The Heavily Abridged Life & Times

Jan 23

Shame made by my good friends, Andy Gaffney, Colm O’Brien & Christina Burke for Jameson/Empire Done In 60 Seconds

Heyyy, that’s me!

Jan 20

“One of the real dilemmas we have in our country and around the world is that what works in politics is organization and conflict. That is, drawing the sharp distinctions. But in real life, what works is networks and cooperation. And we need victories in real life, so we’ve got to get back to networks and cooperation, not just conflict. But politics has always been about conflict, and in the coverage of politics, information dissemination tends to be organized around conflict as well. It is extremely personal now, and you see in these primaries that the more people agree with each other on the issues, the more desperate they are to make the clear distinctions necessary to win, so the deeper the knife goes in.” Bill Clinton, interviewed in Esquire (via kottke)

“Death and disaster are at our shoulders every second of our lives, trying to get at us. Missing, a lot of the time. A lot of miles on the motorway without a front wheel blow-out. A lot of viruses that slither through our bodies without snagging. A lot of pianos that fall a minute after we’ve passed. Or a month, it makes no difference. So unless we’re going to get down on our knees and give thanks every time disaster misses, it makes no sense to moan when it strikes.” Hugh Laurie (via setyourcompass)

(via laikaaon)

Jan 16

“I deplore the artistic and critical cast of mind that repudiates the whole modernist enterprise as an aberration and sets to work as if it hadn’t happened… It did happen: Freud and Einstein and two world wars and the Russian and sexual revolutions and automobiles and airplanes and telephones and radios and movies and urbanization, and now nuclear weaponry and television and microchip technology and the new feminism and the rest, and except as readers there’s no going back to Tolstoy and Dickens.” John Barth

Dec 15

Michael Clayton: good film, fucking great opening.

Dec 14

“Youth is never reactionary; youth is progressive in time and hence always in the avant garde, hence never wrong in spirit, hence never to be satirized, especially in a culture in which the reactionary forces are in power and have guns.” The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, Frederic Tuten (1971) (via thenewinquiry)

Dec 13

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to his daughter Scottie at college:
“Once one is caught up into the material world, not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.
By this I mean the thing that lies behind all great careers, from Shakespeare’s to Abraham Lincoln’s, and as far back as there are books to read—the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not “happiness and pleasure” but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle. Having learned this in theory from the lives and conclusions of great men, you can get a hell of a lot more enjoyment out of whatever bright things come your way.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to his daughter Scottie at college:

“Once one is caught up into the material world, not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.

By this I mean the thing that lies behind all great careers, from Shakespeare’s to Abraham Lincoln’s, and as far back as there are books to read—the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not “happiness and pleasure” but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle. Having learned this in theory from the lives and conclusions of great men, you can get a hell of a lot more enjoyment out of whatever bright things come your way.”

(via laikaaon)

Dec 2

laikaaon:

sofapizza:

Nov 14

andynyman:

Let me introduce you to, quite possibly, THE GREATEST MOVIE GAME EVER!

Say hello to…

‘DE NIRO’

I invented this game in 1986 when I was at drama school & it became a staple addiction between myself & my friends. A few years later I bumped into some students who were at the drama school & to my joy I learned that the game had lived on. Maybe it has spread now beyond into the wide world, who knows. But if you are a movie buff, you shall now learn & love the game.

Here goes.

Any number of people can play.

OBJECT OF THE GAME

To win, obviously.

RULES OF PLAY

1) Player 1 names an actor.

2) Player 2 has to name a movie that Player 1’s actor is in.

On the first play if the person doesn’t know the named actor, another actor must be named - this prevents player 1 naming someone utterly obscure.

3) Player 3 now has to name an actor who stars in the movie Player 2 named.

4) Player 4 now names a movie that Player 3’s actor is in.

…and so on. Bear in mind, actors & movies can only be named once in each round.

5) There will come a point when someone screws up. When they lose that round they take a letter - first mistake is ‘D’, second time it an ‘E’ (DE), third time they’re wrong…you guessed it ‘N’. You are out of the game if you spell ‘DE NIRO’.

6) HOWEVER……If you manage to name De Niro as an actor in a movie, all your letters are wiped clean.

You keep playing until only one player remains…he is the ‘De Niro’ champion for the night & must be worshipped as such.

Nov 4

“

Knowing English is a matter of controlling a system within which words can be deployed in a norm-governed way. Master that system, and you can understand sentences even if the words in them are unfamiliar to you.

If I tell you that all the quemmicks have been sparbulated by a dortfracket, you know I’ve told you something in English. And you actually know what it is. You know I’ve said that a dortfracket has sparbulated the quemmicks. You can assume that unsparbulated quemmicks are thus likely to be in short supply, and it’s because of some dortfracket’s actions. Not that you have a clue what quemmicks or dortfrackets are, or what ensparbulation amounts to, but those are not questions about English.

” Geoffrey Pullum - “Permalinks, Ensparbulaion, Etc.”