The Dream of Free Memory

One day Tereza came to him uninvited. One day she left the same way. She came with a heavy suitcase. She left with a heavy suitcase.

He paid the bill, left the restaurant, and started walking through the streets, his melancholy growing more and more beautiful. He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realized that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.

His love for Tereza was beautiful, but it was also tiring: he had constantly had to hide things from her, sham, dissemble, make amends, buck her up, calm her down, give her evidence of his feelings, play the defendant to her jealousy, her suffering, and her dreams, feel guilty, make excuses and apologies. Now what was tiring had disappeared and only the beauty remained.

— Nesnesitelná Lehkost Bytí/The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera –

TFISS

I have the greatest job in the world right now and it's making me think about what I want to do with the rest of my life.

I get paid $50 an hour to sit at a piano and make up silly music for silly little scenes that are going on in front of me. I genuinely can't think of anything better I could possibly do – except if I had more hours I guess.

So I got to thinking – I would actually do this for the rest of my life if it were an option. It's not, but something like it could be. I want to write music for a living. Now, to do that I'll have to go back to some kind of school. Probably not undergrad again, but I need to learn instrumentation and counterpoint and all that good stuff. It'll be hard and demanding and uncertain, if it's even possible, and I have no idea how the hell I'd do it...

...but right now, feeling the rush of work that I actually love for the first time, I don't think I have any other choice.

Color Tv Ad from 1968

Let's do the checklist here. This ad uses:

- Sex
- Wholesome family imagery
- Catchy, 'hip' music which is really just a knockoff of a genre which had already long gone mainstream
- Implicit suggestion of "need" rather than "want"

So... advertising hasn't changed in 40 years, except for the fact that the ad is an entire minute long.

Illusion and Brain Test

Ok, when you look at this picture:



Which way is she spinning, clockwise or counterclockwise?

The Ghost of Corporate Future

People make you nervous, you'd think the world is ending, and everybody's features have somehow started blending, and everything is plastic, and everyone's sarcastic, and all your food is frozen and needs to be defrosted... you'd think the world was ending, you'd think the world was ending, you'd think the world was ending right now...

Well, maybe you should just drink a lot less coffee, and never ever watch the ten o'clock news. Maybe you should kiss someone nice, or lick a rock, or both. Maybe you should cut your own hair 'cause that can be so funny – it doesn't cost any money and it always grows back (hair grows even after you're dead).

And people are just people, they shouldn't make you nervous. The world is everlasting, it's coming and it's going. If you don't toss your plastic, the streets won't be so plastic, and if you kiss somebody then both of you'll get practice.

The world is everlasting. Put dirtballs in your pocket. Put dirtballs in your pocket and take off both your shoes, 'cause people are just people, people are just people, people are just people like you...

---

There's a certain genius I'm in awe of right now. Can you tell?

Germans, man. They're sick.

But hilarious.


Absolutely Hilarious Bathroom Mirror Prank - Watch more free videos

Sesame Street

OH MY GOD I REMEMBER THIS FROM AN EXTREMELY LONG TIME AGO

Art

Not much to say except that I love it when friends are happy and especially when it's because they have had life-altering philosophical revelations. This one's for you K

Spanish 101

The verb 'joder'.

A regular verb meaning 'to fuck'.

jodo - i fuck
jodes - you fuck
la jodió - i fucked her (it)
jodíamos - we used to fuck
¡Jodamos! - let's fuck!
está jodiendo - she/he/it is fucking
no me joder - don't fuck (with) me
estás jodido - you are fucked

That's it, everyone, ¡van a joderse!

Emo quote of the day

My life moves too fast for this internet connection!

Potato

I have the internet again! Now I can continue my random postings.

In that spirit, here is a listing of the words for "potato" in various languages. I have a theory that it is a consistently silly word across tongues and cultures.

