"
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula—for that was his name—was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher, or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex—just to show her.
And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
"
—Douglas Adams
posted at 6:24 AM |
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Yesterday? a strange lady instructed me (since I held a door open for her) to inform my mother how like a gentleman I had behaved.
posted at 10:05 PM |
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Controlling others is much, much less difficult than self-control.
posted at 8:32 AM |
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Dar's Bibliography
posted at 11:08 AM |
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"
Time comes into it.
Say it. Say it.
The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.
"
—Author unknown
[but I do remember that I was in San Francisco, and I have a vague idea that I saw this written on the side of a bus or that it was stapled to a utility pole]
What I never thought until now was that
stories are made of atoms.
However, is it not true that atoms have stories.
Rather,
fundamental particles are so identical that
some scientists believe that there is only one electron in the whole world.
posted at 7:46 AM |
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I just spent some time this morning throwing away old bank statements, old utility bills, and stuff like that. I did keep anything with remotely sentimental value, of course. Amazingly, it occurred to me that posterity may regret my tossing the bank statements. Fuck it. I'm sure the bank has backups, so I'm going to let posterity figure that out when the times comes.
posted at 7:29 AM |
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Here's my response to my friend Keith's entry of September 21, 2002 at his weblog The Complex Now. It's a bit strident, but I can't really help that when I start thinking about politics these days.
That's very good!
I'm appalled by the US right now in just about every way I can imagine. Bush is a puppet and his puppet masters are evil, evil people whether they intend to be that way or not. I don't really have "more than a superficial understanding of the Gulf war", but that hasn't really hampered me in my assessment of the situation now (though you might not agree that that's possible), and I've come to basically the same conclusions you have. I don't think I've ever been sadder to be an American than I am now.
Things just get more and more surreal. I can't believe what I hear on the news lately. American citizens are being held in jail because they *might* pose a terrorist threat, and the cops admit without a trace of shame that they don't have any evidence that they've committed a crime or are conspiring to do so. I wish I could say I didn't see this coming, but they way things have been moving since a year ago, it was only a matter of time before we started jailing AMERICAN CITIZENS IN AMERICA in an end-run around civil liberties. How will this end?
Best for "the administration" is that the shit doesn't TRULY hit the fan until after Bush has been safely re-elected. If his handlers can manage to keep him from slipping his leash too often then they have a real shot at pulling that off, but Bush is really his own worst enemy in this regard because he swallows the pap that they're trying to feed to the rest of us. Best for *us* is that he'll continue to stay riled up and keep a coherent foreign policy from really gelling. If we can just stay muddled for a year or two more then we might get out of this without triggering a nuclear event.
That's probably not going to happen, though. Americans are more willing now than ever before to suffer casualties, in this new "war on terrorism", and that's a big thing that's a lot worse than it was in 1990, in my opinion. And hell, if we're willing to die for it, we sure as hell would be willing to make some Israelis and a whole lot of Iraqi citizens die for it, too.
I guess the thing I'm most thankful for *now* is that this didn't happen in 1983, because then we probably wouldn't even be around to complain about it.
posted at 6:29 AM |
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/archives