hum

I like low-budget movies and expensive restaurants.

Heaven and Earth are not kind:
The ten thousand things are straw dogs to them.

Sages are not kind:
People are straw dogs to them.

Yet Heaven and Earth
And all the spaces between
Are like bellows:
Empty but inexhaustible,
Always producing more.

Longwinded speech is exhausting.
Better to stay centered.

5

Something marvellous happened to me. I was transported to the seventh heaven. There sat all the gods assembled. As a special dispensation, I was granted the favour of making a wish. “Do you wish for youth,” said Mercury, “or for beauty, or power, or a long life; or do you wish for the most beautiful woman, or any other of the many fine things we have in our treasure chest? Choose, but only one thing!” For a moment I was bewildered; then I addressed the gods, saying: “My esteemed contemporaries, I choose one thing — that I may always have the laughter on my side.”

North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-il is a fanatical cinephile whom is said to have a library of 15,000 films, and for years he has directed his own propaganda movies. He was behind the seizure of a leading South Korean film director and his wife in 1978, “re-educating” him in prison and camps for five years before telling him to get on with more movies, although the couple later escaped during a trip to Vienna in 1986.

You seem to think we might censor a student’s thesis, which is lawful and already in the public domain, simply because a powerful interest finds it inconvenient. This shows a deep misconception of what universities are and how we work. Cambridge is the University of Erasmus, of Newton and of Darwin; censoring writings that offend the powerful is offensive to our deepest values.

Ross Anderson

I would give the secret recipe for my grandmother’s bouillabaisse to be in a Billy Wilder picture.

Life is what
happens when consciousness
meets the present

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

Il “viva la figa” che poi divenne una specie di motto implicito del berlusconismo trionfante, allora era solo un allegro umore da amiconi, quando le mogli non sentivano, o da goliardi del pre-femminismo.

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?

John Cage