Ramblings & ephemera
Man, these are beatiful, evocative lyrics by Johnny Mercer:
When an early autumn walks the land and chills the breeze
and touches with her hand the summer trees,
perhaps you’ll understand what memories I own.
There’s a dance pavilion in the rain all shuttered down,
a winding country lane all russet brown,
a frosty window pane shows me a town grown [...]
Posted on January 26th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From Patsy McGarry’s “Church ‘lied without lying’” (Irish Times: 26 November 2009):
One of the most fascinating discoveries in the Dublin Archdiocese report was that of the concept of “mental reservation” which allows clerics mislead people without believing they are lying.
According to the Commission of Investigation report, “mental reservation is a concept developed and much discussed [...]
Posted on December 1st, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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My book, Linux Phrasebook, which is still selling well & still just as useful today as when it came out in 2006 (& will be for another decade or two, given how consistent the Linux command line is), has been translated into Russian. You can find it at this Russian website, where I found out [...]
Posted on November 29th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Gene Weingarten’s “The Peekaboo Paradox: The strange secrets of humor, fear and a guy who makes big money making little people laugh” (The Washington Post: 22 January 2006):
Even before they respond to a tickle, most babies will laugh at peekaboo. It’s their first “joke.” They are reacting to a sequence of events that begins [...]
Posted on November 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Dwight Garner’s “We Are In a State of Three-Alarm Emergency” (The New York Times Paper Cuts Blog: 11 September 2007):
In his brooding and kaleidoscopic introduction to the new “Best American Essays 2007” – a 5,000-word chunk of it is online – David Foster Wallace doesn’t write so much as shred (in the Jerry Garcian [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From David Foster Wallace’s “Introduction” (The Best American Essays 2007):
Here is an overt premise. There is just no way that 2004’s reelection could have taken place—not to mention extraordinary renditions, legalized torture, FISA-flouting, or the
passage of the Military Commissions Act—if we had been paying attention and handling information in a competent grown-up way. ‘We’ meaning [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From David Wiley’s interview of David Foster Wallace, “Transcript of the David Foster Wallace Interview” (The Minnesota Daily: 27 February 1997):
But Plato and John Stuart Mill both take books to talk about different types of pleasure. In my own personal life, I like really arty stuff a lot of the time. But there’s also times [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Steve Paulson’s interview with Robert Wright, “God, He’s moody” (Salon: 24 June 2009):
Do you think religions share certain core principles?
Not many. People in the modern world, certainly in America, think of religion as being largely about prescribing moral behavior. But religion wasn’t originally about that at all. To judge by hunter-gatherer religions, religion was [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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Q: How do you tell an introverted computer scientist from an extroverted computer scientist?
A: An extroverted computer scientist looks at your shoes when he talks to you.
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
very long pause….
Java.
Saying that Java is nice because it works on every OS is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on every gender.
A [...]
Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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Image by Esther_G via Flickr
From Josh Olson’s “I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script” (The Village Voice: 9 September 2009):
It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you’re in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you’re dealing with someone who can’t.
Related posts
Why Picasso charged [...]
Posted on September 16th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, commonplace book, language & literature, on writing | No Comments »
Image by rustybrick via Flickr
From Robert McMillan’s “Security certificate warnings don’t work, researchers say” (IDG News Service: 27 July 2009):
In a laboratory experiment, researchers found that between 55 percent and 100 percent of participants ignored certificate security warnings, depending on which browser they were using (different browsers use different language to warn their users).
…
The researchers [...]
Posted on July 27th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Robert Darnton’s “Google & the Future of Books” (The New York Review of Books: 12 February 2009):
As the Enlightenment faded in the early nineteenth century, professionalization set in. You can follow the process by comparing the Encyclopédie of Diderot, which organized knowledge into an organic whole dominated by the faculty of reason, [...]
Posted on July 15th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Seth Godin’s “Luxury vs. premium” (Seth Godin’s Blog: 17 May 2009):
Luxury goods are needlessly expensive. By needlessly, I mean that the price is not related to performance. The price is related to scarcity, brand and storytelling. Luxury goods are organized waste. …
That doesn’t mean they are senseless expenditures. Sending a signal is valuable if [...]
Posted on July 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Nicholas Carr’s “Sivilized” (Rough Type: 27 June 2009):
Michael Chabon, in an elegiac essay in the new edition of the New York Review of Books, rues the loss of the “Wilderness of Childhood” – the unparented, unfenced, only partially mapped territory that was once the scene of youth.
…
Huck Finn, now fully under the thumb [...]
Posted on July 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
You’re probably right about appreciating limits. The sixties’ movement in poetry to radical free verse, in fiction to radically experimental recursive forms—their legacy to my generation of would-be artists is at least an incentive to ask very seriously [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Roger Ebert’s “The O’Reilly Procedure” (Roger Ebert’s Journal: 14 June 2009):
The seven propaganda devices include:
Name calling — giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence;
Glittering generalities — the opposite of name calling;
Card stacking — the selective use of facts and half-truths;
Bandwagon — appeals to the desire, common [...]
Posted on June 16th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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photo credit: 708718
From Annie Karni’s “Gabbing Taxi Drivers Talking on ‘Party Lines’” (The New York Sun: 11 January 2007):
It’s not just wives at home or relatives overseas that keep taxi drivers tied up on their cellular phones during work shifts. Many cabbies say that when they are chatting on duty, it’s often with their [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
Rock music itself bores me, usually. The phenomenon of rock interests me, though, because its birth was part of the rise of popular media, which completely changed the ways the U.S. was unified and split. The mass media [...]
Posted on May 23rd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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