Ik kijk tegenwoordig misschien wel meer televisie op mijn computer via deze pagina dan televisie op mijn televisie.

Biedt UPC me straks vast voor veel geld interactieve TV aan.

” We generally give to our ideas about the unknown the color of our notions about what we do know: If we call death a sleep it’s because it has the appearance of sleep; if we call death a new life, it’s because it seems different from life. We build our beliefs and hopes out of these small misunderstandings with reality and live off husks of bread we call cakes, the way poor children play at being happy.

” But that’s how all life is; at least that’s how the particular way of life generally known as civilization is. Civilization consists in giving an innapropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. We manufacture realities. We use the raw materials we always used but the form lent it by art effectively prevents it from remaining the same. A table made out of pinewood is a pinetree but it is also a table. We sit down at the table not at the pinetree. …”

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

” The results were brilliant, especially in concept. My oven, believing incorrectly that its temperature was near the freezing point, went full blast until thick waves of smoke billowed from every crack, vent and pore, filling the house with the palpable signs of scientific progress. Yes, the experiment had to be cut short, but it had lasted longer than the Wright brothers’ first flight. Inside the oven was a blackened disc of dough pocked with puddles of flaming cheese. I had succeeded beyond all expectations. “

Jeffrey Steingarten, Eating for America.

Op je computer uit 2001, van een nieuwe harde schijf die gemaakt is in 2002, probleemloos bestanden uit 1992 openen. En vooral dat jaartal dan zien staan, in de verkenner.

Paul Ford gives his impressions of a TV series he never has seen.

[I] prefer to imagine the show as a black-box play from the 1970s with Beckettian overtones, three women on an empty stage, looking at the audience, speaking in monotones:

1: I doubt I am fecund.
2: I have eaten so little.
3: Where are the men?
1: There are no men.
2: I will pay a woman $40 to caress and decorate my toes with varnish. I will wear shoes that cost more than the weekly wages of a restaurant worker, with tips.
3: What kind of tips?
2: Not on the shoes, for the restaurant workers.
1: I am hungry. I will not marry.
2: Talk about the shoes.
3: The shoes!
Unison: Shoes.

I don’t get hangovers. You have to stop drinking to get a hangover. Why stop? I like the taste and I don’t get drunk any more. I like to put a bit of spirit in the Coke just to keep it clean - those bottling plants are filthy!

Women don’t look at a lot of the things that we comb so carefully and fit so tightly.

Lemmy.

[...]
Doch is ‘t om wijsheid-zelve, of om den naam te doen? -
,, Den naam die ‘t aanzien geeft en ‘t uiterlijk fatsoen;
,,Om ‘t teeken of lievrei voor ieders oog te dragen.” -
Nu reik u d’ arm dan vrij (ik gun ‘t u,) uit het lid,
En tuur u de oogen blind op ‘t onbestendig wit:
Ik heb er meer dan u naar enklen wind zien jagen.

Willem Bilderdijk [fragment]

via de dagelijkse gedichtendienst van Laurens Jansz Coster

Charles Darwin, 1872.

Not that I am losing my grip: I am just tired of summer.
Your reach for a shirt in a drawer and the day is wasted.
If only winter were here for snow to smother
all these streets, these humans; but first, the blasted
green. I would sleep in my clothes or just pluck a borrowed
book, while what’s left of the year’s slack rhythm,
like a dog abandoning its blind owner,
crosses the road at the usual zebra. Freedom
is when you forget the spelling of the tyrant’s name
and your mouth’s saliva is sweeter than Persian pie,
and though your brain is wrung tight as the horn of a ram
nothing drops from your pale-blue eye.

Joseph Brodsky, Part of Speech.

gepubliceerd in het Algemeen Dagblad van 15 xi 2002.

gepubliceerd in Het Parool van 15 xi 2002.

” Oldham hates interviews. ‘What are they for?’ he asks me. ‘They have nothing to do with the music. It’s usually people asking a bunch of weird questions like, “Why are the songs so slow?” Well, maybe because they are. Because that’s how we play them. Because I wrote them at a less rapid pace. It’s always why, why why? Why everything? And the answer to “why” is because it just is. Things just are.’ “

The Observer, Still voice, distant life.

“Years as they roll cut all our pleasures short;
Our pleasant mirth, our loves, our wine, our sport,
And then they stretch their power, and crush at last
Even the power of singing of the past.”

We met at the end of the party
When all the drinks were dead
And all the glasses dirty:
‘Have this that’s left’, you said.
We walked through the last of summer,
When shadows reached long and blue
Across days that were growing shorter:
You said: ‘There’s autumn too’.
Always for you what’s finished
Is nothing, and what survives
Cancels the failed, the famished,
As if we had fresh lives
From that night on, and just living
Could make me unaware
Of June, and the guests arriving,
And I not there.

written for Larkin’s secretary and lover Betty Mackereth.

Suske en Wiskunde,
Teletext VRT en Canvas, pagina 179.

” In short, there have never been better conditions for journalism than in present-day America. Yet there is an influential movement, and an entire publishing mini-genre, dedicated to convincing us that ’s not so. These scolds may defy common sense, but they’re still worthy of attention because they represent the consensus among the profession’s elite. At least for now. “

Matt Welch, Reason.

” Perhaps you will be surprised to be told that I failed in my purpose, when you know of all the uproar that The Jungle has been creating. But then that uproar is all accidental, and was due to an entirely different cause. I wished to frighten the country by a picture of what its industrial masters were doing to their victims; entirely by chance I had stumbled on another discovery — what they were doing to the meat-supply of the civilized world. In other words, I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach. “

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, with supplemental readings.

Boudewijn groeide op in Wassenaar. Het talent voor het bespelen van de media - dat hij bijna dertig jaar later volledig zou gaan benutten - was al zeer vroeg aanwezig. Immers, we zien Boudewijn, nog in de luiers verkerende, en acht a negen maanden oud, (augustus 1949), in een schoonheidswedstrijd voor baby’s opduiken alwaar hij werd verkozen tot de mooiste van Zuid- Holland! Een titel die hij nu al ruim 50 jaar moeiteloos in bezit heeft! Foto’s van die gebeurtenis schijnen afgedrukt te zijn in een landelijk vrouwenblad.

Boudewijn Büch Net.

One biography about H.L. Mencken written by Terry Teachout called The Skeptic. Two reviews:

As this century gets under way, it appears to me suddenly to leave the figure of Mencken decidedly shrunken and localized: a fate of which Terry Teachout seems queasily aware without being fully conscious of it.

Christopher Hitchens

There has never been another voice remotely like his in American journalism [...] or, for that matter, anywhere else. If words did not exist to serve his purposes, he invented them, and as his delight grew ever greater at seeing the words flow out of his rickety typewriter and onto the page, he brought his prose itself to “the highest conceivable amperage.”

Jonathan Yardley

” On the topic of thirst, a new trend is oxygen-fortified drinks to replenish your body with oxygen. It shouldn’t surprise you that breathing works better. Oxygen best enters the bloodstream through the lungs, not the stomach. You would need to drink about a litre of oxygenated water every 30 seconds to get a deep breath’s worth of extra oxygen, and this assumes you don’t pee. “

Christopher Wanjek, Bad Medicine.