| Quotables |
"Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. ... I felt
very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar |
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"On the surface, it sounds irresponsible, but to flourish in a rapidly changing world, you actually need to make more mistakes. Fail quickly. Fail often. If you do something and it
doesn't work, just recover in a hurry and try something else. ... Help develop a culture that is willing to fail its way to the future."
-- Price Pritchett, Culture Shift |
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"There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction -- every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar |
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| hot & snot |
| Saturday, June 13, 2009 |
Who's Hot: Congress, for once
For: Voting to regulate tobacco
I know, I know... everyone wants less government intervention, not more. But I damn near died the first time I heard that the Food and Drug Administration doesn't regulate tobacco. They lord over everything from cosmetics to Bayer aspirin, but one of the most deadly, addictive compounds to enter into the daily human culture remained virtually untouched. This week, Congress voted to change that, and I couldn't be happier. Despite the howling cries of suicidals who insist they're entitled to kill themselves slowly and inflict enormous drains on the health care system in the process, this vote sends a message to the contrary that's about forty years overdue. And the overwhelming majority by which the vote passed was the perfect exclamation point.
Who's Snot: 2.8 Million U.S. households
For: Still being unprepared for the digital switch
Really? Two years of advertising and publicity for the change to digital broadcasting, months and months and months of coupon-mailing antics on the part of the Feds, and according to Nielsen, there are still nearly 3 million households in this country that are caught with their pants down, watching a screen full of snow as of 9 a.m. Central time yesterday. One deadline already passed; you got your extension and still can't keep up. The headlines indicate "confusion" as analog broadcasting ceases and one Federal hotline logs 800,000 calls; I'd be confused, too, if my head was that far up my ass.
Who's Snot: The Supreme Court
For: Upholding "don't ask, don't tell"
If we didn't aleady have a shining example of how not to treat your already oppressed second-class citizenry in California, this week the Supreme Court found insufficient reason -- beyond common sense, apparently -- to repeal the military's discriminatory "don't ask, don't tell" policy, essentially prohibiting gay people from being honest about who they are with their commanders and fellow servicemen. What didn't make headlines was whether heterosexual servicemen will also be required to refrain from talking about their wives and girlfriends. You can bet that ain't part of the deal. |
posted by N.T. @ 11:41 PM  |
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