Noted Quotes
A couple of quotations from my web reading recently:
“I agree with you, Mr. Chairman, waterboarding is torture.” –U.S. Attorney General nominee Eric Holder (via)
“Watch half a film. Ring someone up, ask them about their dreams. Make your life as patchy a discourse as possible.” –M. John Harrison, explaining something about writing
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” –Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (via)
“Few things could scare me more than headlines about walking disaster, failed to the top, finance minister Jim Flaherty wanting an ‘extraordinary budget’ with ‘extraordinary measures’.” –Declan’s pithy comment pretty much nails my response to that story as well.
“Watchmen, by David Hayter and Alex Tse, based on the graphic novel by Dave Gibbons and Cordwainer Bird.” –from Rick Norwood’s list of forthcoming movies. You have to be like three different kinds of nerd to know why that’s funny.
“He was still doing fine work, and he will definitely be missed — particularly as a voice of opposition as Britain slides ever closer to Panopticon status.” –Andrew Wheeler, making apposite comment on the passing of John Mortimer.
“interesting people are full of doubt. People who are totally sure their way is the only way are always wrong. I think self-esteem is a myth perpetrated by psychologists, movie stars, magazines, and the pharmaceutical industry. They want you to think something’s wrong with you because you don’t have self-esteem like you ‘should.’ Oh, please! georgia o’keeffe, beethoven, and mark twain all had their doubts, but managed to get a few things done, and so can you.” –Laurie Rosenwald, in All The Wrong People Have Self Esteem: An Inappropriate Book for Young Ladies, quoted in a review
Tags: adaptations,alan moore,authors,economics,philosophy,quote,thinking,torture
Onyx
Kira
UkendtBruger
Kevin
Entries (RSS)![[Valid RSS]](http://www.chrismclaren.com/blog/wp-content/themes/homosum/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed"){kind=small}
January 19th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
I’m just not a big enough nerd to understand the Watchmen one. Could you elaborate?
The final quote hit home for me. My boss lectured me on having low confidence when I’ve been working here about 7X longer than he has.
January 20th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Well, you have to be a tiny bit of a comics nerd to know that Watchmen is actually by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore. You have to be slightly more of a comics nerd to know that Moore wants nothing to do with movie adaptations of his work, and, to put it lightly, actively distances himself from them. You have to be a really old school SF nerd to know that Cordwainder Bird is an alias that Harlan Ellison used in his TV work in cases where he thought that his work had been defiled by the studios/executives/etc. You have to be a language geek to know that the name could actually be interpreted as meaning someone who works industriously on something that ends up being “for the birds”, or possibly as someone who works hard to give the bird. And you have to be a different kind of old school SF geek to recognize the name as a nod to Paul M. A. Linebarger, who certainly deserves a nod or two.
January 20th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
Aww, looks like I’m only 2 types of nerd. Thank you very much for the explanation.