Quotes - November

By Evan Robertson

11/8

"Lose your mind and come to your senses." - Fritz Perls

11/10

“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.” - Bob Dylan

" I'm good at love. I'm good at hate. It's in between I freeze." - Leonard Cohen

" I hear their voices in the wine
  That sometimes did me seek
  The band is playing Auld Lang Syne
  But the heart will not retreat
  There's no forsaking what you love
  No existential leap
  As witnessed here in time and blood
  A thousand kisses deep"  - Leonard Cohen

11/11


“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”  ― Fyodor Dostoevsky

" The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated." - Oscar Wilde

11/17

"Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools." - Douglas Bader

11/18

“Do not hurry; do not rest.” - Goethe

"Our lives are frittered away by details...simplify, simplify." - Throeau

11/19

“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”  - Ernest Hemingway,

11/20

“There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.” –Salvador Dalí

"Vision without execution is hallucination" - Edison

"The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it." - Edwin Land

 "Don't do anything that someone else can do." - Edwin Land

Puppets and Machines

“Every time you went into the library,” said the book, “the Creator of the Universe held His breath. With such a higgledy-piggledy cultural smorgasbord before you, what would you, with your free will, choose?”

“Your parents were fighting machines and self-pitying machines,” said the book. “Your mother was programmed to bawl out your father for being a defective moneymaking machine, and your father was programmed to bawl her out for being a defective housekeeping machine. They were programmed to bawl each other out for being defective loving machines.

“Then your father was programmed to stomp out of the house and slam the door. This automatically turned your mother into a weeping machine. And your father would go down to a tavern where he would get drunk with some other drinking machines. Then all the drinking machines would go to a whorehouse and rent fucking machines. And then your father would drag himself home to become an apologizing machine. And your mother would become a very slow forgiving machine.”

                            Kurt Vonnegut
                        Breakfast of Champions 

Quotes - October

By Evan Robertson

10/10


" Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent. " - George Orwell

"A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and is confirmed only by other men. Feminist fantasies about the ideal “sensitive” male have failed. Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all." - Camille Paglia


10/13

" The scariest moment is always just before you start." - Stephen King, on Writing.

10/24

" All men's miseries come from their inability to sit quiet and alone." - Blaise Pascal

" It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just aint so." - Mark Twain

10/26

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is." - Yogi Berra

" Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want." - Howard Marks

" Good times teach only bad lessons." - Howard Marks

" Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong." Howard Marks

10/20

“I don’t deserve this honor – but, then, I have arthritis, and I don’t deserve that either.” Jack Benny

“If you don’t know whose side someone is on, he’s probably not on yours.” - Warren Buffett

"Having a rich daddy can lead to sloppy decisions." - Warren Buffett

“Develop your eccentricities when young. That way, when you get older, people won’t think you are going gaga.” - David Ogilvy 

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” - Charles Darwin

10/28

" The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on." - Oscar Wilde

Cockroach rule " Where there is one, there are many."

" Predicting rain doesn't count; building ark does." - Warren Buffett

The Corruption of Language

http://theweek.com/section/cartoon/52/216211/social-issues

" If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." - George Orwell

The basic function of any language is to provide a set of symbols to narrate objective facts and subjective opinions about human condition (which I would call "poetic facts"). In both cases, the challenge is to achieve it with fewest words without compromising the narrative.Clarity of message and simplicity of expression are essential.

The opposite of clarity is vagueness and opposite of  simplicity is "verbal posturing" -using complicated words to dazzle the audience. Vagueness has a place in language but verbal posturing is unjustifiable. Vagueness is powerful because it evokes feelings. It creates a "skeleton" of a specific feeling in the mind of the subject which he then fills with his own fears, hopes and dreams. ( Room 101 in 1984,  "Yes we can" by President Obama). It is an essential tool to  express abstract poetic facts and its a key element of any inspirational speech. But when the matter under consideration is an analysis of the facts, where clarity and simplicity are essential, vagueness and indulgence in feelings is a cardinal sin.

 Context is the key. For a vague expression there must be a context. When Bob Dylan sings " the answer is blowing in the wind" there is a back ground assumption that "it is poetry" which by its very nature has the luxury of using vague expressions. Similarly, when MLK, said " I have a dream" , the context of an inspirational speech was there. 

