| 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 20, 2009 |
It's an All-Snot week, Trolleybusers, the first of its kind, so let's get crackin'.
Who's Snot: the RIAA... again
For: Frivolous litigation
By now you've heard about the jury who fined a 32-year-old mother of two nearly $2 million for various alleged Internet-related copyright infringements. You all know how I feel about this; I've blogged about my distaste for the record companies' desperate, greedy attempts to sue back the losses they've suffered during hard economic times. But an $80,000-per-song penalty is indefensible by any standard of punitive measure. Federal law allows for up to $150,000 per song, but let's be realistic about something: one song? One hundred and fifty grand? Since when did entire albums cost more than $20 up in this motherfucker? The judge in her first trial called her original penalty of $222,000 "wholly disproportionate," and an attorney in the case is quoted as saying, "... she's been fined $1.9 million for stealing [sic] 24 songs that went for about $1.99 on iTunes. There's no way that can be the correct result." Yeah, no shit.
Who's Snot: the anti-equality hawks in Maine
For: Opposing equal rights
Apparently it isn't enough to ban equal protection in California, now the gay-bashing hordes in Maine have hired the Proposition 8 PR firm to come do their dirty work as well. In all my life, I've never seen people go to such lengths to make sure they get rights that others don't. Are they really that anxious to force their religious beliefs on everyone else? Because that always seems to be the basis for their argument -- religion, the Bible, Jesus, Christianity. Well guess what, kids. The Bible doesn't rule this land, and no Jesus I ever knew would fight to ensure the civil oppression of a portion of the citizenry. Air your personal distaste for homosexuality any way you see fit; that's your right under the First Amendment. But don't try to legislate one set of religious beliefs to the exclusion of things like the Constitution -- that's a right you don't have.
Who's Snot: PETA
For: Their fuss over the fly
Has it really come to this? People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has berated President Obama for swatting and killing a fly in a television interview this week. Instead of taking out the pesky insect himself, they expected him to somehow trap it and release it outside; they even sent him a Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catcher for that very purpose. PETA spokesman Bruce Friedrich said, "We support compassion even for the most curious, smallest, and least sympathetic animals." To which the entire country replied: IT'S A FLY.
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posted by N.T. @ 11:14 PM  |
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