Friday, September 30, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 30, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 30, 2011



"There's a wonderful question Schopenhauer asks: How is it that an individual can so participate in the danger and pain of another that, forgetting his own self-protection, he moves spontaneously to the other's rescue, even at the cost of his own life? Schopenhauer's answer is that a metaphysical realization is showing its force in action; namely, the realization that you and the other are one, and that the sense of separateness is simply a function of the way we experience things in space and time.

"All compassion, all sympathy is irrational. That's the point. Love is irrational. The rational is stressing I-thou opposites. The mind is in the world of separateness and angular structures. It's a world put together in a way that can't be calculated. Compassion, love - these jump mathematics."

- Joseph Campbell, in conversation with Michael Toms, from the book An Open Life.

Submitted by: Kathleen Magone
Jun. 10, 2011

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Thursday, September 29, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 29, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 29, 2011



... She turned away from the edge, and that's when she saw a hand poking out from behind a rock.

While the others listened to the tour guide, she went over to the hand. The hand was attached to its forearm, and there was a clean torn cloth wrapped around the end that would have been attached to the rest of his arm. There was no blood on the cloth.

Shandee picked it up and felt it. It was warm; the fingers moved a little. The hand pointed urgently at her bag, so she stuffed it inside and went back to the group and listened to the rest of the tour.

When she got home she pulled the forearm out and laid it on her bed. It was strong, with sensitive fingers and a blue vein traveling up along the muscle on the underside. She lifted it and whispered, "Arm, can you hear me?"

In answer the arm caressed her cheek with two fingers. It had a gentle touch.

Shandee said, "Are you comfortable? Do you need anything?" The arm made a handwriting gesture. Shandee found a pen and handed it over. The hand wrote, "Please unwrap the rag and feed me some mashed-up fish food in an electrolyte solution."

"Where?" Shandee asked.

"Funnel it into the little hole with the green rim," the arm wrote. And then: "I'm glad you found me."

She unwrapped the towel and saw that the arm was capped with a sort of power pack made of black rubber. There looked to be a place for a battery and a place for waste to be discharged, and a place for nutrients to enter.

She had an intuition. "Are you Italian?"

"Half Italian, half Welsh," the arm wrote. "I'm known as Dave's arm."

- Nicholson Baker, from his novel House of Holes.

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Sep. 22, 2011

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Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 28, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 28, 2011



"It`s actually quite fun, writing articles on things about which you know nothing. I do prefer dead people, because they`re much easier: (a) you can`t libel them, and (b) there`s usually an obituary in the Times you can pinch from."

- Tim Riley, a writer for Wikipedia, quoted by Lauren Collins in The New Yorker, August 29, 2011.

Submitted by: Z.D. Hora
Sep. 20, 2011

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Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 27, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 27, 2011



"When instant cake mixes were introduced in the 1950's as part of a broader trend to simplify the life of the American housewife by minimizing manual labor, housewives were initially resistant: The mixes made cooking too easy, making their labor and skill seem undervalued. As a result, manufacturers changed the recipe to require adding an egg; while there are likely several reasons why this change led to greater subsequent adoption, infusing the task with labor appeared to be a crucial ingredient (Shapiro 2004). Similarly, Build-a-Bear offers people the "opportunity" to construct their own teddy bears, charging customers a premium even as they foist assembly costs onto them, while farmers offer "haycations," in which consumers must harvest the food they eat during their stay on a farm.

"One view of the impact of labor on valuation suggests that asking customers to assume production costs should result in reduced willingness to pay once customers subtract the value of their labor from the overall cost of the product; the above examples instead suggest that when people imbue products with their own labor, their effort can increase their valuation. And while some labor is enjoyable (building a bear with one's nephew) and some labor allows for product customization (making a bear with one's alma mater's logo) -- both of which might increase valuation -- we suggest that labor alone can be sufficient to induce greater liking for the fruits of one's labor: Even constructing a standardized bureau, an arduous, solitary task, can lead people to overvalue their (often poorly constructed) creations. We call this phenomenon the "IKEA effect", named in honor of the Swedish manufacturer whose products typically arrive with some assembly required."

