‘ Although candles create a warm, inviting feeling within the home during the holidays and throughout the year, there is research showing that candle usage can create problems for your home’s interior. ‘

How To Minimize Indoor Pollution From Candles

Nothing worse than a Wednesday that feels like a Monday.

Hij keek wel erg opgewekt, voor iemand die geen gulden meer bezat.

Science Fiction from 1883, describing what caused the ice ages. Primitive art included as illustrations.

‘ Word bevat volgens Westendorp een basisfout, die bijna alle moderne apparaten dwars zit en daarmee de gebruikers. ‘Wat ik een fout vind - ik vertel dat ook altijd tijdens colleges -, is wanneer bij een apparaat alle functies standaard “aan” staan. Een videorecorder bijvoorbeeld heeft als standaardfunctie opnemen en weergeven van televisieprogramma’s. Daarnaast kun je ook van alles programmeren. Die extra functies moeten naar mijn idee standaard “uit” staan. Nu ga je bij Microsoft Word aan het werk, bijvoorbeeld met een brief aan de heer A. Beertema. Je drukt “enter” in. En dan tikt Word helemaal uit zich zelf B. Puntje. Hoezo B. Puntje?!’ ‘

omslagverhaal Intermediair

Bram Vermeulen als-ie wakker wordt:

‘ Onderschat de kracht van woorden niet. Mijn mantra is vreugde. ’s Morgens, voor ik opsta, werk ik een heel rijtje af. Ik begin met: I’m filled with vital energy. En dan: I’m all that a master should be - dat scheelt een hoop dingen die ik dan niet meer hoef te noemen. I am my deeper self - dus er bestaat geen verschil tussen mijn inzichten en de dingen die ik doe. I’m perfect and healthy - boem. I’ m psychic, my sixth sense is working. I’m a lucid dreamer: I leave my body reguraly and remember the journey. I’m thirtytwo years old - de methode om ervoor te zorgen dat je cellen niet ouder worden. I live for twohundredandfifty years. My past is complete, oftewel: ik heb alles verwerkt, ik ben er klaar mee. En de laatste is: I am free forever. Boem, klaar. Wat nou: dat is toch allemaal niet waar? Daar gaat het helemaal niet om! Het wordt waar. Nee, laat ik het zo zeggen: het is al zo. Het is niet eens: ik wil het. Het is: ik ben het al. Ik moet het alleen leren toe te laten. ‘

De Tien Geboden, in Trouw

Waarom moet dat nou in het Engels, Bram? Als ik u zo noemen mag. Klinkt het in het Nederlands te dom?

New and improved

Ik betrap mijzelf er ineens op guldens aan te duiden als “Nederlands geld”.

‘ Taylor has revolutionised the game of darts too. Technically, he has mastered a flatter trajectory on his shot so his dart doesn’t enter the board at a dipping angle. A flatter shot means more triple 20s, as less darts are deflected. ‘

according to The Guardian

‘ People still value marriage; but it is only that value—and very little social pressure or legal obligation—that sustains it. ‘

via Arts & Letters Daily

Joe Wenderoth’s book is made up of a series of comments written over the course of a year on customer-feedback cards of fastfood restaurant Wendy’s.

October 3, 1996
I love being in a little girl’s special place. That’s how I look at Wendy’s — it is no less than Wendy’s special place, even if she has abandoned it, or been excluded from it, and even if it has been trespassed by countless strangers by now. If you sit still long enough, you realize you’re deep inside a little girl’s special place, and I don’t care what the priests say — it feels wonderful.

March 22, 1997
Today I ordered a hot wet pussy-dickhead shake with eyes and tongue. “We’re all out,” says the brave young employee. “You must’ve just run out,” says I, “because I can still smell it.” “Yep, just sold the last one,” says the brave young employee. “Why don’t you make more?” asks I. At this point the manager came over. “Is there a problem?” says he. “You’re out of hot wet pussy- dickhead shakes,” says I.

read a review here

‘This last suggestion merits some additional consideration. If the media system of the target area depends to a large extent upon freelance journalists, it may be a particularly effective one. In some foreign areas, even newspapers are dependent upon freelancers to a considerable extent. If there is any receptivity for U.S.A. messages, the operator can often place the message with such a journalist with full expectation that it will be disseminated. Direct control of the message must be surrendered, although often the writer may be willing to have his copy checked “for accuracy” (rather than for anything suggesting “censorship”). This approach is widely used by American public relations men with magazine freelancers, and frequently pays dividends. One of the merits of this approach for the operator is that it puts the shoe on the other foot as far as the relationship between him and the message-carrier is concerned. The local journalist is now in the position of “wanting something.” This may mean that the operator actually ends up with more control of the content of the message than if he delivered it directly to the medium. ‘

Discovering National Elites.
A Manual of Methods for Discovering the Leadership of a Society and Its Vulnerabilities to Propaganda.

Gaat in dezelfde week dat ik over de fastfood-keten Wendy’s lees eigenaar David Thomas dood. Mijn postje van gisteren was dus een eerbetoon, zonder dat ik het wist.

Al was er ooit een blauwe periode.

TO MY MALE READERS.

I SEE with some surprise that there still linger in the field of letters writers who think that, in fiction, when a personage speaks with an air of conviction, the sentiments must be the author’s own. (When two of his personages give each other the lie, which represents the author? both?)

