Category: quotes

“Americans used to go to the circus to see the bearded woman and be amazed and stupefied. Now we have the blockbuster movie release.”

Richard J. Geib, from Rich Geib’s Wonderblog [rjgeib.com]

Brilliant observation, people still want something to gap at, to laugh at or to see violence done. Bread and circuses. Hollywood is good at spectacle and most of the movies from America—even the brain dead teen flicks are in the top tier of global movies in terms of quality. Many great movies are non-American but they only make up a tiny fraction of the global movie output, most of which makes me want to eat my dirty underwear.

“Calculus is wonderful… Geometry fantastic, you know, quantum mechanics—these are wonderful things but they don’t save marriages and they don’t raise children.

Ian Dunbar, in “Dog friendly dog training from EG 2007 Conference, available as a TED talk here [ted.com]

“The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by H. Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not receive this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history.”

Robert A. Heinlein

I wish I could describe Singlish as well as solios described Pittsburghese:

That’s Pittsburghese for you, though – this town will stop loving football long before it embraces the hard consonant. A lot of the locals, when they speak… sentences do not emerge. What comes out is a pile of loosely related vowels, punctuated with the occasional grunt and the glimmer of realization in their eyes that they’re not getting through to you. It’s not for a lack of trying – the inhabitants of the region all seem to have evolved some sort of highly specialized section of larynx – a post-larynx, perhaps – a section that belt-sands all of the hard pointy bits of words clean off, leaving only the most basic impression of phonetic intent.

solios, in this post [deadcityradio.org] on Dead City Radio

“But I don’t want to go among stupid people,” beggs remarked.

“Oh you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “We’re all stupid here. I’m stupid, you’re stupid.”

“How do you know I’m stupid?” said beggs.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “Or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Beggs, In parody of Lewis Carrol from Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland