technology and culture and learning and
academics is built upon using the work that others have done before,
Carmack
thought. But to take a patenting approach and say its; like, well, this idea is
my idea, you cannot extend this idea in any way, because I own this idea - it
just seems so fundamentally wrong."
- David Kushner, Maters of Doom
"She told Moose this story in a letter that she sent him after
she'd heard he had went back to Lake Woebegone. She's living in Maine. She's
married to a cabinet maker. She's very happy. She has a couple of children. He
read her letter as he was sitting in a hot bath at Pastor Inqvist's house. After
he had he had put the children to bed and he was on his second hot toddy...Here
he was sitting in a hot bath, feeling ALMOST alright again on two hot toddies
and he had one left to go. He read the letter from his old love who said
'Richard, when I walked down that street at 3 in the morning with a half naked
man who was singing and holding a bottle of wine, I thought of you. I thought to
myself 'Here is another passionate love affair and I hope it doesn't last too
long. Because I want to get on and live my life.' She said, 'Richard, when I was
young I thought as many young people do, that happiness was somewhere out on the
edge. And you had to go venture into the darkness in order to find it. And I got
out to the edge and it wasn't there. And I realized that happiness has always
been in the middle. And the only reason to go out to the edge is to then realize
where the middle was and to turn around and to come back to it. I hope you're
happy,' she said. 'And if you're not, I hope that you soon will be.'"
- Garrison Keillor
"He was back in the days before there were car seats for
children. I was thinking of that. That was back in the days when your little
child, as soon as he could stand, would ride with daddy standing on the front
seat of the car. We'd go driving off down the road and when daddy needed to stop
he would put his arm across his little boy and hold him - daddy was the seatbelt
back then. Now a days this would be a heinous crime and if I were to do this you
would never speak to me again. My show would be cancelled. I would be in some
kind of program for 'bad daddies' some where."
- Garrison Keillor
"And now, Harry, let us step out into the night and pursue that
flighty temptress, adventure."
-Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,
by J K Rowling
"The Indian never fishes or hunts for sport, only for food.
Grandpa said it was the silliest damn thing in the world to go around killing
something for sport."
-Forrest Carter, The Education of Little Tree
"And they would go through the rest of their lives knowing that
never again would they have a chance to do Westside Story and sing 'When
you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way from your first cigarette...' They would
never, ever get to do that. 'Well okay,' she said. 'We'll take a vote.' And they
voted 10 to 4 NOT to do the senior class play which went against everything they
had been brought up with. Never to quit. Never to quit. Never, ever give up.
And
they found out then, the reason you should never quit or give up is because when
you do it won't make that big a difference to people. They won't notice. You
think it is going to be a scandal and it's not. You'll come home early from
school for three or four days before your parents say, 'Weren't you in a play?' And you
say 'Oh, well, it was canceled. It was canceled.' And they'll say, 'Oh.' That's
all. That's all the world says when you quit. When you give it up. 'Oh.' That's
all you get. So, you want to stay in it, stay in it. And it is not the worst
thing to come into your extremely late middle years, as I have, and never having
had a chance to do Westside Story. It keeps hope alive. The thought that
some day, some how, some where you might still get to do it. It is one of those
dreams that you keep alive. Hope never dies. Hope never dies. I am long past the
age when I've played baseball. Yet is still alive for me and I can see it
somehow in my mind. It's a short grounder hit to the shortstop. I am playing
second. I run towards second base. I catch the flip from the shortstop. I pivot.
I throw to first. As I leap my legs tucked under me to avoid the slide of the
base runner. He comes in under. I catch the base runner going to first by 15
feet. It's a double play and we trot back to the dugout. The shortstop and I. We
don't high five each other. We're pros. We're cool. We've done a double play
many, many times before. Do you see what I am getting at? I haven't done it yet,
but some how, some day, some where. That's the news from Lake Woebegone where
all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are
above average."
