Amazon.com: Jon Ronsons Blog

Ξ July 20th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Words |

Stumbleupon Review of : http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/A3C2KN9OV2QAOC/002-6847012-9369630

    From the page: "My wife Elaine and I are having a weekend away. We're eating dinner in a restaurant in a country house hotel. I'm about to inadvertently do a terrible thing.
    We've been waiting for our soup for half-an-hour. I'm sitting there, shooting waiters paranoid, hungry glances. When it finally arrives I begin to eat it ravenously.
    "Jon," whispers Elaine. "See that girl on the next table?"
    I look up from my soup and spot a frumpy young girl, about 14, wearing a ball gown and sitting with her parents.
    "I just saw her mimic the way you ate your soup," whispers Elaine.
    "Really?" I whisper.
    "Spoiled rich cow," whispers Elaine. "She did this impersonation for her parents of someone eating their soup disgustingly, and I know it was an impersonation of you because you ARE eating your soup disgustingly. It was like this"
    Elaine does an imitation of the girl doing an imitation of me. She twists her face, and mimes some gargoyle hunchback stuffing soup into their mouth.
    "Oh, so what?" I say. "She's only 14 or something. How did her parents respond?"
    "They smiled," says Elaine.
    I feel a flash of anger.
    "She's hardly Gwyneth Paltrow herself," says Elaine.
    I turn back to my soup, but suddenly it doesn't taste so nice. Suddenly, my soup is a big issue.
    "I'm going to the toilet," I say.
    The toilets are at the other end of a grand hallway. As I walk back to the table, I see the girl walking towards me, on her way to the toilet. It is just me and her, alone in this grand hallway.
    "She's so rude," I think. "And the awful thing is, she'll never know that I know she mimicked me."
    I narrow my eyes. "I have to say something to her," I think. "Maybe I should be unambiguous: - It's not nice to grotesquely mime the way someone eats their soup.' Or maybe I should be insulting: - I see YOU hunched over YOUR food frumpily, but I don't mimic YOU.'"
    I pause. "No," I think. "Too much."
    And then, suddenly, I know exactly what to do.
    "It's perfect," I think. "It's simple and devastating. I'll just catch her eye and silently do an impersonation of someone eating soup disgustingly. I'll mimic her mimicking me! Not a word will pass between us. But she'll know. She'll know she's been caught out."
    We're six feet apart now. I suddenly feel nervous about the whole thing. It is very combative, and I'm not usually a combative person.
    "Do it, Jon," I think. "Teach her a lesson. If you don't you'll regret it."
    And so I do. My heart is racing. Still, I make it look casual. I look her straight in the eye, open my mouth and rhythmically move my hand up and down, up and down towards it - clenched as if holding a soup spoon - up and down, towards my open mouth.
    "This is great!" I think. "Withering!"
    I shoot her a proud look as I continue my impersonation.
    "You'd better think twice next time you decide to grotesquely mimic the eating habits of your betters. Yes, your betters!'" I think.
    The girl looks appropriately startled.
    It is at this moment that the awful truth dawns on me. My impersonation of someone eating their soup ravenously is identical to the way people mime blowjobs. I am--for all intent and purpose--a 39-year-old man miming a blowjob to a passing 14-year-old girl in a hotel lobby.
    "Oh Jesus Christ," I think.
    I stare at the ground and walk hurriedly back to our table.
    "What happened?" says Elaine. "You look as white as a sheet. You're shaking."
    "Shall we get the bill?" I ask."

 

Untitled

Ξ June 19th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Words |

Stumbleupon Review of : http://www.halldor.demon.co.uk/MOOMIN1.htm




[Cartoon from here]


    "THE MOOMINS AND THE GREAT FLOOD

    by TOVE JANSSON



    It must have been late in the afternoon one day at the end of August when Moomintroll and his mother arrived at the deepest part of the great forest. It was completely quiet, and so dim between the trees that it was as though twilight had already fallen. Here and there giant flowers grew, glowing with a peculiar light like flickering lamps, and furthest in among the shadows small, cold green points moved.

    'Glow-worms,' said Moominmamma, but they had no time to stop and take a closer look at them. They were searching for a nice, warm place where they could build a house to crawl into when winter came. Moomins cannot stand the cold at all, so the house would have to be ready by October at the latest.

    Continued...

 

The Haiga Pages

Ξ April 19th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Words |

Stumbleupon Review of : http://thegreenleaf.co.uk/HP/Ikkyu/13ikkyulogical.htm


 

xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munr

Ξ February 19th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Words |

Stumbleupon Review of : http://xkcd.com/c208.html


 

index.html

Ξ February 19th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Words |

Stumbleupon Review of : http://www.anps.co.uk/brian/index.html



- Ursula K -


    She keeps kingfishers in their cages
    And goldfish in their bowls
    She is lovely and is afraid
    Of such things as growing cold.


    She's had enough men to please her
    Though they were more cruel than kind
    And their love an act of isolation,
    A form of pantomime.


    She says she has forgotten
    The feelings that she shared
    At various all-night parties
    Among the couples on the stairs,


    or among the songs and dancing
    She was once open wide,
    A girl dressed in denim
    With boys dressed in lies.


    She's eating roses on toast with tulip butter,
    Praying for her mirror to stay young;
    On its no longer gilted surface
    This message she has scrawled:


    `O somewhere between Heaven and Woolworth's
    I live I love I scold
    I keep kingfishers in their cages
    And goldfish in their bowls.'