 In this new era, a new form of expression is emerging . People are using vague language   in situations where clarity and simplicity are crucial.Typical example is politics . Here, hyper inflated vague  language is used to massage the truth, sugar coat a lie, make people feel good ( without providing any real value to their lives), impressing people with their fake erudition ( verbal posturing) and dominating their opponent. I think its morally corrupt and intellectually dishonest and it debases the language. 

 In my experience, most public figures (Talk show hosts for example) are full of this verbiage. Empty calories of language. Many a time, after listening to somebody for more than an hour, I still can not tell what was he trying to say ( or trying not to say) because there was little (if any) exchange of information. I can't even say that it was false or wrong. All I can say is that its gibberish - words strung together in good sounding expressions devoid of any meaning.

There are several reasons why this vague complicated language ( or in Orwell's words " as a cuttle fish squirting ink.") is becoming so prevalent  

- Plain Dishonesty  - The simple fact is that sometimes people are just dishonest. This is especially true in politics. Politics is based on impressing people and making them feel good. Massaging the truth and sugar coating a lie are done in an attempt to please the voters .

- Political Correctness and Ego Stroking - In current culture everyone is "above average". Everyone is special, winner, lovable and just plain awesome. It might be a logical and mathematical  impossibility ("everyone above average") but who cares as long as everybody's ego get stroked. Its creating a generation of people with a sense of entitlement whose feelings get hurt when facing the truth. 

Here is clip of my favorite comedian George Carlin talking about this social disease ( and also about a few more)

Conflict of opposites creates the drama of life. How good success is if there is no failure? How good love is if you have to love everyone? 

- Fashion/Posturing - esp. post modern French literature. Here is an interesting story.  Alan Sakol , a physicist in New York University once wrote a parody with a title of " Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." According to the author " It was a chock full of absurdities." and " by a series of stunning leaps of logic", he arrived at the following conclusion.

" the Pi of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point that can no longer be defined by geometry alone." 

Confused? You bet. Alan send this article to a trendy American cultural studies journal , Social Text. And guess what, it got accepted and published. Worse, it was published in a special issue of Social Text devoted to rebutting the criticisms by several distinguished scientists against post modernism and social constructivism. Later he wrote a book called " Fashionable Nonsense" in which talks about similar kind of intellectual dishonesty and abuse of science which is so prevalent in some fields of humanities .

I think there are some lessons to be learned here

- Be very skeptic of experts. A lot of times they talk about issues with self assurance that far outstrips their competence.

- Be on guard when someone is using big words or worst of all made up big words ( " refudiate" by Sarah Palin) 

- And most important of all, if you don't understand something, don't believe it and don't be intimidated by it.

- Confused Minds with Lack of Coherent Thoughts - Language is an expression of thought. Confused language is one of the signs of a confused mind.

- Demise of Guys and Rise of Feminism -  Lets face it. Marlboro man is dead and masculinity in general is dying. Rules of the game are changed and  men are totally confused about their new role in this ever changing battle of sexes. ( Its always harder for the losing party to adjust to the new environment).The reasons are many and I won't discuss them here ( they deserve a separate discussion) but the effects are devastating.

Confused roles produce confuse thoughts and thus confused language. Here is one example. Men today don't know whether they should be polite with the opposite sex ( which can be read as patronizing or a sign of weakness - By the way, this misunderstanding is a very common in people who recently acquire power. They are very touchy about it. Want to test it? Offer your help to a teenager!) or strong ( which can be read as rude and now he is a stereotypical man ). ( Hint - just be fair and respectful to yourself and to other people. )

George Orwell in his essay " Politics and the English Language" mentioned that direct single word verbs ( break, stop, kill, mend) are now being replaced by passive phrases made up of some noun or adjective tacked on to some general purpose verb ( passed away, give rise to , make contact with ). In my opinion one reason is that  pro-activeness and directness which in a way used to define masculinity are now replaced by reactiveness and indirectness which then manifests in language. 

