Highlights, lowlights, and especially sidelights. The week's sideblog posts, in one easily indigestible lump.
“Nothing is more likely to make you sick than being constantly told that you are sick.”
- Ronald Gold
“Party for your right to fight.”
- Public Enemy
Don’t take it personally when they say ‘no’ — they may not be smart enough to say “yes.”
- Keith Olbermann
“Without humor, a sports fan is a religious fanatic.”
- Keith Olbermann
Sometimes, the way something is said combines with what is said, to create what would be a wonderful quote…if only you could reproduce the how as well as the what. When Laurie Anderson intoned “There is no pilot” in the opening track of “Big Science”, it was a thrilling moment of recorded performance art - which of course relies on just that unity of form and content.
Some messages can’t be written down, because part of the message is the act and way of speaking.
“Crazy people who are productive are geniuses. Crazy people who are rich are eccentric. But crazy people who are neither productive nor rich a just crazy.”
- Unknown
“The Church essentially exists to convince the proletariat to accept its lowly earthly lot while taking its money.”
- Shawn Baker,
Nightcharm
“Some of us have to come out twice — once as gay, and then again as gay geeks.”
- Shawn Baker,
Nightcharm
“People working against their own interests in a proud tradition in conservative circles.”
- Sivi,
'Dispatches from the Culture Wars' Blog Comments
“I like my whisky like I like my boyfriends. Sixteen years old and mixed up with coke.”
- Alex Kelly,
Twitter
“My name is Yon Yonson
I live in Wisconsin
I work in a lumber mill there.
All the people I meet
when I walk down the street
say ‘Hello, what’s your name?’ and I say…”
- Traditional
Theology is an obstacle course. No one gets through it.
Here it is.
Guantanamo Bay has a McDonalds. This and a Subway, Pizza Hut, A&W, Taco Bell, and a KFC.
When we used to say “There’s no McDonalds without
McDonell Douglas“…we didn’t mean it quite so literally.
“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
- Mohandas Ghandi
“The more people know a secret, the harder it is to keep.”
- Unknown. Or possibly a secret.
“Christianity is the belief that a cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.”
- Unknown
To classify some behaviors as ‘Mental Disease’ makes as much sense as to classify some rocks as ‘Inorganically Healthy’.
Whenever you find a net site with a title containing the word “truth”, you can be pretty sure it won’t present the mainstream view. That doesn’t make it wrong, not least because the mainstream itself is usually wrong, but it is a signal.
Psychetruth is a youtube channel giving info and advice on mental health, nutrition and exercise…and from the psychiatry videos it looks nonmainstream and reliable. If you agree that most psychiatric drugs don’t help at all, and most syndromes and disorders are just normal variation, take a look.
The first five episodes of Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’, on youtube.
“I’m the bad guy?
How did that happen?”
Michael Douglas,
Falling Down
“Kenneth Williams and Larry Grayson - sexual gay men pretending to be sexual straight men pretending to be sexless gay men in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Julian Clary - sexual gay man parading as a sexual gay man
desexualised by a retreat into camp from the 50s, 60s and 70s. Graham Norton and Alan Carr - sexless gay men parading as sexless gay men in the 90s and 00s. Not exactly progress.”
(My response to
this.)
“What we desire is not a happy ending, so much as closure.”
- Roger Ebert
“he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it.”
- Stephen King
“There’s a springtime in your life when you think it should add up and make sense, and an autumn when you think, the hell with it, anything can happen.”
- Roger Ebert
“I am asked ‘What do you think of him?’ and my answer is: ‘He doesn’t make me think.’”
- Christopher Hitchens on David Cameron
“Here’s the thing about rights. They’re not actually supposed to be voted on. That’s why they’re called rights.”
- Rachel Maddow
The left wing of the gay rights movement said, “We deserve respect and rights on our own terms, whatever mainstream society thinks of us”. The right wing said, “We want to be treated like normal people”.
Gay marriage is a right wing idea, part of the notion that ‘the gay lifestyle’ is an aberation and a problem, but that gay people can be returned to the true path and treated like they’re as good as straights - or almost, with their own marriage, almost as good as the real thing.
The arguments being made in favour of gay marriage are all about love. But sexuality - homo, hetero, bi, whatever - is not just about love - most obviously sexual activity comes into it, a fact with is avoided like an elephant in the room. So (homo)sexual rights are being justified in terms which evade sexuality. Gay people are being accepted, but only as nonsexual beings.
Conservatism is the notion that whoever has power at the time, has the truth. Liberalism is the notion that everyone has the right to their opinion, and the truth doesn’t matter. Scientism is the notion that truth is independent of opinion, and of power.
“The art of noise must never rest,
just in case they rust.”
- Paul Morley
“Nothing shows a man’s character more than what he laughs at.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
“Whoever said ‘laughter is the best medicine’ never had gonorrhea.”
- Kat Likkel and John Hoberg.
“A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and truth in front of patriotic passion”
- Henry Louis Mencken.
Podcast Directories:
Digital PodcastPodFeedPodcast DirectoryPodcast AlleyPodBean
I’ve got the devil in me tonight. Oh God fuck me. Anal apocalypse. Shove your religion up your ass. Theological titillations.
Holy Dildos, Batman.
“Beginners do not know what they do not know.”
- Michael Heath,
Blog comment
For all your geek news needs:
Geekosystem.
Darryl Cunningham Investigates - Science, psychiatry, and graphic art.
Very interesting blog on masculunity.
“There’s nothing about not caring about someone which means you have to treat them in a uncaring fashion.”
- Dan Savage
“In the future everyone will have a sextape.”
- Dan Savage
“I don’t want to get married because I need the state to tell me that my love is real. I want to get married because I want my partner to be my next of kin.”
- Dan Savage
“When the prevention of evil becomes more important than the preservation of freedom, authoritarianism grows.”
- Roger Ebert
“The camera is a not just a recording device but a looking device.”
- Jean Luc Goddard
“Who is to even say something is a clue? It might simply be a fact seen in the light of suspicion.”
- Roger Ebert
When I was fifteen, I was put into psychotherapy. I was being constantly bullied, so parents, teachers and school administrators wanted to find out what was wrong with me, so it could be cured.
It never occured to any of them that bullying might not be the result of something wrong with the victim. After all, the victim was in the minority, and all the normal kids were the ones doing the bullying.
So they sent me to a therapist, who saw in minutes that there was nothing at all wrong with me…but he kept up the weekly sessions because he found me an interesting person.
He got someone to have intelligent discussions with, and so did I - which was the one thing I truely needed. I quickly came to the conclusion that the majority of psychotherapy was not about solving (or even identifying) major personality problems. It was about providing a nonjudgemental, receptive friend to those who didn’t have one. Therapists are professional friends.
Now, finally,
it looks like someone agrees with me.
What didn’t occur to me at the time was to ask: If there’s such a demand for pretend-friends, why was there such a demand. Where had all the real friends gone?
Misc TV shows, some good or at least interesting. Youtube channel found while looking for something entirely different.
Derek Jarman’s
“blank blue film”. Are the pictures really better on Radio? Would that mean they’re better when you’re blind?
I don’t believe in love at first sight. But I think you can fall in love with a memory, and not just an inaccurate one.
“Funny thing about slippery slopes, they go both ways.”
- Unknown
Science 2.0. Pretentious name, useful site.
“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”
- Winnie the Pooh.
Boston University’s youtube channel. Some interesting contemporary political and philosophical presentations.
To embrace a challenge requires that you embrace the possibility of failure.
It’s not fashionable to be radical. So only those who don’t care about fashion can be.
There are three attitudes to the powerful. To seek their approval, to seek their disapproval - which comes to the same thing - and not to care one way or the other. Freedom requires a certain indifference.
Marx famously said that the philosophers have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it. Heidegger replied that it’s impossible to change the world unless you have an interpetation of it - indeed, that a demand for change must rest upon an idea of what has to be changed. The marxist response is that such an idea can only be produced from an interaction with the world - from trying to change it, even if we don’t know what it is we’re trying to change.
Eternal Fascism:
Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt, essay by Unberto Eco.If Eco’s analysis is correct, the activist left really can resemble the activist right - but only when the left is already defeated or has lost its way.
“There is never enough money to make a film. What people who make films for many millions of pounds don’t realise is that they could probably do as well or better with less. But what people with very little money but moan about it don’t realise is that they may have many millions to make their film with, and they would still have too little to do what they want.”
- Tilda Swinton
“If there is no stuggle inside you…it’s difficult to be an artist.”
- Tariq Ali
“It’s all about me.”
- Dennis Potter
“If a culture stops allowing people the right to fail, that culture will die.”
- Tariq Ali
“I want the world to be filled with fluffy little ducks.”
- Darek Jarman’s last words
“Nothing matters so much that you’re not going to have a cup of tea.”
- Tilda Swinton
“A low budget is almost always a release.”
- Tilda Swinton
“Dying isn’t so bad. It’s getting sick and dying that’s the hard part.”
- Roger Ebert
“You can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you will just get yourself called reverend.”
- Christoper Hitchens
A funeral has two parts. The service part is to enable the friends and relatives of the deceased to do whatever it is they need to do, emotionally or socially.
The other part - the burial, burial-at-sea, cremation, pyre lighting or whatever - we don’t have a single general word for, and I find that quite strange.
When people talk about funerals, they usually mean the service. The actual disposal of the corpse isn’t just hidden by curtains or a wooden box - it’s hidden by a gap in our vocabulary.
How we deal with the death a loved one, or the prospect of our own death, is supposed to tell us something about ourselves.
In both cases, I just shrug a little sadly and try to get on with whatever looks interesting. What does this tell you about me?
Why do people get confused between “A film aimed at children” and “a bad film”?
If you’re going to remix a song, remix one which
needs a remix. One which
wasn’t good to start with.
The media does two things. It presents pubescent teenagers as the sexual ideal. And it demonises anyone who has sex with them - including other pubescent teenagers.
When I was 30, ‘over 50’ was a kink.
There was a straight porn magazine called “50 and over” showing mature but hot women. Being into ‘MILFs’ or ‘DILFs’ meant fancying women or men old enough to be your own parents, so they’d be at least 40 and even 60.
Now that I’m…not quite 40, the kink is now ‘over 30’.
