If you have any interesting projects you’d like to promote, hiring needs, etc., send them to me and I’ll include them in the next edition of SpiersList, which is read by “affluent, well-educated influencers.” Which is new media code for “small.” But you never know.

{ Elizabeth Spiers newsletter, August 2, 2010 }

illustration { Bessy & Combes }

Until the Mexican-American War, it was not clear whether the dominant power in North America would have its capital in Washington or Mexico City. Mexico was the older society with a substantially larger military. The United States, having been founded east of the Appalachian Mountains, had been a weak and vulnerable country. At its founding, it lacked strategic depth and adequate north-south transportation routes. The ability of one colony to support another in the event of war was limited. More important, the United States had the most vulnerable of economies: It was heavily dependent on maritime exports and lacked a navy able to protect its sea-lanes against more powerful European powers like England and Spain. The War of 1812 showed the deep weakness of the United States. By contrast, Mexico had greater strategic depth and less dependence on exports.

The American solution to this strategic weakness was to expand the United States west of the Appalachians, first into the Northwest Territory ceded to the United States by the United Kingdom and then into the Louisiana Purchase, which Thomas Jefferson ordered bought from France. These two territories gave the United States both strategic depth and a new economic foundation. The regions could support agriculture that produced more than the farmers could consume. Using the Ohio-Missouri-Mississippi river system, products could be shipped south to New Orleans. New Orleans was the farthest point south to which flat-bottomed barges from the north could go, and the farthest inland that oceangoing ships could travel. New Orleans became the single most strategic point in North America. Whoever controlled it controlled the agricultural system developing between the Appalachians and the Rockies. During the War of 1812, the British tried to seize New Orleans, but forces led by Andrew Jackson defeated them in a battle fought after the war itself was completed.

Jackson understood the importance of New Orleans to the United States. He also understood that the main threat to New Orleans came from Mexico. The U.S.-Mexican border then stood on the Sabine River, which divides today’s Texas from Louisiana. It was about 200 miles from that border to New Orleans and, at its narrowest point, a little more than 100 miles from the Sabine to the Mississippi.

Mexico therefore represented a fundamental threat to the United States. In response, Jackson authorized a covert operation under Sam Houston to foment an uprising among American settlers in the Mexican department of Texas with the aim of pushing Mexico farther west. With its larger army, a Mexican thrust to the Mississippi was not impossible — nor something the Mexicans would necessarily avoid, as the rising United States threatened Mexican national security.

Mexico’s strategic problem was the geography south of the Rio Grande (known in Mexico as the Rio Bravo). This territory consisted of desert and mountains. Settling this area with large populations was impossible. Moving through it was difficult. As a result, Texas was very lightly settled with Mexicans, prompting Mexico initially to encourage Americans to settle there. Once a rising was fomented among the Americans, it took time and enormous effort to send a Mexican army into Texas. When it arrived, it was weary from the journey and short of supplies. The insurgents were defeated at the Alamo and Goliad, but as the Mexicans pushed their line east toward the Mississippi, they were defeated at San Jacinto, near present-day Houston.

The creation of an independent Texas served American interests, relieving the threat to New Orleans and weakening Mexico.

{ George Friedman, Arizona, Borderlands and U.S.-Mexican Relations | Continue reading }

photo { Gosia Wieruszewska }

Flight Attendant Uses Emergency Slide to Escape Dispute.

He was thought to be the oldest man in Tokyo - but when officials went to congratulate Sogen Kato on his 111th birthday, they uncovered mummified skeletal remains lying in his bed. Mr Kato may have been dead for 30 years according to Japanese authorities.

Turkish bridegroom accidentally kills three relatives after firing AK-47 at his wedding.

A man accused of carrying a set of skeletal remains in a backpack told police that he had fantasies of killing people but had not actually killed anyone.

The owner of a pair of inflatable breasts is being sought by police, who believe they were stolen.

Doomsday shelters–intended to protect those inside for up to a year from catastrophes such as a nuclear attack, killer asteroids or tsunamis–are making a comeback.

The gunman who survived at least 21 bullet wounds in a Harlem shootout with cops probably broke a record, a forensic expert said.

