1114) Alex had never been that big a fan of current events anyway, but he had now come to feel that the world's cheerful shiny-toothed bullshitters were the primal source of all true evil.
Bruce Sterling Heavy Weather (1994)
1115) Heroes must reflect what it is that we feel is ourselves at our best, what we would like to think we would have done under similar circumstances. Heroes make us strive to live up to that image of ourselves. Without heroes, we must make do with celebrities.
John Ford Noble "When We Were Racing With the Moon" in Sunday NY Times Art & Leisure Section (6/25/1995)
1116) Today, with clever computer graphics and other technological smoke-and-mirrors, we can create the verisimilitude of a flight to the moon, but no longer do we have the means or the will for the real thing.
John Ford Noble "When We Were Racing With the Moon" in Sunday NY Times Art & Leisure Section (6/25/1995)
1117) Playing the chief of manned space in "Marooned" (1969), Gregory Peck makes his big speech: "The trip to the Moon was just a walk around the block. We're going to the stars, to other worlds..." But of course we're not.
Thomas Mallon "Visions of the Future, Relics of the Past" in Sunday NY Times Art & Leisure Section (6/25/1995)
1118) I remember when we were going to go up into outer space I remember when the President said We were going to look for things in outer space And I remember the way the astronauts talked And how everybody was watching Because there was the chance that they would burn up on the launching pad Or that the rocket would take off from Cape Canavral And land in Fort Lauderdale five minutes later by mistake And now we're not even trying to get that far Now, it's more like the bus Now it's more like they just go up high enough to get a good view They aim the camera back down They don't aim the camera up And then they take pictures And come right back to develop them That's what it's like now Now, that's what it's like.
Laurie Anderson "New Jersey Turnpike" from United States Live (LP, 1983)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 506 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
started unfutz four years ago, make post to mark occasion
visuals: use graphic "4"; Sesame Street or psychedelic? (check Google images for available)
text: note date started (8/31/03), # of days in existence (1462), # of posts (2489), # of hits (200,450), avg. posts per day (1.7), avg. hits per post (80.5), avg hits per day (137.1), etc.
1112) Everybody's supposed to be equal [at the fictional high-tech company "Interval Research"] [...] but of course you have sub-equal and super-equal personalities. They fall into planet/moon relationships soon enough.
Douglas Coupland microserfs (1995) spoken by the character "Laura"
1113) The Fry's chain [of "nerd superstores"] taps into MSE: Male Shopping Energy. This is to say that most guys have about 73 calories of shopping energy, and one these calories are gone, they're gone for the day - if not the week - and can't be regenerated simply by having an Orange Julius at the Food Fair. Therefore, to get guys to shop, a store has to eat up all their MSE calories in one crack-like burst.
Douglas Coupland microserfs (1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 508 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1097) Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.
Theodosius Dobzhansky "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in Light of Evolution" in American Biology Teacher (v.35/1973) quoted by Daniel C. Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1098) Evolution is a change from a nohowish untalkaboutable all-alikeness, to a somehowish and ingeneral-talkabutable, not-all-alikeness, by continuous somethingelsifications and sticktogetherations
Kirkman, a mathematician cited by P.G. Tait in "Prof Tait on the Formula of Evolution" in Nature (v.23/1880) quoted by Daniel C. Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1099) Frozen accidents.
Francis Crick describing the results of evolution by natural selection "The Origin of the Genetic Code" in Journal of Molecular Biology (v.38/1968) quoted by Daniel C. Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1100) Biological macromolecules have a storage capacity that exceeds that of the best present-day information stores by several orders of magnitude. For example, the "information density" in the genome of E. coli is about 10e27 bits/m[cubed]
Bernd-Olaf Kuppers Information and the Origin of Life (1990) quoted by Daniel C. Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1101) Human beings owe their biological supremacy to the possession of a form of inheritance quite unlike that of other animals: exogenetic or exosomatic heredity. In this form of heredity information is transmitted from one generation to the next through nongenetic channels - by word of mouth, by example, and by other forms of indoctrination; in general, by the entire apparatus of culture.
