From Dr Deadalus by Mark Rosen

"Rosen's ideas and aspirations are frightening to me because they are such vivid, visceral examples of a certain postmodern or perhaps, more precisely put, post-authentic sensibility we embrace and fear as we pop our Prozacs and Ritalins and then decide to be Jewish and then Episcopalian and then chant with the monks on the same Himalayan mountain via a cheap plane ticket we purchased between jobs and just before we sold our condo in a market rising so fast that when it falls if will sound like all of the precious China plates crashing down from the cabinet - a mess! What a mess!

Until recently, no more than a single major ideological shift was likely to occur in a lifetime, and that one would be long remembered for its conflict and soul-searching. But today it is unusual for several such shifts to take place within a year or even a month, whether in the realm of politics, religion, aesthetic values, personal relationships... quite rare is the man or woman who has gone through life holding firmly to a single ideological vision. More usual is a tendency toward ideological fragments, bits and pieces of belief systems that allow for shifts, revisions, and recombinations."

Bells by Hey Mercedes

Is this the best you have to offer us?
you genius, your hair mussed
by now you must have heard about the whirling world outside
twist a knife in it, i don't care
drain the life from it (I don't care)
if you can fake it you can take them like a photograph.

With a coy sigh in time
your girlfriend's waiting on the line
can't you wait to make her cry?
And they'll remember you alive
as that pain in their unkind invitation tonight
so here's your credit for the lie
that you've been hanging
and over awaiting your reply.

is this the worst you have to peddle us?
scandalous! oh spare us!
by now they must have heard about your worried world inside
pull the covers up, i don't care
call all your lovers up, i don't care
if the fates sing to your face queen of the raincloud club.

i lied when i said we were alike
your best friend's waiting on the line
to compliment your new shine
i can hardly stand to stand here now
to be your stare to admit to all
the pain that you've been painting
and over and i can't bear to stay.

so come on!
sing along!
aren't we chuckling through our curls?
(up to heaven and down to hell)
say it again pal, aren't we bells?

aren't we statues in a story
where we choose our goals of glory
over family and over friends
say it again and again.

aren't we bridges aren't we bells?
aren't we sighing in our cells?
up to heaven and down to hell
say it again pal, aren't we bells?
aren't we bells?

To Dream of Pigs Quotes

Nearing Pusan the railway joined the coast. A rusting coaster sat impaled on the rocks, its holded bow rearing out of the water like a frozen fish gaping for air. In a cove beyond the ever-present security fence white-vested soldiers went through their knee-jerks. The train swung round a headland, exposing mile upon mile of white, rectangular, apartment blocks, like cigarette packets standing end to end. It was my first glimpse of Pusan.

Pusan is South Korea's largest port and second largest city, with a population of four million. It lies at the south-east corner of the Republic, diagonally opposite of Seoul, and is the stepping-off point for the Japanese port of Shimonoseki. Unlike Seoul, which bore the brunt of the changing fortunes of the Korean War, Pusan was never occupied by communist forces and bears none of the visible scars of war. It did, however, in the darkest days of 1950, accomodate four million refugees fleeing from Kim Il Sung, many of whom stayed on. Pusan's cosmopolitanism and refugee legacy saddles the city with the reputation of criminal hotspot.

...Pusan is long and twisted. Its major thoroughfares choke with traffic at all hours. On the map the city resembles a misappen tree, stunted branches spilling outwards.


Any charms Pusan posessed did not reveal themselves lightly. Before the Olympic Games yachtsmen complained about the polluted waters of Suyong Bay, close to a favorite tourist area. Floating garbage threatened to rip off the rudders, and crews refused to enter the water to clean their hulls. This prompted an unprecidented change to Olympic rules, permission being given for the boats to be rasied from the water and cleaned on land.

Nor does Pusan earn brownie points for its official bumph, wish is full of Doland Duck English - excusable, comical and even lovable elsewhere, but not in a city of Pusan's resources. 'The beloved trade mark of Pusan is among Koreans,' declaired one tourist pamphlet, nonsensically.

Pusan seemed even more compressed than Seoul, its hills close and more claustrophobic, its traffic still slower.

Waiting at a bus-stop one blustery evening I was treated to the force of Pusan's stink. Korean drains are covered by paving stones with cut-away hand-holes at either end. The hand-holes permit a free view of the passing sewage and ample opportunity to inhale its stench.

He was aggrivated at Korea's obsession with filching tourists as a means of demonstrating her modernity. He examined my entrance ticket and remarked upon its expense. Not the expense of buying it, but of making it - glossy paper with colour pictures. They were always like this in Korea. Bus tickets would have sufficed, at a fraction of the cost, except that in Korea appearances are everything.

