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 Clive Thompson’s “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” (The New York Times Magazine: 5 September 2008):
In essence, Facebook users didn’t think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?
Social scientists have a name for this [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, science, social software, tech in changing society | No Comments »
photo credit: hans s
From Errol Morris’ “Bamboozling Ourselves (Part 2)” (The New York Times: 28 May 2009):
[Errol Morris:] The Uncanny Valley is a concept developed by the Japanese robot scientist Masahiro Mori. It concerns the design of humanoid robots. Mori’s theory is relatively simple. We tend to reject robots that look too much like [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, history, on writing, science, security, tech in changing society, weird | No Comments »
photo credit: Cia de Foto
From Gene Weingarten’s “Murphy’s Law” (The Washington Post: 3 May 2009):
[My dog] Murphy has a good life, which is the least we humans can do for a dog, in return for what they give us, which is access to the sort of innocence and trust and absence of guile or [...]
Posted on May 7th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book | No Comments »
From Roger Ebert’s “Go gentle into that good night” (Roger Ebert’s Journal: 2 May 2009):
What I expect will most probably happen [when I die] is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function, and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. Perhaps I [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, commonplace book, language & literature, religion, science | No Comments »
From Roger Ebert’s “Go gentle into that good night” (Roger Ebert’s Journal: 2 May 2009):
And there is Shakespeare, who came as close as any man to immortality. In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Whitman:
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, language & literature | No Comments »
From Philip Larkin’s “Aubade“:
I work all day, and get half drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, language & literature | No Comments »
From Steven Weinberg’s “Without God” (The New York Review of Books: 25 September 2008):
Worse, the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: religion, science | 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 Vaughan Bell’s “Ghost Stories: Visits from the Deceased” (Scientific American: 2 December 2008):
The dead stay with us, that much is clear. They remain in our hearts and minds, of course, but for many people they also linger in our senses—as sights, sounds, smells, touches or presences. Grief hallucinations are a normal reaction to bereavement [...]
Posted on December 7th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: religion, science | No Comments »
From Allen Abel and Madeleine Czigler’s “Ireland, Islam and envy” (National Post: 24 June 2008):
According to a Chinese folk tale, there once was a turtle whose wife fell in love with a snake. Too humiliated to watch their pan-reptilian canoodling, the turtle pulled a large green leaf over his eyes. Hence the usage, still current, [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | No Comments »
From Steve Marsh’s “Homage to Mister Berryman” (Mpls St Paul Magazine: September 2008):
Berryman’s last words to Kate came on that January morning—he told her he was going to campus to clean his office. He had never said that before, she says, but Kate, who was attending Al-Anon meetings at the time, was trying “not to [...]
Posted on September 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, language & literature | No Comments »
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 Ben Jones’ Benblog, in February 2003:
Ben on breaking up with a girl: “Archer said last night that getting over a girl is like getting over a cold. You just wake up one day, after the lingering affects are over, and vaguely remember that you were sick.”
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