Quote of the day

[iambiguous]

Samuel Beckett from Murphy

You, my body, my mind...one must go.

Just out of curiosity, which one for you?

So all things limp together for the only possible.

"What?", I wondered.

And life in his mind gave him pleasure, such pleasure that pleasure was not the word.

Or [of course]: And life in his mind gave him pain, such pain that pain was not the word.

The syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.

The first two parts, sure.

the last at last seen of him
himself unseen by him
and of himself
A rest.
The last Mr. Murphy saw of Mr. Endon was Mr. Murphy unseen by Mr. Endon. This was also the last Murphy saw of Murphy."
A rest.
The relation between Mr. Murphy and Mr. Endon could not have better summed up than by the former's sorrow at seeing himself in the latter's immunity from seeing anything but himself."
A long rest.
Mr. Murphy is a speck in Mr. Endon's unseen.

Of course, around about now, that's true for all of us.

Neary’s conception of friendship was very curious. He expected it to last. He never said, when speaking of an enemy: “He used to be a friend of mine”, but always, with affected precision: “I used to think he was a friend of mine."

Let's make that our conception. Starting now.
[No pinheads please]

[iambiguous]

The Onion

Dan Snyder Willing To Sell Washington Commanders To Whitest Bidder

That would be you, right AJ?

‘We Need More American-Made Semiconductors,’ Says Man Who Barely Understands How A Stapler Works

An electric stapler anyway.

Nonprofit No Longer Recalls Who They Were Originally Planning To Help

Aside from themselves of course.

New York Local Counsels Friend On How To Masturbate On Subway Without Looking Like Tourist

You know, if that's even possible.

Woman Describes Visiting Boyfriend’s Lower-Class Family Like It Some Type Of Foreign Exchange Program

Well, he is a pinhead.

NCAA Awards Title To Duke In Final Upset Of March Madness

Stupid, sure, but still funny.

[iambiguous]

Don DeLillo from White Noise

How could there be a north below a south? Is this what I found confusing?

For example, is the Milky Way north or south in the universe.

For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set.

You know, before the internet.

No sense of the irony of human existence, that we are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

You know, if that is ironic.

...a life terrain, might itself be the object of a person’s study and wonder for years. A cosmology against the void.

You know, if it is a void.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.” Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean?

Let's pin down the plot here.
While we still have time.

I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American. Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of inter-communication is awe-inspiring. It's like a galaxy that you can hold in your hand, only more complex, more mysterious.
Why does this make you proud to be an American?
The infant's brain develops in response to stimuli. We still lead the world in stimuli.

What say the Brits here to that?!

[Gary Childress]

From an article I would like printed in The Onion:

Social Justice Warrior Finally Comes Clean: "What I've really been advocating for all along was great kinky sex!"

[Gary Childress]

Another news article I'd like to see in The Onion:

Noam Chomsky Finally Realizes He's Right About Everything and Denounces Anarchism!

[Gary Childress]

Idiot Savant Defends Himself from Detractors: "Isn't it at least better than being just a complete idiot?"

[iambiguous]

Joseph Heller from Catch--22

Yossarian marveled that children could suffer such barbaric sacrifice without evincing the slightest hint of fear or pain. He took for granted that they did submit so stoically. If not, he reasoned, the custom would certainly have died, for no craving for wealth or immortality could be so great, he felt, as to subsist on the sorrow of children.

You know me here: WHAT ABOUT THAT, GOD?!!!!

They couldn't keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady.

No chemical or biological weapons please. But otherwise...

I used to think it was immoral to be unhappy.

As though any American actually could be.

And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways, Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about - a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed.

Unless, of course, that's the kind of God He actually is.

What the hell are you getting so upset about? he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. I thought you didn't believe in God.
I don't, she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God.

What would you say to her?

Just for once I'd like to see all these things sort of straightened out, with each person getting exactly what he deserves. It might give me some confidence in this universe.

You know what, me too.

[iambiguous]

The Onion

Breaking: MAGA Patriots Donate Here To Help Protect Our Beautiful President Trump

Okay, pinheads, let's get the ball rolling here.

Pope Francis Trains For Easter Mass By Dragging Pew Loaded With Rocks Across Snow

Get back to us on this.

Dalai Lama Agrees To Box Pope For Charity

Get back to us on this.

Pentagon Confirms Plenty Of U.S. Airstrikes Hit The Correct Target

Unless, of course, you're the target.

MLB To Speed Up Games By Switching To Computer Simulation After Second Inning

Then back to the real thing in extra innings.