It was, perhaps, disadvantageous to visit Korea after having known Japan, for Japan presents most Western visitors with a shattering dose of culture shock. Korea is subtler, more restrained, offering little to compete with Japan's sheer spectacle - for example, Japan's Sumo wrestlers, her tea economy, lava baths, awesome Mt. Fuji, love hotels, bullet trains, pachinko parlours, street bunting, dragon dances, A-bomb museums in Hiroshima and Nakasaki, the dawn calls of her sweet potato sellers.

Korea's culture has absorbed so much from China, Japan and America, and lost so much through erosion, banishment, and subjugation, that, to her detractors, little remains that can be called truly Korean, other than her ondol underfoot heating, her hangul language, and her kimchi. Korea, I felt, is enjoyed not by seeing but by being. The name 'Chosun' (Land of Morning Calm) hints at the softness of her real charm. A night out in provincial Korea is to wander the market-place or stroll the waterside in some fishing port.

Quotes

There is no praise in being upright, where no one can, or tries to corrupt you.
[Latin: Nulla est laus ibi esse integrum, ubi nemo est, qui aut possit aut conetur rumpere.]
— Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero)

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
— George Bernard Shaw

So may the outward shows be least themselves; The world is still deceived with ornament. In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt But being seasoned with a gracious voice, Obscures the show of evil? In religion, What damned error but some sober brow Will bless it and approve it with a text, Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
— William Shakespeare

No one would talk much in society, if he knew how often he misunderstands others.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.
— Henry Cate Vii

Politics is the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
— Ambrose Pierce

I am not anti-American. But I am strongly pro-Canadian.
— John G. Diefenbaker

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what it is you want to hear.
— Alan Coren

What a crazy world we live in! Trying to treat addiction as a legal problem, and trying to treat criminal misbehaviors using guns as a medical problem! Beam me up, Scotty. Ain't no intelligent life down here.
— Julie Cochrane

Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when you decide how to respond.
— Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein

Fascism is capitalism in decay.
— Lenin (vladimir Ulyanov)

A thief believes everybody steals.
— E.W. Howe

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
— Philip Zimmermann

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency. The second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity. Both bring a permanent ruin.

History, a distillation of rumor.
— Thomas Carlyle Topic: History

Money can't buy happiness; it can, however, rent it.
— Anonymous

The way to resumption is to resume.
— Salmon Portland Chase

You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.
—Indira Gandhi

We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries. —Harry S. Truman Source: None

We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries.
— Harry S. Truman

Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world's first overcommunicated society. Each year we send more and receive less.
— Al Ries

The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
— Joseph Priestley

To be adult is to be alone.
— Jean Rostand

Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.
— Eugene O'neill

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.
— Mitchell Kapor

Whenever anyone says, 'theoretically,' they really mean, 'not really.'.
— Dave Parnas

Art and science have their meeting point in method.
— Paul Dirac

It is useless to send armies against ideas.
— George Brandes

There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.
— James Anthony Froude

A satellite has no conscience.
— Edward R. Murrow

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
— Alfred North Whitehead

The most heroic word in all languages is revolution.
— Eugene Debs

The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal - that you can gather votes like box tops - is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.
— Adlai E. Stevenson

If you don't double-click me, I can't do anything.
— Anonymous

We're all living in a chemical soup.
— Lance A. Wallace

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history—with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
— Mitch Ratliffe

An error is the more dangerous the more truth it contains.
— Henri-frederic

640K [of RAM] ought to be enough for anybody.
— Bill Gates

You cannot feed the hungry on statistics.
— Heinrich Heine

URLs are the 800 numbers of the 1990's.
— Chris Clark

When you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research.
— Lawrence J. Peter

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
— Daniel J. Boorstin

Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.
— John Perry Barlow

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.
— Alexis De Tocqueville

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
— Walter Bagehot

The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and human stupidity.
— Unknown

Science... never solves a problem without creating ten more.
— George Bernard Shaw

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
— Elbert Hubbard

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
— Joseph Snipp

Multimedia? As far as I'm concerned, it's reading with the radio on!
—Andrew Brown

Before we work on artificial intelligence why don't we do something about natural stupidity?
— Steve Polyak

You know you've achieved perfection in design, Not when you have nothing more to add, But when you have nothing more to take away.
— Antoine De Saint-exupery

If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up in a person.
— Ralph Bunche

Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.
— Howard Mumford Jones

This problem, too, will look simple after it is solved.
— Charles Francis Kettering

I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.
— Jim Harkins

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
— Albert Einstein

Expecting a carjacker or rapist or drug pusher to care that his possession or use of a gun is unlawful is like expecting a terrorist to care that his car bomb is taking up two parking spaces. - "Usenet posting in talk.politics.guns".
— Joseph T. Chew

Tourists are terrorists with cameras. Terrorists are tourists with guns.
— Anonymous

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency. The second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity. Both bring a permanent ruin.

