tired fools

I found this through a Singaporean VC’s site. Not heard the song but i’d love to.

“Underwear Goes Inside the Pants”
Lazyboy

Why is marijuana not legal? Why is marijuana not legal?
It’s a natural plant that grows in the dirt.
Do you know what’s not natural?
80 year old dudes with hard-ons. That’s not natural.
But we got pills for that.
We’re dedicating all our medical resources to keeping the old guys erect,
but we’re putting people in jail for something that grows in the dirt?

You know we have more prescription drugs now.
Every commercial that comes on TV is a prescription drug ad.
I can’t watch TV for four minutes without thinking I have five serious diseases.
Like: “Do you ever wake up tired in the morning?”
Oh my god I have this, write this down. Whatever it is, I have it.
Half the time I don’t even know what the commercial is:
people running in fields or flying kites or swimming in the ocean.
I’m like that is the greatest disease ever. How do you get that?
That disease comes with a hot chick and a puppy.

The schools now: It is all about self-esteem in the schools now.
Build the kids’ self-esteem, make them feel good about themselves.
If everybody grows up with high self-esteem, who is going to dance in our strip clubs?
What’s going to happen to our porno industry?
These women don’t just grown on trees.
It takes lots of drunk dads missing dance recitals before you decide to blow a goat on the internet for fifty bucks.
And if that disappears, where does that leave me on a Friday night with my new high speed connection?

Masterminds are another word that comes up all the time.
You keep hearing about these terrorists masterminds that get killed in the middle east.
Terrorists masterminds.
Mastermind is sort of a lofty way to describe what these guys do, don’t you think?
They’re not masterminds.
“OK, you take bomb, right? And you put in your backpack. And you get on bus and you blow yourself up. Alright?”
“Why do I have to blow myself up? Why can’t I just:”
“Who’s the fucking mastermind here? Me or you?”

Americans, let’s face it: We’ve been a spoiled country for a long time.
Do you know what the number one health risk in America is?
Obesity. They say we’re in the middle of an obesity epidemic.
An epidemic like it is polio. Like we’ll be telling our grand kids about it one day.
The Great Obesity Epidemic of 2004.
“How’d you get through it grandpa?”
“Oh, it was horrible Johnny, there was cheesecake and pork chops everywhere.”

Nobody knows why were getting fatter? Look at our lifestyle.
I’ll sit at a drive thru.
I’ll sit there behind fifteen other cars instead of getting up to make the eight foot walk to the totally empty counter.
Everything is mega meal, super sized. Want biggie fries, super sized, want to go large.
You want to have thirty burgers for a nickel you fat mother fucker. There’s room in the back. Take it!
Want a 55 gallon drum of Coke with that? It’s only three more cents.

Sometimes you have to suffer a little bit in your youth to motivate yourself to succeed in later life.
Do you think if Bill Gates got laid in high school, do you think there’d be a Microsoft?
Of course not.
You got to spend a long time in your own locker with your underwear shoved up your ass before you start to think,
“You’ll see. I’m going to take of the world of computers! I’ll show them.”

We’re in one of the richest countries in the world,
but the minimum wage is lower than it was thirty five years ago.
There are homeless people everywhere.
This homeless guy asked me for money the other day.
I was about to give it to him and then I thought he was going to use it on drugs or alcohol.
And then I thought, that’s what I’m going to use it on.
Why am I judging this poor bastard.
People love to judge homeless guys. Like if you give them money they’re just going to waste it.
Well, he lives in a box, what do you want him to do? Save it up and buy a wall unit?
Take a little run to the store for a throw rug and a CD rack? He’s homeless.
I walked behind this guy the other day.
A homeless guy asked him for money.
He looks right at the homeless guy and says why don’t you go get a job you bum.
People always say that to homeless guys like it is so easy.
This homeless guy was wearing his underwear outside his pants.
Outside his pants. I’m guessing his resume isn’t all up to date.
I’m predicting some problems during the interview process.
I’m pretty sure even McDonalds has a “underwear goes inside the pants” policy.
Not that they enforce it really strictly, but technically I’m sure it is on the books.

ok, so why have i got a fucking dog photo here? well, this is courtesy of flikr and A9 (the finest search site out there). I have added one of the hundreds of new columns now available to my A9 page, namely flikr. So when i search for something i get a flikr photo tagged with the same words as the search string, in this case “lazyboy”. I know that i am not the only person doing this. Each day I find blogs which attach a photo from flikr which may or may not be relevant to the post (example). I’m not really sure what they are doing, but i’d like to know. I invite hypotheses please.

UPDATE
after all that the photo doesn’t show.
blogsome is becoming tiresome. it goes down almost daily and now carries error messages like screen decorations. now it’s cost a dog a wider audience.

A while ago a friend gave me a copy of Malcolm Gloadwell’s “The Tipping Point”. It was, as he would say, good. It was a NYT bestseller, a look at how ideas spread within the culture. Later, some months ago, I was at another friends who’d just been interviewed by Gladwell. He had an advanced copy of “Blink”. Unwilling to wait for the publishing date, and failing to get the agreement of my friend to borrow it, I purloined the thing. Again it was good. I’ve recently come across many blog posts on Blink. Today one at Deep Green Crystals (entreprenuer / VC blog). The following is a comment I posted to his review:

I read Blink a while ago from an advanced copy I purloined from a friend. I liked it too, though I agree that the actionable content isn’t very high. Charles Sanders Peirce, founder of semiotics, associate of William James, disgraced philosopher, and all-round genius, is altogether different. Blink with more Think. He gives plenty more to go on. His work was lost for decades in the Harvard library and his contribution in many fields has only recently come to light.