Man’s Natural Instinct To Fear The Unfamiliar Overcome By Promise Of ‘Great Barbecue Taste’

Not many [scumball meat eaters] that won't work on, PETA says.

[iambiguous]

Andy Warhol

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

No, that's actually true from time to time.

When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can't make them change if they don't want to, just like when they do want to, you can't stop them.

Well, as often as not, not counting the real world, of course.

As soon as you stop wanting something, you get it.

Well, as often as not, not counting the real world, of course.

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, So what. That's one of my favorite things to say. So what.

You know, if you're Andy Warhol.

Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

What, even here?!

Art is what you can get away with.

Wow! Just like everything else!!

[iambiguous]

Philip K. Dick from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression.

Fuck that, right?

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.

That probably includes Earth then.

You mean old books?
Stories written before space travel but about space travel.
How could there have been stories about space travel before...
The writers, Pris said, made it up.

Pris -- "a basic pleasure model" -- having been made up herself.

It's the basic condition of life to be required to violate our own identity.

And [as we all know] not just in a dystopia.

I like her; I could watch her the rest of my life. She has breasts that smile.

Your breasts ever smile?

Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.
I see. The girl regarded him uncertainly, not knowing whether to believe him. Not sure if he meant it seriously.
There's the First Law of Kipple, he said. 'Kipple drives out nonkipple.' Like Gresham's law about bad money. And in these apartments there's been nobody here to fight the kipple.
So it has taken over completely, the girl finished. She nodded. Now I understand
Your place, here, he said, this apartment you've picked--it's too kipple-ized to live in. We can roll the kipple-factor back; we can do like I said, raid the other apts. But... He broke off.
But what?
Isidore said, We can't win.
Why not?
No one can win against kipple, he said, except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.

Next up: all the kipple here.

[Gary Childress]

From The Funion:

Members of Internet Forum Have Fellow Forumite Banned for Practicing Elenchus Correctly Without a Proper License.

[iambiguous]

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. from Slaughterhouse-Five

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too. And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.

Millions and then billions so far.

He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was.

You tell me yours and I'll tell you mine.

All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist…It’s just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once that moment is gone it is gone forever.

An illusion. Like free will.
Thus...

If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings, said the Tralfamadorian, I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by 'free will.' I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.

Well, that settles that then.

Billy coughed when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit thin gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton. This law tells us that for every action there is a reaction and opposite in direction.

Not unlike birth and death itself.

People would be surprised if they knew how much in this world was due to prayers.

I certainly would be.

[iambiguous]

Thomas Pynchon from Gravity's Rainbow

It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.

Let's decide: is this sexist?

She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as ‘pretty’… but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him.

Let's decide: is this still sexist?

So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.

Not, perhaps, unlike the zone here: https://youtu.be/YuOnfQd-aTw

Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow when I wake up.

Sure, by all means, get back to us on this.

There is a theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati. It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little. Too many anarchists in 19th-century Europe—Bakunin, Proudhon, Salverio Friscia—were Masons for it to be pure chance. Lovers of global conspiracy, not all of them Catholic, can count on the Masons for a few good shivers and voids when all else fails.

Next up: where Donald Trump and George Santos fit into it.

The object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that, however it finds you, it finds you under very weird circumstances.

First up, however: a weird life.

[iambiguous]

The Onion

Trump Revealed To Have Paid Hush Money To Conceal Children He Had In Wedlock

Any of them here perchance you?

Baltimore Archdiocese Passes Around Collection Plate For Victims To Take Settlement From

No! No! Not Baltimore too!!

Trump Boys Ask Melania If They’re Getting New Daddy Now

Them and Ivanka.

Critical Erase Theory

Woke of course.

Study Finds Controlling, Possessive Behavior Most Pure Expression Of Love

Wow. Who would have ever thought that? Well, aside from you, of course.

Apartment Building Washing Machine Only Accepts Money Orders

In the exact amount of course.

[iambiguous]

Zadie Smith from White Teeth

...and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out...

Okay, but only if it is actually true.

The prophet Muhammad---peace be upon Him!---tells us that on the Day of Resurrection everyone will be struck unconscious. Deaf and dumb. No chitchat. Tongueless. And what a bloody relief that will be.

Top that, Jesus!

...the end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.

Trust me: some more than others.

No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios:
Pebble : Beach
Raindrop : Ocean
Needle : Haystack

pinhead : philosopher

A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.

Next up: Brexit.

More silence; children's silence, so desperately desired by adults yet eerie when it finally occurs.

Let's finally explain that.