Home...

When there is nowhere
that you have determined
to call your own,
then no matter where you go
you are always going home.

--Muso Soseki

Right Through the Heart

Another quote from the NY Times article in the previous post:

When I was a child, it wasn’t unusual for my 15-minute walk home from school to begin under clear skies and end in a blizzard. I remember once, when I was 8 years old, stumbling into my house, my hair covered in powder and my eyelashes frozen together, and screaming, “Why do we live here?!” My mother took my face in her warm hands and said, “Because it’s where people love you.”

At the time, that struck me as the lamest statement ever uttered by a human being. But today, as I sit under the California sun, it only strikes me as halfway lame, and maybe even less than that.

— TIM LONG, a writer for “The Simpsons”

I seem to have something in my eye...

Quote of the D'eh

From a New York Times editorial celebrating Canada Day:

Back home, hockey highlights lead off SportsCenter. That is the height of civilization.

— SEAN CULLEN, a comedian

Damn straight.

If You Can't Say Something Nice...

It's hardly a phenomenon unique to Japan, but some politicians really should learn to keep their mouths shut. With a declining population and an almost certain labor shortage looming on the horizon, Japanese lawmaker Jiro Kawasaki ruminates on the topic of immigration:

We should stop letting unskilled laborers into Japan. We should make sure that even the three-K jobs [*] are paid well, and that they are filled by Japanese [...] I do not think that Japan should ever become a multiethnic society. [The United States has been] a failure on the immigration front...

I don't imagine anyone has ever accused Mr. Kawasaki of being overly ironic...

I have to admit, though, that the image of a Japanese politician claiming the immigration policies of another country (any country, really) are a "failure" strikes me as rather rich, whatever one's opinion might be on the subject. I would be the first to agree that Japan should approach the topic of immigration cautiously (hell, I dont feel like being accosted by deadbeat Canadians on every street corner, bumming change and smokes and generally making a nuisance of themselves). Comments like Mr. Kawasaki's, however, betray both a fear of "the foreign" and an utter ignorance of what a "multiethnic" society is. I might add a somewhat more harsh criticism: also evident here is a certain mental laziness--immigration is a difficult subject, so it'd be best to avoid it altogether. It remains to be seen how much longer "leaders" like Mr. Kawasaki can avoid the subject before it jumps up and bites them in the ass.

[*] Kitsui, kitanai, kiken — hard, dirty and dangerous.

Stupid or Ironic? Who Can Tell These Days?

Just consider this the Ministry of Truth...

--Dick Wadhams, chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, discussing a Republican "war room" set up at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

[Via Fark.]

From the Department of Stupid Questions

Prolegomenon to a wingnut theory of higher education:

Why bother attending college if you can't play the sport you love?
--Phylis Schafly, wingnut

[Via Sadly, No!]

Quote of the Week

"All I know is that I know nothing."
--Famously attributed to Socrates

Socrates never said any such thing. Finally the record has been set straight.

On Orthodoxy

Another nice quote from 1984 (Chapter 5):

"[...] Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

Personally, I quite like thinking...

Duckspeak

Anytime I read about politics or religion these days, I'm reminded of this passage in Orwell's 1984 (Chapter 5):

'There is a word in Newspeak,' said Syme, 'I don't know whether you know it: duckspeak, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.'

Bleak and Black and White

Sorry to (as usual) beat an idea to death, but I'm a) a little bored, and b) trying to think about something other than going to the dentist tomorrow. I haven't been to the dentist since I was fourteen years old...

"Ha, ha, ha! You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next," you cry, with a laugh.

"Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment," I answer. I had toothache for a whole month and I know there is. In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan [...]

Those moans express in the first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating to your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same while she does not. They express the consciousness that you have no enemy to punish, but that you have pain; the consciousness that in spite of all possible Wagenheims you are in complete slavery to your teeth; that if someone wishes it, your teeth will leave off aching, and if he does not, they will go on aching another three months; and that finally if you are still contumacious and still protest, all that is left you for your own gratification is to thrash yourself or beat your wall with your fist as hard as you can, and absolutely nothing more [...]

