The original (rather than the charming revision of SB) of the expression captured in the title used to be one of my dad's favorite things to say.
So many comments to choose from. Which to post?
2: And imagine that dilemma if you could actually post to the blog itself, especially if it was new and especially if having actual content was not compulsory.
Some people do better in the compulsories than in the all-around.
4: ... especially if it your ability to do so was new ...
So many comments to choose from. Which to post?
HEH INDEED
SB is Joseph Grand.
"I'd like you to understand, Doctor. I grant you that it is easy enough to choose between a 'but' and an 'and.' It's a bit more difficult to choose between 'and' and 'then.' But definitely the hardest thing may be to know whether one should to put an 'and' or leave it out."
Remember when Unfogged used to be funny?
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This Netflix "watch instantly" thing is kind of neat.
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Linking to penny arcade, huh? You seem eager to defile. What's the rush? You've got all the time in the world to fuck this up. Ease into it, says me. Either that, or link to fark and be done with it.
Heh, I was just thinking, "Penny Arcade? Next they'll be linking to Fark." And then I read foolishmortal's 13.
I would like to unhumbly suggest that I would be a better new blogger than the current crop, based on their current output to date. I've dug up the dirt on the history of the Mandom ad campaign, I've been recognized by Ogged himself for finding a cool article about shoes, and my overseas presence means I can also be counted on to supply you with the funkiest stuff the East has to offer.
Search your hearts, Unfoggeders. You know it to be true. Plus, as a good-faith gesture, if selected, I promise no gun rights, Iraq, or Middle East stuff.
NOTHING IS COMPULSORY. EVERYTHING IS PERMISSABLE.
The exact point made in the cartoon was made by Stravinsky first:
As for myself, I experience a sort of terror when, at the moment of setting to work and finding myself before the infinitude of possibilities that present themselves, I have the feeling that everything is permissible to me.
Actually I like getting emails from people I know, makes me feel better every morning.
It wasn't what I saw that stopped me Max... it was what I didn't see.
Take the piano: keys begin, keys end. You know there are 88 of them. Nobody can tell you any different. They are not infinite. You're infinite... And on those keys, the music that you can make... is infinite. I like that. That I can live by...
You rolled out in front of me a keyboard of millions of keys, millions and billions of keys that never end. And that's the truth Max, that they never end. That keyboard is infinite... and if that keyboard is infinite, then on that keyboard there is no music you can play. You're sitting on the wrong bench... That is God's piano.
Christ, did you... did you see the streets, just the streets? There were thousands of them! Then how you do it down there, how do you choose just one... one woman, one house, one landscape to look at, one way to die...?
Land? Land is a ship too big for me, it's a woman too beautiful, it's a voyage too long, perfume too strong...
The exact point made in the cartoon was made by Stravinsky first
Ulrich in The Man without Qualities feels the same way about decorating his home as Tycho feels about playing GTA and buying ice cream.
TMWQ should be read by everyone, in part at least (it's 1800 pp. long). Subtitle: "Pseudo-reality Prevails".
My current theory is that the US is turning into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where no one actually believed anything or liked what was happening, but didn't see the possibility of change and didn't care a whole lot, since the status quo was mostly endurable or even quite nice, with luck.
Until Gavrilo Princip came along and destroyed the whole thing with one shot.
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I had my first unfogged dream last night. You people are better looking, but less sexually adventurous than I originally thought.
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In Austro-Hungarian Empire, pseudo-reality prevails over you!
My unfogged dreams, I'm sorry to say, usually take the form of comment threads.
Like that time you dreamed that you insisted on a comment thread that 88 degrees was hot?
I recently dreamt that an 8-year-old Witt was directly involved in Reagan's reëlection.
26: No, and it's going to be hot today again! So there! Even the water at the beach was warm!
Seriously, though, nothing sucks more than waking up and realizing you've been dreaming of reading comment threads. Jesus.
26: Oh yeah, about that, B: Crybaby!
