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I've always enjoyed collecting quotes, where a big puddle of wisdom has been distilled into a shot of wisdom. Kottke linked to "The 365 Most Famous Quotes of All Time" (where the collector fights the good fight against the misattributions that are so common online)

Here are my favorites. One set I liked are all different takes on an idea I find crucial; the importance of guiding and channeling our reactions to the world, especially the parts we don't like:

He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

It isn't what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.

What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain.

A sunny disposition is worth more than fortune. Young people should know that it can be cultivated; that the mind, like the body can be moved from the shade into sunshine.

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Another set that resonated for me, especially right now, was about fear...

What would you do if you weren't afraid?

I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.

That last one is interesting, since it speaks to the fear generated by people worried about doing the wrong thing. But like I'll get to later, I'm worried by people who aren't worried about the wrong thing, who have self-granted permission to do what they want.

My dad would actually encourage me to fail growing up. I would come home from school and he would say to my brother and I: 'So what'd you guys fail at this week?' And if we didn't have something, he would actually be disappointed. I didn't realize it at the time, but he was just changing my definition of failure. My definition of failure became not about the outcome, but about not trying.

Failure is a massive part of being able to be successful. You have to get comfortable with failure. You have to actually seek failure. Failure is where all of the lessons are.

I was an overnight success all right, but thirty years is a long, long night.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.

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This next set is more of a mix, but about how to be in life in general:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.

Do what you gotta do so you can do what you wanna do.

(Guess that last one is one of those work to live, don't live to work kind of thoughts)

The right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

That last one has a big implication for UX + Analytics. (Compare to the sometimes (mis-)attributed to Peter Drucker "You can't manage what you can't measure" A certain type of person craves the certainty vibe the accompanies some quantifications, and are willing to put "lies, damn lies, and statistics" aside.)

As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.

As a sometimes rambling speaker I appreciate that last one.

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

Damn, don't like that one! I'm more into "time you enjoy wasting is not wasted". You don't always have to be driven on by that will to accomplish.

What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong. I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original -- if you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.

I guess my main point is not missing "you gotta try to be right" even as you're not afraind to be wrong. (Just like, you gotta try to try and not just preemptively be at ease with failure) Earliest Recording of the word "F*ck" (1885):
I think one takeaway from these years of "is it COVID?" is the idea that I can be a range of different temperatures without it being a fever, something I was only dimly aware of prior. "COVID or just warm?" is right there with the endless rounds of "COVID or just allergies?".

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"American Flags to Half-Staff Honoring the Death of Queen Elizabeth II Until Sunset on the Day of Interment (currently unknown)"

Ugh? Really?? Like maybe one or two days outta respect but YEESH.
We fought against monarchy. And the UK was, shall we say, a bit problematic with that whole "definition of colonialism: see Britain" thing?

Maybe she was mostly a nice, "inspiring" person, but she lived a long and privileged life, and we are paying this WAY too much attention.

I'll tell you the thing Nikki Sixx said in the Mötley Crüe Behind the Music. "You gotta date your wife."

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For my devblog I did a deep dive of the animation shown here - a lovely bit of code snuggled in a 280-max tweet!
Orca attacking sailboats off of the coast of Spain. Super sad. What kind of stresses are they under to change their behavior like that? Probably too poetic to think it's just the only sadly limited affordance they have of striking back at a species that have proven to be rather shitty caretakers of the planet, but there's a probably a parallel to what's really happening, where human-caused changes to their way of life are making them weird and desperate. Since the turn of the century, the Red Sox have won more World Series titles than anyone, but generally stumble the following the year, like how this year they're reigning champions but unlikely to make the postseason. It's kind of like they took the old "Just wait 'til next year!" line and turned it from a promise into a threat...

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supper mario broth. Guess I just love random off-model images of Donkey Kong

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via the-ice-castle 12 Letters That Didn't Make the Alphabet - Icelandic Lowercase Thorn is still available as a bandname.

