Lan D. Ho!

December 28, 2010

"I'm deejaying a fashion party on New Year's Eve," I said. "I'll play any song you want."

"Oh!" said IV. "Play 'Electro World' by Perfume."

"Sorry, but no. Really, I was asking to see whether you would request something that I was going to play anyway so that you would be happy when I agreed. But instead, you requested total garbage, so the ruse is up."

December 26, 2010

"I remember passing shopwindows with my mother and asking why people didn't just kick them in. She explained that there were unspoken rules of social behavior, and that's the way we coexist as people. I felt instantly confined by that notion that we were born into a world where everything was mapped out by those before us." (Patti Smith, Just Kids, 174)

December 17, 2010

"True hypermnesiacs (persons gifted with 'photographic' memory) are rare. By no means all are better off for their ability. The memory of the famous patient 'S.' of Russian psychologist A. R. Luria led to mythic tragedy. S. grew unable to distinguish present experiences from his too-vivid recollections of the past, and spent his last years in an insane asylum." (William Poundstone, Prisoner's Dilemma, 32)

On horror movies:

In the 1950s, in the throes of the Cold War, Americans were preoccupied with the fear of annihilation from the outside: from bombs and warheads, from poisoned water reservoirs, communist armies, and invaders from outer space. The threat to society was perceived as external. Horror movies—the thermometers of anxiety in popular culture—featured alien invasions, parasitic occupations of the brain, and body snatching: It Came from Outer Space or The Man from Planet X.

But by the early 1970s, the locus of anxiety—the "object of horror," as Salecl describes it—had dramatically shifted from the outside to the inside. The rot, the horror—the biological decay and its concomitant spiritual decay—was now relocated within the body of man. American society was still threatened, but this time, the threat came from inside. The names of horror films reflected the switch: The Exorcist; They Came from Within. (Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, 182)

December 12, 2010

What is the difference between emotional honesty and banality?

December 11, 2010

"You must have no emotional attachment to that money you throw on the table. It must mean little to you. If you lose it, so what; it is only money. If you cannot afford to lose it, you cannot afford to bet it. In no way is short-run profit guaranteed. You cannot plan on winning the next hand. Lady Luck has a heart of stone. You will be way ahead if you play long enough, but only if. The actual play is a hand at a time and you must be emotionally able to handle the losses that will occur regularly. Bet an amount you can live without." (Stanford Wong, Professional Blackjack, 205)

December 10, 2010

"We cannot see a person's potential, only his or her results, so we often misjudge people by thinking that the results must reflect the person." (Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, 209)

December 07, 2010

" 'Thermodynamic miracles...events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter...until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and from that union, of the thousand million sperm competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold...that is the crowning unlikelihood.'

'But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anyone in the world.'

'Yes. Anybody in the world... But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles, that they become commonplace and we forget...' " (Alan Moore, Watchmen, Chapter IX: "The Darkness of Mere Being," 26–27)

*
"I am sometimes taken aback by some people can have a miserable day or get angry because they feel cheated by a bad meal, cold coffee, a social rebuff, or a rude reception.... We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions." (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, 297–298)

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