"There`s something about approaching universal truths with the simplicity of the acoustic guitar. You can take it anywhere and it helps me reach listeners of all ages and walks of life." -- Jim Croce (b. 1943-01-10, d. 1973-09-20)
"I couldn't love a man who commands me - any more than I could love one who lets himself be commanded by me." -- Jacquotte Delahaye
<innocent-look>(What, is it Talk Like A Pirate Day today?)</innocent-look>
"The days grow short; but though the falling sun
To the glad swain proclaims his day's work done,
Night's pleasing shades his various talk prolong,
And yield new subjects to my various song.
For now, the corn-house filled, the harvest home,
The invited neighbors to the husking come;
A frolic scene, where work, and mirth, and play,
Unite their charms, to chase the hours away."
-- Joel Barlow (n. 1754-03-24, d. 1812-12-26)
"The Hasty Pudding", 1793
Chag Sameach to my friends celebrating Sukkot!
"What was important was that my two assistants were scared. They were trying hard not to show it, but in doing so, each was dropping into old patterns, slipping behind old character masks. Guido was playing his 'tough gangster' bit to the hilt, while Massha was once more assuming her favorite 'vamp' character with a vengeance. The bottom line, though, was that, scared or not, they were willing to back my move or die trying. It would have been touching, if it weren't for the fact that it meant they were counting on me for leadership. That meant I had to stay calm and confident ... no matter how scared I felt myself. It only occured to me as an afterthought that, in many ways, leadership was the mask I was learning to slip behind when things got tight. It made me wonder briefly if anyone ever really knew what they were doing or felt truly confident, or if life was simply a mass game of role-playing." -- Skeeve, in Myth-ing Persons by Robert Lynn Asprin, 1984
"The guns and bombs, the rockets and the warships, all are symbols of human failure." -- Lyndon Johnson (b. 1908-08-27, d. 1973-01-22; US President 1963-1969)
From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-08-29:
"[T]o be an American, I think, is to trust and be trusted by a certain kind of system, a Constitution which guarantees safety from illegal search and seizure, the right to assemble, excoriate the president, to do whatever, really, we want to do. And the fact that I am free means, of course, that the system is still working. But the un-Americans are sort of whittling away at our system. And, frankly, that's not the kind of America that I believe in and I think most people believe in. I think it's disgusting, and I think it's un-American." - William Vollman, journalist and novelist, from an interview on NPR discussing the FBI's investigations of him.
[ http://www.npr.org/2013/08/22/214392632/w
riter-william-vollmann-uncovers-his-fbi-f ile]
(submitted to the mailing list by Jeff Copeland)
"That which God said to the rose,
and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty,
He said to my heart,
and made it a hundred times more beautiful."
--
Rumi (b. 1207-09-30, d. 1273-12-17)
[via
wikiquote]
(Okay, Rumi wasn't Jewish -- but an appropriate thought for Yom Kippur nonetheless, I hope?)
"Publishers seem unwilling to sell their books on Amazon for more than a few years after their initial publication. The data suggest that publishing business models make books disappear fairly shortly after their publication and long before they are scheduled to fall into the public domain. Copyright law then deters their reappearance as long as they are owned." -- Paul J. Heald, quoted in "The Hole in Our Collective Memory: How Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish" by Rebecca J. Rosen The Atlantic, 2013-07-30
"Copyright advocates have long (and successfully) argued that keeping books copyrighted assures that owners can make a profit off their intellectual property, and that that profit incentive will "assure [the books'] availability and adequate distribution." The evidence, it appears, says otherwise." -- Rebecca J. Rosen, in the same article.
To my friends celebrating Yom Kippur tonight/tomorrow, may you be sealed for a good year in the book of life.
"The word 'redistribution' implies that there is a distribution that is default, and that we redistribute when we modify the distribution away from it. This, of course, is wrong. There is no default distribution. All distributions are the consequence of any number of institutional design choices, none of which are commanded by the fabric of the universe. [...]
"These are very basic examples, but literally every single institutional choice that is made surrounding the economy sets the stage for the distribution that results [...]
"So there is no baseline default distribution against which we can measure redistribution. Instead, there are a multiplicity of possible distributions, none of which is more natural, or less interventionist, or whatever than any other. All of these possible distributions can, in a sense, be called redistributive relative to all the other possible distributions. But calling them redistributive tells us nothing more than that they differ from each other.