Peter Medawar "Unnatural Science" in New York Review of Books (2/3/1977) quoted by Daniel C. Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1102) Most of what is unusual about man can be summed up in one word: 'culture'.
Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene (1989)
1103) Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientists hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.
Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene (1976) quoted by Daniel C. Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1104) We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. [...] We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene (1976) quoted by Daniel C. Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1105) It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl.
John von Neumann quoted by William Poundstone in The Prisoner's Dilemma (1992) cited by Daniel C. Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1106) Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorely tempted to misuse that power in furthering a person prejudice or social goal - why not provide that extra oomph by extending the umbrella of silence over a personal preference in ethics or politics? But we cannot, lest we lose the very respect that tempted us in the first place.
Stephen Jay Gould Bully for Brontosaurus (1991) quoted by Daniel C. Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1107) C.P. Snow, in the Two Cultures, extolled the great discoveries of science as "scientific Shakespeare." But in one way he was fundamentally mistaken, Shakespeare's plays were Shakespeare's plays and no one else's. Scientific discoveries, by contrast, belong - ultimately - to no one in particular.
Nicholas Humphrey "Scientific Shakespeare" in the Guardian (8/26/1987) quoted by Daniel C. Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1108) The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again but less and less and less.
Piet Hein quoted by Daniel C. Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1109) Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.
Robert M. Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
1110) Science is wonderful at destroying metaphysical answers, but incapable of providing substitute ones. Science takes away foundations without a replacement. Whether we want to be there or not, science has put us in the position of having to live without foundations. It was shocking when Nietzsche said this, but today it is commonplace; our historical position - and no end to it is in sigh - is that of having to philosophize without "foundations".
Hilary Putnam The Faces of Realism (1987) quoted by Daniel C. Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1111) Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers, you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.
Richard Feynman What Do YOU Care What People Think? (1988) quoted by Daniel C. Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 508 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1096) [T]here are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections.
Daniel C. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 509 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1091) A prosthetically enhanced imagination is still liable to failure, especially if it is not used with sufficient rigor.
Daniel C. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1092) Experience teaches [...] that there is no such thing as a thought experiment so clearly presented that no philosopher can misinterpret it [...]
Daniel C. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1093) Philosophers might care to ask themselves [...] how often they are accomplices in increasing the audience for a second-rate article simply because their introductory course needs a simple-minded version of a bad idea that even freshmen can refute. Some of the most frequently reprinted articles in twentieth-century philosophy are famous precisely because nobody believes them; everybody can see what's wrong with them. [...] The confirmation of this claim is left as an exercise for the reader. Among the memes that structure the infosphere and hence affect the transmission of other memes are the laws of libel.
Daniel C. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1094) If you have ever asked yourself if their are facts about yourself (about your health, your competence, your prospects) you would rather not know, and decided that there were, you should be prepared to consider seriously the suggestion that the best - perhaps the only - way to ensure that such facts are not imposed on people is by prohibiting investigations likely to discover them.
Daniel C. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1095) It is not "scientism" to concede the objectivity and precision of good science, any more than it is history worship to concede that Napoleon did once rule in France and the Holocaust actually happened. Those who fear the facts will forever try to discredit the fact-finders.
Daniel C. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 510 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1085) From what can "ought" be derived. The most compelling answer is this: ethics must be somehow based on an appreciation of human nature - on a sense of what a human being is or might be, and on what a human being might want to have or want to be. If that is naturalism, then naturalism is no fallacy. No one could seriously deny that ethics is responsive to such facts about human nature. We may just disagree about where to look for the most compelling facts about human nature - in novels, in religious texts, in psychological experiments, in biological or anthropological investigations. The fallacy is not naturalism but, rather, any simple-minded attempt to rush from facts to values. In other words, the fallacy is greedy reductionism of values to facts, rather than reductionism considered more circumspectly, as the attempt to unify our world-view so that out ethical principles don't clash irrationally with the way the world is.
