‘Obviously it’s not meant to be taken literally, it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.’
Humor
Repost-Twain, Mencken, And O’Rourke
I think these will be relevant for a good long while…
“That’s the difference between governments and individuals. Governments don’t care, individuals do.”
“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”
“The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.”
Tell Me About How You ‘Provide Essential Communication Skills Which Connect Existing Company Architecture…’
Tuesday Quotation-P.G. Wodehouse
“You can’t be a successful dictator and design women’s underwear. One or the other. Not both.”
You Can Do Anything-Some Links
Still funny in my opinion: Who reads the newspapers?
Even funnier (generic tattoo, but for eggheads….the kinds of people visiting France for a week in college expecting to run America someday): Yes, that’s a Chinese brothel.
Forget LLMs, and neural modeling. ‘You can do anything‘ at Zombo.com
Hey, Teach
“Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.”
—
Robert Conquest reminds of what can happen in institutions as conventions harden, mediocrity and rule-following abounds, and where incentives matter:
“Those teach who can’t do” runs the dictum,
But for some even that’s out of reach:
They can’t even teach—so they’ve picked ’em
To teach other people to teach.
Then alas for the next generation,
For the pots fairly crackle with thorn.
Where psychology meets education
A terrible bullshit is born.’
More here.
I’m With Admiral Benson, Not Jack D. Ripper
‘Accordion factories and mime schools.’
Hey, hey. Ho, ho. Marcel Marceau has got to go.
Repost-Thursday Quotation: P.G. Wodehouse
“You can’t be a successful dictator and design women’s underwear. One or the other. Not both.”
Wednesday Quotation-Oscar Wilde
‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible…’
Sunday Quotation-Mark Twain
‘Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.’
Seattle Photo-The Case Of The Stuffed Gull
You probably only get a few thousand chances at life, but today, this life hangs in the balance.
Seattle Photo-The More Things Change…
Some say ‘Delicatessen’, with its 156 minute run-time, is a slog. Three hours of film cut down from eight, taking place entirely within a midday Parisian deli, can be a bit much. Half-heard conversations. A 13 minute single-shot discussion of death, children and cheese.
Others say no modern work illuminates as many centuries of French history, family tensions and socio-economic struggles as does this modern French classic.
***Auteur theory: New Wave theory holds that the two female protagonists are simply puppets for Clement Barreau’s own failed marriages, disgraced career as a pop-signer, and his desire to ‘burn down the Sorbonne and stand like Napoleon within’.
After Clement Barreau’s infamous 1967 Dakar rally accident, his body was returned to Paris from the colonial deserts.
C’est la vie, mon ami…
—
***Easily manipulable images and standardized, formalized text are happening right now. Keep your bullshit detectors finely-tuned.
Seattle Photo-Giacomo Bellagamba R.I.P.
‘By the time “Paralyzed: 50 Floors” earned wide release, Bellagamba’s unique blend of post-war Italian neorealism, sci-fi surrealism, and giallo was no longer finding an audience.
Bellagamba died penniless in his native Abruzzo in 1999, interred within a bowl of Diavolicchio (red chili) inside the stomach of a white dove. ‘
Still from the set of “Paralyzed: 50 floors:’. Antonio Stagglione (sp) plays the protagonist as child and future child within the then-longest-recorded Italian sci-fi action dream sequence.
‘We look inside the shards of the past to discover a future that lies stranded in the present.‘
-Giacomo Bellagamba. R.I.P.
***Addendum: Hey, I’d just like to help prepare us all for a world with the coming AI assistive technology. Easily manipulable images and standardized, formalized text are happening right now. Keep your bullshit detectors finely-tuned.
Seattle Photo-Red Light District, Green Light: Murder
July is heating-up, and Aurora Avenue heats-up even more with three dead runaways in three weeks.
Another Ted Bundy?
Detective Harry Rama is out of incense, out of free sandwiches, and most importantly, out of time.
A Bellinger True Crime Series Classic.
Seattle Photo-File 59
After the Crime Syndicate strikes on Christmas Day, only hours remain.
Detective Harry Rama finds himself out of free literature, out of patience, and, most importantly, out of time.
A Bellinger True Crime Series Classic.
—
Sunday Quotation-P.G. Wodehouse
“You can’t be a successful dictator and design women’s underwear. One or the other. Not both.”
Some Monday Funny Links
Still funny in my opinion: Who reads the newspapers?
But, still to me, even funnier: Yes, that’s a Chinese brothel.