- Garrison Keillor
"'April in Paris' was the theme of the prom, but nobody told the
farmers who were out Northwest of town that it was the 'April in Paris' and so
they were out spreading manure for three days. Spreading fresh manure and the
prevailing winds carried it into town so it wasn't very Parisian unless you've
been in the wrong parts of Paris. And the boys tried to make a joke of it but it
wasn't funny to the girls. Some of the girls wept to 'This was the culmination
of their high school life. This was to be the epitome of elegance and this smell
that wafted through.' Teachers walked through spraying air freshener, but
something synthetic and sweet could not compete with this smell of the fecal
matter of cows and pigs. It was a disaster for those girls. They came home
ruined. <pause> Oh poor things. If that is the worst thing you ever have to suffer. I
hope so. God bless you."
- Garrison Keillor
"... Emily, who has a summer job in Oregon at a sports resort.
And she is the sort of kid who could go out there and never come back. That is
the tragedy of raising kids. You raise them to be independent and strong and
self reliant and then if they are, you never see them again. You see the ones who
are troubled. Those are the ones you get to know. Your successes go away. You
never see them again."
- Garrison Keillor
"Moreover, I said, you must not wonder that those who attain to this beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell; which desire of theirs is very natural, if our allegory may be trusted."
-Plato, The Allegory of the Cave
"Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed."
-Jonathan Swift
"I'm as right as the mail!" [coughing up blood and on
the verge of passing out]
-Doc Holiday (Val Kilmer), Tombstone
"We crave reality. To know where the floor is. Not to drift
in the air, but to be able to get down through the muck and touch the stone and
know where reality is. Which ordinarily you need to travel to get in touch with
reality. To get away from all these little comfortable systems that we have set
up to make our lives easier. So we tell our children to go off on pilgrimages.
To go off to foreign lands. To have a touch of reality. To see what life is
really like. Which is what winter really is. It is a form of travel, but it
brings the arctic circle to us. Six months ago we were living in Miami, sort of.
Now we are in Murmansk. We're in Lapland."
- Garrison Keillor (Which is kind of what summer is in
Austin. The equator comes to us. For four months out of the year we are in the
Sudan. We are in Mali.)
"What happened was this: I got an image in my head that
never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things,
but that is different. We get very few of the true images in out heads of the
kind I am talking about, the kind which become more vivid for us as if the
passage of the years did not obscure their reality but, year by year, drew off
another veil to expose a meaning which we had only dimly surmised at first. Very
probably the last veil will not be removed, for there are not enough years, but
the brightness of the image increases. And our conviction increases that the
brightness is meaning, or the legend of meaning, and without the image, our
lives would be nothing except an old piece of film rolled on a spool and thrown
into a desk drawer among the unanswered letters. ... We went different
ways in the world, as I have said, but I had with me always that image of the
little girl on the waters of the bay, all innocence and trustfulness, under the
stormy sky. Then, there came the day when that image was taken from me. I
learned that Anne Stanton had become the mistress of Willie Stark, that somehow
by an obscure and necessary logic I had handed her over to him. That fact was
too horrible to face, for it robbed me of something out of the past by which, unwittingly
until that moment, I had been living."
-Robert Penn Warren, All the Kings Men. [This is my
favorite book. I have probably read it 5 times. Notice the ... or ellipsis,
which is used to omit words or portions of text. The first passage occurs on
page 118 in my version of All the Kings Men. The second passage occurs on
page 311! It was not until the most recent reading that I realized the second
passage was making reference to the first. This is one of the many reasons I
love this book. I discover something new and interesting every time I read it,
just as Warren alludes to the removal of veils. Is this why teachers of English
and Literature do what they do? They experience this sort of revelation with
many works? It is certainly one of the reasons I like computer science, always
learning new things.]
"If you want to get something done find a busy
person."
-unknown
"But the Cherokee did not cry. Not on the outside, for the
Cherokee would not let them see his souls; as he would not ride in the wagons.
And so they called it the Trail of Tears. Not because the
Cherokee cried; for he did not. They called it the Trail of Tears for it sounds
romantic and speaks of the sorrow of those who stood by the Trail. A death march
is not romantic.
