“I hope something happens. I’m restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
“The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws but Max stepped into his private boat and waved goodbye.”
— RIP Maurice Sendak.
You were an integral part of my childhood.
“A final curious twist in this story is the professional background of President Assad. He is an ophthalmologist, a doctor bound by the same professional oath as the rest of us. He has broken his contract with society and betrayed his medical colleagues. Perhaps we should all send a letter of complaint.”
—
Dr. Greg Elder,
MSF dept. director of operations, in a blog he wrote for the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on the humanitarian principles and medical ethics that have become another silent casualty of the conflict in Syria.
Check out more about the situation in Syria.
(via doctorswithoutborders)
“The nie nie zu (the “crush-crush tribe”) are so named because they go into supermarkets and take out their frustration by standing in the aisles crushing packets of instant noodles.”
— Who knew China was tribal? The diversification of Chinese society has seen a flowering of a new vocabulary. Perhaps most fascinating has been the division of people into tribes (zu in Mandarin). (via theeconomist)
“Most of my experience has been in sports writing, but I can write everything from warmongering propaganda to learned book reviews.”
(via Hunter S. Thompson’s 1958 cover letter for a newspaper job - Boing Boing)
From a Freudian perspective, face is the ultimate mask that conceals the horror of the Neighbor-Thing: face is what makes the Neighbor le semblable, a fellow-man with whom we can identify and empathize. (via Slavoj Žižek, The Two Types of the Fear of the Burka)
“In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Sibera; aware of how all mail will be read by the censors, he tells his friends:
‘Let’s establish a code: if a letter you get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it’s true; if it’s written in red ink, it’s false.’
After a month, his friends get the first letter:
‘Everything is wonderful here. The shops are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, cinemas show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair – the only thing you can’t get is red ink.’
One starts by agreeing that one has all the freedom one wants – then one merely adds that the only thing missing is the ‘red ink’: we ‘feel free’ because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.
”
— From ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’ by Slavoj Zizek (via Rideo Ergo Sum)
“Bullshit. War ain’t over till people stop shooting. You can’t say you’re done taking a crap if shit’s still coming out of your ass.”
Polyglot Optional
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Girl 1:
He knows French, German, Arabic and English.
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Girl 2:
Who cares? He won't fuck you with any of those languages.
