Commonplace

“ There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her claws sooner or later, trouble will come for him—disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others.[1] —Anton Chekhov

— The Nicest Boy in the World - The New York Review of Books

“ A couple times a month I’m asked to speak at tech, Linux, and PHP student conferences at various types of events, which would be a flattering opportunity if I was a naturally more tactful person and therefore not worried about dropping f-bombs in a room full of technology-persuing Christian undergrads

— v-nessa.net » All Work and No Sleep Makes Nessa a Dull Girl

“ When it comes to Hollywood, Alan Moore can’t catch a break, not that he necessarily wants one. The price of being a visionary is that everyone wants to use your vision to show how much of a visionary they are.

— The Watchmen Film Trailer Creates Buzz For Movie | Top 50 WTF Moments In Comics | UGO.com

“ People use books like law school. They think if they have some piece of paper – a degree, a contract – then people will respect them and then they’ll respect themselves. But self-respect comes from having some sort of vision for one’s life and heading in that direction. And there is no one who can give you that vision – you have to give it to yourself, and before you can feel like you have direction, you have to feel lost — and lost is okay.

— 5 Reasons why you don’t need to write a book » Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk

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Food isn’t about Nutrition
Clothes aren’t about Comfort
Bedrooms aren’t about Sleep
Marriage isn’t about Romance
Talk isn’t about Info
Laughter isn’t about Jokes
Charity isn’t about Helping
Church isn’t about God
Art isn’t about Insight
Medicine isn’t about Health
Consulting isn’t about Advice
School isn’t about Learning
Research isn’t about Progress
Politics isn’t about Policy

The above summarizes much of my contrarian world view. (What else should go on this list?) When I say “X is not about Y,” I mean that while Y is the function commonly said to drive most X behavior, in fact some other function Z drives X behavior more.

— Overcoming Bias: Politics isn’t about Policy

“ Drink coffee until it hurts, and you’ll get stronger!

— ZhurnalyWiki: StrongCoffee

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“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about, quote, the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

“This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.”

— {David Foster Wallace: An appreciation} {} — chicagotribune.com

Ellen Forney » Please Come!

“ By improbably (and I’ve often thought, mistakenly) landing a brief berth in the Technorati Top 100, 43 Folders was also “discovered” by an unspeakable black mildew of PR people who, on their clients’ behalf, “reach out” to bloggers with the gruesome goal of getting them to trade their credibility for access to free crap and “embargoed” press releases. Mm, pinch me. And, somewhere in there, I heard somebody say, “Marketing is the tax you pay for being unremarkable,” and I dreamed of having that phrase printed on a giant hammer.

— Four Years | 43 Folders

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In a recent critical essay about economist-philosopher Friedrich Hayek, Jesse Larner notes:

… Hayek understood at least one very big thing: that the vision of a perfectible society leads inevitably to the gulag. Experience should have taught us by now that human societies are jerry-built structures, rickety towers of ad hoc solutions to unforeseen problems. Their development is evolutionary, and as in biological evolution, they do not have natural end-states. They are what they are continuously becoming. Comprehensive models of how society should work reject the wisdom of solutions that work and deny the legitimacy (indeed, from Lenin to Mussolini to Mao to Ho to Castro to Qutb, deny the very right to exist) of individuals who demonstrate anti-orthodox wisdom. Defenders of these models are required by their own rigidity to invent the category of the counterrevolutionary. To Hayek, this is what socialism, communism, and collectivism—he makes little distinction between them—mean: the dangerous illusion of perfectibility. …

— ZhurnalyWiki: Illusion of Perfectibility

The Avenging Unicorn Playset

» ZhurnalyWiki: Rule 6

“ And when the interchangeable young man says, after the cricket game on the lawn, “Ripping performance, old boy! Come up to the house and meet the mater,” well, that touches all my Anglophile buttons.

— Doctor Who: Black Orchid » Comics Worth Reading

Le Pétomane

“ I’ve never been impressed by middle-ground or art-of-the-possible stuff,” he says. “Why would people bother with politics if that’s all they wanted to do? If you weren’t trying to see if you could expand the art of the possible, break the limits of the feasible, redefine it, expand it—why would you bother? Who wants to be just a manager?

— ‘Christopher Hitchens’, Prospect Magazine issue 146 May 2008 - Printer Friendly Article