You cannot write poetry about the death-stiffened baby in his
mother's arms, staring at the jolting sky with eyes that will not close, while
his mother walks.
You cannot sing songs of the father laying down the burden of his
wife's corpse, to lie by it through the night and to rise and carry it again in
the morning - and tell his oldest son to carry the body of his youngest. And do
not look ... nor speak ... nor cry ... nor remember the mountains.
It would not be a beautiful song. And so they called it the
Trail of Tears."
-Forrest Carter, The Education of Little Tree
"Granma's name was Bonnie Bee. I knew that when I
heard him late at night say, 'I kin ye, Bonnie Bee,' he was saying, 'I love ye,'
for the feeling was in the words.
And when they would be talking and Granma would say, 'Do you
kin me, Wales?' and he would answer, 'I kin ye,' it meant, 'I understand ye.' To
them love and understanding was the same thing. Granma said you couldn't love
something you didn't understand; nor could you love people, nor God, if you
didn't understand the people and God.
Granpa and Granma had an understanding, and so they had a
love. Granma said the understanding run deeper as the years went by, and she
reckined it would get beyond anything mortal folks could think upon or explain.
And so they called in 'kin.' "
-Forrest Carter, The Education of Little Tree
"What's the greatest thing you've ever done on a bike?
Reached the point when I could finally say 'On you left.'"
-Bob Tindle, 75, TN; rides 2,500 miles a year"
[Bicycling magazine, December 2004 issue. See, when you
are on a bike you say 'On you left.' when you are coming up on another
cyclist to pass
them. You always try to pass on the left side. So, here is this 75 year old man,
passing people, presumably, much younger than he. He certainly ought to be
proud.]
"That is a Christmas I won't ever forget. The one when we
were visited by the Dark Angel of Projectile Vomiting."
- Garrison Keillor
"I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack
the time to make it shorter."
- Blaise Pascal.
"It was the rain that made Floyd Landis drink 13
cappuccinos.
It wasn't because he thought it was a good idea."
-Lance Armstrong, Every Second Counts
"The urgency was just mine entirely. I didn't have any
interviews I couldn't postpone. But I was 24. I was a graduate student in
English, floundering. Liable to be drafted to Vietnam. Wondering what that would
be like. Fearful. And one of the things I was most fearful of was living an
ordinary life. And I had to come to New York to find a way out of that. ... I
was afraid of an ordinary life. And I came to New York and realized that is what
we all get. We all get an ordinary life. And it's good enough. It's good
enough."
- Garrison Keillor
"Grandpa come back to his body mind. He wanted his hat,
which I got; and he put it on his head. I held his hand and he grinned. 'It was
good Little Tree. Next time, it will be better. I'll be seein' ye.' And slipped
off; like Willow John done."
-Forrest Carter, The Education of Little Tree
"Schools out. I just want to thank all of the school
teachers for all their good work. How much we're grateful to them school is out.
Especially those primary teachers who do the heroic job. They're the ones,
they're the miracle workers. The ones who take the illiterate and turn them into
readers. When you turn a kid into a reader. That is the gift, you know. That is the
gift that unlocks all of the other gifts."
- Garrison Keillor
"Now we're sitting with Matt Ocko, a clever young
programmer who is working on the problem of seamless communication between
programs running on all different types of computers, which is something along
the lines of getting vegetables to talk with each other even when they don't
want to."
- Robert X. Cringley
"My bank has quit sending me my old checks. ... Here is
what we should be able to do: We should be able to check a box that say 'I'm old
and I don't want to change.' Which means I am old and I want my checks
back."
- Tony Kornheiser
In object oriented programming why do we call user defined data types "classes"? Here is one answer:
"When my son was 3 years old, he once asked me, "Dad, can you kill a witch?" I thought about it for a while, formulating all sorts of informative answers, but ultimate replied, "Yes," which I think was the answer that did him the most good at the time.
When freshmen ask me, "Professor, why is it called a class?" I also think of lots of informative answers, but I reply "Because that's the place where we teach objects how to do things"."
