The demystification of art is one of the most far-reaching effects of the use of computers in the arts. No sooner is it recognized that the creation of art can be formalized, programmed and subjected to mathematical treatment, than all those secrets that used to enshroud art vanish. Similarly with the reception of art; the description of reality in rational terms inevitably leads away from irrational modes of thought, such as the idea that art causes effects that cannot be described scientifically, or that information is passed on to the public by the artist that could not be expressed in any other way. And so art loses its function as a substitute for faith, which it still fulfills here and there.
He was Born April 21st, 1818. He didn't become Josh Billings 'til he was forty years old. Between then and his death in 1885, he produced a plethora of pithy aphorisms. Consider these:
There's a great power in words, if you don't hitch too many of them together.
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
Common sense is the knack of seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be done.
Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt of, not swallowed.
As a general rule, if you want to get at the truth - hear both sides and believe neither.
Solitude: A good place to visit, but a poor place to stay.
As long as we are lucky we attribute it to our smartness; our bad luck we give the gods credit for.
When a man comes to me for advice, I find out the kind of advice he wants, and I give it to him.
One-half the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.
Keep a cow, and the milk won't have to be watered but once.
I have lived in this world just long enough to look carefully the second time into things that I am the most concerned of the first time.
The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so.
As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
Confess your sins to the Lord, and you will be forgiven; confess them to men, and you will be laughed at.
| Are You harboring a Fugitive? | HU YU HAI DING? |
| Approach me | KUM HIA |
| Stupid fellow | DUM GAI |
| Small horse | TAI NI PO NI |
| Did someone fertilize the field? | HU FLUNG DUNG? |
| Prices are too high here | NO BAI DAM TING |
| Late night Peking talk show | JAH NI KA SUN |
| I bumped into a coffee table | AI BANG MAI NI |
| Have you considered a face lift? | CHIN TU FAT |
| You trying to save electricity? | WAI SO DIM |
| Time until next bus arrives | HAO LONG WEI TING |
| You're blowing your diet | WAI YU MUN CHING? |
| Keep out of pond | NOH WEI DING |
| Tow-Away zone | NO PA KING |
| The latest Michael Jackson release | WAI YU SING DUM SONG? |
| You are not bright | YU SO DUM |
| I don't deserve to die!! | WAI HANG MI?! |
| How 'bout staying awhile | WAI GO NAO |
| Our meeting was last week | WAI YU KUM NAO? |
| They are approaching | HIA DEI KUM |
| Remain out of sight | LEI LO |
| Cleaning automobile | WA SHING KAH |
| Premature infant | TAI NI BEI BI |
| Cigarettes are bad for you | NO TSMO KING |
| Your body odor is offensive | SHU MAN GO |
from the Old Testament Lamentations of the Father by Ian Frazier.
Of the beasts of the field, and of the fishes of the sea, and of all foods that are acceptable in my sight you may eat, but not in the living room.
Of the hoofed animals, broiled or ground into burgers, you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the cloven-hoofed animal, plain or with cheese, you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the cereal grains, of the corn and of the wheat and of the oats, and of all the cereals that are of bright colour and unknown provenance you may eat, but not in the living room. Of quiescently frozen dessert and of all frozen after-meal treats you may eat, but absolutely not in the living room.
Of the juices and other beverages, yes, even of those in sippy-cups, you may drink, but not in the living room, neither may you carry such therein. Indeed, when you reach the place where the living room carpet begins, of any food or beverage there you may not eat, neither may you drink.
But if you are sick, and are lying down and watching something, then may you eat in the living room.
And if you are seated in your high chair, or in a chair such as a greater person might use, keep your legs and feet below you as they were. Neither raise up your knees, nor place your feet upon the table, for that is an abomination to me. Yes, even when you have an interesting bandage to show, your feet upon the table are an abomination, and worthy of rebuke.
Drink your milk as it is given you, neither use on it any utensils, nor fork, nor knife, nor spoon, for that is not what they are for; if you will dip your blocks in the milk, and lick it off, you will be sent away.
