The Who: Substitute (1966)

What the grown-ups say

“Substitute is an ironic comment on the gulf between image and reality, set to one of Pete’s trickiest little riffs, all driven along by a ringing open D string. A bona fide pop classic.”

What the kids say

Holly It sounds like when your wee goes back up.

The Guardian

You’re only as old as your knees.

Shirley Conran

Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.

Such a transformation of the environment from a commons to a productive resource constitutes the most fundamental form of environmental degradation. This degradation has a long history, which coincides with the history of capitalism but can in no way just be reduced to it. Unfortunately the importance of this transformation has been overlooked or belittled by political ecology so far.

Ivan Illich

[C]ould the rapidly accelerating warming that we are experiencing actually hasten the onset of a new ice age? A growing body of evidence suggests that, at least for the UK and western Europe, there is a serious risk of this happening - and soon.

the cumbersome North Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation

I am rereading William Somerset Maugham’s autobiography The Summing Up at the moment. And I still think it is a delightful book, full of sarcasm and useful remarks about writing. But, I have been rereading it for more than a fortnight now, which indicates something as well. Too much Maugham a day is difficult to digest.

The same sentiment is shared in this New Criterion essay, in which Anthony Daniels tries to answer the question how good a writer Maugham really was.

Was he a great writer? I don’t think the question is important, though it is always raised in his case. But we should value him for what he wrote, not for what others wrote, or for what he didn’t write, or for what he should have written if he had been more ‘advanced.’ Suffice it to say that I think he will still be read in a hundred years, if anyone reads at all, that is. Perhaps his firm and extremely forceful views on English prose, while a pleasure themselves to read, have harmed his reputation, for he has been taken to imply that everyone should write like him, which is clearly absurd. I certainly wouldn’t want every writer to write like him, any more than I would like every writer to write like Sir Thomas Browne, or indeed like anyone else. To read too much of him at a sitting makes one aware of a certain flatness or insipidity in his prose, which at first had seemed bracingly direct and unadorned, as well as urbane.

Yesterday’s truth is today’s lie. Ibsen gave the process 20 years and he was right. Feminism started as a revolution, succeeded, and turned into an orthodoxy.

This much I kow.

Writing for the web reveals to me some of the illusions that ordinary writing can create. History–particularly the history of ideas–does not proceed in a linear fashion like lines of words across a page. It is more like an expanding net, with different people influencing each other across the disciplines and from centuries past. On the Understanding Evolution site, we decided to lay out the history of evolutionary thought as a set of tangled branching vines, with plenty of links joining it all together. While books remain my first love, I’ll admit that the web sometimes gets closer to the shape of reality.

Carl Zimmer

Eerst begonnen de bestuurders hun tweeslachtige manoeuvres tijdens de crisisdagen rond Oudkerk moeizaam uit te leggen. Vanuit de zaal kon regelmatig een forse bres in hun verdediging worden geschoten.

Dan waren er de goedbedoelde, maar o zo pijnlijke interventies van enkele vrijpostige leden. “Ik vind het jammer, want ik vind het een leuke man”, riep een man. Oudkerk keek lachend achterom, maar hij draaide zich bij het vervolg haastig om. “Rob had mij moeten bellen, dan had ik ‘m gratis gepijpt”, zei de man.

Frits Abrahams

Stephen Wolfram’s controversial book about literally everything is readable on-line right now as well. A New Kind of Science is what the title says it is about. And as science is as much socially constructed as it is invented, Wolfram’s book was either received as cursing in church, or completely ignored.

The author wasn’t a scientist, but a succesful software entrepreneur. So, he didn’t belong to the tribe. And it might explain his insistence that everything in nature is based on little programs, that come time are automatically executed.

From what I’ve read, I have to say it is at least intriguing in some aspects. But, a lot of his ideas are not that new. And an author who announces his own genius from time to time basically is annoying.

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is true or right or real,
But forced to qualify or so I feel,
Or Well, it does seem so:
Someone must know.

Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:
Their skill at finding what they need,
Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed,
And willingness to change;
Yes, it is strange,

Even to wear such knowledge - for our flesh
Surrounds us with its own decisions -
And yet spend all our life on imprecisions,
That when we start to die
Have no idea why.

Philip Larkin

Zit u rustig, achter uw bureau? Til dan uw rechtervoet enkele centimeters van de vloer, en laat uw voet met de klok mee cirkeltjes beschrijven. Toe maar.

Til nu uw rechterhand van de muis, en laat die het cijfer zes schrijven in de lucht. En zie, ineens draait uw voet de geheel andere kant op.

Denk nu na waarom dit is. Of niet, en lach er maar om.

Of the experience of teaching a doctoral seminar in Geneva for twenty-five years, Steiner, with characteristic overstatement, remarks that this was “as near as an ordinary, secular spirit can come to Pentecost.” He then pulls out one of the two great clichés used by teachers to describe their experience: “By what oversight or vulgarization should I have been paid to become what I am? When, and I have felt this with sharpening malaise, it might have been altogether more appropriate for me to pay those who invited me to teach?” In other words, he would have done it for nothing. (The other standard teaching cliché has to do with how much a teacher has learned from his students.)