- Confusing Poetic Truth with Literal Truth - All religions speak poetic truth. A religion is like an abstract art and poetry ( you may call it poorly written poetry but its a poetry nonetheless). And as with poetry and abstract art, everybody has different capacity to understand a religion. Worst, religion lends itself to people who abuse it by using poetic expressions as scientific facts and objective truths. In this case, the problem is more with the listener than with the speaker.

( I would like to explain the above point in little more detail. What you get from poetry and art depends on where you are. Its meaning changes with time and is also different for different people. Ask a good artist what is the meaning of his painting and he will look at you as if you are crazy. It has no meaning. You give it a meaning based on where you are. Similarly, the word God has different meaning for different people even in the same religion.)

- Lack of Empathy and Courage to Speak the Truth - George carlin in his famous stand up routine speaks about how over the course of last 80 years the word Shell Shock has deteriorated in to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder ( which is now abbreviated and spoken as PTSD !). One word evokes the feelings of shock and tragedy while the other word is cold and clinical. Speaking about post traumatic stress disorder is no different than talking about a toaster. This elimination of emotional content may make the speaker feel better, but it totally ignores the suffering of the victim. This a sign of lack of empathy and courage to speak the truth.

- Shooting the Messenger - No one wants to be the bearer of  the bad news. So what do we do? We wrap it up in vague language. Politicians do it. Even a lot of Physicians do it.

- Treating Major Social Issues as a Sport - In sports, what matters the most is winning . everything else is secondary. Letting this attitude permeate in major social debates can create groups of people who would support a party or a leader no matter what. ( " He may be a son of a bitch but he is our son of a bitch." - FDR on Nicaraguan dictator Somoza Garcia ). Rational thinking and clear language goes on vacation when an argument degrades in to "Us vs Them."

R word, L word, N word, F Word, LoL - Symbols slapped on symbols. And facts, they are crushed underneath a pile of symbols and cliches. But all of this is not without a price. One can see the effects  in "gimme generation" with a false sense of entitlement, confused directionless youth, political corruption, vague non specific fear which permeates the whole society, people lack of trust in each other, arrogance and cruelty. 

Churchill once said, " The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.". The big question is, are we trying to change truths by changing the language? And does truth even matter to people anymore?

                                                                     

  

Ithaka - C.P.Cavafy

C.P.Cavafy

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean. 

Quotes - September

9/1

"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." - Victor Frankl

"Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." - Victor Frankl

"When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves."  - Victor Frankl

"Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone's task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it." - Victor Frankl 

"For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment." - Victor Frankl 

"Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for." - Victor Frankl 

"Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives."- Victor Frankl 

9/3

Kieran Culkin: What did she die of? 
Caine: She died of secrecy. She died of ignorance. - Cider House Rules

"Goodnight. You princes of Maine. You Kings of New England." - Cider House Rules

9/7 ‎  
"Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious." - Oscar Wilde

9/8    
“You shape your houses and then they shape you.” - Winston churchill

9/9   
" Power is based on perception. If you think you got it, you got it, even if you don't got it" - Herb Cohen 

9/17
"I sometimes think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability." - Oscar Wilde

9/19

"One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards." - Oscar Wilde

9/21

“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.” - William Gibson

"Think like a person of action. Act like a person of thought." -  Jim Rohn

"Money often costs too much." - Ralph Emerson

"If you owe bank 100$ its your problem. If you owe bank 100 Million $ its their problem." - J paul Getty

" Its human nature not to do anything irreversible " Andrei Tarkovsky

" Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do." - Mark Twain

9/25

"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live." - Oscar Wilde

“I liked you better before I got to know you so well.” 

9/26

"When someone with experience proposes a deal to someone with money, too often the fellow with money ends up with the experience, and the fellow with experience ends up with the money." - Warren Buffett 

" It is hard to grow up in a society in which one's important problems are treated as non existent." - Paul Goodman

9/27

Michael:  What's the matter? What's bothering you? I'll handle it. I told you I can handle it, I'll handle it. 

Don Corleone: I knew Santino was going to have to go through all this and Fredo... well, Fredo was... But I, I never wanted this for you. I work my whole life, I don't apologize, to take care of my family. And I refused to be a fool dancing on the strings held by all of those big shots. That's my life, I don't apologize for that. But I always thought that when it was your time, that you would be the one to hold the strings. Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone, something. 

