I'm in the market for a new MP3 player -- my second-gen iPod Nano is finally dead, and I don't want to buy another iPod, or any other player with DRM built in. I figure that any company that wants to devote its engineers to figuring out how to frustrate my desires doesn't really want my business.
W... More.
That is not Batman's boat but rather Earthrace, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's ultraslick bio-diesel-powered anti-whaling speedboat. It's 80-feet long and very stealthy. Next month, it will head out to the seas around Japan to, er, protest the country's whaling industry. Life magazine ... More.
A Verizon commercial depicts the dismal extent of AT&T's 3G coverage. AT&T is suing, claiming the map confuses customers. [Engadget]... More.
For months (years?) Rupert Murdoch has been waving his jowls around and shouting that Google is stealing from him by not paying to index his material. And all along, we've been saying, "Pffft, right. If you don't like it, just add a robots.txt file that tells Google not to index you. Until you do, s... More.
On the Day of the Dead (Dia de Finados) in Brazil, Ademir Jorge Goncalves walked into his own funeral. His family had thought he had died in a car wreck but Goncalves had actually been out drinking. According to CNN, "the sight of... Goncalves alive shocked relatives, some of whom tried to jump out ... More.
I'm an archival researcher--I work part-time at Princeton Architectural Press in the editorial department and the other half of the week freelance researching book projects. Last year I researched the subject of Nothing for the author Joan Konner (former Dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism). Her book, You Don't Have to be Buddhist to Know Nothing, just came out last week. It's a sound bite history of the presence of Nothing in Western thought (including some essential bites from Eastern minds as well). The quotations come from a long list of thinkers, writers, artists, scholars (Dickinson, Sartre, Beckett, Rilke, Shakespeare, but also Steven Wright, Edward Albee, Philippe Petit, etc.). A really neat collage of Nothing.
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"I didn't know so much could be said about nothing. " You're forgetting all the interviews you've heard with politicians.
As D.T. Suzuki once said about Nothing: "It's very hard to understand. Thank You."
"Why do so many people care about nothing when there is so little of it?" - Ken Nordine
...
Committed boingers can only hope that Konner includes Aleister Crowley's NOT-GOD triad:
Nothing is.
Nothing Becomes.
Nothing is not.
I can guarantee from personal experience that after many years studying these three lines, you will understand nothing.
Contemplating this now, I sense a Discordian aphorism rising from the swamp. Something about the difference between understanding nothing and not understanding anything.
Actually wily old St. Paul may already have covered this in Philippians 4:7.
I just have to put in plug for my friend Jon Agee's wonderful kid's book, "Nothing":
http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Jon-Agee/dp/0786836946/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257348155&sr=8-1
I'm trying to think of something to say here but, like George Costanza, I've got nothing.
Thanks for Nothing. Nothing is Freedom.
Know what sounds like a good gig? Getting author credit on a book of quotes that you paid someone else to come up with.
Seriously. Joan Konner is not an idiot.