Potato (English...)
Kartoffel (German)
Pomme de Terre (French)
Tapuakh Adama (Hebrew -- literally "Earth Apple", like in French. Who the hell looked at that thing and thought, "That looks like an apple." The French and the Jews, apparently.)
Kartoshka (Russian)
Papa (Spanish -- not to be confused with "papá", or "father")
Brambory (Czech -- possibly my favourite)

See!? All silly. Silly!

more to come.

A Czech Proverb

Kolik jazyků znáš, tolikrát jsi člověkem.

You live a life for every language you speak.

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I love this proverb.

It's simple, powerful and true, like all proverbs, but without a popular counterpart in English-speaking culture that would make it feel cliché and dead. We've all heard "birds of a feather" and lines like it way too many times for it to mean anything anymore. That's what's great about other languages' proverbs— they're all about the same stuff, but coming from such a totally different angle that you're capable of experiencing their elegance and profundity all over again, like a child.

Let's look at it literally. "Kolik jazyků znáš," word for word, is "how many tongues you know". (Interesting how 'tongue' is a synonym for "language" here as well!) "Tolikrát jsi člověkem" is trickier: "so many you are a human". So the proverb tells us not about lives, but about people. And this is so true. People tell me that they just feel different when thinking in another language, as if they have many selves—not fractured, but distributed, like colours.

And I like the ominous implication that a monoglot lives only once. Want to be immortal? Crack open those books and turn on Telemundo.

Moral of the story: languages are cool.

[Irrelevant PS: the first translation my dictionary offers for the word "člověkem" is "joker", not "human". Other translations are "subject", "soul" and "heart". I dig how these concepts are conflated into one word—especially "joker". It reminds me of "The Solitaire Mystery" by Jostein Gaarder, author of the great philosophy primer "Sophie's World", and of the neo-Jungian philosophy that Professor Jordan Peterson enjoys. For Gaarder, the philosopher is a joker, the misfit card not easily categorized, even ostracized, but with immense, subtle, metasystemic power. For Peterson, the joker is the Trickster, part of the great archetype of the Child or Selfhood. Either way, the joker is a metonym for human wisdom and human nature. Not that this is probably why the words are synonyms in Czech, but I think it's cool that they make sense together on this (extremely academic and arcane) level.]

Hide and Seek (Imogen Heap)

Apparently I'm the last person on earth to discover it, but this song is excellent. Ignore the video, that part kind of sucks. But the music! Thinking of covering it with two singers and a cello.

The Amazing Eight-Handed Cello

I like music, random silly music-related things, and cellos. So this is a good pick for the first video I'll be posting here: four men playing one cello. Enjoy.

Fwends

Thanks for linking to me, "aznkay". I have no idea who this "Joshy Woshy Wikipenislar" is, but I appreciate the hits.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Josh. I've been needing a place to put all the random stuff that floats around my brain, and this blog is going to be it. Come, share in my mental randomness.

Words without importance

Ainsi le petit prince, malgré la bonne volonté de son amour, avait vite douté d'elle. Il avait pris au sérieux des mots sans importance, et il est devenu très malheureux.

“J'aurais dû ne pas l'écouter,” me confia-t-il un jour, “il ne faut jamais écouter les fleures. Il faut les regarder et les respirer. La mienne embaumait ma planète, mais je ne savais pas m'en réjouir …

"Je n'ai alors rien su comprendre … les fleurs sont si contradictoires! Mais j'étais trop jeune pour savoir l'aimer …

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So the little prince, in spite of all the good will that was inseparable from his love, had soon come to doubt her. He had taken seriously words which were without importance, and it made him very unhappy.

“I ought not to have listened to her,” he confided to me one day. “One never ought to listen to the flowers. One should simply look at them and breathe their fragrance. Mine perfumed all my planet. But I did not know how to take pleasure in all her grace...

“The fact is that I did not know how to understand anything ... Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her...”

— Le Petit Prince/The Little Prince — Antione de Saint-Exupéry —