-Rich Pattis
"The reason for getting an education here—or anywhere
else—is that it is better in and of itself. Not because it gets you something.
Not because it is a means to some other end. It is better because it is better.
Indeed this statement implies that the phrase 'aims of education' is
nonsensical; education is not a thing of which aims can be predicated. It has no
aim other than itself."
-Andrew Abbott, in a lecture to the incoming class at the
University of Chicago on the aims of education, 2003.
(After a less than rousing rendition of the chorus of Alice's
Restaurant by the audience.)
"That was horrible. If you want to end war and stuff you got to sing loud."
- Arlo Guthrie, Alice's
Restaurant
"there's a big ole goofy man dancin' with a big ole goofy
girl
ooh baby its a big ole goofy world."
- John Prine, It's a Big Ole Goofy World, via The Reverend Patrick Miller
Pacha: What happened?
Old Man: Well I, uh, I threw off the Emperor's groove.
Pacha: What?
Old Man: His groove! The rhythm in which he lives his life! His pattern of
behavior! I threw it off! And the Emperor had me thrown out the window!
Pacha: Oh, I'm supposed to see him, so -
Old Man: DON'T THROW OFF HIS GROOVE!
Pacha: Okay.
Old Man: Bewaaaaaaaare, the grooooooooove!
Pacha: Say, are you gonna be all right?
Old Man: Groooooooooooove!
- The Emperor's New Groove
"If you have ever seen the movie Night of the Living Dead, you
have a rough idea how modern corporations and organizations operate, with
projects and proposals that everybody thought were killed constantly rising from
their graves to stagger back into meetings and eat the brains of the living."
- Dave Barry
"Claiming Java is easier than C++ is like saying that K2 is shorter than
Everest".
- Larry O'Brien
"You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have for
instance."
- Franklin P. Jones
"Wooooo - Hoo! College!"
-
Dr. Steve Brada
"Control is the ultimate illusion."
- Professor James C. Brown
"They asked, they asked him outright if he would take them up North.
They were not brought up to ask this sort of question of a stranger. To ask for
something. You are suppose to earn it, but there was no way they could earn it.
And he said 'Yes he would.' "
- Garrison Keillor
"A good marriage is worth all the money in the world."
- Quartermaster Chief Petty Officer Ashby, Naval Submarine
School
"Games? You must be joking. I've seen better organized riots."
- Sam Mussabini (Ian Holm), Chariots of Fire
"That's not the prettiest quarter I've ever seen Mr. Liddle. [pause.
Continues, under his breath.] Certainly
the bravest."
- Sam Mussabini (Ian Holm), Chariots
of Fire
"Forty two million of anything, is a lot."
- Professor Doug Burger, (commenting on the number of
transistors contained on the Pentium IV processor)
"The ceremonies and excuses by which decisions (by government) are
avoided may surprise you, but the effect will not. Government accomplishes
virtually nothing of what it sets out to do. It can barely fire an employee who
doesn't show up for work."
- Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense
"Real seriousness is involuntary. If you're held at gunpoint or run over
by a bus, you'll be serious about it. If you're a decent person, you'll also
have some serious feelings when you see someone else threatened or squashed. In
fact, if you're a decent person faced with the world's catastrophe's, horrors,
and pleas for help, you'll do the right thing whether you're serious or
not"
- P. J. O' Roarke
"It's supposed to be hard! If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The
hard... is what makes it great!"
- Jimmie Dugan (Tom Hanks), A League of Their Own
"God is so good. And we don't realize it when our lives are so easy and
it's just one blessing after another, but when there is trouble and we are beset
with fear and all is when we realize God's goodness and we are grateful just for
life itself. It's good enough. It's good enough."
- Garrison Keillor
"One of the principles of this culture is we were not brought up to
expect to be happy. We never expect it so we are not comfortable with it if it
should occur. Joy and prosperity make us a little bit uneasy."
- Garrison Keillor
"In the midst of great success the most we could ever say is 'It's not
bad. It could be worse.' We come from a 'could be worse' culture."
-Garrison Keillor
"Email: Your 'To Do' List that other people get to add to."
