"I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the acquisition
of an old book is a rebirth."

(Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections)

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 10:36 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 38 words, total size 1 kb.

1. If you are choking on an ice cube, don't panic. Simply pour a cup of boiling water down your throat and presto. The blockage will be almost instantly removed.

2. Clumsy? Avoid cutting yourself while slicing vegetables by getting someone else to hold them while you chop away.3. Avoid arguments with the women in your life about lifting the toilet seat by simply using the sink. more...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 10:23 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 257 words, total size 1 kb.

The Original Monty Python SPAM Skit

From the second series of "Monty Python's Flying Circus"

Transcribed 9/17/87 from "Monty Python's Previous Record" by Jonathan Partington

Scene: A cafe. One table is occupied by a group of Vikings with horned helmets on. A man and his wife enter.

Man (Eric Idle): You sit here, dear.

Wife (Graham Chapman in drag): All right. more...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 10:19 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 436 words, total size 3 kb.

Zoe: "Isn't the Bible kinda specific about killin'?"

Book: "Yes, but it is somewhat fuzzy in the area of kneecaps."

(Firefly)

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 10:17 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 33 words, total size 1 kb.

...can now pinpoint you a bit better, these days...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 10:04 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 17 words, total size 1 kb.

Your financers buy you a horse.

You learn how to ride a horse and train the horse and breed it's offspring to take you to interesting places.

After a great trip on the third generation horse, your financers cut the travel budget and tell you to get into the trucking business so... more...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 09:58 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 171 words, total size 1 kb.

NASA
You have one cow.
The cow just runs around in circles in the field.
You miss your old cow.
You can't rely on any other farmers (because farming is just too hard).
You retire your cow, dig up your old cows bones and wrap it in new leather. more...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 09:50 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 127 words, total size 1 kb.

Ratz: Now, some night, you get maybe too artistic, you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts.

(William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984)

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 09:48 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 26 words, total size 1 kb.

It is by caffeine alone that I set my mind in motion.

It is by the beans of Java that my thoughts acquire speed.

My hands begin to shake. The shakes are a warning.

It is by caffeine alone that I set my mind in motion.

(Author lost, alas!)

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 09:24 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 51 words, total size 1 kb.

"Your act was unwise," I exclaimed "as you see by the outcome."

He solemnly eyed me.

"When choosing the course of my action," said he, "I had not the outcome to guide me."

(Ambrose Bierce)

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 09:18 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 39 words, total size 1 kb.

Or, at least, one-tenth of the cabin trunks were full of vivid and often painful and uncomfortable memories of her past life; the other nine-tenths were full of penguins, which suprised her. Insofar as she recognized at all that she was dreaming, she realized she must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed to use only about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine tenths were for, but she certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.

(Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul)

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 09:06 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 121 words, total size 1 kb.

In later years it is stifled and gagged—buried deep, a green turf at the head of it, and on its heart a stone; but it lives, it breathes, it lurks, it will up and out when 'tis looked for least. That stockbroker, some brief summers gone, who was missed from his wonted place one settling-day! a goodly portly man, i' faith: and had a villa and a steam launch at Surbiton: and was versed in the esoteric humours of the House. Who could have thought that the Hunter lay hid in him? Yet, after many weeks, they found him in a wild nook of Hampshire. Ragged, sun-burnt, the nocturnal haystack calling aloud from his frayed and weather-stained duds, his trousers tucked, he was tickling trout with godless native urchins; and when they would have won him to himself with honied whispers of American Rails, he answered but with babble of green fields. He is back in his wonted corner now: quite cured, apparently, and tractable. And yet—let the sun shine too wantonly in Throgmorton Street, let an errant zephyr, quick with the warm South, fan but his cheek too wooingly on his way to the station; and will he not once more snap his chain and away? Ay, truly: and next time he will not be caught.

(Kenneth Grahame, "Orion", Pagan Papers)

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 08:50 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 224 words, total size 1 kb.

"It has spaceships, a bank heist, Interplanetary cannibal zombies, geishas, ruthless government operatives, and a hot psychic kung fu fighting chick, how could you possibly have been bored!"

(A fan's reaction to a non-fan's dislike of Serenity.) more...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 08:47 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 121 words, total size 1 kb.

I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature.

(White Jacket, Herman Melville)

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 08:44 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 67 words, total size 1 kb.

Doctors don't seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.

(Joe Haldeman, The Forever War)

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 08:34 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 33 words, total size 1 kb.

Seen on a mailing list I'm on...

Ken Burnside:

Agreed 100% on the Whiney Doomed Angstman aspect.

The other thing that boggled my mind when reading it was that the enemy ships (which were presented as Overwhelming and Unbeatable) were spacegoing fish that spat acid.

Which utterly and completely blew my suspension of disbelief out the airlock.

Rick Robinson:

Only out the airlock? Mine would fly off at relativistic velocities. Does suspension of disbelief have a mass? If so, there's the ultimate operatic space drive for you.

Heh.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 08:26 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 95 words, total size 1 kb.

If you have a cricket ball in each hand, what have you got?

Total control over a very large cricket.

(Author lost in the mists of time, alas.)

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 08:16 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 30 words, total size 1 kb.

"It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulations, stands mainly in need of freedom."

(Albert Einstein)

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 08:05 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 49 words, total size 1 kb.

"A band, like a golf course, is only as good as its weakest link."

--Peter Schickele, "PDQ Bach: Music for an Awful Lot of Winds & Percussion" [featuring the Turtle Mountain Naval Base Tactical Wind Ensemble]

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 08:00 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 35 words, total size 1 kb.

"Anything that happens, happens. Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again. It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though."

—Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:05 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 46 words, total size 1 kb.