They’re known for speeding, cutting corners, mouthing off to passengers and driving like maniacs. But now, bad cabbies are being sent to reform school at record rates to shape up — or else. “teach them about anger management.”

Bluntly: American Apparel is probably fucked. Here’s why. Unrelated: NYC Fashion Week, September 9 through 16 and London Fashion Week, September 17 through 22.

Just how risky are China’s housing markets?

Drug trafficking has long gone on in Mexico, and for many decades operated under the eye of the government, according to analysts. More: Acapulco, Mexico’s celebrated coastal resort, was once a destination for Hollywood stars, but now struggles to attract foreign tourists frightened by drug-related violence.

On the bright side, the practices that consumers have adopted in response to the economic crisis ultimately could — as a raft of new research suggests — make them happier. New studies of consumption and happiness show, for instance, that people are happier when they spend money on experiences instead of material objects. Related: How Money Restricts Life’s Pleasures.

Running improves memory: Steps to a better brain.

You told me that already! Why we’re so poor at remembering to whom we told what.

Central to the art and science of persuasion is understanding three goals for which everyone is aiming.

Beautiful women are denied manly jobs.

An estimated 68,130 Americans will be diagnosed this year with melanoma, the most dangerous form of skin cancer, and 8,700 will die from it.

Girls entering puberty at younger ages, study suggests.

It’s all in the toes. Why Old World monkeys change their limb posture to run.

What’s the link between left-handedness and drinking behaviour?

Now we are starting to work with organisms that are more likely to appear in a hospital, like staph and influenza, and we have our sights on Clostridia difficile, Pneumococcus aeruginosa, Acetinobacter baumanii and an alarming number of other bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.

So, drinking beer = more likely to get bit by potentially malaria-carrying A. gambiae mosquitoes. Related: Attracting mosquitoes by smell.

Ancient “cat-crocodile” found in Tanzania.

Ancient Mars rocks may be remains of life.

Scientists reaffirm theory that giant asteroid killed dinosaurs.

Computer scientists solved the Bermuda Triangle mystery.

The death of the phone call.

5 Futuristic Metals That Are More Metal Than Apple’s Fancy Metal.

A Girls’ Guide to Saudi Arabia.

What is known about Agatha Christie’s mysterious “disappearance”?

Über Coca, Freud’s experiences with cocaine.

As late as the 1860s the only way to transmit information across oceans was by ship, which meant weeks of lag time between sender and receiver. Naturally, the completion of the first sustainable transatlantic telegraph line (1866) redefined international communications—literally overnight. The epic struggle to lay the first transatlantic cable.

If planets like ours are common but intelligent life like ours is rare, then it should be rare that life on a planet evolves to our level of development before life is no longer possible on that planet. If Earth was “lucky” in this way, and if life had to go through a series of stages of varying difficulty to reach our level, how long should each stage have taken?

I’ve published several books, won adoring reviews, and even sold a few copies. But I’ve made almost no money and had my heart broken. Here’s everything you don’t want to know about how publishing really works.

“Lolling in a chair was the new creative supervisor of Ted Bates & Co. advertising agency, one Jerry Della Femina, 30 years old, a $50,000-a-year marvel out of Brooklyn, hired to bring a bit of sparkle to the Bates image.” The writer described a brainstorming session for a new client, a “Japanese electronics company” called Panasonic. It was Della Femina’s first day on the job and he was surrounded by account executives, art directors and copywriters awaiting his direction. Finally he cleared his throat. “I’ve got it! How about this for a headline: ‘From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor.’”

Fiona Gardner, Meet Miss Subways, 2007. (Miss Subways was a beauty contest run by the Subways Advertising committee from 1941–1976.)

David Zwirner’s pop-up bookstore.

The Ten Most Iconic Crotches in Rock History.

Must be getting tough, Renzo Rosso, keeping Stupid Fresh, yes? Diesel Denim 2010/2011 campaign.

We’ve built companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars from scratch, sold them, and built new ones…

Website Hours: Wed. 10am to 8pm.

Why don’t you walk?