When you have drunk, let the empty cup then remain upon the table, and do not bite it upon its edge and by your teeth hold it to your face in order to make noises in it sounding like a duck: for you will be sent away.
When you chew your food, keep your mouth closed until you have swallowed, and do not open it to show your brother or your sister what is within; I say to you, do not so, even if your brother or your sister has done the same to you.
Eat your food only; do not eat that which is not food; neither seize the table between your jaws, nor use the raiment of the table to wipe your lips. I say again to you, do not touch it, but leave it as it is.
And though your stick of carrot does indeed resemble a marker, draw not with it upon the table, even in pretend, for we do not do that, that is why. And though the pieces of broccoli are very like small trees, do not stand them upright to make a forest, because we do not do that, that is why.
Sit just as I have told you, and do not lean to one side or the other, nor slide down until you are nearly slid away. Heed me; for if you sit like that, your hair will go into the syrup. And now behold, even as I have said, it has come to pass.
For we judge between the plate that is unclean and the plate that is clean, saying first, if the plate is clean, then you shall have dessert.
But of the unclean plate, the laws are these: If you have eaten most of your meat, and two bites of your peas with each bite consisting of not less than three peas each, or in total six peas, eaten where I can see, and you have also eaten enough of your potatoes to fill two forks, both forkfuls eaten where I can see, then you shall have dessert.
But if you eat a lesser number of peas, and yet you eat the potatoes, still you shall not have dessert; and if you eat the peas, yet leave the potatoes uneaten, you shall not have dessert, no, not even a small portion thereof.
And if you try to deceive by moving the potatoes or peas around with a fork, that it may appear you have eaten what you have not, you will fall into iniquity. And I will know, and you shall have no dessert.
Do not scream; for it is as if you scream all the time. If you are given a plate on which two foods you do not wish to touch each other are touching each other, your voice rises up even to the ceiling, while you point to the offense with the finger of your right hand; but I say to you, scream not, only remonstrate gently with the server, that the server may correct the fault.
Likewise if you receive a portion of fish from which every piece of herbal seasoning has not been scraped off, and the herbal seasoning is loathsome to you and steeped in vileness, again I say, refrain from screaming.
Though the vileness overwhelm you, and cause you a faint unto death, make not that sound from within your throat, neither cover your face, nor press your fingers to your nose. For even I have made the fish as it should be; behold, I eat it myself, yet do not die.
Cast your countenance upward to the light, and lift your eyes to the hills, that I may more easily wash you off. For the stains are upon you; even to the very back of your head, there is rice thereon.
And in the breast pocket of your garment, and upon the tie of your shoe, rice and other fragments are distributed in a manner wonderful to see.
Only hold yourself still; hold still, I say. Give each finger in its turn for my examination thereof, and also each thumb. Lo, how iniquitous they appear. What I do is as it must be; and you shall not go hence until I have done.
Bite not, lest you be cast into quiet time. Neither drink of your own bath water, nor of the bath water of any kind; nor rub your feet on bread, even if it be in the package; nor rub yourself against cars, not against any building; nor eat sand.
Leave the cat alone, for what has the cat done, that you should so afflict it with tape? And hum not the humming in your nose as I read, nor stand between the light and the book. Indeed, you will drive me to madness.
Nor forget what I said about the tape.
About 50% of them are mediocre at best, and another 45% of them should have as many of their products forcefully shoved up their asses as is physically and mathematically possible, then flayed alive, the wreckage of their bodies hanged over the sea, the corpses drawn and quartered, the pieces burned, and their ashes mixed into a concrete brick which shall be sealed in a leaden box and hurled into the deepest trench of the ocean.
-- John S. Novak, on dealing with sub-contractors.
When you write copy you have the right to copyright the copy you write, if the copy is right. If however, your copy falls over, you must right your copy. If you write religious services you write rite, and have the right to copyright the rite you write.
Very conservative people write right copy, and have the right to copyright the right copy they write. A right wing cleric would write right rite, and has the right to copyright the right rite he has the right to write. His editor has the job of making the right rite copy right before the copyright can be right.
