I am thousands of years old, I have been immortal, and I did make a bargain with the devil.

Thoughts on Terry Gilliam:

With purpose he paints the fantastic with a crude brush and it's perfect. It's plastic magic, its strength is the imagination, not a world suffocating in marvelous effects.

Almost all of his films feel like they are amateur endeavours. But almost all of them succeed. Each movie he makes is something like an accidental success. Each one is like a homebrew experiment and each time he tries he succeeds. He's not an amateur though, he's really good at it.

If you've seen the criterion collection release of Fellini's 8.5 you can tell from his commentary that he is clearly well versed in film and to call him a novice is unfair.

There is a lack of polish to the man. But there is an abundance of accent.

This is what happens when I scribble notes while drinking...

Invictus

This is a great movie. Watching it really gives you a feel for how improbable Mandela was. The most improbable man in the most improbable nation. South Africa is like fiction. The man spent something like 30 years in a cell and came out a forgiving and thoughtful leader. It makes me wonder about good leaders and what their real effect can be on a society. Sometimes I wonder if South Africa is just running on Mandela's momentum. The leadership of SA following Mandela seems less than stellar from my outsider perspective. How cynical it feels to say that a society sometimes won't do what it needs to do for itself and a brilliant leader needs to come along, but I really think that without the moderating/inspirational leadership of Mandela South Africa might have seen far more blood and gone the way of Zimbabwe long ago.

It goes without saying that this is one of the greatest songs ever recorded

Genial

Bikes!

Slate has a great photo gallery of people on bicycles up.

Good Enough for a Post

Joan Didion on New York City

I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best's and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live, But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions ("Money," and "High Fashion," and "The Hucksters"), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of "living" there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not "live" at Xanadu.

Found at the Atlantic's City Blog

Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?

This exchange makes me like Steve Jobs quite a bit.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

Just ordered this book from Amazon. This purchase is solely based on story titles.

The Green Hills of Earth
"The Last Flight of Dr. Ain"
"The Screwfly Solution"
The Boundaries of Humanity
"And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side"
"The Girl Who Was Plugged In"
"The Man Who Walked Home"
"And I Have Come Upon This Place By Lost Ways"
Male and Female
"The Women Men Don't See"
"Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!"
"Houston, Houston, Do You Read?"
Star Songs
"With Delicate Mad Hands"
"A Momentary Taste of Being"
"We Who Stole the Dream"
Life and Death
"Her Smoke Rose Up Forever"
"Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death"
"On the Last Afternoon"
"She Waits for All Men Born"
"Slow Music"
Epilogue: And Man Abides...
"And So On, and So On"

he must yield to the fate of mortality

Cyrus Buck

Georgia, VT
June 28th 1813

Dear Sir,

Feeling under obligation of transmitting to a friend importand and interesting events I with sorrow and depression communicate the following but perhaps you may have heard of the same but I consider it no less than an incumbent duty to inform you of some particulars realtaive to this event; your Brother Moses recieved a couple of wounds one in his breast the other in his side in the actoin at Fort George he was brought to Fort Lewis and terminated in Death the 17th Day following this news I had personally from a soldier belonging to his own Company who was taken a prisoner soon after and deserted them on his passage to quebeck who was formerly a resident of this town and was acquainted with your Brother he saw Moses twice in his wounds and conversed with him on his situation for a few days he thought he should recover but soon found that he must yield to the fate of mortality he at lenght became resigned knowing he fell in a glorious cause in as much as the loss his friends sustained was an unperishable gain of his beloved Country thus he bid a long Farewell to things with a hope of a blest immmortality above.

I have one of these cold sweats coming and will have to lie down

Sarah I sometimes wish our government could be crushed to attoms. When I see good men treat in the way they are. But we must do the best we can another year will soon rowl around, And then I'me done soldering for such a government as This.

I have lots more I should be glad to write but dont feel very well. I have one of these cold swets coming on and will have to lie down.

I remain as ever your true Brother

Write soon without fail

A good strong stomach for hard tack and sowbelly

My mom just sent me copies of letters written by some of my ancestors going all the way back to the revolutionary war. I'm sitting here reading them and thinking how great it is to have this kind of thing.