Oh, poor, B. I had no idea that you didn't have a/c or a fan or ice water to drink or PK to give you an alcohol rubdown.
Also advised: A naked romp through the sprinkler.
We went to the beach last night after dinner and I waded in the ocean. The plan for today is shaved ice at the swapmeet.
I try to keep my a/c use down -- thank god for ceiling fans and public pools -- but I certainly do use it. (High of only 97 today!) I can't imagine what it was like to live here before a/c, with or without a seersucker suit.
On the tragic consequences of heatwaves and their social and political origins, there's an excellent book from a few years ago called Heatwave, about the 1995 Chicago heatwave that killed 700 people. Highly recommended.
Right, clearly 97 is crazy hot and requires at least a fan.
I think that pre-a/c living required a very different kind of architecture, for one. Too many "nice" CA ranch houses (including this one) seem to be built to create a hermetic environment. It's totally bizarre.
35: Definitely true. Lots more attention to breezeways and cross drafts and which side of the house should be used during which part of the day. All that stuff that's been rediscovered by green architecture.
But I digress from the scent of Stanley. I'll support Stanley's wearing cologne if he shoots an Obsession-like video.
Oy, they just get worse and worse. And
worse.
Oops -- 37 is in the wrong thread, of course.
37: The avant-garde stuff of my youth became a mainstream commercial cliche within 3 decades. I'm thinking of the Jovovich.
Some people made it through the heat pre-A/C by dealing with it. Also, porches and stoops and not staying inside.
40: I'm talking about the people who wore long sleeves and long pants/skirts and worked in the sun all day or over a stove or etc. Layabouts like me would have had no excuse.
Sleeping porches are excellent; I hope they'll make a comeback.
Bitching about it is part of that whole "dealing" thing. Duh.
It would be clueless indeed to bitch about B's bitching. Take it or leave it, folks! She came to us that way.
The Lur is no longer with us, but the Persians developed a whole system of architecture designed to create cool places. "In Iran you learn to hate the sun" said my Iranian friend.
Architecture probably was of limited help to people working out in the sun. Unless hats count. I think dealing with it was one of the few choices they had. Work schedules for some jobs varied with the season, but when you get down to it, a lot of everyday life in the past really kind of sucked. (This observation probably falls in the category of "enormous condescension of the present.")
I find long-sleeves really uncomfortable, but the longer I'm in the sun, the more I prefer to wear long pants.
The sieasta was the worker's adaptation to the sun.
The longer I'm in the sun, in long pants, the more I want to wear skirts.
47: Male Peace Corps volunteers wept at the thought of leaving Samoa, and therefore the capacity to look perfectly decently and normally dressed on a hot day by tying two square yards of floral cotton around one's waist, behind.
48: That's a pretty lonely behind, LB.
I do feel quite sorry for men in the summer. They can look at us in sundresses, sure, but they can't (won't, not can't; cultural norms, blah, blah, blah) wear them.
I'm having the hardest time finding a sundress I like and can wear a regular bra with this summer. Everything is waistless or strapless or mint green or otherwise blugh.
I'm in love with a skirt I got at the Gap--I think it might be supposed to be a swimsuit coverup thing--that's just one piece of stretchy, thin material that folds down at the top to create a waistband. I've been wearing it with T-shirts and walking around feeling as comfortable as I've ever been, and even a bit naked. I might try to live in it all July-August.
44, 47, 48, 51:
The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever - Les Murray
To go home and wear shorts forever
in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass,
to camp out along the river bends
for good, wearing shorts, with a pocketknife,
a fishing line and matches,
or there where the hills are all down, below the plain,
to sit around in shorts at evening
on the plank verandah -
If the cardinal points of costume
are Robes, Tat, Rig and Scunge,
where are shorts in this compass?
They are never Robes
as other bareleg outfits have been:
the toga, the kilt, the lava-lava
the Mahatma's cotton dhoti;
archbishops and field marshals
at their ceremonies never wear shorts.