I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache, on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan, not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by progress and European civilisation, a man who is "divorced from the soil and the national elements," as they express it now-a-days. His moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days and nights.

And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself no sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he is only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his whole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha'porth of faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently, more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well, in all these recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous pleasure...

--Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground (Part I, Chapter IV)

I was somewhat surprised earlier today to discover that "abscess" is not spelled "abcess". Time for "rescess"...

This Month in Existentialism

Not Even Wrong

Umm... what the fuck does "existentialism" mean again?

As the Joni Mitchell song says, options traders are looking at life from both sides now. This bout of existentialism follows Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's decision to lower interest rates by 50 basis points (a half-percentage point).

In English we are learning about existentialism. In this philosophy, life is meaningless.

When all those spirited mental wrestling matches you have about existentialism start growing old (yeah, right!), you can always put an end to the debate with cogito ergo sum [sic]. René Descartes, the 17th-century French philosopher, coined the phrase as a means of justifying reality. According to him, nothing in life could be proven except one's thoughts. Well, so he thought, anyway.

Try This

At bottom, every human being knows very well that he is in this world just once, as something unique, and that no accident, however strange, will throw together a second time into a unity such a curious and diffuse plurality: he knows it, but hides it like a bad conscience why? From fear of his neighbour who insists on convention and veils himself with it. But what is it that compels the individual human being to fear his neighbour, to think and act herd-fashion, and not to be glad of himself? A sense of shame, perhaps, in a few rare cases. In the vast majority it is the desire for comfort, inertia - in short, that inclination to laziness [...]

Stumbling across quotes like this reminds me why I am the way I am. I am...

Have You Ever Been to Sea, Billy?**

Adventure and Romance on the High Seas

Being the jaded type of guy that I am, it's not often that I'm startled out of my boredom by something that I've happened to have read. This caught my attention, though:

Almost everybody in the fishing business has had sex with a manta at some point...

--Comedian and ex-fisherman Taro Makeburu

Something to think about next time you're watching National Geographic or old Jacques Cousteau programs...

[** No Sir, but I've been blown ashore many times!]

The legendary Captain Highliner

Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

[William Blake, "The Tiger"]

At the Novelty Shop

This is what I thought: for the most banal event to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell.

--Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea (Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1964. p. 56)

Sigh... this is the kind of crap that passes through my mind these days whenever I sit down to "blog". Although I'm essentially an existentialist myself [yes, yes, I know already!], I think Sartre was a bit of a whiny wanker. I mean, look at the title of the book I took the above quote from. Nausea. Nausea? Was he gut-punched or something? Well, yeah, but only "figuratively". Personally I've never had too much trouble telling the difference between myself and a rock on the ground (although I'll have to concede that others may have more difficulty), but if I were gut-punched (literally or figuratively), I somehow doubt that "nausea" would be the first word to spring to my lips to describe the attendant emerging sensations. More likely I would utter something involving the words "puke" or "barf". But that's just me.

Quote(s) of the Week

Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.
--Richard Rorty, New York Times Magazine, 1990



(1) [An ironist] has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself.
--Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p.73

Quote of the Week

Our loathing of dirt may be so great as to prevent our
cleaning ourselves--"justifying" ourselves.

--Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil (Chapter IV, Apophthegms and Interludes, 119)

'Nuff said...

Quote(s) of the Week

I had haemorrhoids for five years and nothing gave me relief. But six months ago, I started drinking half a glass of my urine every morning and I am practically healed...

For several years I haven't had a hair on my head, but since I started drinking my urine it's started growing again - it's extraordinary.

--testimonials on behalf of "urine therapy" (urinotherapy)

'Nuff said...

...er, wait a minute... "'nuff said" my ass... cures haemorrhoids and baldness...?

Quote of the Week

Beer is the basis of modern static civilization. [...] before beer was discovered, people used to wander around and follow goats from place to place.
--Charlie Bamforth (Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Brewing Science, University of California, Davis)

'Nuff said...

Quote of the Week

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.
--Kurt Vonnegut

'Nuff said...

[Thanks Daniel, the Guy in the Desert]