Michael: Another pezzonovante. 

Don Corleone: Well, there wasn't enough time, Michael. There just wasn't enough time. 

Michael: We'll get there, Pop. We'll get there.     

- Godfather

                                                             
"Fredo, you're my older brother, and I love you. But don't ever take sides with anyone against the Family again. Ever." - Godfather

Quotes - August

Salvador Dali

8/7

" Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last." - Winston Churchill  

8/8

" Talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness" -  Soren Kierkegaard

" Truths are more likely to have been discovered by one man than by a nation" - Decartes

" Without its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink to the size and shape of the estimation of others" - Michael Pollan

8/9

" The great thing about real life is that it will always surprise you " - Neil Strauss

" And with great power comes great fear of losing it." - Neil Strauss

" He was saying something about the unique responsibility we had to lead the world. " The sun will always rise in America as long as each new generation lights the fire of freedom," he concluded. It sounded good. But really, when you think about it, what the fuck does that mean?" - Neil Strauss

" And all we can ask for, all we can hope for, all we can beseech God for, is to win a few battles in a war we will ultimately lose." - Neil Strauss

8/10

" I must now go a long way ....
I must face a fight that I have not faced before.
And I must go on a road that I do not know. "     Gilgamesh, Tablet III 2100 B.C.

8/11

" A moment of realization is worth a thousand prayers "  - Quentin Torantino

8/12

" When I get up in the morning my real concern is to discover whether or not I'm in a state of grace. And if I make that investigation and if I discover that I am not in a state of grace, I try to go to bed. A state of grace is that kind of balance with which you ride the chaos that you find around you. It's not a matter of resolving the chaos - because there is something arrogant and warlike about putting the world in order - but having that kind of .. like an escape ski down over a hill, just going through the contours of the hill" - Leonard Cohen

8/16

" ... as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams." Michael Ondaatje

8/17

" I always thought of romance as the ideal smeared with possibility" - Leonard Cohen

" We didn't know it was the 60's then, we just thought it was ordinary time" - Leonard Cohen

" There are dreams of glory whispering through the wires of my spine." - Leonard Cohen

"Whats the best place an opponent should hide? In the very last place you will ever look. He is hiding behind your pain, Jake. You are protecting him with your pain. Embrace the pain and you will win this game"  -  Guy Richie 

"If you change the rules on what controls you, you will change the rules on what you can control."  - Guy Richie

8/18

" All great ideas are dangerous." - Oscar Wilde

" Hounds follow those who feed them" - Otto Von Bismarck

" Every saint has a past. Every sinner has a future." - Oscar Wilde

" Ultimately, it comes down to taste " - Steve Jobs

"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop"  Herbert Stein


8/19

" Its not what you look at that matters, its what you see" - Thoreau

"One thought driven home is better than three left on base." -James Liter

"Everyone has a plan until they get hit." - Joe Louis

"The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds." - John Maynard Keynes

8/22

"The rabbit runs faster than the fox , because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner." - Richard Dawkins

8/24

"The more a man judges, the less he loves." - Honoré de Balzac 

"Thinking is seeing." Honoré de Balzac 

"My further advice on your relations to women is based upon that other motto of chivalry, "Serve all, love one." - Honoré de Balzac 

"When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they do not love, they cannot forgive anything, not even our virtues." - Honoré de Balzac 

"The most virtuous women have in them something that is never chaste." - Honoré de Balzac 

"Power does not consist in striking with force or with frequency, but in striking true." - Honoré de Balzac 

"It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day, than to say bright things from time to time." - Honoré de Balzac 

 "Behind every great fortune there is a crime." - Honoré de Balzac 

"Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness." - Honoré de Balzac 

8/26

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."  - Oscar Wilde

"The best truths can not be spoken and the second best will be misunderstood." Heinrich Zimmer

" When the President does it, that means its not illegal." Richard Nixon

“To go wrong in one's own way is better then to go right in someone else's.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment.

8/27

Ah, you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win    - