Ramblings & ephemera
This quotation is directly about politics, but it’s about anyone – or even anything – we emotionally attach ourselves to.
From Glenn Greenwald’s “My friend the president” (Salon: 8 December 2009):
Those who venerated Bush because he was a morally upright and strong evangelical-warrior-family man and revere Palin as a common-sense Christian hockey mom are similar [...]
Posted on December 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, politics, religion | No Comments »
From David Foster Wallace’s “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub: Seven Days In The Life Of The Late, Great John McCain” (Rolling Stone: 13 April 2000):
The weird thing is that the word “leader” itself is cliché and boring, but when you come across somebody who actually is a real leader, that person isn’t cliché [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, language & literature, politics | No Comments »
From THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE: A Talk with John Gottman (Edge: 14 April 2004):
So far, his surmise is that “respect and affection are essential to all relationships working and contempt destroys them. It may differ from culture to culture how to communicate respect, and how to communicate affection, and how not to do it, but [...]
Posted on February 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: science | No Comments »
From danah boyd’s “Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing Community Into Being on Social Network Sites” (First Monday: December 2006)
John’s reference to “gateway Friends” concerns a specific technological affordance unique to Friendster. Because the company felt it would make the site more intimate, Friendster limits users from surfing to Profiles beyond four degrees (Friends [...]
Posted on December 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, social software, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Federico Biancuzzi’s interview with security researchers Greg Hoglund & Gary McGraw, authors of Exploiting Online Games, in “Real Flaws in Virtual Worlds” (SecurityFocus: 20 December 2007):
The more I dug into online game security, the more interesting things became. There are multiple threads intersecting in our book: hackers who cheat in online games and are [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, security, social software, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Evelyn Nieves’s “Slab City Journal; For Thousands, a Town of Concrete Slabs Is a Winter Retreat” (The New York Times: 18 February 2001):
Every winter, when the Winnebagos and pickups shake the desert off Beal Road like a small earthquake, Ben Morofsky gets wistful for the 120-degree days of summer, and the peace of living [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, fiction | Comments Off
From Charlie LeDuff’s “Parked in a Desert, Waiting Out the Winter of Life” (The New York Times: 17 December 2004):
Directions to purgatory are as follows: from Los Angeles drive east past Palm Springs into the bowels of the Mojave Desert. Turn south at the stench of the Salton Sea. Proceed down Highway 111 to the [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, fiction | Comments Off
From Daniel A. Nathan’s “The Big Fix” (Legal Affairs: March/April 2004):
THE BLACK SOX SCANDAL was the sports crime of the 20th century. In a complicated and poorly conceived and executed conspiracy, several prominent Chicago White Sox ballplayers teamed up with gamblers to lose the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. …
Of those artfully deceitful [...]
Posted on June 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, law, security | Comments Off
From Geoffrey Gagnon’s “King James I, of Michigan” (Legal Affairs: September/October 2005):
One letter that isn’t on display is the one that James Jesse Strang said he received from Smith just before the Mormon leader was murdered in June 1844. In the letter, which now resides in a university library, Smith bequeaths the nascent Mormon Church [...]
Posted on May 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics, religion | Comments Off
From The New Yorker’s “The Disappearing Poet” (4 July 2005):
There is no more volatile compound known to man than that of decorum and despair. — Anthony Lane, on Weldon Kees
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Posted on May 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, language & literature | Comments Off
From The New Yorker’s “The Disappearing Poet” (4 July 2005):
[Weldon] Kees himself was toiling on a script, a spy thriller called “Gadabout” … Kees was introduced as “Mr. Weldon Kees, poet, painter, artist, etcetera, composer, critic, etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum.”
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Posted on May 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, language & literature, on writing, true stories | Comments Off
From James Grimmelmann’s “Life, Death, and Democracy Online“:
… The necessity of a ‘Quit’ option is obvious; no adventure game yet invented can force an unwilling player to continue playing. She can always give the game the three-finger salute, flip the power switch, or throw her computer in the junk heap. …
Banishment is the absolute worst [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, politics, social software, tech in changing society, technology, writing ideas | Comments Off
From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (127):
Men interpreted [Jefferson Davis] as they saw him, and for the most part they considered him argumentative in the extreme, irascible, and a seeker after discord. A Richmond editor later wrote, for all to read, that Davis was “ready for any quarrel with any and [...]
Posted on April 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | Comments Off
From The Scotsman’s “Men, you have 30 seconds to impress women“:
HALF of all women make their minds up within 30 seconds of meeting a man about whether he is potential boyfriend material, according to a study on speed-dating.
The women were on average far quicker at making a decision than the men during some 500 speed [...]
Posted on April 15th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, science, social software | Comments Off
From The Washington Post’s “Bringing Botnets Out of the Shadows“:
Nicholas Albright’s first foray into some of the darkest alleys of the Internet came in November 2004, shortly after his father committed suicide. About a month following his father’s death, Albright discovered that online criminals had broken into his dad’s personal computer and programmed it to [...]
Posted on April 8th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security, writing ideas | Comments Off
From danah boyd’s “Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad?“:
No, it is not just a moral panic that could make MySpace a fad. The primary value right now has to do with identity production and sharing, practices that are more critical to certain populations at certain times in their lives and it is possible [...]
Posted on April 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: social software | Comments Off
From The New York Times‘ “1 Cafe, 1 Gas Station, 2 Roads: America’s Emptiest County“:
At last count (by Sheriff Hopper toting it up in his head), 16 people make Mentone their home and 55 others are spread throughout the rest of Loving County’s 645 square miles of parched, salty West Texas grassland and rattlesnakes  [...]
Posted on February 25th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, politics | Comments Off
From MSNBC’s “75-year-old jewel thief looks back“:
When Doris Payne went to work, she stepped into her fancy dress, high heels and donned a wide-brimmed hat. Her creamy, mocha skin was made up just so, her handbag always designer. Sometimes a pair of plain gold earrings would do. Always, she looked immaculate, well-to-do. …
New York. Colorado. [...]
Posted on January 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, fiction | Comments Off
