The Sriracha of spices.
This is the the one for me. Whenever people ask about favorite authors, I reflexively blurt out Tom Robbins (even though it’s been a few years). “Have you read Jitterbug Perfume?” I’ll ask. “Still Life with Woodpecker, Even Cowgirls get the Blues? No matter, you’ll get to all of them. But first, start with this one.”
One of my many favorite quotes from the book:
“What a dull world this would be were we all alike. What an evolutionary dead end! To be brothers, to live in peace, we do not have to be overly similar. We do not have to admire or even like one another’s peculiarities. We need only respect those peculiarities-and to be grateful for them. Our similarities provide us with a common ground, but our differences allow us to be fascinated by one another.
Differences give human encounters their snap and their fizz and their brew.”
Sterling, Cooper, Draper and Price, how may I help you?
"Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place."
— The Alchemist
"We apologize for making you have to click in order to read page 2 of the article and for wasting 15 - 20 seconds of your time waiting for that freely available page to load. We’ll be sure to tell the journalists and designers who get paid and supported by us about your unnecessary frustration with the user experience."
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rikin disagrees with marco (via nickdouglas)
Good content ain’t free folks.
"If hearing the word “culture” makes you think of Rossini, the latest translation of “Anna Karenina,” the Guggenheim Museum or “The Wire,” then you’re probably a liberal. But if the word culture means for you forms of courtship, or sexual preference, or the relationship between parents and children, or the set of rituals that revolve around the ownership and use of a gun, or, most passionately of all, ways of living, and believing, and rejoicing, and suffering, and dying that are hallowed by the religion you practice and embodied in the church you belong to — if for you, culture does not primarily signify opera or HBO, then you are probably celebrating Sarah Palin’s ragged, real-seeming life. In that case, you are what might be called either a heartland or a Bloomian conservative."
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Reading people’s thoughts on values and politics today, I’m reminded of this fantastic opinion piece from Lee Siegel, written leading up to the presidential election last September.
He explains that Reagan republicans were excellent in framing the fusion of one’s values with their politics. Liberals can seemingly keep culture, values, and politics separate, while for conservatives it’s all the same thing.
Siegel sums it up like this:
one stark distinction stands out among the differences between contemporary liberals and conservatives (the real differences, not the manufactured ones). Liberals always think that there is something broken in politics. Conservatives always think that there is something wrong with the culture.
Things that may be worth the price of an Acela ticket
caro:
The new ChurchKey in Washington, D.C., pours 555 kinds of beer (500 bottles, 50 drafts, five cask ales and not a single Bud in sight) alongside designer pizzas.
O’Leary?
Fung Wah bus for us unemployeds, please.
Back when I was in DC, we fancied The Brickskeller (here’s the beer list). The first bar I frequented that was serious about ales, lagers and stouts. I mean, look at their URL:
"While Sorkin basks in Wall Street’s attention, his image at the Times is more conflicted. His rise at the paper was jet-propelled—he was a kind of legend before he was 20. And he was one of the first at the paper to realize the centrality of the web and also one of the first to realize that on the web, a journalist’s personal brand can sometimes be more valuable than that of the institution that employs him. With his DealBook e-mail, read by some 200,000 people, plus the blog, with 2.5 million unique monthly visitors, plus the weekly column, breaking news scoops, television appearances, and 60,000 Twitter followers, he is one of the Times’ most visible players. Media ubiquity is a strategic decision. In the cubicle jungle of the Times, he’s an entrepreneur. “All of it is self-reinforcing,” Sorkin says."
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No matter where you are, no matter what you do, you have to market yourself. I’m not talking about any of that “ten secrets to inflating your personal brand” BS. I’m saying that at a minimum, you have to understand at a base level that the game has intrinsically changed.
The Internet creates a lot of noise and it’s a challenge to rise above the din. Yet for those who do, it creates opportunities that in the past were unheard of and impossible.
Cookie Monster is confronted with the phenomenon of “om nom nom.” [Rocketboom]
Fantastic, and I’m just now realizing that Cookie Monster has a bit of a foreign accent going on. That Eastern European?
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