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Not sure if losing weight (slowly) because of half-assed diet (light breakfast, generous lunch, all other eating during day < 150 calories at a time, like one of those Chilly (not "Skinny") Cow popsicles) or just the stress of life and pangs of fight or flight :-D

Also I restored walking as part of my commute. Again, not sure if it really matters in terms of weight, though obvious more motion is better than less.

Still the best diet plan comes from the book "Chubster: A Hipster's Guide to Losing Weight While Staying Cool" and also "The Hacker's Diet": "find a method to hit a daily calorie count without making yourself miserable" I doubt there's an all-in-one for everyone, but so many successful diets boil down to that. People just can't stop looking at this photo of a cat falling off of a table

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Man, that was my first thought too.... Apple's Creepy New Emoji Are a Gateway Drug to Furrydom

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And Tim said a really simple sentence to me. He said 'Do you think it's ok to punish people who've done nothing wrong?'
And I said no, even though I kind of felt somewhere in my heart that it was a trick question.
And then he said 'Then why is it ok to reward people who've done nothing right?'
And he said 'Can't you see that you can't reward without punishing, they are the same thing.'
That shut me up for a little while.

There's then a second question about the use of force but I felt this bit alone was containing at two errors, or at least massive presumptions:

One is the ending - reward = punishing, and the assumption that everything in life is a zero-sum game. That's radical overreach.

The second is - here we are, animate matter. ("Lucky me, lucky mud" to quote Vonnegut.) This is one of the most distinct rewards and privileges the universe bestows... and yet, undeserved by me. I guess you could say "well it's a reward for my parent's work in making me" but that leads to an infinite regress. So - it's ok, at least in this universe, because this is what the universe DOES.

So, while there might indeed be legitimate arguments about where to draw the line in what we as a society should do for ourselves via taxes and policing and regulation and collective military defense, I don't think it starts in a "all rewards must be justified by right action" stance.
Britney Spears' Toxic But It Keeps Getting Faster (quoth one listener: "I think this is what anxiety sounds like")

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On my dev blog, talk about a part of the iphone many USAians don't even know is there but is really popular in Asia and Brazil...

September Blender of Love

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switcheroo

There are more than 3 times as many new mobile apps released per day (~2400) than the total number of unique games made for NES ever (~800).

when i like someone all i want to do is text them 'HI' all day long like a dog who has learned how to text

Jon Rafman's 9-eyes is an amazing capturing of some of the more interesting stuff Google's Street View cars have seen while scouring the globe... this was one of the better ones.

Also a fair number of street walkers and people flicking off the camera...

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There is no finish line. There is no starting line. There is no track. There is only Me, your cosmic gym teacher, screaming at your fat ass.

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Cubism was perverse when Picasso first did it. People justify it by talking about looking at an object from three sides and so on, but it always seemed to me much more about seeing the ass and the breast at the same time. That's basically what Picasso used it for, and even after he gave up Cubism, he still habitually drew the ass crack, the pussy and the breast on the front.

--via 22 words

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Inbox Zero AND Todo List Zero. Been a while!

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DHL was handing out free Thunder Sticks noisemakers. Besides the noise when hit together, they're fun drumsticks. The sticks are the drum!
--via gifanime

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The food chain according to 3-year-old Toph: Squirrels eat racoons, racoons eat busses, and busses don't want to eat.

Random comics I have saved: (insert "fair use" argument here)







Arlo and Janis is really great - I love it when Arlo gets either melancholy and philisophical, and sometimes the whole sexy/innuendo thing with his wife is nice to see on the comics page as well... it's a darn shame Arlo and Janis doesn't seem to have many anthologies.