Should Thom Wright decide to write right rite, then Wright would write right rite, which Wright has the right to copyright. Duplicating that rite would copy Wright right rite, and violate copyright, which Wright would have the right to right.
Right?
Copyright 1991 Shelley Herman S.P.E.B.S.Q.S.A., Whittier Chapter
Unknown: Some days you're the dog; some days you're the hydrant.
Gene Hill: Whoever said you can't buy happiness forgot about puppies.
Unknown: In dog years, I'm dead.
Dave Barry: Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in your ear.
Groucho Marx: Outside of a dog, a book is probably man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
Aldous Huxley: To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
Robert Benchley: A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.
Sue Murphy: Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in? I think that's how dogs spend their lives.
August Strindberg: I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves.
Fran Lebowitz: No animal should ever jump up on the dining room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.
Anne Tyler: Ever consider what they must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul: chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!
Rita Rudner: I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.
Joe Weinstein: My dog is worried about the economy because Alpo is up to 99 cents a can. That's almost $7.00 in dog money.
James Thurber: If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
Nora Ephron: You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets.
Ann Landers: Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.
Robert A. Heinlein: Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
Dereke Bruce: In order to keep a true perspective of one's importance, everyone should have a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.
Dr. Tom Cat: Of all the things I miss from veterinary practice, puppy breath is one of the most fond memories!
Ben Williams: There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.
Edward Abbey: When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.
Unknown: Cat's motto: No matter what you've done wrong, always try to make it look like the dog did it.
Unknown: Money will buy you a pretty good dog, but it won't buy the wag of his tail.
Christopher Morley: No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.
Josh Billings: A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.
Holbrook Jackson: Man is a dog's idea of what God should be.
Andrew A. Rooney: The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.
Unknown: He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog. You are his life, his love, his leader. He will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart. You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion.
Mark Twain: If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
Smiley Blanton: Things that upset a terrier may pass virtually unnoticed by a Great Dane.
John Steinbeck: I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.
Many of the requirements of graduate education [...] are "dragons." Dragons have no purpose except to be slain; that is, they are tests of motivation to prove how difficult it is to get knighthood (or the valuable doctorate) and, therefore, how valuable those people must be who already have it (the faculty).
Mills (1953) cited by Karon, 1995 in _Becoming a first-rate professional psychologist despite graduate education_
A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.
Why would there be 22,000 books on, for instance, the enigma of Richard Wagner? The supposed enigma is that a man who wrote some music that is sublime (Parsifal), some that is noble and romantic (Lohengrin), and some that is wise and gently humorous (Meistersinger) should have been an active anit-Semite, the seducer of a loyal friend's wife (Cosima Von Bulow) and at various times a liar, cheat, politician, egomaniac and sybarite. Why on earth not? The real enigma is that experienced people who must know that trait of character and talent have complex, shifting causes, can believe or pretend to believe, that a personality must be all of a piece morally.
Richard Brown, Social Psychology, 2nd ed. (New York, Free Press, 1986).
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
From Herb Huston:
The formulation I've heard is Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. This is called Hanlon's Razor; Hanlon was probably Murphy's barber.
Herewith I offer Huston's Corollary to Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute creationist codswallop to moral degeneracy if it can be adequately explained by mental defect.
All in all, studies of alarm calls may be inching closer to a conclusion that some animals convey specific information in their calls---a feat once thought to be uniquely human.
Stepping back from the debate, [Marc D.] Hauser admonishes his fellow humans to play fair with the evidence. "Let's face it. We have, and probably always will have, an obsession about our uniqueness", he observes.
Whenever animals are found to demonstrate humanlike cognitive processes, people's blood pressures rise. "Every time a discovery has been made that challenges our domination of the animal kingdom, we are disbelieving at first, and, once convinced, unleash all of our intellectual horsepower and search for something else that will set us apart from them", Hauser notes.
from Science News, 12 September 1998, V.154, N.11, p.175
If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.
Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus [...] scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right.
Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, trans. E.F.J.Payne (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), pp.15--16.
by Bertrand Russell:
[...] You may question all sorts of things about a man without making him really angry. You may say that he is stupid, that he is ruthless, that he is not honest about money, that he allowed his aged mother to starve in a garret, and he will argue with you calmly and reasonably to prove that he is innocent of these various crimes. But if you say that he has no sense of humour you will invariably produce an explosion of fury. This is a peculiarity of our age. In the 17th century, men burned each other at the stake for minute points of theology and killed each other with rapiers to prove that they were men of honour. They prided themselves, not on humour but on common sense
[...] In the early days of the 19th century [...] the necessary equipment of a gentleman was Byronic despair, a tortured heart, a love of rocky solitudes and ruined temples. He was not expected to laugh, unless it were a hollow laugh wrung from the anguish of despair. Gradually, however, these heights of sentiment were found fatiguing, and in their place came the modern cult of humour. I am not sure that the change has made the world more amusing. Where formerly ladies learnt to play the harp, they now learn to say everything with a sprightly air, and an appearance of wit. When people say to me: 'I always think the autumn is so much cooler than the summer. Ho! Ho! Ho!' and expect me to behave as though I had heard an epigram worthy of Talleyrand, I find the appropriate behaviour somewhat difficult. Even at a higher level too much humour may become tiresome.
I was once in the company of a number of professors who were talking university politics and describing various people as respectively liberals and conservatives in economic matters. I inquired, with a real desire for knowledge, what were the differences between the two university parties. The professors, each in turn, fired off a witty remark, but from none of them could I obtain any information. If I had been adequately endowed with a sense of humour I would not have minded this, but, alas, I am that extremely rare being, a man without a sense of humour.
[...] There was once a Chinese emperor who constructed a lake full of wine and drove peasants into it to amuse his wife with the struggles of their drunken drownings. He had a sense of humour.
by Scott Adams.
I get many complaints. Usually they take the form of editorial commentary like, "YOU SUCK. RETIRE NOW! GARFIELD RULES!" I appreciate the constructive feedback. It helps me grow as an artist. But lately I have been getting a new type of complaint that I haven't seen before. I call these new complaints the "praying mantis syndrome."
Here's how it works: If I drew a cartoon in which, for example, Dilbert accidentally stepped on a praying mantis, I would get letters from people who are sickened by my treatment of religion. They would argue passionately that people who pray should not be regarded as bugs to be stepped on. They will say I am creating a situation of religious intolerance that will lead to genocide.
You think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. Many productive hours are lost to the praying mantis syndrome. As a public service, I have written a short, generic complaint letter that can be used in all future praying mantis syndrome complaints. Just fill in the appropriate blanks.
Dear [cartoonist's name],
I saw your cartoon dated XX/XX/XX and was shocked and appalled that you would insult the [group not mentioned in the comic]. You wouldn't think it was funny if [a bad thing] happened to a(n) [pick one: woman, African-American, Jew]. Believe me, I am not being "politically correct" when I write this. This time you have gone too far!
Signed,
[name of nut]
Scientists may one day arrive at the fundamental individuals, whatever they are---particles, or space-time singularities, or sub-spatio-temporal monads---which make up the cosmos. They may then find that each of these encodes in some way or other a certain message. If scientists crack these codes, they may find that every single fundamental particle (or whatever) carries the following message: `Nothing exists except me, God or Nature, with all my infinite attributes and all their individual modes, exactly as described by my favorite author-mode, B.Spinoza'. This, then, is a possible message from the cosmos. [...]
David C. Stove, The Plato Cult: And Other Philosophical Follies, "Epistemology and the Ishmael Effect", pp.80, Basil Blackwell, 1991.
We trained hard - but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
Petronius Arbiter, 210 BC
I am astonished at the foolish music written in these times. It is false and wrong, and no longer does anyone pay attention to what our beloved old masters wrote. I hope this worthless modern coinage will fall into disuse, and new coins will be forged according to the fine old stamp and standard.
Baroque composer Samuel Scheidt writing in 1651, a full 34 years before J.S.Bach.
The Cowboy Way? -- A Cowboy's Guide to Life. From Don't Squat With Yer Spurs On, A Cowboy's Guide To Life.
[ Assorted Humor | Krishna Kunchithapadam ]
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