December 2010
1 post
November 2010
3 posts
"they were capable of folly"
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from Vanity Fair on Sean Parker:
Reggae plays in the background at Shawn Fanning’s huge 40th-floor apartment, directly over San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. It is late at night. [Sean] Parker stretches back on an easy chair and bemoans what he sees as the scarcity, in contemporary culture, of revolutionary thinkers on the level of, say, Jim Morrison and Jack Kerouac. “They were capable of folly,”...
"If you're good at something, never do it for...
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From Adrian Tan’s now-viral speech:
The most important is this: do not work.
Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.
Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit,...
October 2010
1 post
From In Praise of Quitting Your Job:
x x x for some people, work is personal. Personal in the same way that singing or playing the piano or painting is personal. As a creative person, you’ve been given the ability to build things from nothing by way of hard work over long periods of time. Creation is a deeply personal and rewarding activity, which means that your Work should also be deeply...
September 2010
1 post
August 2010
1 post
“The wine god sighed. ‘Oh, Hades if I know. But remember, boy, that a kind act can sometimes be as powerful as a sword. As a mortal, I was never a great fighter or athlete or poet. I only made wine. The people in my village laughed at me. They said I would never amount to anything. Look at me now. Sometimes small things can become very large indeed.’”
— The Battle...
July 2010
2 posts
May 2010
2 posts
April 2010
10 posts
How to be a Man - Esquire →
A man carries cash. A man looks out for those around him — woman, friend, stranger. A man can cook eggs. A man can always find something good to watch on television. A man makes things — a rock wall, a table, the tuition money. Or he rebuilds — engines, watches, fortunes. He passes along expertise, one man to the next. Know-how survives him. This is immortality. A man can speak to dogs. A man...
The Beauty of Maps - Historical Maps →
The Real Tina Fey →
I really love cursing a lot. But as I get older, I realize it’s a little unseemly for women of a certain age. But then once you pass sixty-five, you can hit it full tilt again and it’s charming. Once you’re Lauren Bacall’s age, you can be like, “What the fuck.”
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/tina-fey-funny-quotes-040710#ixzz0lWatNvlO
Bite Me! Q&A, Bourdain →
Fair enough. But you’ve observed that professional kitchen culture is often unfriendly to women. Do you think it will always be that way? x x x But [even as more women join kitchens], I’d like to think that the level of discourse will stay the same, and just as offensive, and just as crude. I think it’s great that kitchens are maybe the last meritocracy, the last workplace...
In Cambodia there’s a bar called Heart of Darkness. You could have happy hour everyday in the Heart of Darkness.
“As far as one journeys, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the Taj Mahal to the Siberian wilds, he may eventually come to an unfortunate conclusion—usually while he’s lying in bed, starting at the thatched ceiling of some substandard accommodations in Indochina,” writes Swithin in his last book, the posthumously published Whereabouts, 1917 (1918). “It is impossible...
“Dad on Child-rearing: “There’s no education superior to travel. Think of The Motorcycle Diaries, or what Montrose St. Millet wrote in Ages of Exploration: ‘To be still is to be stupid. To be stupid is to die.’ And so we shall live. Every Betsy sitting next to you in a classroom will only know Maple Street on which sits her boxy white house, inside of which whimper...
March 2010
3 posts
“There was a radio in the cab of the truck and it was playing “One” by U2. I knew this song. It was always playing in our home. This is because the men came from the city one day and they gave us clockwork radios, one to each family in the village. We were supposed to wind them up and listen to the World Service from the BBC, but my sister Nkiruka turned ours in to the Port...
Manny Pacquiao: Profiles: GQ →
Excerpt: “YOU’RE NOT A boxing fan? Doesn’t matter. We’re all fans of the strange, hardwired to seek and behold it—and Manny Pacquiao is the most beautifully strange human being to befall boxing, and perhaps even all of sport, in a generation.”
February 2010
2 posts
January 2010
5 posts
Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert →
” … Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.”
“I rose and went through the curtains into the bedroom. There was nothing I wanted there, except to get away for a moment from that silence sitting in a chair. Phuong’s picture books were back on the shelf. She had stuck a telegram for me up among the cosmetics — some message or other from the London office. I wasn’t in the mood to open it. Everything was as it had been...
December 2009
2 posts
“And therein lies the best career advice I could possibly dispense: just DO...”
– from thoughts on tour
the Ommwriter →
“A wise man once said “We are all at the mercy of our wild monkey minds. Incessantly swinging from branch to branch.” With multiple windows and applications all vying for our attention, we have sadly adapted our working habits to that of the computer and not the other way around.”
Ommwriter is a humble attempt to recapture what technology has snatched away from us today:...
November 2009
1 post
tom robinson travel photography - feet first →
tom takes pictures of his and his girlfriend’s feet as they travel to different places around the world. :)
October 2009
1 post
the Evel Knievel of leaping to conclusions →
Excerpt
Stated premises, however, rarely get us all the way down to the bottom of a philosophy. Even when we think we’ve reached bedrock, there’s almost always a secret subbasement blasted out somewhere underneath. William James once argued that every philosophic system sets out to conceal, first of all, the philosopher’s own temperament: that pre-rational bundle of preferences that urges him to...
September 2009
8 posts
“I feel great,” I said, trying to decide how I did feel. I felt sorry to have driven Emily to leave me, not because I thought that I could have done otherwise, but because she’d tried very hard for many years to avoid an outcome to which she was, in a way that would always remain beyond my understanding, morally opposed. Her own parents had married in 1939 and they were married still, in a manner...
the 50 best foods in the world and where to eat... →
one must find ways to keep looking forward. :)
kottke on merlin mann →
“How to Blog:
“Find your obsession. Every day, explain it to one person you respect. Edit everything, skip shortcuts, and try not to be a dick. Get better.”
75 things every man should do →
esquire’s bucket list.
No. 38: Listen to war stories.
No. 39: Tell war stories.
i think my friend was wrong →
some things that are better than a new york city hotdog:
“New bed linen An all-you-can-eat seafood buffet Tokyo A sky full of hot-air balloons Coming home after being away for a while Emily Dickinson”
August 2009
11 posts
Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the...
pitchfork's top 500 tracks of the 2000s →
as recognition that, yes, by gahd, this decade is about to end.
“A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous” - Coco Chanel
‘nobody’s creepy from the inside, hazel.’ -death, from death: the high cost of living
the art of scything
“I am particularly fond of this scene, first of all because it takes place in Pokrovskoye, in the Russian countryside. Ah, the Russian countryside… there is a very special charm about such a place — it is wild and yet still bound to mankind through the land, mother to us all… The most beautiful scene in Anna Karenina is set at Pokrovskoye. Levin, dark and melancholy, is...
