A Coney Island of the Soul
Riding the Cyclone into Unstable Equilibrium
Rating position
Journal created:
on 24 January 2002 (#449135)
Updated:
on 23 June 2013
Name:
Mike
Website:
External Services:
Voice telephone: +1 617 671 1321
I'm not goth — I just have a tendency to be sarcastic, wear black, and hang around with depressed people.
You can always tell a zigamorph by the element of surprise. You're going along, perfectly happy and content, and then — BAM! You run right smack into a zigamorph, and you know time's up, you've reached the end, game over. Zigamorphs always come upon you when you least expect it, otherwise they just wouldn't be doing their job.
In case it's not obvious from my journal title and subtitle, I have a significant interest in the Beat literary movement and counter-culture generally, especially the 1960s. My favorite band is The Who.
| If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when? — Hillel, Pirke Avot 1:14 | ||||||||||||||||
| You learn to like someone when you find out what makes them laugh, but you can never truly love someone until you find out what makes them cry. — anonymous | ||||||||||||||||
| Because of a few songs Wherein I spoke of their mystery Women have been Exceptionally kind in my old age. — Leonard Cohen, "Because Of" The Rube has a sincere little boy look, burns through him like blue neon. | — William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's | — Allen Ginsberg, Howl An entomologist is not a bug. | — Kenneth Rexroth It's got to be fate that's doing it | A spooky witch in a sexy dress has been bugging me — Belle and Sebastian, "My Wandering Days Are Over" When you marry your mistress, you create a job vacancy. | — Sir James Goldsmith Being — forgive me — rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger. | — Albus Dumbledore (character in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. | — George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster. | — T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"), "A Report on Mesopotamia," in The Sunday Times, 22 August, 1920 The premise of the First Amendment is that the American people are neither sheep nor fools, and hence fully capable of considering both the substance of the speech presented to them and its proximate and ultimate source. If that premise is wrong, our democracy has a much greater problem to overcome than merely the influence of amassed wealth. Given the premises of democracy, there is no such thing as too much speech. | — Justice Antonin Scalia, McConnell v. FEC (dissenting) Our kids live in an age of prohibition, where more and more of what seems to them to be ordinary behavior is against the law. They recognize it as against the law. They see themselves as "criminals." They begin to get used to the idea. That recognition is corrosive. It is corrupting of the very idea of the rule of law. | — Lawrence Lessig, "In Defense of Piracy," The Wall Street Journal (October 11, 2008) I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the demigodic party. | — Dennis Ritchie we had a good long talk about the extent of reality in virtual reality. we concluded: if you can't get her pregnant, it's not the same. | — Amanda Palmer, private blog entry A software engineer cares whether it works, a computer scientist cares only whether it should work in theory. | — me Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them. | — Marvin the Martian Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. | — Bertrand Russell Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation. | — Richard Feynman |
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