"Dear Sister and Brother,

At a late hour I seat myself to have a little chat with you by way of letter. Though I had intended the next letter I wrote I should be the maile caryer myself but as things are progressing differently than we expected I fear we shall get lots of time to answer letters though I hope not very long. Myron said he wrote you yesterday, I was not aware of that and should not attempt to write this morning as he wrote all the news.

So here goes for what it may fetch you, As you will know before this reaches you that nearly all of the Co. (?) have taken another sollem oath to defend their country for three years longer. Therefore it would be useless for me to expend time and good talents writing in regard to this matter. but there is one thing which seems quite a mistory. And that is whether the 3rd Iowa Inlisted through pure and undefiled Patriotism. Or whether its for those four hundred and odd dollars. I think the latter.

....

I suppose Myron told you why he made his foolish move in regard to goin into the actions. So I suppose you will expect me to give my reasons. Well don't know as I have any in partikular, more than I inlisted partly because he did, and partly, the biggest part for big pay and a privleg of coming home. I think this is enough to justify anyone that has got a speck of patriotism and Lincolns Green Backs. And also a good strong stomach for hard tack and sowbelly. I may beet this home. When we will have some of those old fashioned country visits that are long to be remembered, And besides this we shall expect some pretty good grub which I know you have pleanty. With these remarks I close hopeing you will not wait to long before answering this."

Autism-Spectrum Quotient

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html

I scored 26 today. Took this a few years ago and had a much higher score... I guess that just means my answers depend on my mood.

OLD (jazzy) Bjork

Oh Asia, why did I leave you so quickly???

Caribou - Jamelia

From Study Hacks:

"...deep procrastination, though scary, represents something important and perhaps even exciting. It marks that key transition where the momentum of “this is what you need to do” — the momentum that carried you through high school and into college — begins to wane, leaving you to discover a new source of propulsion — not just new, but also more durable and more personal."

Star Wars Considered

This is... great.

Sometimes I envy my parents

From Felix Salmon

"It’s been a very impressive day to learn how the stock-market sausage is made: I think we just saw the largest intraday fall, in point terms, that has ever happened. But the bigger lesson is that in the short term, any market can fail temporarily. The question is whether the jitters from this afternoon are going to mean increased volatility and risk aversion going forwards. My feeling is that, yes, they both will and should."

Do you ever look at the post war 20th century with envy? Barring the threat of nuclear annihilation it was a fertile environment for positive thinking. Things were on the up in general and progress seemed to be something that was inevitable. Maybe they were just starting so low it made any gains seem extraordinary. News like today's stock market freak out is so utterly unsurprising that we should all be shocked at how not shocking it all is. A guy tried to kill a bunch of people in times square the other day, no biggie. The stock market went absolutely nuts for seemingly no reason, just another day right?

Great Gladwell Article in This Week's Newyorker

LINK

"In the case of Operation Mincemeat, Germany’s spies told their superiors that something false was actually true (even though, secretly, some of those spies might have known better), and Germany acted on it. In the case of Cicero, Germany’s spies told their superiors that something was true that may indeed have been true, though maybe wasn’t, or maybe was true for a while and not true for a while, depending on whether you believe the word of someone two decades after the war was over—and in this case Germany didn’t really act on it at all. Looking at that track record, you have to wonder if Germany would have been better off not having any spies at all."

"He then returned to Washington and rose to head the C.I.A.’s counter-intelligence division throughout the Cold War.

Angleton did not write detective stories. His nickname was the Poet. He corresponded with the likes of Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, and William Carlos Williams, and he championed William Empson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity.” He co-founded a literary journal at Yale called Furioso. What he brought to spycraft was the intellectual model of the New Criticism, which, as one contributor to Furioso put it, was propelled by “the discovery that it is possible and proper for a poet to mean two differing or even opposing things at the same time.” Angleton saw twists and turns where others saw only straight lines. To him, the spy game was not a story that marched to a predetermined conclusion. It was, in a phrase of Eliot’s that he loved to use, “a wilderness of mirrors.”

Orion Beer Song

This makes me so happy...

Kaki King - Gay Sons of Lesbian Mothers

Candy Claws - Catamaran

Creepy

The XKCD web comic is good sometimes:

Solving for Happiness

Here are some points from a read-worthy longer article on the Lesswrong blog:

Happiness is a pairing between your situation and your disposition. Truly optimizing your life requires adjusting both variables: what happens, and how it affects you.