    - Brian Patten

 

Parkour Larry

Ξ December 1st, 2006 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Words |

Stumbleupon Review of : http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=ctg4nlwagi




Claymation, Parkour - combine them, what do you get?

Yes!

A strong urge to stick forks in your thighs to make it go away.

 

Table of Contents – John Taylor Gatto

Ξ November 28th, 2006 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Words |

Stumbleupon Review of : http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm



Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.

Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is a reflection on the phenomenon, warned us that prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the effects of schooling because they are promised more lifelong comfort and security for yielding wholly:

Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment....The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by...the word of experts.

The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil.

 

Neil Gaiman – American Gods

Ξ November 14th, 2006 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Words |

Stumbleupon Review of : http://www.neilgaiman.com/works/books/americangods



"There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr Ibis in his perfect copper-plate handwriting.
    That is the tale; the rest is detail.
    There are accounts which, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. Look -- here is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends: he is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as best he can. So, efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showers -- many people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes when they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews. There will be life, they assure themselves, after the showers. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy as the earth is cleansed of its pests.
    There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems to simple.
    No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we are not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was some human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes: forming patters we have seen before, as like one another as peas in the pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you would mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection) but still unique.
    Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, 'casualties may rise to up to a million'. With individual stories, the statistics become people -- but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, the flies that crawl in the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?
    We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearl-like, from our souls without real pain.
    Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume out lives.
    A life, which is, like any other, unlike any other.
    And the simple truth is this: there was a girl, and her uncle sold her.

 

Has Science Fiction Cranked Your Head? Part One | memetherapy

Ξ September 21st, 2006 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Words |

Stumbleupon Review of : http://memetherapy.net/19/has-science-fiction-cranked-your-head-part-one/

This post
Is it calling?
Is it calling?
is a response to the viral BrainParade seed question on the memetherapy.net site. As every child over the age of Octebuary knows, memes are our invisble overlords Some memes are a little... well, one could say 'odd', but perhaps 'downright twisted' or 'OMG EEEK! WTF!?' would convey a more accurate impression. This is why they need therapy of course, it is hoped that with counseling they may get to grips with their own inner trauma and epistemological disjuncts in order to become happy memes. Happy memes are a good thing. Happy memes may reward us with cake! Who would not say 'hurrah!' for happy memes but a big fat grumpynose. Which I am sure is no-one here.

The questioning process is a fairly simple and painless one, apart from the complexity and intense pain that is. They contact you and ask you if you would like to take part, or whether you would prefer they mail the negatives to the media and law enforcement agencies. Having thus gained your joyful acquiescence they turn up unannounced one night in a plain sided panel van, drag you kicking and screaming with glee into the back and strap you down to a chair. From there it's just a quick drill into the cranium to inject the viral memes, a short and enjoyable hypnotic brainwashing program to show you how wonderful the future will once Commandte Reid takes over from Blair and and saves us from having to worry our pretty little heads about all that politics business by abolishing voting and any other form of public input into government. There was then a brief beating session with a variety of salt water fish, the haddock being my personal favourite, before they sung the question in rather fine three part harmony.

"Has Science Fiction had an impact on your world view? And if so how? Is there one writer or novel in particular that has "cranked" your head open?"
Later, as I walked back in the icy rain from Ebberston Moor where I'd regained consciousness, duct taped hastily to a solitary tree, I had plenty of time to ponder this question.

Although I can really think of no one instance where it would be directly possible to say that because of SF I think This, at the same time it would also hard to argue that it has had none, more probably it is the very foundation that my world view is constructed on.

My sordid affair with SF probably began when I was 6 or 7 or 6 again, when I gave up the grisaille of sickly-sweet-communist-ideology-laden tracts of writers like Enid Blyton and Arthur Ransome for the unfettered and boundless freedom to be found in books like the dragonfall-5 series, or the works of Nicholas Fisk and some other guy I can't recall offhand who wrote a book about this bloke whose planet was blown up and was really good and fighting and stuff and junk and it was really cool; at the same time delving into the slightly-less-forbidden world of fantasy in the shape of such authors as Susan Cooper, Lucy M. Boston, Robert Westall and Alan Garner.

It could well be that it was the books that I read in those early years were the ones that most shaped my way of thinking, as they were the ones that educated me in open-mindedness and inoculated against the lure of conformism, something that science fiction tends to do in general, apart from Piers Anthony obviously.

From there I wandered like an almost giant unstoppable pink plastic gyrovague from one book to the next, devouring them in a manner that would give Gojira mild hiccups just thinking about it -- although not literally. Stopping only occasionally to quaff the Somerset scrumpy cider of which I was much enamoured of at the time, but now can't stand. I even went on the seemingly inevitable Lord of The Rings binge at round-about the age of 12 or 13 or possibly 12 again, reading it through 9 times before moving on once again to more grown-up works (oh yes, we likeses our flamebait, don'ts we my expensive....)

 

Kamilya Jubran – Safar

Ξ August 25th, 2006 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Words |

Stumbleupon Review of : http://www.kamilyajubran.com/audio_lyrics_solo_safar.htm





Safar

I walk in the clouds.
My horizon tinted dew.
Mirages are the myths,
My life has passed in vain
Looking for the true.

If a friend would ask me back
To the land of the sane,
I'd never leave the sands,
I'd never leave the track.

Thoughts stretch taut at night.
Desire is a light
That sparkles in the eye.
I am a mad song.
Like an echo, I fly.

-- Salman Masalha



Audio (mp3 - 1.193 Kbytes)

 

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