February 2012
94 posts
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Distance - Peter Everwine
The light pulling away from trees, the trees speaking in shadows to whatever listens… Something as common as water turns away from our faces and leaves. The stars rise out of the hills - old kings and animals marching in their thin tunnels of light. Once more I find myself standing on a dark pier, holding an enormous rope of silence.
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“I guess the excavator I bought is conservative because it only goes to the right, and I can’t make it go left at all. … That was funny.”
“Yes, you’re very funny, dad.”
“Yes I am.” (sardonic laugh)
Good god I love my dad.
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“Baba Amr is being exterminated. Do not tell me our hearts are with you because I know that. We need campaigns everywhere across the world and inside the country. People should protest in front of embassies and everywhere. Because in hours, there will be no more Baba Amr. And I expect this message to be my last.”
The reported last message of Rami Al-Sayed, a Syrian citizen...
I highly recommend listening to BBC Newshour today, or any of the BBC’s excellent audio coverage (and interviews) about the most recent shelling of Homs and the deaths of Remi Ochlik and Marie Colvin.
Newshour today also has some good coverage of developments in Somalia.
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'We live in fear of a massacre'
The last report of Marie Colvin, the British war correspondent killed in recent violence in Homs.
‘We live in fear of massacre,’ in the Sunday Times.
Almost every building is pock-marked after tank rounds punched through concrete walls or rockets blasted gaping holes in the upper floors. The building I was staying in lost its upper floor to a rocket last Wednesday. On some streets...
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Republicans and "Smaller" Government
politicalprof:
One constantly hears that Republicans are the party of small government while Democrats are the party of big government. And, of course, the person making this claim usually makes it clear that small government is good and big government is bad.
Except, of course, this characterization of the two parties’ positions on government is factual twaddle.
Think about it this way:...
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How to Remove Your Google Search History Before... →
h/t: Crossword Inspirations
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“Definitely William Henry Harrison. If you can’t be brilliant, at least be brief.”
– WashPo: Who is the most underrated president, and why?
I’m dying.
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“All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know...”
– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840 (via politicalprof)
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Rules for Captain Ahab's Provincetown Poetry...
1. Ye shall be free to write a poem on any subject, as long as it’s the White Whale.
2. A gold doubloon shall be granted to the first among ye who in a poem sights the White Whale.
3. The Call Me Ishmael Award shall be given to the best poem about the White Whale, with publication in The White Whale Review.
4. The Herman Melville Memorial Picnic and Softball Game shall be open to...
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“I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see...”
– Henry David Thoreau (via rae-elizabeth)
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Instructions for Building Straw Huts - Yusef...
First you must have unbelievable faith in water, in women dancing like hands playing harps for straw to grow stalks of fire. You must understand the year that begins with your hands tied behind your back, worship of dark totems weighed down with night birds that shift their weight & leave holes in the sky. You must know what’s behind the shadow of a treadmill - its window the...
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A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen - Martín...
- 9th Avenue and West 48th Street, New York, October 1998 Above the deli in Hell’s Kitchen where the fire erupted, above the firefighters charging with hoses like great serpents, above the fingerprints of smoke smearing the night, above the crowd calling his name with tilted faces, above the fire truck and its ladder reaching for him, a man leaned elbows on the third-floor fire escape,...
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“And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think...”
– from The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
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“It is my opinion that the combat exclusion policy actually increases the risk of...”
– Former Army Sergeant Kayla Williams dropped a lot of wisdom in an NPR interview earlier this week. You should go read/listen to what she had to say. (via thepoliticalnotebook)
Nicknames →
Photos of NYC couples captioned with their nicknames for each other. Lots of these are gold, but THE DRAGON AND CAPTAIN CLUNKHEAD. !!
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Descartes at Bell's Beach - Peter Goldsworthy
In the tumbling rough beyond the crumbling edges of the great white sea, there is the rock and roll of heavy water amplified against the drumskins of the mind and body as if against a single drum. Out there the world is wild and sonic, my eyes are ears, my mouth an ear, my jostled limbs four tiny bones inside a common ear, transmitting sound, buffeting white noise against the tight-stretched inner...
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Just spent four hours in a coffee shop sipping on Americanos and finding unbelievably great info for my upcoming conference presentation. Flowers and candy can’t beat that - they just can’t.
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Definitely - Mary Jo Bang
What is desire But the hardwire argument given To the mind’s unstoppable mouth. Inside the braincase, it’s I Want that fills every blank. And then the hand Reaches for the pleasure The plastic snake offers. Someone says, Yes, It will all be fine in some future soon. Definitely. I’ve conjured a body In the chair before me. Be yourself, I tell it. Here memory makes you...
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King David Dances - John Berryman
Aware to the dry throat of the wide hell in the world, O trampling empires, and mine one of them, and mine one gross desire against His sight, slaughter devising there, some good behind, ambiguous ahead, revolted sons, a pierced son, bound to hear, mid hypocrites amongst idolaters, mocked in abysm by one shallow wife, with the ponder both of priesthood & of State heavy upon me, yea, all the...
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“Oh, baby, how you’ve come back to me. You come back serious and with a...”
– Rinaldi in A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
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The Widening Sky - Edward Hirsch
I am so small walking on the beach at night under the widening sky. The wet sand quickens beneath my feet and the waves thunder against the shore. I am moving away from the boardwalk with its colorful streamers of people and the hotels with their blinking lights. The wind sighs for hundreds of miles. I am disappearing so far into the dark I have vanished from sight. I am a tiny seashell that has...
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“Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.”
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Peter Ustinov (from “Achtung! Vorurteile,” translated from the original German) (via r-i-o-t)
Clausewitz famously discussed war as “the formulation of policy by other means,” and I don’t find it a stretch to consider terrorism the same way. Terrorism and war are...
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A message from my best friend
“Cait, work on your penchants. Penchants for criminal masterminds is a TERRIBLE idea. Although incredibly attractive, grant you. How about instead YOU be the criminal mastermind and the man gets to be the clever upstanding foil who outwits you? Yes yes? And then you outwit him, and then he outwits you, and so on and so forth until lots of sex and babies results?”
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“No hables al menos que puedas mejorar el silencio.”
– Jorge Luis Borges
“Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.”
(via leftist-linguaphile)
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“night after night after night stay up all night
nothing but your own night”
– Zen master Ikkyu
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Body as Cloud - Jillian Weise
Before the body there were photographs of the body, gray transparent clouds. The parents saw fists the size of hail and this meant confidence in her walk. The doctor saw heart and lungs, skull and brain; this was good, no need to test for Down Syndrome or the others because the cloud was big and full. The cloud was yawning, breathing. When the body came out twisted, six...
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“Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn...”
– from Moby-Dick, Herman Melville