My Blog

“we are always asked
to understand the other person’s
viewpoint
no matter how
out-dated
foolish or
obnoxious.

(Charles Bukowski)

Invite a virtuoso violinist into a public passage hall, have him play for coins, and see if anyone notices. Spoiler: not many. As Thoreau once put it, you cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind.

Pearls Before Breakfast

“There’s a story quite funny,
About a toy bunny,
And the wonderful things she can do;
Every bright Easter morning,
Without warning,
She colors eggs, red, green, or blue.

Some she covers with spots,
Some with quaint little dots,
And some with strange mixed colors, too
– Red and green, blue and yellow,
But each unlike its fellow
Are eggs of every hue.

And it’s odd, as folks say,
That on no other day
In all of the whole year through,
Does this wonderful bunny,
So busy and funny,
Color eggs of every hue.

If this story you doubt
She will soon find you out,
And what do you think she will do?
On the next Easter morning
She’ll bring you without warning,
Those eggs of every hue.”

(M. Josephine Todd, 1909)

A SHEPHERD, keeping watch over his sheep near the shore, saw the Sea very calm and smooth, and longed to make a voyage with a view to commerce. He sold all his flock, invested it in a cargo of dates, and set sail. But a very great tempest came on, and the ship being in danger of sinking, he threw all his merchandise overboard, and barely escaped with his life in the empty ship. Not long afterwards when someone passed by and observed the unruffled calm of the Sea, he interrupted him and said, “It is again in want of dates, and therefore looks quiet.”

(Aesop)

Finished the play “An Enemy of the People” today and I’m impressed. The reading started being ”smoother” after dawning upon me that the theatrical and exaggerated style is not more than a comical approach to the narration from the main character, Dr. Thomas Stockmann. In the end it all made sense. Another quote taken from this fine work:

“The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That’s one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population — the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it’s the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it’s the fools that form the overwhelming majority.”

Next in the book pile after Ibsen? Chekhov, I say. Looking forward to it.

A quote from the book I’m currently reading, “An Enemy Of The People“ . It is the last one of Henrik Ibsens‘ plays I set upon myself to read during this last month.

“Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.”.

Quite right.

Katinka Matson uses a flatbed CCD scanner to create highly detailed images of natural life.

“No camera or lenses are used. The process involves scanning flowers and other natural objects on an open-top scanner from underneath the objects with a slo-moving sensor. This technique allows for unusual opportunities to explore new ideas involving light, time, and rhythm.”

Swedish television in 1962 was black and white, and it only broadcast one channel. On the 1st of April, a technical expert at the station named Kjell Stensson appeared on TV to announce that all viewers could now quickly and easily convert their current TV sets to display color reception. How? Simply by pulling a nylon stocking over their TV screen. He went on to demonstrate the process. Reportedly hundreds of thousands of people tried it, only to be thwarted until real color TV debuted in Sweden in 1970. Real color with a shift in the spectrum torwards the red, that is.

A History of Violence, a piece by prominent experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and popular science writer Steven Pinker:

This doctrine [of the noble savage], “the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset (“War is not an instinct but an invention”), Stephen Jay Gould (“Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species”), and Ashley Montagu (“Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood”),” he writes. “But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.”