John Waters: deviate genius.

"My movies are a political act against the tyranny of good taste."

John Waters--passing statement on NPR's "Wait, wait, don't tell me."

Why are women cast in motion pictures?

"Often, the woman is in a movie just to make sure the audience knows the guy isn't gay."

-Catherine O'Hara on women in the movie industry.

Narcissistic validation of the self's primacy.

"I can imagine the sick mental pathways by which suicide comes to seem like the one consciousness-quenching substance that nobody can take away from you. The need to have something apart from other people, the need for a secret, the need for some last-ditch narcissistic validation of the self's primacy, and then the voluptuously self-hating anticipation of the last grand score, and the final severing of contact with the world that would deny you the enjoyment of your self-involved pleasure..."

Jonathan Franzen writes on David Foster Wallace's suicide. The New Yorker, April 18th, 2011.

Barber Shop Talk (overheard)

Barber: What would you like?

Client: A Princeton.

Barber: Haven't heard that in awhile.

Client: Is that not what you call it?

Barber: No, that's it. Damn right it's called a Princeton.

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"I carry a pistol in my belt and an automatic rifle in my hands when I hunt wild turkey."

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"My brother-in-law was diagnosed as a schizophrenic back in the 60's. He thinks Obama is the anti-Christ. I guess that's what you'd expect from a crazy person."

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Overheard today while getting my hair cut--M.C.

Being at the right place at the right time.

"Nellie," my next door neighbor's cat. Practice makes...a perfect place to perch.

-Photo by M.C.

The cut-up truth of the absurdity of War.

The Finnish people now have a chance to withdraw from their hateful partnership, after the privations of life in Nazi internment camps and the terrors of a “hell train” on which they left the Reich while a record night attack by the RAF which hit Stuttgart, Munich and other targets with more than 1,000 four engine bombers carrying 3600 tons of bombs, hinder sappers struggling to clear the debris when two star players on Bloomfield high school's 1934 state champion football team are together again in a war prison camp in Germany unbeknownst to them a Detroit obstetrician is convicted of conspiracy to violate the war time espionage act, None of the foe found in the "Ghost City" all the while the county game warden has been setting traps during the last few weeks to catch the rabbits that threaten to be pesty later on, Forces listed “one elephant” among the supplies and equipment taken from the enemy. A Mopping up party was clearing the last hold outs from the last dug outs on one of the marshall islands: As a fuse was set to discharge the demolitions a man came running out with his hands held high "don’t shoot, Ive got a brother in brooklyn.” Today, variable cloudiness occasional rain; Tonight and friday, variable cloudiness occasional rain, somewhat colder. -M.C. Excerpts spliced and pasted from Passaic, NJ's "The Herald News." March 16th, 1944

Those damn Luddites.

"The original Luddites would answer that we are human. Getting past the myth and seeing their protest more clearly is a reminder that it’s possible to live well with technology—but only if we continually question the ways it shapes our lives. It’s about small things, like now and then cutting the cord, shutting down the smartphone and going out for a walk. But it needs to be about big things, too, like standing up against technologies that put money or convenience above other human values. If we don’t want to become, as Carlyle warned, “mechanical in head and in heart,” it may help, every now and then, to ask which of our modern machines General and Eliza Ludd would choose to break. And which they would use to break them."

Excerpt from an article by Richard Conniff: "King Ludd's War."

Smithsoniam, March 2011.