- Sharon LaVoy
"God adolescence is brutal. Nothing afterwards is nearly so hard.
Nothing, nothing what so ever. I go back to high school reunions. It's like
people from a shipwreck getting together celebrating being alive, you
know?"
- Garrison Keillor
Latest sign that the end of civilization is near:
"Last year parents loved it! So, The University of Texas Child Care Center
will be here again to serve our families attending the UT football games this
season. Child care for children ages 3 to 12 years will be available
beginning September 1, 2001 for all home games."
-Rhonda Strange, Director of Communications, Office of the
Vice President for Employee and Campus Services
The University of Texas at Austin
"In the Pacific Northwest, which is my territory, we have increased
sales 106% in the last 12 month period. And this with a war on."
- Salesman
"Eh heh heh. Eh heh heh. You know if I had your job, I'D KILL
MYSELF!! Sit here, I'll see if I can dig up a pistol."
- Ernie Capadino (John Lovitz), A
League of Their Own
"Finally I would like to offer some helpful advice to students about how
best to learn discrete mathematics. You will learn the most by working
exercises. I suggest you do as many as you possibly can..."
- Kenneth H. Rosen, Discrete Mathematics and its
Applications
"We've got one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel!"
- Professor Don Batory
"... and people are to march around the church to commemorate the event,
Palm Sunday, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem and was greeted with applause and
with palms. People thought he had come to overthrow the Romans, but ... no ... he had
come to change THEM ... and that led to things turning bad."
- Garrison Keillor
"In the morning the Mobile Bay (an Aegis class guided-missile
cruiser) left the Mayport Naval Station and steamed - that is, gas-turbined- out
to sea. The departure was so smoothly effected and the engines so quite in their
puissance that I was having breakfast in the officers' mess and didn't know I
was gone. I spent the next two days wandering through the repository of my tax
dollars trying to discover what defense spending buys.
It buys complexity. The Mobile Bay is the most complex
thing I've ever been in, not counting love. All the spaces of the ship are
filled with nests of valves and switches and transversed by ganglia of pipes and
wires. To attempt any real understanding of how it all works is to slide into
that mood of childish despair at having taken the alarm clock apart. Defense
spending also buys cleanliness. The Mobile Bay is unnaturally clean,
cleaner than anything ever is in civilian life. Every crease of every corner of
the ship is tended every day. And not only is there incessant scrubbing and
mopping but eternal chipping and brushing besides, so that in the course of a
two-year cycle all surfaces, however inaccessible, and every rivet, nut and bolt
head will have been repainted. Each of these items is also numbered. Every
hatch, pipe, bulkhead, gangway, locker, compartment, and nameless do-funny has a
number stenciled on it, and that number tells an adept just what the object is
and where, exactly, its proper place is within the ship. The Mobile Bay is
so clean and organized as to mock God for the frowsy quantum-physics universe he
created."
- P. J. O'Rourke, from the chapter "Defense Policy: Cry
'Havoc!' and Let Slip the Hogs of Peace", Parliament of
Whores
"Culture is not something you can acquire by going to the symphony. It's
not something you get out of books. You can't change it by redoing your living
room in a Southwestern decor and hanging Navajo blankets on the wall. Culture is
what you knew by the time you were twelve years old. It's a gift from your
parents and people way back and people try to run away from their culture. Of
course they do. They go off to New York and try to be somebody else, but your
attempt at independence only shows how much like the others your are."
- Garrison Keillor
"Perhaps that was the moment when Slade made his fortune. How life is
strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture,
and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes
like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow ... Slade never
confided in me, but I figure Slade got his reward for being an honest man."
- Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
"No, it's just-- I-- You know, I just think, right now I have
*one key*, you know, everything I own is in the car, and I just... I like that;
you know, I mean, I just-- if I get an apartment, that's two keys, if I get a
job, you know, um, I might have to open or close, that's more keys..."
- Graham (James Spader), Sex, Lies, and Videotapes
[This leads to the "key theory of responsibility". The amount of responsibility in
one's life (real or perceived) is directly proportional to the number of keys one
carries.]