Discoveries by scientists over the past 10 years have elucidated biological sex differences in brain structure, chemistry and function. “These variations occur throughout the brain, in regions involved in language, memory, emotion, vision, hearing and navigation,” explains Larry Cahill, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California, Irvine.

While women and men struggle to communicate with each other and ponder why they don’t think and react to things in similar ways, science is proving that the differences in our brains may have more serious implications beyond our everyday social interactions. (…)

To better understand the implications of sex differences in the brain, it is important to examine disease entities in depth. Take Alzheimer’s disease, for example. Significant differences exist between men and women who suffer from the disease. (…)

Schizophrenia is another disease that affects men and women differently. Differences include age of onset, symptoms and the time course of the disease. In addition, structural brain differences are apparent. According to Cahill, “men with schizophrenia show significantly larger ventricles than do healthy men, whereas no such enlargement is seen in women with schizophrenia.”

Researchers do not understand the implications of these differences yet, but the study of sex differences in the brain is advancing quickly.

{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading }

There are fundamental sex differences between males and females that go well beyond reproduction. The more people look, the more differ ences are found in both the structure and function of cells throughout the brain. It’s just mind-boggling when you see the complexities. There is recent data suggesting that glial cells from male and female neonates respond differently to estrogen, as if there’s already been some programming that keeps the male glial cells from responding to estrogen the same way as the female cells. We have evidence, as do others, that the hippocampus, a memory-related organ unrelated to reproduction, responds differently to estrogens. The female responds to estrogen by forming new synaptic connections in the hippocampus, while the male does not. But if you block the actions of testosterone in the male at birth, then the male will respond to estrogens to induce these synapses. There are many other examples. The differences include cerebellum, the autonomic nervous system, cerebral cortex, and hypothalamus. The more we look, the more sex differences we discover. (…)

It’s very clear, for example, that psychotropic medications and many other drugs work differently in males and females. Some of it is related to sex differ ences in how the liver clears drugs from the body, but almost any drug that affects the brain is going to work somewhat differently in the male and female, depending on the gender first and secondly on the hormonal status. (…)

When the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) tested Prempro, a combination of Premarin [estrogen made from horse urine] and Provera [a synthetic progestin], all it really did was to show that that’s not a very good combination.

{ Bruce McEwen interview/The Dana Foundation | Continue reading }

{ Ty Segall, So Alone, 2008 | Thanks Douglas }

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins.

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.

{ We Are What We Choose, Remarks by Jeff Bezos, as delivered to the Class of 2010, Baccalaureate | Princeston University | Continue reading }

In his book, “The Triple Bind: Saving Our Teenage Girls From Today’s Pressures,” Stephen Hinshaw, chairman of the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley, explains that sexualizing little girls — whether through images, music or play — actually undermines healthy sexuality rather than promoting it. Those bootylicious grade-schoolers in the dance troupe presumably don’t understand the meaning of their motions (and thank goodness for it), but, precisely because of that, they don’t connect — and may never learn to connect — sexy attitude to erotic feelings.

That ongoing confusion between desirability and desire may help explain another trend giving parents agita: the number of teenage girls — 22 percent according to a 2008 survey by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy — who have electronically sent or posted nude or seminude photos of themselves.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

How to maxmize your happiness from a vacation

1. Enjoy the planning process

2. Do your best to make your trip very relaxing (a trip that is just ‘relaxed’ doesn’t quite cut it)

3. Multiple short trips are better than one long trip

{ Psychothalamus | Continue reading }

We’re happier when busy but our instinct is for idleness. Unless we have a reason for being active we choose to do nothing - an evolutionary vestige that ensures we conserve energy.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

The Instinctive Drowning Response is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind.

To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents). (…) In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening. Drowning does not look like drowning.

1. Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled, before speech occurs.

{ gCaptain | Continue reading }

photo { Playboy, July 1970 }

“Yoga is a good thing, so you tend to push further than you would in a sport where you are actually more attuned to injury and afraid of injuries,” said Dr. Michelle Carlson, an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan who specializes in arms and hands. She said she recently “saw four women in a row in my office with hand injuries from yoga.”