Daniel C. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1086) [I]f you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to [participate]. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith as a way of getting to the truth, and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do take seriously). But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side. You are sightseeing with a loved one in a foreign land, and your loved one is brutally murdered in front of your eyes. At the trial it turns out that in this land friends of the accused may be called as witnesses for the defense, testifying about their faith in his innocence. You watch the parade of his moist-eyed friends, obviously sincere, proudly proclaiming their undying faith in the innocence of the man you saw commit the terrible deed. The judge listens intently and respectfully, obviously more moved by this outpouring than by all the evidence presented by the prosecution. Is this not a nightmare? Would you be willing to live in such a land? Or would you be willing to be operated on by a surgeon you tells you that whenever a little voice in him tells him to disregard his medical training, he listens to the little voice? I know it passes in polite company to let people have it both ways, and under most circumstances I wholeheartedly cooperate with this benign agreement. But we're seriously trying to get at the truth here, and if you think that this common but unspoken understanding about faith is anything better than socially useful obfuscation to avoid mutual embarrassment and loss of face, you have either seen much more deeply into the issue that any philosopher ever has (for none has ever come up with a good defense of this) or you are kidding yourself.
Daniel C. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1087) A faith, like a species, must evolve or go extinct when the environment changes. It is not a gentle process in either case. [...] It's nice to have grizzly bears and wolves living in the wild. They are no longer a menace; we can peacefully co-exist, with a little wisdom. The same policy can de discerned in our political tolerance, in religious freedom. You are free to preserve or create any religious creed you wish, so long as it does not become a public menace. We're all on the Earth together, and we have to learn some accommodation. [...] The message is clear: those who will not accommodate, who will not temper, who insist on keeping only the purest and wildest strain of their heritage alive, we will be obliged, reluctantly, to cage or disarm, and we will do our best to disable the memes they fight for. Slavery is beyond the pale. Child abuse is beyond the pale. Discrimination is beyond the pale. The pronouncing of death sentences on those who blaspheme against a religion (complete with bounties or reward for those who carry them out) is beyond the pale. It is not civilized, and it is owed no more respect in the name of religious freedom than any other incitement to cold-blooded murder. [...] That is - or, rather, ought to be, the message of multiculturalism, not the patronizing and subtly racist hypertolerance that "respects" vicious and ignorant doctrines when they are propounded by officials of non-European states and religions.
Daniel C. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1088) [I]n all mammalian species that have so far been carefully studied, the rate at which their members engage in the killing of conspecifics is several thousand times greater than the highest homicide rate in any American city.
Daniel C. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) citing the research of George Williams from "Huxley's Evolution and Ethics in Sociobiological Perspective" in Zygon (v.23/88)
1089) People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species - and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture. [...] We have language, the primary medium of culture [...] In a few short millennia - a mere instant in biological time - we have already used our new exploration vehicles to transform not only our planet but the very process of design development that created us.
Daniel C. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1090) When comparing the time scales of genetic and cultural evolution, it is useful to bear in mind that we today - every one of us - can easily understand many ideas that were simply unthinkable by the geniuses in our grandparents' generation!
Daniel C. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 510 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1080) The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story. Like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput, it is unbudgable, not because of some one or two huge chains of argument that might - hope against hope - have weak links in them, but because it is securely tied by thousands of threads of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other area of human knowledge. New discoveries may conceivably lead to dramatic, even "revolutionary" shifts in the Darwinian theory, but the hope that it will be "refuted" by some shattering breakthrough is about as reasonable as the hope that we will return to a geocentric vision and discard Copernicus.
Daniel C. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1081) The evidence of evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy (Darwin's chief sources), but from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences. To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant - inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write. Doubts about the power of Darwin's idea of natural selection to explain this evolutionary process are still intellectually respectable, however, although the burden of proof for such skepticism has become immense [...]
Daniel C. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1082) Much of the controversy and anxiety that has enveloped Darwin's idea [...] can be understood as a series of failed campaigns to contain Darwin;s idea within some acceptably "safe" and merely partial revolution. Cede some or all of modern biology to Darwin, perhaps, but hold the line there! Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion! In these campaigns, many battles have been won by the forces of containment: flawed applications of Darwin's idea have been exposed and discredited, beaten back by the champions of the pre-Darwinian tradition. But new waves of Darwinian thinking keep coming.
Daniel C. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1083) There is a familiar trio of reactions by scientists to a purportedly radical hypothesis: (a) "You must be out of your mind!", (b) "What else is new? Everybody knows that!", and, later - if the hypothesis is still standing - (c) "Hmm. You might be on to something!" Sometimes these phases take years to unfold, one after another, but I have seen all three emerge in near synchrony in the course of a half-hour's heated discussion following a conference paper.
Daniel C. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
1084) [A] skyhook is [...] an exception to the principle that all design, and apparent design, is ultimately the result of mindless, motiveless mechanicity. A crane, in contrast, is a subprocess or special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated to permit the local speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection, and that can be demonstrated to be itself the predictable (or retroactively explicable) product of the basic process. [...] [T]he physicist Steven Weinberg, in Dreams of a Final Theory (1992) [...] distinguishes between uncompromising reductionism (a bad thing) and compromising reductionism (which he ringingly endorses). Here is my own version. We must distinguish reductionism, which is in general a good thing, from greedy reductionism, which is not. The difference, in the context of Darwin's theory, is simple: greedy reductionists think that everything can be explained without cranes; good reductionists think that everything can be explained without skyhooks.
Daniel C. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 510 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
1078) Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
Edward Abbey A Voice Crying in the Wilderness: Notes from a Secret Journal (1989) "sig" (signature) of unknown Usenet user (~6/95)
1079) The last thing that a peacekeeper wants to know is the history of the region he is going into. It complicates the task of mediation.
Maj. Gen. Lewis Mackenzie (Canada), one of the first UNPROFOR ground commanders in Sarajevo during the Yugoslav wars quoted by Mark Almond in Europe's Backyard War (1994) Cynthia Price, personal e-mail (6/21/95)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 511 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.
"[T]he cook [on Ernest Shackleton's 1914 expedition to Antartica], had written a letter to his parents when he signed on [...] but the ship carrying his message was torpedoed, so that no one knew where he was. On return to civilization in 1916, he, like others of the crew, had to find his own way home -- officers and scientists returned on a liner -- and eventually got passage as a "distressed British seaman." Back in England, he discovered that his parents had cashed in his life insurance policy and that his girlfriend had married." Caroline Alexander, The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctica Expedition (1998)
"On May 11, at 4:43am, [Rob] Hall radioed down and said that he was on the South Summit [of Mount Everest]. He reported that Harris had reached the two men, but that Hansen had died of hypothermia sometime during the night and that Harris was missing as well. Hall was not breathing bottled oxygen, because his regulator was too choked with ice. By 9:00 am, Hall had fixed his oxygen mask, but indicated that his frostbitten hands and feet were making it difficult to traverse the fixed ropes. Later in the afternoon, he radioed to Base Camp, asking them to call his wife, Jan Arnold, on the satellite phone. During this last communication, he reassured her that he was reasonably comfortable and told her, "Sleep well my sweetheart. Please don't worry too much." Shortly thereafter, he died, and his body was found on May 23 by mountaineers from the IMAX expedition." Wikipedia: 1996 Everest Disaster
absolutist
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anti-Constitutional
anti-intellectual
arrogant
authoritarian
blame-placers
blameworthy
blinkered
buckpassers
calculating
class warriors
clueless
compassionless
con artists
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craven
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dogmatic
doomed
fanatical
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heinous
hostile to science
hypocritical
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ignorant
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Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
recently seen
i've got a little list...
Elliott Abrams
Steven Abrams (Kansas BofE)
David Addington
Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson
Roger Ailes (FNC)
John Ashcroft
Bob Bennett
William Bennett
Joe Biden
John Bolton
Alan Bonsell (Dover BofE)
Pat Buchanan
Bill Buckingham (Dover BofE)
George W. Bush
Saxby Chambliss
Bruce Chapman (DI)
Dick Cheney
Lynne Cheney
Richard Cohen
The Coors Family
Ann Coulter
Michael Crichton
Lanny Davis
Tom DeLay
William A. Dembski
James Dobson
Leonard Downie (WaPo)
Dinesh D’Souza
Gregg Easterbrook
Jerry Falwell
Douglas Feith
Arthur Finkelstein
Bill Frist
George Gilder
Newt Gingrich
John Gibson (FNC)
Alberto Gonzalez
Rudolph Giuliani
Sean Hannity
Katherine Harris
Fred Hiatt (WaPo)
Christopher Hitchens
David Horowitz
Don Imus
James F. Inhofe
Jesse Jackson
Philip E. Johnson
Daryn Kagan
Joe Klein
Phil Kline
Ron Klink
William Kristol
Ken Lay
Joe Lieberman
Rush Limbaugh
Trent Lott
Frank Luntz
"American Fundamentalists"
by Joel Pelletier
(click on image for more info)
Chris Matthews
Mitch McConnell
Stephen C. Meyer (DI)
Judith Miller (ex-NYT)
Zell Miller
Tom Monaghan
Sun Myung Moon
Roy Moore
Dick Morris
Rupert Murdoch
Ralph Nader
John Negroponte
Grover Norquist
Robert Novak
Ted Olson
Elspeth Reeve (TNR)
Bill O'Reilly
Martin Peretz (TNR)
Richard Perle
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ralph Reed
Pat Robertson
Karl Rove
Tim Russert
Rick Santorum
Richard Mellon Scaife
Antonin Scalia
Joe Scarborough
Susan Schmidt (WaPo)
Bill Schneider
Al Sharpton
Ron Silver
John Solomon (WaPo)
Margaret Spellings
Kenneth Starr
Randall Terry
Clarence Thomas
Richard Thompson (TMLC)
Donald Trump
Richard Viguere
Donald Wildmon
Paul Wolfowitz
Bob Woodward (WaPo)
John Yoo
guest-blogging
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recent listening
influences
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Aphex Twin
Isaac Asimov
Fred Astaire
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"Catch-22"
Raymond Chandler
Arthur C. Clarke
Elvis Costello
Richard Dawkins
Daniel C. Dennett
Philip K. Dick
Kevin Drum
Brian Eno
Fela
Firesign Theatre
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David Gordon
Stephen Jay Gould
Dashiell Hammett
"The Harder They Come"
Robert Heinlein
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Frank Herbert
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Bill James
Gene Kelly
Stanley Kubrick
Jefferson Airplane
Ursula K. LeGuin
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John McPhee
Harry Partch
Michael C. Penta
Monty Python
Orbital
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
"The Prisoner"
"The Red Shoes"
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Oliver Sacks
Erik Satie
"Singin' in the Rain"
Stephen Sondheim
The Specials
Morton Subotnick
Talking Heads/David Byrne
Tangerine Dream
Hunter S. Thompson
J.R.R. Tolkien
"2001: A Space Odyssey"
Kurt Vonnegut
Yes
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.
Entertaining, interesting, intelligent, informed and informative comments will always be welcome, even when I disagree with them.
I am the sole judge of which of these qualities pertains.
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the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.
If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.
(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)
Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.