"Charlie's often thought 'What was the difference between my son and
myself? How did I have a good life and he not?' And the only answer he's ever
been able to come up with was Marliss Hovdy. She was the difference, the whole
difference. He rode in and rescued her from her family and then the rest of his
life she has been rescuing him. Such a sensible woman, such a loving woman. A
woman he was always able to talk to and tell whatever was on his mind."
- Garrison Keillor
"I had a boy under the old system of parenthood, back before most of you
were born. This was under the old system where men were out busy hunting and
fighting heathen savages and we were just brought into villages for breeding
purposes and then we wandered off again and we'd come back to see the child
after the child was born, we'd walk in smeared with blood and one ear half
chewed off, wrapped in animal skins, and we'd walk in and look at the child and
we'd grunt and then we'd go off and hunt and fight some more, and eventually the
child sort of grew up on his own and we came back and there was this young man
there. And now to have a child under the new system of parenthood, in which
parents are assumed to be vitally involved in every step of their child's life,
and arrange their children's social life, and read every book available on the
subject of child rearing, which is like having a second unpaid job, makes me
nostalgic for the old way that I grew up under. The Lake Woebegone way in which
children were free and wandered in this magical land of childhood beyond the
notice or attention or knowledge of our parents. We were just out there
wandering around like coyotes. We were free as birds. Back in the days before
children had to pass entrance exams for Kindergarten. Back before we were aware
of so much that could be wrong with children. Back before they were aware of
this ADD, this Affection Deficit Disorder ... We were free; children were
absolutely free. Our parents sent us off to school with lunch money and told us
to do as the teacher said and if there was a problem it was going to be our
fault. So we were sent out into this world of adults and adults who are not as
self conscience as my generation is today. Who are always aware of trying to
look good in front of children and be heroic and be cool. Adults then didn't
care to be cool, they didn't know about cool, it didn't matter to them. They
just expressed themselves. We children were not the center of their lives. They
did not weave their lives around us. They didn't read books about us. They had
their own lives which were a mystery to us completely."
- Garrison Keillor
"I want to finish this little session by reading three fairly short poems.
This one started when I read a sentence in an article about the history of
printing. And the sentence was 'It has been calculated that each copy of
the Guttenberg Bible required the skins of three hundred sheep.' and I
wrote this little poem called Flock."
- Billy Collins, Poet Laureate of the United States
Flock, by Billy Collins
I can see them squeezed into the holding pen behind the stone building where the
printing press is housed.
All of them squirming around to find a little room and looking so much alike it
would be nearly impossible to count them.
And there is no telling which one of them will carry the news that the Lord is a
shepherd
One of the few things they already know."
"I've got twelve pages here. That's not like me. I'll probably skip half of it and get half way through this thing and quit anyhow. It's getting awful hot out here, so that's a good excuse to make it short.
So, but anyhow, I think defense belongs in the Hall of Fame. Defense deserves as much credit as pitching and hitting. And I'm proud and honored to be going in to the Hall of Fame on the defensive side and mostly for my defensive abilities. I feel special. (applause)
This is gonna be hard, so I probably won't say about half of this stuff. I
want to thank the Veteran's Committee for this great, great honor. The highest
honor in baseball. I thought when the Pirates retired my number that that would
be the greatest thing to ever happen to me. It's hard to top this. I don't think
I'm gonna make it. I think you can kiss these twelve pages down the drain. I
just want to thank everybody. I want to thank the Hall of Fame, I want to thank
the Veteran's Committee, I want to thank all the friends and family that made
this long trip up here to listen to me speak and hear this crap. Thank you very,
very much. Thanks everybody. That's enough. (applause)"
- Bill Mazeroski's speech on his induction to the Baseball
Hall of Fame, August 5, 2001. This was following a polished, 23 minute
presentation by Dave Winfield. Mr.
Mazeroski could not continue due to being overcome by his emotions. The vast
majority modern of induction speeches are much, much longer than Mr. Mazeroski's.'