Man I don't even know how many times I've quoted that last one (mostly the "both a depressant and a stimulant" part)

Semi-infamous Daphny had an LJ thread about making up lyrics for Nintendo games , inspired by this video:



That reminded me what we did to the "DK Hammer" music.
In Smash Bros and its sequels, games where four characters taken from a range of Nintendo game duke it out on screen, one of the most awesome weapons to pickup is the Hammer... the weapon and its tune harken back to the first appearance of Mario in the original Donkey Kong, and when you are wielding the fabled hammer you a force to be reckoned with. You can see the weapon in its original form and its use in Smash Bros Melee here:

Anyway, with EB we invented a song to go with that music, and get goes

watchoutformy hammer! hammer!
gottawatchoutformy HAMMER! HAMMER!

The best part of it is it's easy to remember and sing.
Plus you have the hammer.

(EB and I would sing this song pretty much any time we picked up a hammer during the Rockport renovation project.)

Weird thing is, Daphnee reports her group singing the same song...

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At local pub Flann's; something with the fish and chips or the guiness or the music gave me a weird Man Ray flashback. Music booze, prob.

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they may not know which end is which / but thingamajigs scratch where thingamajigs itch [wash away your wildlife!]

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I dig how English evolves and is easy-going but I'm kind of worried about "u" becoming the default. Though I guess it's a nice match to "I"

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Always a bummer when you're at the game and the hometeam says "ah well, let's see what these kids can do..."

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We would have been right in that game if it wasn't for those back-to-back 3-run innings.

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Sometimes I'm way too pleased with myself that I seem to have landed "kirkjerk" as a nickname before any other kirk online. I've got a Hawaiian Shirt that has a "sunglass loop", a dense loop of fabric near the top of the pocket that you can hang sunglasses from. While I appreciate the ingenuity of the idea, as well as it being better than a mere pocket at stopping a pair of glasses from clattering to floor, I was somehow annoyed reading the tag for it and see that it was "Patent Pending".

Just something a bit too... Jimmy Buffet in the blend of vacation wear and corporate interest.

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Video of the Moment

--Speaking of unholy corporate blends, Slashdot linked to this errr... rap video pitching MS-DOS 5, apparently to retailers. (Is it just me or is it kind of odd that both the three backup singers and the woman who constitutes half of the in-video audience are in red dresses?) Heh, remember when beta tests were largely performed by the companies themselves? I think I previously posted a similar-ish Windows 386 promotional video that goes on at a stodgy place for seven minutes and then gets distinctly...odd.

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Prose of the Moment

"And how do you finance this interesting life with these daily climbs of yours?" she asks, her voice curling in on itself with playfulness. She is leaning on one arm on the back of my chair, her hips canted forward; her shirt rides up, showing a chevron of sleek tummy, a demure ring at the navel.

In an effort to banish the blues during those few hours between when the sun goes down at about four and the time when it might be appropriate to start drinking, I take myself to see Flight Club, which, while featuring an awfully good performance by the four-inch band of flesh across Brad Pitt's stomach just above his pubic hair, does little to lift my spirits.

David Rakoff likes flat tummies. I can see where he's coming from with that.

You know, Miller moving in makes me realize that among the relatively few things that might count as "sacred" to me, hospitality is one of them. Specifically, being able to provide a place to crash for an out-of-town guest or even a local friend down on their luck.

And the weird thing is, I think it's this passage from "Of Mice and Men" that is the nexus for that thought, where George is taking about the place he dreams about setting up:

"An' it'd be our own, an' nobody could can us. If we don't like a guy, we can say: 'Gedt the hell out,' an' by God he's got to do it. An' if a fren' come a long, why we'd have an extra bunk, an' we'd say: 'Why don't you spen' the night,' an' by God he would."

Admittedly I've led a much more priveleged privileged ("Thanks", FoSO) life than the characters in that book and have had "my own place" since graduation, but still, the concept resonates.

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Quote of the Moment

So long as there's a jingle in your head, television isn't free.