Nobody seems to keep careful track of the numbers. The most recent estimate comes from the United States Product Safety Commission, which tracks sports injuries: it listed 4,450 reported yoga injuries in 2006, up from 3,760 in 2004. But Dr. Carlson and several others said they had seen large increases lately, as yoga became more popular. “I have been doing this for 20 years, and I didn’t see yoga injuries 20 years ago,” Dr. Carlson said. “I can see a couple of injuries a week.”

Training for yoga teachers can vary, and classes are so large in some studios that instructors do not pay enough attention to everybody. In New York, many people approach yoga with a no-pain, no-gain mind-set, with predictable results.

Then there is the age factor: you see a fair share of middle-aged people twisting and bending and lunging, and I know from experience that a 40-something body is temperamental.

Back injuries are quite common. Positions like upward dog and cobra, requiring backbends, can aggravate the spine. Others that call for elongating the back, like seated forward bend, can wreak havoc on discs. Rotator cuffs and wrists can get battered during plank poses and chaturangas, which are like push-ups, while knees are susceptible to the lotus position, hero’s pose and the warrior positions.

The headstand — a more advanced move — is an equal opportunity offender. If done improperly, it can roil your back, neck, shoulders and wrists.

Then there are the freak injuries. A woman in crow pose fell over and broke her nose.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Anthony Suau }

Man steals house, claimed he purchased it from Yahweh.

Chinese carpenter survives being impaled with a steel pole.

Man caught smuggling 18 monkeys in girdle.

The only bodily fluid you can compost in San Francisco is snot.

Wells Fargo ATM in Antarctica.

Older, more educated workers, have highest length of unemployment.

“But imagine a device,” says Tan Le, founder and president of Emotiv Systems, an electronics company focused on brain-computer interfaces, “that learns how to use you.”

The Internet will run out of Internet addresses in about 1 year’s time.

How best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing? The web means the end of forgetting.

Almost as soon as the first iPhone was introduced in 2007, AT&T realized it might run short of bandwidth. Inside the iPhone network meltdown.

For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining.

A Method for Creativity – Lessons from Joan Rivers.

Gene linked to aging also linked to Alzheimer’s.

Caterpillars crawl like none other.

Soccer players know the secret of predicting where to go as they navigate around other humans, but the rest of us are dummies. How to walk through crowds.

Designing The Perfectly Smooth Roller Coaster Ride.

Women more likely to give their phone number to a man after they’ve listened to music with romantic lyrics.

If you’re visiting a strange town and need company, you can always rent a friend.

Interview with Maurizio Cattelan.

Damien Hirst interview with John LeKay.

Was Mona your last girlfriend? Yes.Interview with John Waters.

Tobias Wong, the enfant terrible of the design world, had died on May 30 at 35, in what authorities ruled a suicide. This was no tortured artist, locked in a downward spiral, friends and family said. Complex, mercurial, mischievous — he was all those things. But he was not miserable.

Heather L. Johnson finds inspiration in the infrastructure systems of cities and their impact on the physical space and experience of urban environments. Referencing both anatomy and machine, Johnson uses delicate embroidery and graphite drawing to consider movement, identity, activity and space.

The Washington obelisk, made of marble, granite, and sandstone, is both the world’s tallest stone structure and the world’s tallest obelisk. There are taller monumental columns, but they are neither all stone nor true obelisks.

Today in cutesy packaging.

Jerry Saltz Studio Visit Report.

At a press conference Tuesday, God Almighty, our Lord and Heavenly Father, gave his strongest indication yet that he might soon step down from his post as the supreme ruler of all things.

Nonexistent people.

Double Rainbow.

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

{ James Joyce, Ulysses, published in 1922 | Continue reading }

photo { Imp Kerr & Associates, NYC }

The word is douche bag. Douche space bag. People will insist that it’s one closed-up word—douchebag—but they are wrong. When you cite the dictionary as proof of the division, they will tell you that the entry refers to a product women use to clean themselves and not the guy who thinks it’s impressive to drop $300 on a bottle of vodka. You will calmly point out that, actually, the definition in Merriam-Webster is “an unattractive or offensive person” and not a reference to Summer’s Eve. They will then choose to ignore you and write it as one word anyway.