- Michael I. Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely, from the Harvard Business Review article The "IKEA Effect": When Labor Leads to Love.

[http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/11-091.pdf]

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Sep. 26, 2011

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Monday, September 26, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 26, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 26, 2011



"The truest memorial America could offer those who died on 9/11 is to refuse to fall into the moral orbit of the death-cults we claim to abhor. No reflecting pools, no spires at 1776 feet, none of it. We shouldn't have become the photo-negative of jihadis seeking martyrdom, cowering in the skirts of craven politicians promising to shield us from harm and make our streets safe for commerce.

"We should have rebuilt the towers exactly as they were, within a year. We should have marked the ground with a small, tasteful plaque, and held annual parades celebrating the season we brushed off the worst Osama bin Laden and his pals could dish, then turned on the demagogues screeching from the most shameful perspectives present in our national dialogue when they asked us to pay for the victims' deaths with civil liberties. We should be whooping and hollering and singing songs about how al-Qaeda bored us, how bin Laden died from neglect, his corpse reeking in the stank of his own sick creed, how not one American teenager died thinking he or she was fighting Saddam over 9/11, and no Afghani or Iraqi teenager died thinking American teenagers were invaders, or occupiers. We should be celebrating how we were centered enough to tar and feather our own vilest blowhards and ride them to Harlem on a rail."

- Steve Marlow, "Prepositional Phrases".

[http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/potpurri/prepositional_phrases.html]



Submitted by: Chris Doherty
Sep. 15, 2011

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Sunday, September 25, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 25, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 25, 2011



"It's a bit facetious, but take LSD. See some bigger pictures."

- Simon de Jong, former member of the Canadian Parliament, when asked recently what he would do if he was Prime Minister. de Jong died August 18, 2011.

[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/deaths/simon-de-jong-was-the-countrys-left-wing-wild-card/article2159134/]

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Sep. 9, 2011

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Saturday, September 24, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 24, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 24, 2011



"A poet once said, `life can be a challenge, life can seem impossible, but it's never easy when there's so much on the line'."

- Herman Cain, candidate for the Republican U.S. presidential nomination, inadvertently quoting from the Donna Summer song "The Power of One" - better known as the theme song from Pokemon: The Movie 2000 - during the August 11, 2011 Iowa Republican presidential debates.

[http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/08/did_herman_cain_know_he_was_qu.html]

Submitted by: Bob Bruhin
Aug. 12, 2011

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Friday, September 23, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 23, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 23, 2011



"I have something of a pet theory about LPs in charity shops, which is that while they can and do supply reams of fascinating data about the rise and fall of musical trends and formats, the shifts in status of artists as their records slide from ubiquity to obsolescence (oh, happy day it was when copies of No Jacket Required and Brothers In Arms started turning up in Help the Aged shops in the early 1990s), they also tell us (or did for a long time anyway) that Mantovani and his peers (Frank Chacksfield, Percy Faith, Bert Kaempfert, Ray Conniff, James Last, et al) once bestrode the world as musical colossi. Which, though probably truer than we'd like to admit, now seems unimaginable -- and odd.

"If, for example, some peculiar meteor were to strike the earth, triggering an even more bizarre apocalyptic event that wiped out at a stroke most of the globe's population and every LP ever made, except those stored in charity shops (bear with me on this: it's something to do with the uniquely awful window displays -- wonky dummies clad in previously unimaginable combinations of man-made fibre outfits and figurines of small children with dogs -- deflecting the vinyl-, cassette-, CD- and iPod-melting radiation), then future civilisations would be forced to conclude that Hawaiian Album, Silk and Steel and Strictly Mantovani were the acme of this lost world's musical achievements."

- Travis Elborough, from his book The Vinyl Countdown: The Album from LP to IPod and Back Again.

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Sep. 20, 2011

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Thursday, September 22, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 22, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 22, 2011



"One in three Americans now weigh as much as, well, the other two."

