A few weeks ago I was at a resort in Boca Raton on business, and while there I felt lonesome because it seemed that I wasn’t finding the same appeal others did in the ostentatious beach resort and its fancy clientele. Even young girls knew the difference between the quotidian BMW and the Lamborghini, and cared. But according to Alain de Botton, I might just as well have felt sorry for the rich folks as for myself:
“When you see someone in a Ferrari, don’t think, ‘This is a greedy person.’ Think: ‘This is someone vulnerable and in need of love.'”
via Caterina
“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit,†Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.â€
“The seed-starter works, always, at the edge of a mystery. Though we may take it for granted, we are part of that mystery, along with the fragility, the resilience, the dependability of the green world.”
–Nancy Bubel, The New Seed-Starters Handbook
What makes you feel less bored soon makes you into an addict. What makes you feel less vulnerable can easily turn you into a dick. And the things that are meant to make you feel more connected today often turn out to be insubstantial time sinks — empty, programmatic encouragements to groom and refine your personality while sitting alone at a screen.
—Merlin Mann
So, for myself, random tips and lists that aren’t anchored to solving a real-world problem for a smart but flawed adult with a mind are dead to me.
—Merlin Mann
You like spaghetti, George? I like spaghetti? I like board games. I like grabbing the trifecta with that long shot on top. That ozone smell you get from air purifiers. And I like knowing the space between my ears is immeasurable. Mahler’s first, Bernstein conducting. You’ve got to think about all the things you like and decide whether they’re worth sticking around for. And if they are, you’ll find a way to do this.
Rube, Dead Like Me: Season 1, Episode 2
“Long ago, in the poverty-stricken hills of southern China, a village banished its children to the forest to feed on wild fruits and leaves. Years later, when food stores improved, the children’s parents returned to the woods to reclaim their young.
To their surprise, their offspring had adapted to forest life remarkably well; the children’s white headdresses had dissolved into fur, tails grew from their spines and they refused to come home.”
Lemur slideshow: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/09/22/science/092308-Monkeys_index.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Biologist Pan Wenshi Helps a Region and a Species, the Langur – NYTimes.com.
And nothing more exposes the hypocrisy of financial elites riding the coattails of those who revere small-town religious values than a downturn that highlights the vast gulf in power between the two key components of the conservative coalition. Even cultural conservatives will start to notice that McCains tax policies are geared toward the wealthy investing class and Obamas toward the paycheck crowd. Even the most ardent friends of business have begun to argue that a re-engagement with sensible regulation is essential to restoring capitalisms health.
E. J. Dionne Jr. – Whose Elitism Problem Now? – washingtonpost.com.
“Power is no longer measured in land, labour, or capital, but by access to information and the means to disseminate it… Unless we design and implement alternate information structures which transcend and reconfigure the existing ones, other alternate systems and life styles will be no more than products of the existing process.
Our species will survive neither by totally rejecting nor unconditionally embracing technology – but by humanizing it; by allowing people access to the informational tools they need to shape and reassert control over their own lives.”
–Radical Software, 1970
via active social plastic
Some experts say that people tune things out for good reasons, and that over time boredom becomes a tool for sorting information — an increasingly sensitive spam filter. In various fields including neuroscience and education, research suggests that falling into a numbed trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative at least as often as they are disruptive.
BENEDICT CAREY, “You’re Checked Out, but Your Brain Is Tuned In,” nytimes.com, 8/5/2008