I could not find it for free, but you can check out the first few pages at the link: Uncle Fred Flits By, by P.G. Wodehouse.
This is a classy joint. A real time capsule.
Thanks For The Laughter-R.I.P. Norm MacDonald
Apparently, he passed away today from complications due to cancer, first diagnosed ten years ago.
This is my favorite:
—
Also, a dirty Johnny joke:
Shaggy dog:
Monday Poem-Ogden Nash: The Purist
The Purist
I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist,
Trustees exclaimed, “He never bungles!”
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
“You mean,” he said, “a crocodile.”
From James Lileks: ‘The Gobbler’
Click here to experience ‘The Gobbler.‘
‘If you’re ever wondering what the War Room of “Dr. Strangelove” would look like if the movie had been directed by Prince, here you go.’
After taking the photo tour, I remain convinced that ‘The Gobbler’ exists in its own realm of awesome badness. Such a shag-covered, abandoned love-child of the late 60’s and early 70’s is challenging just what I thought I knew about American culture.
And while I can lounge in the bathos of this Wisconsin motor court/supper club’s global ambitions, and walk through the valley of the shadow of its modernist, U.N. international style, I still can’t fathom the intentions of its authors.
Why, Gobbler, why?
–Want to lose an afternoon? Visit Lileks.com. A fine humorist with a sharp pen and a keen eye. This is what the internet is for.
Additionally: Donald Pittenger, at Art Contrarian, and formerly of 2 Blowhards, has been looking at modernism. From the banner of his blog:
‘The point-of-view is that modernism in art is an idea that has, after a century or more, been thoroughly tested and found wanting. Not to say that it should be abolished — just put in its proper, diminished place’
Here’s Australian art critic Robert Hughes discussing the Albany plaza, and almost hyperbolically criticizing the aims of modernist architecture.
***Fun fact, he pronounces the “Boogie Woogie” the “Boo-gie Woo-gie.”
——————–
Related On This Site: They designed a city in the heart of Brazil that really doesn’t work for people: Brasilia: A Planned City
No thanks to living in planned communities upon someone else’s overall vision?: Roger Scruton In The City Journal: Cities For Living–Is Modernism Dead?…Repost-Via Reason: ‘Salvador Allende’s Cybersocialist Command Center’……From Grist.Org Via The New Republic Via The A & L Daily: ‘Getting Past “Ruin Porn” In Detroit’… some people don’t want you to have the economic freedom to live in the suburbs: From Foreign Policy: ‘Urban Legends, Why Suburbs, Not Cities, Are The Answer’
A structure in the desert…not even a city Update On LACMA, Michael Heizer And The ‘Levitated Mass’-Modern Art And The Public;..where is modernism headed? Via Youtube: Justin, The Horse That Could Paint…
Denis Dutton suggested art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth…the money and the fame) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’
Michael Dirda From The Sunday Times Via The A & L Daily: ‘H.L. Mencken At Full Throttle’
“As a student of his native literature, Mencken favours writers with the authentic American yawp – Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, the humorists George Ade and Ring Lardner. Huckleberry Finn is the novel he loves most (followed, somewhat surprisingly, by Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim). He judges Emerson to be overrated – “an importer of stale German elixirs, sometimes direct and sometimes through the Carlylean branch house”. He can’t bear the circumlocutions of Henry James and the gentility of William Dean Howells”
Also On This Site: How might Nietzsche figure in the discussion, at least with regard to Camille Paglia. See the comments: Repost-Camille Paglia At Arion: Why Break, Blow, Burn Was Successful…Here’s Nietzsche scholar J.P. Stern on Nietzsche’s anti-Christian, anti-secular morality (Kant, utilitarians), anti-democratic, and anti-Greek (except the “heroic” Greek) biases…
From Poemshape Via Andrew Sullivan: ‘Let Poetry Die’…Here’s a suggestion to keep aesthetic and political judgements apart-Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment…English departments can’t just copy “(S)cience”…yet they have so much to offer.
From The Telegraph Via A & L Daily: ‘The Lost Symbol And The Da Vinci Code Author Dan Brown’s 20 Worst Sentences’
Many of the commenters seem to think that whatever pleasure Dan Brown gives them, it’s perhaps worth more than this little bit of criticism.
Related On This Site: More Stanley Fish At The NY Times Blog: ‘What Should Colleges Teach-Part 3′ Gore Vidal’s power as an essayist can almost convince one of the rightness of his assertions: Vidal/Buckley Debate, 1968…
Camille Paglia At Arion: Why Break, Blow, Burn Was Successful