"Given the incoherent nature of 'redistribution' as an objective category, the only thing we are really left to do is debate about which distribution we want." [...]
-- Matt Bruenig, 2012-09-20
"How we got to this point is an interesting study in reactionary politics, fear-mongering and a disconcerting willingness of the American public to accept almost anything in the name of 'security.' Conned and frightened, our nation demands not actual security, but security spectacle. And although a reasonable percentage of passengers, along with most security experts, would concur such theater serves no useful purpose, there has been surprisingly little outrage. In that regard, maybe we've gotten exactly the system we deserve." -- Patrick Smith, "The Airport Security Follies", The New York Times, 2007-12-28
"Many others have joined relatively macho professions or attempted risky behaviors, such as reaching the summit of Mt. Everest for the first time on Coronation Day in 1953. Their purpose was a form of self-administered reparative therapy.
"This self-repair can be cloaked in a religious vestment, as was my experience, or it can be completely secular in nature, but the key point lies in the attempt to cure oneself of the feelings, the profoundly intimate knowledge that you're female, even though everyone else perceives you as male, or vice versa. The process usually proceeds for years, often decades, before the erosion of one's resistance to the truth has been completed and you're left with nothing but the raw truth. At that point, should you reach it, you either engage with your truth or take your life. Some people never get to that point and are able to run and hide forever; others come up short in childhood or adolescence. The majority have made it to adulthood, with all the trappings that that involves, before the executive decision must be confronted."
-- Dana Beyer, 2013-08-19
[Personal note: SF fandom partially short-circuited that crisis for me, by providing me an opportunity to start acknowledging and exploring my identity early, before I hit that do-or-die point. But the pressure she describes, the erosion of resistance, is familiar to me even if I never hit that absolute crisis point with it. I was fortunate.]
"Hard statistical studies repeatedly find that there is no better way to predict ethnocentrism than to measure political conservatism."
[...]
"In 1920s America, conservatives lobbied for lower immigration quotas for Irish, Italians, Jews, and Poles, whom they called 'inferior races.' Ninety years later, the immigrants were different and the politicians shied away from overt prejudice, but conservatives were still the group most opposed to immigration."
-- Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature (Prometheus Books, 2013), excerpted at Alternet
From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-01-26:
"Even what is most unnatural is part of nature." -- Georg Christoph Tobler (1757-1812), from "Die Natur".
(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)
"Since air quotes are so annoying, I'm going to start doing
air italics, where I just lean to the side when I want to
emphasize something." -- Emily Toffelmire (@klickitatstreet),
2011-10-14 (thanks to
![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
realinterrobang for
quoting this earlier)
An unfortunate earworm: my brain keeps trying to play the last minute or so of Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain" over top of Alice Cooper's "School's Out". It did this to me over the weekend, too.
"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."
-- Oscar Wilde
[thanks to
blueeowyn]
"Doing what's right isn't the problem. It is knowing what's right." -- Lyndon Johnson (b. 1908-08-27, d. 1973-01-22; US President 1963-1969)
Today is:
Gregorian: 2013 September 05
Julian: 2013 August 23
Hebrew: 5774 Tishri 01 -- Happy New Year!
Islamic: 1434 Shawwal 29
Persian: 1392 Shahrivar 14
Mayan: 0.0.0.13.0.0.12.18
"In the long run it is no easier to compare poets with poets than it is to compare peaches with blueberries." -- from "E. E. Cummings: Poet of the Heart", Time, 1962-09-14
[To my Jewish friends: L'Shana Tovah!]
"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." -- Frederik Pohl (b. 1919-11-26, d. 2013-09-02)
"War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known." -- Thomas Hobbes (b. 1588-04-05, d. 1679-12-04)
Just a quick reminder that we're playing this afternoon at the Virginia Scottish Games at Great Meadow, in The Plains, VA -- hope to see some of you there!
From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-05-21:
"We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about." -- Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, quoted in The Atlantic.
