hum

Hsieh Hui was very meticulous in selecting his friends.
He once said: “Who has ever entered my room?
Only the wind.
Who has ever drunk with me?
Only the moon.”

T.C. Lai

Siccome negli ultimi momenti della creatura umana, il prete, profittando dello stato spossato in cui si trova il moribondo, e della confusione che sovente vi succede, s’ inoltra, e mettendo in opera ogni turpe stratagemma, propaga coll’ impostura in cui è maestro, che il defunto compì, pentendosi delle sue credenze passate, ai doveri di cattolico: in conseguenza io dichiaro, che trovandomi in piena ragione oggi, non voglio accettare, in nessun tempo, il ministero odioso, disprezzevole e scellerato d’ un prete, che considero atroce nemico del genere umano e dell’Italia in particolare. E che solo in stato di pazzia o di ben crassa ignoranza, io credo possa un individuo raccomandarsi ad un discendente di Torquemada.

Giuseppe Garibaldi

The other medical expert was James P. Grigson, a forensic psychiatrist. He testified so often for the prosecution in capital-punishment cases that he had become known as Dr. Death. (A Texas appellate judge once wrote that when Grigson appeared on the stand the defendant might as well “commence writing out his last will and testament.”) Grigson suggested that Willingham was an “extremely severe sociopath,” and that “no pill” or treatment could help him. Grigson had previously used nearly the same words in helping to secure a death sentence against Randall Dale Adams, who had been convicted of murdering a police officer, in 1977. After Adams, who had no prior criminal record, spent a dozen years on death row—and once came within seventy-two hours of being executed—new evidence emerged that absolved him, and he was released. In 1995, three years after Willingham’s trial, Grigson was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association.

David Grann

He tried film scores for a bit, but that wasn’t rewarding. People kept interfering: producers, the distributors. “You put all this effort into it, and then the film comes out and you realise that the interest in the music is so limited, it’s so homogenised. You look at the poster and think, fucking hell, what did we have to do with it?” He rolls his eyes. “You know, it would be easier to make another record.” And Massive Attack dissolve into laughter again.