I know this because, during my three-plus years as a copy editor, I had this argument many, many times. (…)

I pretty much knew I wanted to go into journalism since I served as an editor on my high-school newspaper, the Three Penny Press, but what exactly I wanted to do changed throughout the years. Initially I thought I wanted to work for People, but then I realized that I am way too shy to approach famous people and ask them about their personal lives. Also, my desire to be their best friend would likely interfere with my ability to do objective reporting. Then I decided I wanted to work at a fashion magazine, a dream killed by The Devil Wears Prada, a friend’s internships in the industry and the acknowledgment that I’m not very good at putting clothing combinations together. (I like dresses for a reason.) But starting at some point in college, I aspired to one day, fingers crossed, work at New York magazine.

{ Lori Fradkin/The Awl | Continue reading }

photo { The Cobra Snake }

{ Loïc Raguénès | more }

{ “Top Secret America” Washington Post Investigation Reveals Massive, Unmanageable, Outsourced US Intelligence System | Full story }

Police in Russia are investigating allegations of animal cruelty after a donkey was made to parasail as part of an advertising stunt. [video]

But the bottom line is Home prices remain too high: There can be no doubt that home prices have moved way down from the 2005-06 peaks. How did I reach the conclusion that, even after a 33% decrease in prices, home prices are high?

Niederhoffer is a hedge fund manager, a former partner of George Soros, a five-time U.S. Nationals squash champion, and the best-selling author of The Education of a Speculator and Practical Speculation. Those successes notwithstanding, Niederhoffer is best known for two spectacular financial blow-ups. In 1997, a risky investment in Thai bank stocks combined with a dramatic one-day drop in the Dow Jones to permanently close the doors of Niederhoffer Investments. Ten years later, having recouped his losses, Niederhoffer saw his Matador Fund, buffeted by the 2007 credit crunch, self-destruct. Interview.

The hidden, invisible, and private web.

A new kind of time travel based on quantum teleportation solves the Grandfather Paradox.

With wrinkles, it’s the quantity, not their location, that ages you most.

Why we dream.

Why parents hate parenting.

Touching a soft or hard object can influence how a person thinks or even makes decisions, researchers now say.

Do words have a shape?

Money does buy you life satisfaction, but for feeling good rely on psychosocial capital.

Everyone wants to be like Steve Jobs and his powerhouse company. It’s not as easy as it looks.

The man who keeps finding famous fingerprints on uncelebrated works of art. [Thanks Daniel]

For the last two years of his life, after an attempted suicide, Robert Schumann was confined to a mental institution at his own request.

Although the current spill still limited to the US coasts of the Gulf, this accident is already unprecedented in history because its injury to such a large variety of ecosystems of uniquely rich biodiversity that is impossible to cleanup. As the oil asphyxiates mangrove trees, perturbs microbial communities and disrupts the ecological stability affecting animals and microbes throughout the food chain– It may be hundreds of year before these ecosystems recover, making it the worst and possibly the most far reaching of any previous oil disaster in the history of this planet.

{ Journal of Cosmology | The Gulf Oil Gusher Catastrophe: Toxic Chemicals, Undersea Oil Plumes, Currents of Death. | Tracking and Predicting the Gulf Oil Spill Plumes | Can We Learn From the Past? | Thanks Douglas }

artwork { Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851-1852 }

Eternity! What mind of man can understand it? And remember, it is an eternity of pain. Even though the pains of hell were not so terrible as they are, yet they would become infinite, as they are destined to last for ever. But while they are everlasting they are at the same time, as you know, intolerably intense, unbearably extensive. To bear even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment. What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever? For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun.

{ James Joyce, A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, 1916 | Continue reading }

[Deep is the pain … But deeper is the joy… Pain says Go! … But joy wants eternity.] Never yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love thee, O Eternity!

{ Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883 -1885 | Continue reading }

image scanned from { John Waters, Director’s Cut }

A few years ago I decided that I’d be happy as long as I spent most of my time doing my three favorite things: reading, writing, and fucking (the three R’s).

{ Alternate 1985 | Continue reading }

image { e-Baby | watch the video | More: Pleix.net }