(submitted to te mailing list by Mike Krawchuk)
"Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good." -- Alice May Brock
"You just don't want to go to your grave in what you believe is the wrong body." -- Ellen Clark Hampton, quoted in an article about a book about her transition[yes, it appears to be Yet Another all-about-the-changing book, and the article isn't perfect pronoun-wise, but I liked this quote]
"It's going to be weird when Fox News accuses Obama of making this speech about race all about race." -- @indecision, 2013-08-28
[I'm afraid to go look at Fox to find out whether this joke has already come true.]
The Homespun Ceilidh Band will be performing at the 40th Annual Virginia Scottish Games this Sunday, 1 September (at Great Meadow, in The Plains, VA, as usual, but in a new part of the site -- see their web site). Look for us in the Fiddle Tent (which looks like it's much closer to the entrance in the new layout). We're scheduled for 3:30 in the afternoon, though that might shift a little earlier or later depending on how long the fiddle competition takes earlier in the day.
Peat and Barley has a set at 1:30, Celtic Cross at 2:30, and if you want to make a whole weekend of it, The Devil's Tailors will be playing the day before. The festival opens at 9:00 AM an closes at 6:00 PM. Admission:
Two day adult $30
Single day adult $20
Children 5 - 12 $5
Under 5 Free
Children 12 and under free on Sunday
This'll be a little louder and livelier than our performance last weekend at the Battle of Bladensburg -- more of us will be there and we'll have more room, to start with. So to everyone who complains that we don't play on that side of the Potomac often enough (which, true, we don't), come on out for a fun day of festival and catch us in the Fiddle Tent in the afternoon!
"In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny. All life is interrelated, and all men are interdependent. The agony of the poor diminishes the rich, and the salvation of the poor enlarges the rich. We are inevitably our brothers' keeper because of the interrelated structure of reality." -- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (b. 1929-01-15, d. 1968-04-04)
From "In California, a Champion for Police Cameras", by Ian Lovett, The New York Times, 2013-08-21:
In the first year after the cameras were introduced here in February 2012, the number of complaints filed against officers fell by 88 percent compared with the previous 12 months. Use of force by officers fell by almost 60 percent over the same period.</i>
[...]
"When you put a camera on a police officer, they tend to behave a little better, follow the rules a little better," Chief Farrar said. "And if a citizen knows the officer is wearing a camera, chances are the citizen will behave a little better."
"The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men." -- Lyndon Johnson (b. 1908-08-27, d. 1973-01-22; US President 1963-1969)
[Posting this today, instead of on Johnson's birthday tomorrow, 'cause it seemeed appropriate to have a quotation about voting on an anniversary of an important date in the history of voting in the US. (Yeah, I do realize this timing makes the heavy repetition of 'man'/'men' a little jarring.)]
Fom the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-08-14:
"I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what's going on--the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise." -- Ladar Levison, owner of Lavabit, a secure e-mail service. Levison shut the firm down this month when he felt he could no longer guarantee the privacy of clients in the face of U.S. government information requests.
(submitted to the mailing list by Mike Krawchuk)
"It's funny how everything that starts with the word 'adult' generally indicates 'sex' (or booze), and yet, even as adults, we're discouraged from talking openly about it. It's impolite dinner conversation, it's not considered appropriate for small talk. Aside from weather and food, I say, what's a better getting-to-know-you conversation topic than sex and sexual preferences? Right?
"This may be why I'm so popular at parties."
-- Danielle Corsetto, author/artist of Girls With Slingshots, interviewed by Jamal Registre; published 2013-07-24
A subset of The Homespun Ceilidh Band will be playing on-and-off at the 18th Annual Battle of Bladensburg Encampment at Riversdale (War of 1812) this afternoon. From the page I just linked to:
This FREE family-friendly event features American and British War of 1812 troops, including Ship's Company, Baltimore United Volunteers, and Aisquith's Sharp Shooters. Kids, you might even get recruited for the American militia! Check out cavalry and horseback demonstrations with the Maryland Light Dragoons, too! Take a peek into camp life with demos, gunnery drills, cannon firings, and kitchen and camp displays throughout the afternoon.
We've got children's activities at the ready, too! Kids can enjoy story time with an author, arts and crafts, and even try on period dresses and uniforms.
