and sometimes funny has a sexual character…

Sometimes? Nearly always, according to Sigmund Freud. The whole point of humor, Freud thought, is to get around our inhibitions. Most of us in our daily lives expend a certain amount of psychic energy in keeping our sexual impulses at bay. (If we didn’t, civilization would be rather a mess.) A naughty joke — whether verbal or visual — catches our inner censor off guard and liberates these dangerous impulses, if only for a moment. The result is a discharge of nervous energy through the facial and respiratory muscles: in a word, laughter.

latimes

Socrates ultimately interprets the meaning of the oracle to be that human wisdom is worth little or nothing. The oracle merely uses Socrates as an example, “as though he would say to men, ‘he among you is the wisest who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is really worth nothing at all’” (23b3–4). So Apollo is right after all: no one is wiser than Socrates because only Socrates admits his own ignorance.

skeptic

life isn’t short, we just use so little of it.

manifesto

“This nation survived an invasion of a superpower in the early 19th century when the country was young and rather defenseless. It survived a civil war that killed more Americans than every other war we’ve fought. It survived the War to End All Wars. It survived the most destructive conflict this planet has ever seen. It survived the Cold War and all its attendant small wars. And now, when faced with box cutters, we decide that our civil liberties are a burden, that the Constitution is a scrap of paper, that our ideals are quaint?

-NTodd via sideshow

be a simple kindaa man

June 23, 2008

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
-Umberto Eco

June 20, 2008

http://dme.mozarteum.at/DME/nma/nma_cont.php?vsep=93&gen=edition&l=1&p1=11

In 1991 Harvard’s music library discovered a lost canon of Mozart, the composer who Leonard Bernstein said offers “the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering — a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.”

It’s called “Lick Me in the Ass.”

futilitycloset.com

lakota

June 20, 2008

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hachiko.JPG

In 1924, university professor Hidesamuro Ueno brought his dog, Hachiko, to Tokyo. Every morning Hachiko saw his master off at the front door, and every evening he greeted him at the nearby train station.

The professor died in May 1925, but the faithful dog still went to the station every day to wait for him.

He kept this up for 10 years.

The dog became a national sensation in 1932, when this story was published, and he’s since been the subject of books and movies. Today a bronze statue stands at Shibuya Station, where he kept his vigil.

futilitycloset

June 17, 2008

I think O’Neill, no stranger to childhood trauma, observed that the past is never really past. We keep revisiting the same pain, hoping to make it turn out right. And it never does

- commenter on althouse

mo

June 14, 2008

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.
Terry Pratchett

jc n mo