I recently closed down a university teaching career of thirty years, and I would like to go on record as saying that I wouldn’t have done it for a penny less. Teaching is arduous work, entailing much grinding detail and boring repetition–a teacher, it has been said, never says anything once–interrupted only occasionally by moments of always surprising exultation. And I should like to add that I don’t think I learned a thing from my students, except that, as one student evaluation informed me, I tend to jingle the change in my pocket.

Joseph Epstein.

Beim 200. Todestag, das Bonner Kant-Korpus.

Als je er goed over nadenkt dan begrijp je gauw dat het bijna altijd hun schuld is en daarom moet je nooit aan zelfkritiek doen. Niets toegeven of opbiechten, niet de hand in eigen boezem steken. Hef je vinger op en wijs naar hen: ze hebben het altijd gedaan. Die weerzinwekkende media. En mochten ze tegenspartelen, zeg dan ronduit dat hun reactie je geen bal interesseert. Ze zijn te walgelijk voor woorden. Onbetrouwbaar en hypocriet. Maar hoe meer ik erover nadenk, hoe meer ik begrijp dat er nog een categorie bestaat die de media in onsmakelijkheid overtreft. Het betreft die honderdduizenden, die miljoenen smerige verslaafden die hun afnemers zijn. Die immense legioenen junks die zonder hun afstandsbediening en krantenabonnement niet meer zouden kunnen functioneren. Die duizenden die bezig zijn dit leugenachtige stuk te consumeren.

Sylvian Ephemenico.
[user=universele passwd=login]

• Search MS source code for evidence of theft from open source projects;
• Search MS source code for evidence of antitrust violations (”Windows isn’t finished until * won’t run”);
• Reverse engineer MS souce code for greater compatibility with all sorts of open source projects;
• Reverse engineer MS source code for Windows emulators on Linux such as WINE or Lindows;
• Prove that the browser/media player/etc. can be removed from the operating system with little harm done;
• Reverse engineer MS source code to crack DRM schemes;
• Play with source code just because Bill Gates won’t like it;

The Importance Of

hier

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

e.e. cummings

And other tips for care and handling. Most cd’s and dvd’s will last 30 years or longer, if they’re handled with care.

Pull A String, A Puppet Moves

each man must realize
that it can all disappear very
quickly:
the cat, the woman, the job,
the front tire,
the bed, the walls, the
room; all our necessities
including love,
rest on foundations of sand -
and any given cause,
no matter how unrelated:
the death of a boy in Hong Kong
or a blizzard in Omaha …
can serve as your undoing.
all your chinaware crashing to the
kitchen floor, your girl will enter
and you’ll be standing, drunk,
in the center of it and she’ll ask:
my god, what’s the matter?
and you’ll answer: I don’t know,
I don’t know …

Charles Bukowski

In nije mooglikheid fan dizze webside is dat fanôf hjoed in part fan ‘e ynhâld ek fia de opsje “seleksje” oproppen wurde kin. Kies “frysk”, en dan ferskynt der in side mei alle Fryske postjes dy ‘t ik oait skreaun haw. En sjoch: de ien-nei-lêste datearret al fan mear as in jier lien.

Eamelje net, yndied.

As I wrote on January 23, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer can’t handle transparent PNG’s. So the logo of this website would look good in any browser, but a dull grey in IE.

At last, I’d found a javascript that could bring a solution. Internet Explorer has some obscure graphical filter options that no-one ever uses, but that would make transparent PNG’s as transparent as they were intended to be.

And indeed this javascript works. But now Internet Explorer doesn’t recognize the clickable maps on the logo anymore. Thank you so much Microsoft for always creating other problems after every new solution.

‘Sometimes,’ he says, sounding suddenly reflective, ‘I think of that wonderful line by George Opren, the great American poet, that I used in The Invention of Solitude. He’s talking about the apparent suddenness with which we grow old, and he says, “What a strange thing to happen to a little boy”. That’s it exactly. You’re trying to resurrect that little boy.’

He thinks about this some more and his thoughts lead him back to the act of writing, to those long stretches in that lonely room. ‘Why do I do this?’ he says. ‘The only answer I can come up with is that somehow I think that by living my life as a writer, I am living my life to the fullest. Even if I have a day when I sit there crossing out sentences, tearing up pieces of paper and have advanced not one jot, I can still stand up from my chair and say, “Well, I’ve given it my best”. And if you can say that at the end of every working day, you feel like there’s some reason to go on living.’

in The Guardian.

Zum Denken sind wenige Menschen geneigt, obwohl alle zum Rechthaben.

Masters of Photography

The late Philip Larkin — original and very grand, especially in his later work — thought that form and content were indivisible. He worked slowly, he said. “You’re finding out what to say as well as how to say it, and that takes time.” It sounds simple; but it states a difficult thing. Literature is not like music; it isn’t for the young; there are no prodigies in writing. The knowledge or experience a writer seeks to transmit is social or sentimental; it takes time, it can take much of a man’s life, to process that experience, to understand what he has been through; and it takes great care and tact, then, for the nature of the experience not to be lost, not to be diluted by the wrong forms. The other man’s forms served the other man’s thoughts.

in the NY Review of Books