(A week from tomorrow, the whole band will be at the Virginia Scottish Games. I'll
Some of you may have noiticed that I'm not at Pennsic this year. The rest of you won't have noticed because our paths don't cross that often there or because you don't go to Pennsic. (And some won't see this because you don't check social media from Pennsic.) Anyhow, I'm not at Pennsic and I'm trying not to obsess over that even though it's kind of a big deal -- this is the first one I've missed since 1986, the first one I went to.
I'm not there for a bunch of reasons, any two of which I pobably would have stubborned my way past, but they added up. It's tempting at this point to say I'm having a sucky year, but earlier in the year were my fun birthday dinner and the trip to Cyprus (a very big deal, a very good thing!), so it's more accurate to say I'm having a really sucky summer. I also missed Conterpoint and Baitcon. (I actually got most of the wall-of-instruments loaded into the van for Conterpoint, but wore myself out so badly doing so that I never made it out of the driveway. A week later I finally managed to get it all unloaded again. Frustrating.)
So, since I haven't been writing as much as I ought, here's what's been up, some little things, some inconvenient things, some big-but-can't-tell-how-scary-yet things:
( state-of-me lately )As long as I'm in babbling-catch-up mode ...
I don't really have a good closing note in mind, and I'm sure I've left stuff out. I'll close with a not-exactly-random musing that's bounced around in my head for a couple of months: do "polymath" and "autodidact" go together more often than not?
"Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world." -- Eleanor Roosevelt (b. 1884-10-11, d. 1962-11-07)
From "Bradley Manning and the Two Americas" by Quinn Norton:
Ellsberg related the story of a panel on which he debated his own actions and those like him, with someone who seemed to him a surprisingly vigorous opponent. "I asked him after we'd had a debate, whether we really disagreed as much as had appeared in the debate," Ellsberg continued, "And he said 'Oh, I think you're evil.' That was a little startling. And I said really? Why do you think that? He said 'You undermine authority and that's evil.'"
There's a lot more
thought provoking bits than that in it -- take the time to read
it through. (Thanks to
![[info] - personal](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twistedchick
for
linking to it).
"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." -- Thomas Jefferson (b. 1743-04-13, d. 1826-07-04, US President 1801-1809), 1786-01-28
"When I arrived, I was told that Madison city council member Mark Clear had already been arrested, while he was singing 'This Land Is Your Land.' This seemed to be an escalation, since he was the first currently serving elected official to be rounded up in the more than 200 arrests that Scott Walker's capitol police have made in the last few weeks. [...]" -- Matthew Rothschild, 2013-08-15 at The Progressive
"When local elected officials and magazine editors are being arrested, real damage is done to the rule of law and to the broad understanding of basic liberties." -- John Nichols, 2013-08-16 blogging at The Nation, referring to the arrest of Mark Clear as mentioned above, and the arrest of Matthew Rothschild a few minutes later
"It's bad enough to prosecute and imprison sources. It's worse still to imprison journalists who report the truth. But to start detaining the family members and loved ones of journalists is simply despotic. Even the Mafia had ethical rules against targeting the family members of people they felt threatened by. But the UK puppets and their owners in the US national security state obviously are unconstrained by even those minimal scruples.
"If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further. Beyond that, every time the US and UK governments show their true character to the world - when they prevent the Bolivian President's plane from flying safely home, when they threaten journalists with prosecution, when they engage in behavior like what they did today - all they do is helpfully underscore why it's so dangerous to allow them to exercise vast, unchecked spying power in the dark."
-- Glenn Greenwald, 2013-08-18, regarding the detention of his partner for nine hours at Heathrow under 'antiterrorism' pretenses (the questioning was all about the story Greenwald is working on about the NSA leaks, not terrorism).
"I'll let you in on a secret: SF Fans never get old. We don't. Oh, sure, we age. We die. But we retain, for all our lives, that sense of wonder that made us say as kids, 'I love these stories about worlds beyond mine, and future times beyond mine; about what's possible, and what's not possible but should be. I. Want. More.' We retain it, or we stop being fans. And that sense of wonder keeps us young. And that sense of wonder also feeds on the hope and enthusiasm of others who have it. Not in any vampiric way (though Marty fancied himself a vampire), but in a way that gives even as it takes, a symbiosis. Two fans together, if all is as it should be, feed each others' level of excitement." -- Steven H. Wilson, 2013-07-22, in the middle of trying to describe Marty Gear, whose mmorial service is this afternoon in Savage, Maryland.