I must ask you to shun this error; for instance, do not go and take Eve Dodd’s opinion of my heroine, or Mrs. Bazalgette’s, for mine.

Miss Dodd, in particular, however epigrammatic she may appear, is shallow: her criticism péche par la base. She talks too much as if young girls were in the habit of looking into their own minds, like little metaphysicians, and knowing all that goes on there; but, on the contrary, this is just what women in general don’t do, and young women can’t do.

No male will quite understand Lucy Fountain who does not take “instinct” and “self-deception” into the account. But with those two dews and your own intelligence, you cannot fail to unravel her, and will, I hope, thank me in your hearts for leaving you something to study, and not clogging my sluggish narrative with a mass of comment and explanation.

The End.

Love Me Little, Love Me Long by Charles Reade.

The top ten search terms on TechEncyclopedia are:

DSL
OEM
ASP
XML
Napster

DVD
dynamic RAM
Athlon
MP3
cracker

I don’t need the Encyclopedia to tell what any of them means. Which makes me a geek. That word is probably in it as well.

” Children should be taught as little as possible,” he declares in so many words, for it is much worse that they should get “educational indigestion and come to detest education.” He would take especial care to free the children of the well- to-do from the parasitic tendencies of their position. They should learn to do things for themselves; and not to have everything done for them. The first condition of a good education, he says, is that a child should know that all he uses does not fall from heaven ready-made, but is produced by other people’s labour. He should be ashamed to have his boots cleaned by servants, “who do it not out of love for him, but for some other reason quite unintelligible to him.” “If he is not ashamed, and if he continues to use them, that is the very worst commencement of an education, and leaves the deepest traces for his whole life. “

Tolstoy as a Schoolmaster

Ik pak mijn oude kranten in alsof het cadeautjes zijn; dubbelgevouwen stuk krantepapier om de stapel en een paar stukjes plakband op strategische plekken om de boel bij elkaar te houden.
En dat alleen maar om de stapels makkelijker naar de rand van de weg te kunnen sjouwen. Of te zorgen dat het papier niet wegwaait in de wind.

Hoeveel boeken heb ik gekocht in de hoop er over een paar jaar wel iets mee te kunnen aanvangen?

So if Sweden is the drooping cock of Europe in this design, what would that make Finland? What would that make Europe, for that matter?

‘ In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought–frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. ‘

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The first point to which attention should be called is that the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly HUMAN. A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression. You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of, in this case, is not the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it,–the human caprice whose mould it has assumed. It is strange that so important a fact, and such a simple one too, has not attracted to a greater degree the attention of philosophers. Several have defined man as “an animal which laughs.” They might equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at; for if any other animal, or some lifeless object, produces the same effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man, of the stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to.

Bergson Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic

-:-

Voici le premier point sur lequel j’appellerai l’attention. Il n’y a pas de comique en dehors de ce qui est proprement humain. Un paysage pourra être beau, gracieux, sublime, insignifiant ou laid ; il ne sera jamais risible. On rira d’un animal, mais parce qu’on aura surpris chez lui une attitude d’homme ou une expression humaine. On rira d’un chapeau ; mais ce qu’on raille alors, ce n’est pas le morceau de feutre ou de paille, c’est la forme que des hommes lui ont donnée, c’est le caprice humain dont on a pris le moule. Je me demande comment un fait aussi important, dans sa simplicité, n’a pas fixé davantage 1′ attention des philosophes. Plusieurs ont défini l’homme « un animal qui sait rire ». Ils auraient aussi bien pu le définir un animal qui fait rire, car si quelque autre animal y parvient, ou quelque objet inanimé, c’est toujours par une ressemblance avec l’homme, par la marque que l’homme y imprime ou par l’usage que l’homme en fait.

Bergson Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique

‘ Voices of Revolution, 1917 is a formidably boring book – which is itself of some interest, given the desperate fascination of the historical moment. ‘

review

The basics of evidence based medicine.

‘ It is this sense of balance - the essential ingredient of our success as a species, and one which is so often expressed in what are now defined as ‘bad habits’ - that we are now in serious danger of losing. We need some bad habits, I suggest, in order to retain our subscription to the human race. ‘

Peter Marsh’s lecture

So what would an intelligent car be like, for example?
Well, there may never be such a thing. But we used to have intelligent cars; they were called horses. And they used to know stuff that our cars don’t know. They used to know where they lived and how to get home and how not to knock over people. Even how to refuel themselves. The amazing thing was that they could even make new cars. The intelligent car would be like a horse. Something that really enjoyed a good drive and prided itself on not knocking people down.

Steve Grand, interviewed
via ScitechDaily

Peter Watson’s ten favourite non fiction books:

1. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1900)
The book that introduced the idea of a systematic unconscious, created the psychological age and changed the way we think about ourselves.

Douglas Rushkoff’s top ten of favourite designer reality books.

‘ 1. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by R Buckminster Fuller
Bucky Fuller’s most concise and compelling argument for how humankind might be able to survive and transcend its own compulsion for increased industrialisation and economic growth - through new, more consciously executed industrialisation and economic growth! His brief history of how the ‘great pirates’ dominated global politics and economics for centuries, installing puppet monarchs and harnessing the resources of entire nations goes a long way towards demonstrating the relationship between power and perception. ‘

The Bible in Lego.