He invented the term abduction, being a third form of inference (in addition to Induction and deduction). Induction is inferring the general from the specific; and deduction the specific from the general. Abduction, however, is the spontaneous generation of a hypothesis which is then to be tested by further observation. Like, Karl Popper, whose work may or may not derive from Peirce (the jury is still out), he claimed that this is the true methodology of science. It is abduction that is practised by Sherlock Holmes (there is a good book edited by Umberto Eco, “The sign of three”, that compares Holmes with Peirce). Peirce said “There is a more familiar name for it than abduction, for it is neither more nor less than guessing.”

Of further interest may be Timothy D Wilson’s “Strangers to Ourselves – Discovering the Adaptive Conscious” which rounds up current science on the subject.

Blink is abduction at work.

tags:gladwell, peirce

Banksy has been at it again, this time in New York. He entered the MoMA, The Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Natural History, leaving behind each time a different piece of his art on the walls. Some of his work hung for days before being spotted. The site is worth checking out. Here’s one of my favourites:

Banksy is a growing brand. I bought a Benjamin Zephania CD recently which came with a booklet of Banksy’s street art. I’ve blogged about his stuff before.

UPDATE
The blogosphere has been full of banksy these last few days. Apparently the Tesco Value Soup in the style of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup is sitting in the security office at the MoMA ready for collection. Here’s a chance for someone to blag their way to a genuine banksy. The other museums are keeping their contributions. Very wise.

Note to Banksy: come back to London and work outside again. One of my favourite pastimes is discovering a new banksy whilst getting lost during what I thought was a shortcut.

Just $10.

It’s spring. Just a week or so ago it was -6C, now in 20’s and I’m sitting in a t-shirt in the sun. The kids have been tasked by the school into listing the signs of spring. OK, that’s not so bad. We go out into the garden and point to a crocus, a daffodil, blossom etc. In the trees a pair of blue-tits are fucking.

But then comes the words “Easter Bonnet”.

At 3.30am this morning Ita, her sister, and I were ransacking the house for anything useful. Imagine Zac turning up at school for the parade sans hat. Unthinkable. Eventually we got something together.

You’ll see that my suggestion of a crown of thorns complete with stage blood trickling down Z’s forhead was vetoed by the female contingent.

recently anglicised american finally jives with english cuisine

courtesy of Spell with flickr.

The BBC is finally going to open its creative archive. This is great, and about time. I’ve blogged about this before.

Interesting also because already a bunch of people out there have started putting out BBC content on their own sites because of the lack of an alternative. Like this dramatisation of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

The BBC are not going to use DRM but are seeking to restrict the archive to the UK only. I’ve no idea how. Presumably they have got to try given their contractual obligations to the writers and actors etc involved. My own meagre contract with the BBC (and yes I am looking forward to being able to get hold of my stuff) doesn’t, I believe, allow them to broadcast a show more than twice without paying me repeat fees. There is certainly no mention of allowing access on the net. Quite how this is going to pan out is anybodies guess. In any case they are wasting their time restricting the output to the UK. Anything that is any good is bound to end up mirrored elsewhere.

In further BBC developments: Dr. Who is back tomorrow next week. We’re preparing to move the couch forward allowing rear access so that the kids can hide just like we did all those moons ago. With a script by Russell T Davies, and Christopher Ecclestone in the lead, it has all the credentials for a good show. Russell Davies let out recently that one element he planted to scare kids was killer wheelie-bins, something all kids would come across on Monday morning on their way to school. He said he hoped to scare the shit out of them. All power to him.

Jean-Paul Sartre:

Smoking is the symbolic equivalent of destructively appropriating the entire world.

France’s National Library have airbrushed a cigarrette from a photograph of Sartre for a current exhibition. Apparently this is to get around a law prohibiting tobacco advertising.

Also:

Man is not the sum of what he has but the totality of what he does not yet have, of what he might have.

From Jaques Lacan’s “Jouissance”:

Look, you arrive into the world with this intense attachment to the great whole, It. You have it, all the answers, everything. Only it’s gone now, you’ve just been detached. That’s all over.

Within a country house at Guitrancourt, Courbet’s “L’Origine du monde” occupies a space behind a sliding wooden door. It is a cunt, as depicted by a painter of the realist school. The model is unimportant, her head and upper torso covered in neutral cloth. The upper thighs, midriff and cunt are all that may be seen. The scruff of wild dark hair contrasting with the easy flesh and leading us in an unfocused arrow down to the unseeable. But you can feel it, are drawn to it. Climb inside, nestle in that fine belly, what is there that is left?

This house, at Guitrancourt, is the seat of Jacques Lacan, master of psychoanalytic theory, once beloved of the surrealists, friend of Dali, and personal physician to Pablo Picasso. It is his painting and it is his sliding wooden door that obscures it. What is the reason for this obfuscation? The subject, perhaps, is too bold or unacceptable for casual display. It may be that the door is rolled across as guests arrive. It is even possible that the image is too strong to be a permanent feature of the room for Lacan himself. It may be appreciated only when the moment is right, when it cannot distract from the details of everyday life, and when there is no one around.

The wooden door, however, had not been left bare to obscure this cunt. How to decorate it? Lacan asks Andre Masson, his artist brother-in-law, to sketch a relief of L’Origine on the door. A cunt obscured by a cunt.

Be wary of the image.