You are constantly changing your disposition. The question is whether you'll do it with a purpose. Your experiences change you, and you affect those, as well as how you think about them, which also changes you. It's going to happen. It's happening now. Do you even know how it works? Put your intelligence to work and figure it out!

The road to harm is paved with ignorance. Using your capability to understand yourself and what you're doing is a matter of responsibility to others, too. It makes you better able to be a better friend.

You're almost certainly suffering from Ugh Fields: unconscious don't-think-about-it reflexes that form via Pavlovian conditioning. The issues most in need of your attention are often ones you just happen not to think about for reasons undetectable to you.

How not to waste the effort:

Don't wait till you're sad. Only thinking when you're sad gives you a skew perspective. Don't infer that you can think better when you're sad just because that's the only time you try to be thoughtful. Sadness often makes it harder to think: you're farther from happiness, which can make it more difficult to empathize with and understand. Nonethess we often have to think when sad, because something bad may have happened that needs addressing.

Introspect carefully, not constantly. Don't interrupt your work every 20 minutes to wonder whether it's your true purpose in life. Respect that question as something that requires concentration, note-taking, and solid blocks of scheduled time. In those times, check over your analysis by trying to confound it, so lingering doubts can be justifiably quieted by remembering how thorough you were.

Re-evaluate on an appropriate time-scale. Try devoting a few days before each semester or work period to look at your life as a whole. At these times you'll have accumulated experience data from the last period, ripe and ready for analysis. You'll have more ideas per hour that way, and feel better about it. Before starting something new is also the most natural and opportune time to affirm or change long term goals. Then, barring large unexpecte d opportunities, stick to what you decide until the next period when you've gathered enough experience to warrant new reflection.

Elephant Funeral

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/holiday_type/wildlife/article1271944.ece

As they grew closer, we could see a column of elephants, headed by their matriarch, the grandmother (or even great-grandmother) of the herd, her tattered ears indicating great age.

On they came, until they began to assemble around the bloody remains of the baby elephant, some stamping their feet and snorting in the direction of the lion family they knew still to be near. But most would lightly touch and sniff the body with their trunks and then move to a respectable distance, standing in silent groups.

Still more elephants arrived until there were at least 100 in all, the latecomers filtering their way to the body, seemingly paying their respects, then moving to the rear of the congregation.

All the time, the lions watched from the shade of the bushes, great oval eyes unblinking – perhaps like terrorists relishing the extent of the grief they had caused without ever being able to comprehend the depth of that grief.

Then the matriarch abruptly turned away and began to head back along the valley. Others followed until only one female was left. Our Botswanan guide was certain it would be the mother.

Carl Sagan Never Ceases to Amaze

"We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning."

-Carl Sagan

Science and culture could really use another Carl Sagan. There are several wonderful popularizers of science out there (Neil Degrasse Tyson anyone?) but none of them come close to connecting the spiritual and sublime aspects of human living to scientific understanding like Sagan could. There is really a vacuum here and it seems so critical for someone to pick up where he left off. Scientific understanding underlies almost all human progress and it represents the only means we have to defend civilization from catastrophe. Modern popular science and the media that cover it seldom express any kind of complete vision. Science(human understanding, really) is treated like a domain all to itself and is cordoned off from the rest of life, when it's linked inherently with everything we are and do. More and more I get the feeling that if human civilization is to thrive and survive, leaps in technology need to happen, but to happen safely they need to happen in a world where science is culture and religion and sloppy thinking are artifacts of the past. Daily living and the seemingly human need for spiritual understanding need to be brought more in line with discovery and scientific knowledge, and Carl Sagan was supreme in this endeavor.

Ok, that's enough hippie shit for one day.

Going Pear-Shaped

From Wikipedia:

"It describes a situation that went awry, perhaps horribly wrong. A failed bank robbery, for example, could be said to have "gone pear-shaped". Less well known in the US it generated some media interest when British politician Margaret Thatcher used the phrase in front of the world's press at one of her first meetings with President Ronald Reagan, with many reporters being unsure of the meaning of the term."