(via preciousstuff)
“There’s no reason why we can’t do this. This is America. There’s no reason why the future of travel should lie somewhere else beyond our borders. Building a new system of high-speed rail in America will be faster, cheaper and easier than building more freeways or adding to an already overburdened aviation system –- and everybody stands to benefit.” – President Obama
French Nobel Literature Laureate, anno 1921, Anatole France (b. April 16, 1844 – 1924) was considered the perfect suave man of letters with a superb command of wit and irony…
The Prize was awarded him “in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament” – not the type of motivation one would hear today…
Glib, apolitical France quotes:
“I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.”
“Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.”
“Nine tenths of education is encouragement.”
“All religions breed crime.” (Thaïs)
“The people who have no weaknesses are terrible: there is no way of taking advantage of them.” (The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard)
“It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.”
(Photo: Anatole chez lui)
DON’T TELL
No matter how tempting it is to blurt out your brilliance, the safest bet is to keep mum. To producers, directors, executives, assistants – and especially other writers. This carries an added advantage. Some writer, I forget who, held the policy of “only tell your story on paper.” He maintained that when he told the story verbally, his need to communicate it was satisfied, and he’d lose the impulse to write it. I’m inclined to »
The “Raiders” Story Conference
Steven Spielberg: “How much trouble can a camel be?”
(link)
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is projected for ‘first light’ in 2014 in Chile’s Atacama Desert -the world’s Southern Hemisphere space-observatory mecca. The 8.4-meter telescope will be able to survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its 3-billion pixel digital camera.
LSST is designed to be a public facility. The database and resulting catalogues will be made available to the public with no proprietary restrictions. A sophisticated data management system will provide easy access, enabling simple queries from individual users. The public will actively share the adventure of discovery.
“LSST is truly an Internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore it. The 8.4-metre LSST telescope and the 3-gigapixel camera are thus a shared resource for all humanity — the ultimate network »
Brando emerged from his bedroom in a kimono, with his long blond hair in a ponytail. As Coppola watched through the camera lens, Brando began a startling transformation, which he had worked out earlier in front of a mirror. In Coppola’s words, “You see him roll up his hair in a bun and blacken it with shoe polish, talking all the time about what he’s doing. You see him rolling up Kleenex and stuffing it into his mouth. He’d decided that the Godfather had been shot in the throat at one time, so he starts to speak funny. Then he takes a jacket and rolls back the collar the way these Mafia guys do.” Brando explained, “It’s the face of a bulldog: mean-looking but warm underneath.”
– The Godfather Wars
Film the Blanks. An ongoing experiment in deconstructing and abstracting film posters. (via Design Observer)
The Housing Chart That’s Worth 1000 Words
[h/t joe]
The market isn’t crashing, it’s CORRECTING.
“It has become a beloved ritual at Dana-Farber: Every day, children who come to the clinic write their names on sheets of paper and tape them to the windows of the walkway for ironworkers to see. And, every day, the ironworkers paint the names onto I-beams and hoist them into place as they add floors to the new 14-story Yawkey Center for Cancer Care.”