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history--with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
— Mitch Ratliffe

An error is the more dangerous the more truth it contains.
— Henri-frederic

When you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research.
— Lawrence J. Peter

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
— Daniel J. Boorstin

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
— Walter Bagehot

Science... never solves a problem without creating ten more.
— George Bernard Shaw

Multimedia? As far as I'm concerned, it's reading with the radio on!
— Andrew Brown

All art exists in the gap between physical object and human experience.

American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis)

I make no comment, lost in my own private maze, thinking about other things: warrants, stock offerings, ESOPs, LBOs, IPOs, finances, refinances, debentures, converts, proxy statements, 8-Ks, 10-Qs, zero coupons, PiKs, GNPs, the IMF, hot executive gadgets, billionaires, KenkichiNakajima, infinity, Infinity, how fast a luxury car should go, bailouts, junk bonds, whether to cancel my subscription to The Economist, the Christmas Eve when I was fourteen and had raped one of our maids, Inclusivity, envyingsomeone's life, whether someone could survive a fractured skull, waiting inairports, stifling a scream, credit cards and someone's passport and a book ofmatches from La Cote Basque splattered with blood, surface surface surface, a Rolls is a Rolls is a Rolls. To Evelyn our relationship is yellow and blue, but to me it's a gray place, most of it blacked out, bombed, footage from the film in my head is mindless shots of stone and any language heard is utterly foreign,automated tellers, women giving birth through their assholes, embryos frozen or scrambled (which is it?), nuclear warheads, billions of dollars, the total destruction of the world, someone gets beaten up, someone else dies, sometimes bloodlessly, more often mostly by a rifle shot, assassinations, comas, life played out as a sitcom, a blank canvas that reconfigure itself into a soap opera. It's an isolation ward that serves only to expose my own severely impaired capacity to feel. I am at its center, out of season, and no one ever asks me for any identification...

Saramago (Blindness)

They were proclaiming the end of the world, redemption through penitence, the visions of the seventh day, the advent of the angel, cosmic collisions, the death of the sun, the tribal spirit, the sap of the mandrake, tiger ointment, the virtue of the sign, the discipline of the wind, the perfume of the moon, the re-vindication of darkness, the power of exorcism, the sign of the heel, the crucifixion of the rose, the purity of lymph, the blood of the black cat, the sleep of the shadow, the rising of the seas, the logic of anthropophagy, painless castration, divine tattoos, voluntary blindness, convex thoughts, or concave, or horizontal or vertical, or sloping, or concentrated, or dispersed, or fleeting, the weakening of the vocal chords, the death of the word...

Phil-Osophies

• Sarcasm is irritating and unsettling and should be used frequently.
• Save a dollar a day and some day you'll be sorry it wasn't two dollars.
• If you say something stupid and no one disagrees, then you know you're the boss.
• Variety is the spice of divorce.
• An egotist is a disgusting, low person who is more interested in himself than he is in me.
• The better the opportunity appears to be, the more likely it is that you don't know all the facts.
• If everyone agrees with me I reconsider.
• Sometimes it is necessary to repeat yourself to make a point. Sometimes.
• Just because you call the shots doesn't mean you're at the right end of the barrel.
• We only owe our children two things: love and hope.
• Never repress anything but your pants.
• Iíd rather be lonely alone than lonely with somebody else.
• I DO understand youóthatís the problem.
• Always take the road less traveled--unless itís through Gary, Indiana.
• If you want to make someone hate you, explain to them, logically and politely, why they are wrong.
• I wash and wear the pants in my family.
• It is dangerous to be right when the boss is wrong.
• I can handle criticism so long as it isnít about me.
• When the heart is full, the head is empty.
• The two most common reasons for losing are: not knowing you're competing in the first place, and not knowing with whom you really are competing.
• We're all a little nearsighted and must take a step back to see things more clearly.
• The best way to kill someone's enthusiasm is to tell them "yes".
• Shit in a giftbox is still shit.
• When your competitionís sleeping, itís best to tiptoe bye.
• You can make your own omelet: either scramble your brains with drugs and alcohol, or just keep your sunny side up.
• Thank God there are only 10 Commandments!
• I don't mind sleeping on an empty stomach so long as it isn't my own.
• Life is only in balance if you play as hard as you work.
• If you stop to consider all the options before you act, you will always know what to do next time.
• "Tact" is when the mind says, "Go to hell!" but the mouth says, "Hope to see you again, real soon."
• Listen to your heart, but use your brain when you open your mouth.
• Don't come on too strong when you hold the winning hand or you'll find yourself playing solitaire.
• The biggest problem with stupid people is they don't know it.
• Friendship, love, success...you can have each only to the extent you are willing to compromise the other two.
• Being worse is no excuse for losing.
• The only thing you can be sure of in New York is death in taxis.
• The stepping stones of life are often made of flesh.
• There are two kinds of people in this world: dumb people; really dumb people; and really, really dumb people.
• There's nothing wrong with promiscuity that a fatal disease wouldn't cure.
• If everyone likes you, you must be doing something wrong.
• There are many ways to measure success, but only one you can spend.
• Spare the rod.
• The only people you should admit your transgressions to are your great, great grandchildren.
• Peace of mind grows in my garden.
• The deeper the thought the more I want a beer.
• You can't win if he has nothing to lose.
• If you don't laugh at yourself once in a while, others will.
• Love goes without saying.
• If you can't find the tune, it's classical. If you find it and lose it, it's jazz.
• What you are is more important than who you are.
• Being divorced means knowing how to maintain a rejection.
• Even your favorite dessert tastes bitter if it's shoved down your throat.
• If success does not buy happiness, what's the point of being happy?
• There's an inverse relationship between availability and desirability.
• If you want people to remember you, tell them something really interesting about them.
• If you canít beat 'em, don't play 'em.
• "Thank you, I would like a banana," is the most you should tell your competitor.
• You are where you eat.
• No matter what the subject, be passionate about it, or forget it.
• An empty closet is the devilís playground.
• Pulling your weight is smarter than pushing your luck.
• If you don't love yourself neither will anyone else.
• Honesty is the best foreplay.
• All I want is someone to hold me. And pay me for it.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbuch J