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Fetish of the Moment
BoingBoing linked to this Radar Online piece on fetish clubs in Japan (NSFW Warning: Breasts) catering to odd, sometimes weirdly-innocent-sounding sexual interests. This one, women frolicking in green gel, was one of the weirder ones though I also liked "pay a 40,000-yen [~$340] entrance fee to drink and watch [topless] foreign women swim in a tank." Lyric of the Moment

The best thing you've ever done for me
Is to help me take my life less seriously, it's only life after all

These lines that keep going through my head. I'm not sure if they apply to how I actually feel, or if it's just a catchy thought...but if it keeps up it might become a sort of mantra for me, at least the time being.

Questions of the Moment

1. How would you describe yourself as a child between the ages of 5 and 12?
If you're like most people you are still the little boy or girl you once were.

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2. What did you learn about women (or, if you're talking to a woman, about men) when you were growing up?
By asking a prospective spouse about men and women in general you will find out what he or she thinks about them.

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3. What are three or four of your childhood memories?
These memories will reveal your partner's past hurts, fears, and anxieties--and give you a glimpse into his or her general view of life.

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4. How would you describe either of your parents?
Either is the important word here. The parent your date chooses to describe first is usually the one who had the greatest impact.

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5. What were your siblings like?
Your potential love did not grow up in a vacuum; she or he developed a personality as part of a delicate interplay with brothers or sisters. To truly understand someone, you must understand how the person sees herself or himself in relation to these siblings.

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6. What's the difference between your ideal self and your real self?
The key here is to find out if there is a huge gap between the ideal self and the real self. In a healthy adult, you won't find too many surprises.

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7. How would you fill in the blank?: I only matter in life when I _________.
You need to know what makes your partner feel like he or she matters, because if you're going to love someone for the rest of your life, you need to figure out how this person wants to be loved.

--"7 Essential Questions for Getting Closer" by Kevin Leman, from "The Birth Order Connection" excerpted by Utne. (Thanks Lex...)

"5" almost makes me wonder, being an only child and all. As for the analysis "7", I think the thing is I want to be appreciated for the stuff I create, the jokes I tell.

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Article of the Moment
The Washington Post had an unflinching look at the (non-)future of New Orleans. The tourist and other stuff wasn't that badly off, and will be rebuilt, it's the "real community" stuff that likely won't come back. It also pointed out that New Orleans as a functional port isn't synonymous with a functional city (In fact, it seems like the lack of jobs might be tied in to how autmation the shipping industry has added.)

Ramble of the Moment
So I really love my GPS navigator thing for my car. And while its route plotting and tracking function is its most crucial and useful routine, it occured to me that somehow it's cooler when it's just displaying my position on a map, just sitting there silently doing its thing, mellowly printing the name of the cross streets.

Similarly, whenever I see a vending machine where some of the slots are empty, I'm always tempted to put in some money and punch the code for the empty slot, watching the little spiral thing turn, just an odd bit of vending machine performance art.

I'm trying to think of other examples of the beauty of zen-like mechanical uselessness...

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Conspiracy Theory of the Moment
WTC 7 was a 47 story building near the twin towsers that collapsed, supposedly because of debris from the towsers and some internal fires (maybe some fuel had been stored there.) Some people says that seems unlikely, and that when FDNY said they were going to "pull it" they meant demolish it, not just withdraw their men. On the other hand, planting explosives would've been a kind of tough job that day. So what the hell went on?

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Article of the Moment
Slate had a well-written piece about the use of printed gaming guides and online FAQs called Turn Left At The Zombie.

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Pathetic Fishing for Comments of the Moment
Is anybody out there? I can hear you breathing...

Seriously, how was your weekend? I think I'll always breathe a sigh of relief whenever a September 11th passes without incident.

Sometimes I get the feeling I used to be more clever than I am now. But that was in college, and I was in idiot then, so maybe not. Actually, I've always had that feeling, so either I'm always getting dumber, or more aware of my limitations, or some of both.