The very word
means underpants in North America.
Shorts can be Tat,
Land-Rovering bush-environmental tat,
socio-political ripped-and-metal-stapled tat,
solidarity-with-the-Third World tat tvam asi,
likewise track-and-field shorts worn to parties
and the further humid, modelling negligee
of the Kingdom of Flaunt,
that unchallenged aristocracy.
More plainly climatic, shorts
are farmers' rig, leathery with salt and bonemeal;
are sailors' and branch bankers' rig,
the crisp golfing style
of our youngest male National Costume.
Most loosely, they are Scunge,
ancient Bengal bloomers or moth-eaten hot pants
worn with a former shirt,
feet, beach sand, hair
and a paucity of signals.
Scunge, which is real negligee
housework in a swimsuit, pyjamas worn all day,
is holiday, is freedom from ambition.
Scunge makes you invisible
to the world and yourself.
The entropy of costume,
scunge can get you conquered by more vigorous cultures
and help you notice it less.
To be or to become
is a serious question posed by a work-shorts counter
with its pressed stack, bulk khaki and blue,
reading Yakka or King Gee, crisp with steely warehouse odour.
Satisfied ambition, defeat, true unconcern,
the wish and the knack of self-forgetfulness
all fall within the scunge ambit
wearing board shorts of similar;
it is a kind of weightlessness.
Unlike public nakedness, which in Westerners
is deeply circumstantial, relaxed as exam time,
artless and equal as the corsetry of a hussar regiment,
shorts and their plain like
are an angelic nudity,
spirituality with pockets!
A double updraft as you drop from branch to pool!
Ideal for getting served last
in shops of the temperate zone
they are also ideal for going home, into space,
into time, to farm the mind's Sabine acres
for product and subsistence.
Now that everyone who yearned to wear long pants
has essentially achieved them,
long pants, which have themselves been underwear
repeatedly, and underground more than once,
it is time perhaps to cherish the culture of shorts,
to moderate grim vigour
with the knobble of bare knees,
to cool bareknuckle feet in inland water,
slapping flies with a book on solar wind
or a patient bare hand, beneath the cadjiput trees,
to be walking meditatively
among green timber, through the grassy forest
towards a calm sea
and looking across to more of that great island
and the further tropics.
re: 48
You can sort of of do that in Scotland, too, naturally. I have friends -- punk/hippie/music/arty types, mostly -- who regularly wear kilts just as day to day wear. But kilts aren't exactly light fabric.
Another literary precedent for SB's dilemma occurs to me, Ebenezer Cooke in The Sotweed Factor in his chambers just before Burlingame famously rouses him with his "We are dying men" speech.
The man (in short), ...was dizzy with the beauty of the possible; dazzled he threw up his hands at choice
Although one assumes that SB's paralysis is not quite so comprehensive:
Finally one day he did not deign even to dress himself or eat, he sat immobile in the window seat in his nightshirt* and stared at the activity in the street below, unable to choose a motion at all even when, some hours later, his untutored bladder suggested one.
*Nightshirts had window seats back then.
22: I had my first unfogged dream last night.
Surprised myself last night by having an Unfogged dream as well. A lot of awkwardness, somehow I had arranged for some rather fastidious friends to host an Unfogged gathering, I recognized no one in the rather aggressive drove of people who showed up and no one recognized me, plus it was never evident whether or not my friends (whose house/property was changed beyond recognition) really understood the nature of the party and there were issues with things like wireless access, food and the partygoers insistence on surfing porn. (I normally have pleasant rather than anxious dreams.)
Actually, I quite like Penny Arcade.
This happens to be one of those comics that quickly took up residence in my brain. A friend and I have been talking about things costing "money dollars" for, well, apparently about two months, based on the date of that comic.
Interesting. I quite hate Penny Arcade.
Eh, tastes differ. Has anyone (else) here played "On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness"?