OnionA.V. Club interview with John Cleese

B-BZ-Philosophy~_BS_Bible

I like this quote from John Cleese from his interview at the Onion A.V. Club:

http://ping.fm/93Olq

“JC: Here’s what I think in a single sentence: I think that the real religion is about the understanding that if we can only still our egos for a few seconds, we might have a chance of experiencing something that is divine in nature. But in order to do that, we have to slice away at our egos and try to get them down to a manageable size, and then still work some practiced light meditation. So real religion is about reducing our egos, whereas all the churches are interested in is egotistical activities, like getting as many members and raising as much money and becoming as important and high-profile and influential as possible. All of which are egotistical attitudes. So how can you have an egotistical organization trying to teach a non-egotistical ideal? It makes no sense, unless you regard religion as crowd control. What I think most organized religion—simply crowd control.”

Blog title…

Z-Lib

Really good response to a patron at a public library about a picture book:

http://ping.fm/4U0RI

On Automobiles

T-Crafts~_TL_AutomobileCar

“The average U.S. citizen completely ignores the regularity with which the automobile kills him, maims him, embroils him with the law and provides mobile shelter for rakes intent on seducing his daughters. He takes it into his garage as fondly as an Arab leading a prize mare into his tent. He woos it with Simoniz, Prestone, Ethyl and rich lubricants — and goes broke trading it in on something flashier an hour after he has made the last payment on the old one.

By last week, this peculiar state of mind had not only sucked thousands of American oil wells dry, stripped the rubber groves of Malaya, produced the world’s most inhuman industry and its most recalcitrant labor union, but had filled U.S. streets with so many automobiles that it was almost impossible to drive one. In some big cities, vast traffic jams never really got untangled from dawn to midnight; the bray of horns, the stink of exhaust fumes, and the crunch of crumpling metal eddied up from them as insistently as the vaporous roar of Niagara.

That’s from Time magazine in 1947. (thx, david)”

http://ping.fm/yscIn

Lumière and Company is a movie I plan on getting soon.

“Lumière and Company is a 1995 movie where more than 40 directors were invited to make a short film using the Lumière brothers’ original cinématographe hand-cranked camera invented in the 1890s. Each short had to be less than 52 seconds long without synchronized sound and be made in fewer than three takes. All editing, of course, was done in-camera. “

Ping and Memes

H-Business~_HM_Sociology

Here’s a quick rundown of some internet memes you might have run across.

http://ping.fm/5OtKl

To use ping as of 2007-07-31 use “pingscompany” without the quotes. I’ve really been enjoying this service.

Moral compromises

What I absolutely loved about The Dark Knight movie was (beyond that they _finally_ got the Batman and Joker dynamics I love so much from the comics right on the screen) was that there was no black hat/ white hat oversimplification of the heroes or villains. How far do you have to go, how many compromises must be made for the greater good (or bad if you’re a mobster).

On a tangent to that, Microsoft was basically started by a few thefts originally, but now the Bill Gates Foundation is doing some amazing, incredibly worthwhile work.
So how many bad things are acceptable for future good things?

Where do you draw the line?

OSC link

I like a lot of the schemes the users and librarians have come up with so far.
http://ping.fm/i60xZ

http://ping.fm/2ABiD

@

Blog title…

@b Open Shelves Classification is a cool idea

is thinking about bicycling with the wife after I drive my bike home.

Michel Gondry

He’s one of ’s favorite directors. One of mine too. The music videos he did in the 90s are amazingly low-tech and still-amazing.