A great speech is easy to learn by heart and a great poem is easier still. How hard it would be to memorize as many words linked together senselessly, or a speech in a foreign tongue! Sense and understanding are thus critical to the function of memory. Sense is order and order is in the final analysis conformity with our nature. When we speak reasonably, it is our being and our nature that speaks. When we want to incorporate something into our memory, we always search for a sense or another kind of order as a tool to that end. That is why we utilize the notions of genus and species in the case of plants and animals. The practice of forming hypotheses must be considered in this same light: we are obliged to have them because otherwise we would be unable to retain things. And while this is frequently observed, we must return to it again and again. The question is whether everything is legible to us. Certainly experiment as well as reflection enable us to introduce a significance into what is not legible, either to us or at all: thus we see faces or landscapes in the sand, though they are certainly not there. The introduction of symmetry belongs here too, seeing silhouettes in inkblots, for instance. Likewise the gradation we establish in the order of creatures: truly, all of this is not to be found in the things themselves, but in us. In general we cannot recall too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

– Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbuch ‘J,’ No. 392 (1789) in: Schriften und Briefe, vol. 1, p. 710 (W. Promies ed. 1968)(S.H. transl.)

Girlfriend 1.0

Last year a friend of mine upgraded from GirlFriend 1.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it's a memory hog, leaving very little system resources available for other applications. He is now noticing that Wife 1.0 is also spawning Child Processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomena was included in the product brochure or the documentation, though other users have informed him that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application. Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself such that it is always launched at system initialization, where it can monitor all other system activity. He's finding that some applications such as PokerNight 10.3, BeerBash 2.5, and PubNight 7.0 are no longer able to run in the system at all, crashing the system when selected (even though they always worked fine before).

During installation, Wife 1.0 provides no option as to the installation of undesired Plug-Ins such as MotherInLaw 55.8 and BrotherInLaw Beta release. Also, system performance seems to diminish with each passing day.

Some features he'd like to see in the upcoming wife 2.0.

• A "Don't remind me again" button
• Minimize button
• An install shield feature that allows Wife 2.0 be installed with the option to uninstall at anytime without the loss of cache and other system resources.

I myself decided to avoid the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking with Girlfriend 2.0. Even here, however, I found many problems. Apparently you cannot install Girlfriend 2.0 on top of Girlfriend 1.0. You must uninstall Girlfriend 1.0 first. Other users say this is a long standing bug that I should have known about. You'd think they would have fixed such a stupid bug by now. To make matters worse, the uninstall program for Girlfriend 1.0 doesn't work very well, leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system.(Editorial comment: The uninstall button should have an added feature. Upon activation, the user's joystick should be permanently disabled - What do you think? Too harsh?). Another thing: all versions of Girlfriend continually pop up little annoying messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0.

BUG WARNING

Wife 1.0 has an undocumented bug. If you try to install Mistress 1.1 before uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install, claiming insufficient resources.

More applications that won't run with Wife 1.0 include Golfing 2.3, Softball 3.6, and Cubgamewatching 2.7. Applications that run very well with Wife 1.0, however, include Fixthis 1.1, Waitforme 3.5, and Couldupickthisuponthewayhome 5.7!