Quotes calendar

Anonymous

It's weird how Beethoven's good symphonies are the odd-numbered ones, but the good Star Trek movies are two, four, and six.

Stephen Prouty

I've always wondered where the Old Timers bought their pants, with their cantaloupe-sized balls and all.

-- on rock climbers in the olden days

Anonymous

Here's my image of what a barbecue is.  A bunch of people outside, standing or sitting around, beers in hand, talking informally with one another.  The sizzle of meat on the grill and the sweet smell of cooking beef fill the air and everyone is happy and jolly and life seems so much easier.  The barbecue is sort of a tonic for the dolor of everyday life, a reminder of a sort of greater purpose than 40 hours of work a week.  And yet, barbecue is not just a reminder of that purpose but, in many ways, is that purpose.  For barbecue is one of the great binding elements of the universe. [...]  It is not barbecue's purpose to enlighten participants upon matters of fact or scientific knowledge, but that barbecue is inherently enlightening into matters of a more ontological nature.

- From This American Life epsiode 036 "Letters"

David Foster Wallace

… the whole enterprise becoming such a towering baklava of abstractions and abstractions of abstractions that you pretty much have to pretend that everything you're manipulating is an actual, tangible thing or else you get so abstracted that you can't even sharpen your pencil, much less do any math.

-- in Everything and more, talking about modern mathematics

Anonymous

The Enemy doesn't drive a Lexus.  But apparently He might drive an Escort.

From Catch-22

"You put so much stock in winning wars," the grubby iniquitous old man scoffed. "The real trick lies in losing wars, in knowing which wars can be lost. Italy has been losing wars for centuries, and just see how splendidly we've done nonetheless. France wins wars and is in a continual state of crisis. Germany loses and prospers. Look at our recent history. Italy won a war in Ethiopia and promptly stumbled into serious trouble. Victory gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that we helped start a world war we hadn't a chance of winning. But now that we are losing again, everything has taken a turn for the better and we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being defeated."

Todd Lothery

"If Jesus returned to Earth and was this vanilla, this spectacularly bland, this utterly lacking in charisma, he'd have a hard time panhandling for change, to say nothing of attracting disciples."

--- form a review of the movie Joshua in the Raleigh News & Observer

Some music reviewer on NPR

When I hear Kanye West, it makes me want to take all the money out of my bank account and move somewhere they don’t have Kanye West.

Skip

For her birthday, I bought my girlfriend a children's book about parasites that attach themselves to goats.  What's wrong with that?

Doc Venture

"I would have called, but…  Oh, right.  I've turned into a giant worm.  Well, I'm in the superscience racket.  These things happen."

--- from The Venture Brothers