UPDATE: bozo left a cheery message on today's Comments section, forecasting accelerating mental deterioration in my 30s, 40s, and beyond. Though I don't think that link I posted was a particularly good example...I think I just got lucky with the windows drivers, and I can probably repeat such bits of cleverness even now in my pre-middle age. Actually, the "slippage" that I'm more curious about now is usually in the form of typos...I definitely make more of them than I used to, but the diagnosis is made murky by the way I taught myself to more or less touchtype in 1999 or so. Eh, still, I have faith that my brain will be able to compensate for its own shortcomings for a long, long time.

Bozo also suggests not waiting too long before having kids, if I'm gonna have 'em....yurk. That's a bit area of indecision for both me and Mo.

Hrrm. It makes me wonder about what I see as "meaningful" in my life. In college it was getting an education chasing after R. After college, it was accimating to the workplace and managing to woo Mo. (And damn if you trying to impress women doesn't bring out the most creativity in literate guys...unfortunately, I think from an objective view I made better stuff chasing R. because the chase was so much harder.) These days, though, I think I really get satisfaction out of various projects, ongoing (like this site and the loveblender) and one-offs (like my Atari 2600 game.) I guess I've always found discussion, intellectual and otherwise, important as well.

Still, I guess I don't just view life as a quest for meaning, because I'm willing to believe childraising is about as meaningful as you can get, but I'm still very ambivalent about it.

Heh...I just glanced at this e-mail in the K+R Carousel Archive from 1995, and I was making stupid typos then, "this" for "there is"...and that's exactly the kind of sound blend typo I tend to make these days.

Hrrm. This italicized update is about 6-8 times as long as the original comment. Ah well!

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Line of the Moment

I can't say any more than I love you. Anything else would be a waste of breath.

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Link of the Moment
In the old link department, this Teens and Politics page for Tom Watson, a British Labour MP, is interesting; I think it's a sincere appeal to teens that works by making fun of sincere trying-to-be-cool appeals to teens. A relatively sophisticated idea for that kind of site. Pet peeve: when people link to an article on a site, they often feel a need to link to the main page of the site. This is stupid, making it difficult to see what is the main link of the Blog entry. Almost any site worth linking to will provide a link to its own frontpage as part of its standard article template (and it's generally trivial to figure out the frontpage URL even if it's not displayed.) Slashdot articles do this all the time. If the main site's URL is obscure enough that its worthwhile to display, sometimes I'll show it, but not make it a link.

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Passage of the Moment

[The family] sat around the kitchen table eating fish sticks and hash browns, and their dog Rex walked in and said, "I wish you people knew what you smell like to me. I think you'd find it informative."

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Political Point of the Moment
Rarely is the question asked: "Is our presidents learning?"

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Backlog Link of the Moment
Ever want to build your own chatbot? Now you can. Not sure if I can think of a worthwhile reason to spend the programming effort, but it's an interesting idea.

This is (the back of) Mo standing in front of the fountain at the World Trade Center plaza, taken September 11, 1999, two years (to the day) before the tragedy.

I liked that fountain very much. I once got the chance to look down on it, from about halfway up the tower, three years earlier when I was on assignment for Barron's Online. It was the most interesting thing to look at from that height... water poured from the center circle onto the larger circle. All around the outside border of the inner circle it looked a bit like a boat's wake (you can make out the 'wake' in the picture), giving the illusion that the inner circle's edge was constantly moving inward. But of course it was remaining the same size, thus confounding the eye. It was a great piece of art, now ruined. That pales in comparison to the rest of the tragedy, but that's my attempt to connect to what has happened.

Update 2002.02.25: I moved a thumbnail and link to this page to kisrael.com's front page. The image shows up on the second page of Google image search for "WTC", but the resulting "in context" link is to the site's front page.

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Image Gallery
The pictures from Tuesday were horrifying, but for some reason these images of the citizens of other countries sharing our grief really moved me. (Update: parts two, three and four)

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A Lighter Note
Brunching.com has An Open Letter To Dorks and Losers, exploding the myths of bullydom, like "they'll back down if you stand up to them". It's very funny and rings very true.