Elbert Hubbard

Little minds are interested in the extra-ordinary; great minds in the commonplace.

it is too overwhelming

Woody Allen on Penélope Cruz:

I don’t like to look at Penélope directly. It is too overwhelming.

you know I believed it

one thing, and only one thing, I have asked from the map of gentle england, that I shall seek: where the hell is the magic faraway tree?

he had me at solid breakfasts

George Orwell on England:

Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization… It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red-pillar boxes. It has a flavour of its own.

dehumanize us in many ways

Haruki Murakami:

The conflict between individuals and the System has always been the most important theme for me. The System is something that must exist, but it can also dehumanize us in many ways…  How much freedom we have is something that we need to constantly keep asking ourselves.

what does it mean

Mainichi Daily News:

33 percent of Japanese men confess to sitting down to take a leak

soften the boldness of our propositions

Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Montaigne would prefer that children be taught other ways of speaking, more appropriate to the nature of human inquiry, such as ‘What does that mean ?’, ‘I do not understand it’, ‘This might be’, ‘Is it true?’ Montaigne himself is fond of ‘these formulas that soften the boldness of our propositions’: “perhaps”, “to some extent”, “they say”, “I think”, and the like.

Grey’s Anatomy S6E1

In medical school we have a hundred classes that teaches us how to fight off death and not one lesson in how to go on living.

the eye is glass

A. J. Liebling:

A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one ownership, is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.

that same night

BBC News Magazine:

In the book Gulag Archipelago, author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recounted how a fellow prisoner in the USSR labour camps told how he came to be arrested. At a local party conference, someone toasted Stalin and “stormy applause, rising to an ovation”, broke out. Even though the great leader was absent, it continued. “But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching… However, who would dare be the first to stop?

“Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a business-like expression and sat down in his seat.” That same night, he was arrested.

what we measure

Joseph Stiglitz:

What we measure affects what we do. If we have the wrong metrics, we will strive for the wrong things.

the good life

Robert Skidelsky:

Although real incomes in rich countries have doubled in the last thirty years, the populations of these countries work harder than ever and are no happier. This raises the question of why they are still on the growth treadmill. Is it because capitalism needs constantly to expand markets, and ensnare by advertising more and more people into useless consumption? Is it because economists have ignored the fact that, as societies become wealthier, positional goods — goods which satisfy not our needs, but our longing for status — become more and more desirable? Is it because globalization has made affluence too insecure and too uneven in its spread for most people in wealthy societies to ease off work? Or is it because we lack any agreed idea of the good life in the name of which we can say “enough is enough”?

fear, revulsion and suspense at the national library

National Libary Board:

Both horror and thriller are genres usually used for Fiction titles. In Horror fiction, the aim is the incite feelings of fear and/or revulsion and there is usually some element of the supernatural. In Thrillers, the aim is to excite the reader with suspense and action (usually dangerous action, eg crime, espionage), usually with a climatic ending.

2 works of fiction are in great demand at the national library: Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol (number 74 in the holds list, 105 copies for reservation) and Men In White (number 130 in the holds list, 124 copies for reservation).

2 reasons why i am afraid of eastern europeans – hostel (2005) and this

FT:

I was recently warned about a trap being sprung by a professional gang from eastern Europe. They plant an attractive female staff member in an organisation. At roughly the same time, a male co-conspirator also gets a job; the connection between them is unknown to the employer. After a little while, he sends a series of highly suggestive internet jokes to the pretty female. She complains of harassment and threatens to bring an embarrassing employment tribunal involving sexual discrimination – and, once she reveals that she has hired expert legal advisers and PR agents, the victim business settles quickly.

Language in Thought and Action by S.I and Alan Hayakawa

i read this after a Wired profile on Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist: “In 1972, while still a college student, he read ‘Language in Thought and Action’, the classic book on communication by S. I. Hayakawa, and it helped him understand himself better.”

8 – The cultural accomplishments of the ages, the invention of cooking, of weapons, of writing, of printing, of methods of building, of games and amusements, of means of transportation, and the discoveries of all the arts and sciences come to us as free gifts from the dead.

8 – To be able to read and write, therefore, is to learn to profit by and to take part in the greatest of human achievements–that which makes all other human achievements possible—namely, the pooling of our experience in great cooperative stores of knowledge, available (except where special priviledge, censorship, or suppression stand in the way) to all… Cultural and intellectual cooperation is, or should be, the great principle of human life.

15 – “Companion” means one with whom you share your bread.

18 – … if a Japanese school house caught fire, it used to be obligatory in the days of emperor worship to try to rescue the emperor’s picture (there was once in every schoolhouse), even at the risk of one’s life.

oh dear

on the meidi-ya supermarket public address system at 3:19 pm today:

we found a lost boy. his name was kai…

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

80 – (on Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible) It’s all so arty there’s no art left in it.

81 – Geniuses don’t adjust their interpretations to suit the taste of tyrants.

142 – The belly is a demon. It doesn’t remember how well you treated it yesterday; it’ll cry out for more tomorrow.

163 – I’m not against God, understand that. I do believe in God. But I don’t believe in paradise or in hell. Why do you take us for fools and stuff us with your paradise and hell stories? That’s what I don’t like.

link

guests of honor

a colleague told me recently that she did not understand my sense of humor.

i must admit – it (my humor not my esteemed colleague) is rather peculiar.

for example, when i attend events, i always laugh when they refer to certain visiting PAP ministers as guests of honor.

and the bridge is love

Newsweek:

In a speech after the 9/11 attacks, Tony Blair made an inspired citation of the book’s closing peroration on love, and how it endures through cruelty and death. “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead,” it concludes, “and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

japan in a nutshell

Japan Times:

In one of the book’s more opaque observations, Raskin writes, “People often ask me what fascinates me about Japan, and for a long time I never knew how to explain it. Here it is though, in a nutshell: There’s a Gyoza Stadium on the third floor of a video game arcade called Namco City, and a chart on the wall lists the ratios of soy sauce to vinegar found in gyoza dipping sauces in different regions of the country.”