Knock, knock?
Who’s there?
Gobbledygook.
Gobbledygook who?
Gobbledygook, the weekly compendium of all the shit I’ve learned this week, you dumb fuck, now let me in.
Here’s a couple of things I learned this week:
- …from moving pictures:
- That Amish people may seem all innocent, but when they turn 16, they become some of the most cracked-out nutjobs on the Devil’s Playground.
- That the Horse and Buggy can be almost as cool as a Ford Mustang.
- That Deadwood should probably be experienced at night, with Surround Sound, and on something bigger than a 13.7-inch laptop screen.
- That it’s difficult to watch a Western without thinking that all the male actors are simply doing their best Clint Eastwood impression.
- …from static pages:
- That The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a rather amazing book. It’s quiet, and about little more than a few characters who are simply living their lives, but the author, Milan Kundera, punctuates almost every section with at least one insightful passage.
- That “Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”
- That “Human lives are composed [like music]. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life…. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress. It is wrong, then, to chide [a novel] for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences…but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.”
- That “vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
- That “Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.”
- That “Anyone who thinks the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.”
- That “What is unique about the ‘I’ hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person.”
- That “Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female world. The obsession of the former is lyrical: what they seek in women is themselves, their ideal, and since an ideal is by definition something that can never be found, they are disappointed again and again. The disappointment propels them from woman to woman gives their inconstancy a kind of romantic excuse, so that many sentimental women are touched by their unbridled philandering. The obsession of the latter is epic, and women see nothing the least bit touching in it.”
- …from the web:
- That someone built a poster out of the ENTIRE text of The Hobbit and the classic image of Bilbo Baggins’ front door.
- That the weekly marijuan crop report gives stoners a chance to compare the price of an ounce of weed by geographic location.
- That Dawn thinks this is funny.
- That Relevare may have the coolest user-interface design I’ve seen in while.
- That AllRecipes.com has nifty feature that lets you first, find all the recipes you want to cook that week, then save them to your personal recipe box, and then (and this is the best part) get an itemized shopping list of everything you need to cook those recipes, making the whole process of food shopping about a dozen times easier.
- That yours truly got his theatre review published on Vermont.com.
- …from life:
- That I’m pretty good at my new job.
- That my new grill is the bomb.
- That my brother, Shawn, makes some damn fine ribs, and this is coming from a guy who doesn’t even like ribs.
- That a life without homework means having way too much time to be social.
- That the local pub is starting to feel too much like an extension of my home.
- That I somehow have severly pissed off the God of Financial Transactions, and I’m probably going to be cursed for the rest of my life unless I sacrifice an accountant.
- That some kittens don’t deserve their fates.
- That thunder and lightning can still scare the hell out of me.
- That despite the fact that she has never seen Planet of the Apes, my 2-year old niece somehow learned to fall to her knees, throw her hands to the sky and call out to her maker, “Why!? Why!?” before burying her face in her hands and pretending to cry; then she stands up, bows, and says, “Thank you, thank you.”
- That I’m getting pretty sick of the three-and-a-half-hour drive to Boston.
- That no matter how many people tell me they can’t live in New England because of the winters, it’s really the summers that I can’t stand.
- That I should really start eating more than one meal a day.
- That against my will, I’ve come to agree that Mario Party 7 is not a good game (pun intended, for those who would know).
And that’s it for this week’s installment of Gobbledygook. Have a great weekend!