- James Rhodes, pianist and columnist.

[http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/jamesrhodes/100055785/in-britain-obese-children-are-allowed-to-wallow-in-their-misery-theres-a-name-for-that-child-abuse/]

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Sep. 21, 2011

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Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 21, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 21, 2011



"Vi sælger til Irland. Her går det som varmt brød."

["We sell to Ireland. Here it goes like hot cakes."]

- Ole Schou, director of the world's largest sperm bank, Cryos. A glut of product has led his firm to reject new donations from redheaded men. However, their product is still in high demand in Ireland.

[http://ekstrabladet.dk/kup/sundhed/article1621030.ece]

[http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=da&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fekstrabladet.dk%2Fkup%2Fsundhed%2Farticle1621030.ece]

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Sep. 20, 2011

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Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 20, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 20, 2011



"Mr. Obama's defenders argue that he is the victim of reckless, nihilistic, obstructionist Republicans. There's some truth to that too, sort of. The Republicans have behaved very badly. (My suggestion for the GOP slogan in 2012: "Vote Republican. It's just too dangerous to have us in opposition.")"

- David Frum, in the National Post, August 9, 2011.

[http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/08/09/david-frum-obama-can-no-longer-play-the-victim/]

Submitted by: Z.D. Hora
Aug. 10, 2011

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Monday, September 19, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 19, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 19, 2011



"Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem."

- Woody Allen, quoted in a BBC commentary on "Why Pessimism is Good for Business".

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14768974]

Submitted by: Hora, Michael (MTC)
Sep. 7, 2011

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Sunday, September 18, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 18, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 18, 2011



"A sober attitude towards reality."

- Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950), writer, explaining why he drank.

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Aug. 30, 2011

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Saturday, September 17, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 17, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 17, 2011



"...you should drink some red wine every day: it has relatively few calories and induces milder hangovers than other sources of alcohol, and it is thought to raise good cholesterol and reduce the bad kind, as well as protect arteries against cholesterol-related damage. Red wine is also usually consumed in the company of others, so it encourages human connection, a very powerful factor in maintaining health."

- Dr. Mehmet Oz, Time Magazine, September 6, 2011.

Submitted by: Dorene Smith
Sep. 14, 2011

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Friday, September 16, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 16, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 16, 2011



"Corporations are people, my friend!"

- Mitt Romney, candidate for the U.S. Presidency, during a question session at the Iowa State Fair.

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2011/08/11/romney_corporations_are_people_my_friend_.html]

Submitted by: Bob Bruhin
Aug. 11, 2011

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Thursday, September 15, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 15, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 15, 2011



"It can't be anywhere above the Mull of Kintyre."

- Matthew Goode, actor, in an interview about his new film Burning Man, explaining how how full-frontal a shot of an unclothed man can be in film. The Mull of Kintyre is the tip of the Kintyre Peninsula in Scotland.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mull_of_Kintyre]

[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/tiff/interviews-and-features/down-and-dirty-sex-in-the-lineup-at-tiff-2011-makes-for-a-racy-festival/article2162678/page2/]

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Sep. 13, 2011

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Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 14, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 14, 2011



"The only people who know what business Wall Street is in are the traders. They know what business Wall Street is in better than everyone else. To traders, whether day traders or high frequency or somewhere in between, Wall Street has nothing to do with creating capital for businesses, its original goal. Wall Street is a platform. It's a platform to be exploited by every technological and intellectual means possible."

- Mark Cuban, in a blog post May 9th, 2010, quoted in http://www.thepostgame.com/blog/daily-take/201108/did-mark-cuban-predict-market-crash

Submitted by: Jeff Copeland
Aug. 11, 2011

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Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Quotation of the day for September 13, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for September 13, 2011



"We wished to go very far. Japan is too near. There is always the telegraph. The Pacific gives you at least two months free from news."

- John La Farge, artist, explaining why he was making a trip to the South Seas. Quoted in Romantic Paintings in America by James T. Soby and Dorothy C. Miller.

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Aug. 30, 2011

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