From the same page, specifically about Marty:
"My kids lost their grandmother in 2003, and it was devastating. When Marty came into our lives in this way, it was as if they'd gained another Grandfather. And with his passing, it's as if they've lost one.
"And with his passing, I've read on Facebook how many kids in Fandom feel they lost a Grandfather last Thursday night. And that just brings home another amazing thing about Marty: Everyone felt important to him when they were with him. Dozens, hundreds of us felt accepted into his family. That was just Marty.
"Marty paid it forward. In the same way that the great Robert Heinlein advocated repaying those who have helped us and asked nothing in return, he helped others as he had been helped. Marty took that welcome that Doc Smith and the others gave him on his first convention visit, stretched it over the decades, and shared it with us all. Nor did he only reach out to those whom he met personally. [...]"
"Twitter is a plot by ADD people to take over the world and -- ooooh, kitties!" -- Harold Feld, 2013-08-16
"Ugh. I hate labels. Unless they're being used to describe something that's difficult to understand, I just hate labels.
"That's the only reason I shy away from being called a feminist. Being a feminist isn't a complicated concept, so I only use the word to describe myself when I feel it's appropriate, but I'll usually tiptoe around any label that seems superfluous to me.
"I'll say it here: of course I'm a fucking feminist! I'm a feminist who hates labels. So, y'know, I'm really just a person who's not an asshole. Feminist. Same thing."
-- Danielle Corsetto, author/artist of Girls With Slingshots, interviewed by Jamal Registre; published 2013-07-24 (emphasis added)
"Now, compare this with the way children are taught not to tattle. What grown-ups really mean by 'Don't tell' is that we want children to learn to work it out with one another first. But tattling has received some scientific interest, and researchers have spent hours observing kids at play. They've learned that nine out of ten times, when a kid runs up to a parent to tell, that kid is being completely honest. And while it might seem to a parent that tattling is incessant, to a child that's not the case -- because for every time a child seeks a parent for help, there are fourteen instances when he was wronged but did not run to the parent for aid. So when the frustrated child finally comes to tell the parent the truth, he hears, in effect, 'Stop bringing me your problems!'" -- from "Learning to Lie", by Po Bronson, New York magazine, 2008-02-10 (quoted passage appears on the fourth of five pages in the web version of the article)
"Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought in here so insidiously designed so as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers, and to prevent any possibility of the employers providing work for the people." -- Representative John Taber (R-NY), 1935-04-19, regarding the Social Security Act of 1935, which he failed to keep from being enacted 1935-08-14.
[So how'd that prediction of doom work out, again? For more quotes in this vein, here's where I got this quotaion.]
"I don't know what it is about men, they just have a habit of reminding me of carbohydrates and razorblades." -- Marie Lyn Bernard, aka Riese, 2013-04-25
( some context )
"Political history is largely an account of mass violence and
of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and
hopes." -- Murray Edelman
[thanks to
blueeowyn]
From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-08-09:
"Where a great proportion of the people are suffered to languish in helpless misery, that country must be ill policed, and wretchedly governed: a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization."</i> -- Samuel Johnson
(submitted to the mailing list by Mike Krawchuk)
From Little Dee by Christopher Baldwin, 2008-01-09 (re-posted 2013-07-31):
| Vachel: | It's a grim fate, Ted, but it's still our fate.</i> |
| Ted: | Maybe baking cookies is our fate.</i> |
| Vachel: | Odd how I've never come across that one in Greek literature.</i> |
| Ted: | You go re-read the Iliad, and I'll start mixing some dough.</i> |
[Oh come on -- Greeks? Cooking? There has to be some classical fate that involves pastries or something! (See my 2012-04-12 QotD.)]
<[>"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world." -- J.R.R. Tolkien</p>
"You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too. And you've got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food." -- Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird
From Skin Horse by Shaenon K. Garrity and Jeffrey Channing Wells, 2008-01-09:
| Tip: | [...] You were raised by humans to interact with other humans. |
| Leo: | Actually, I was raised to sit on other humans and kill them and eat them. |
| Tip: | "Killing" and "eating" are forms of interaction. |
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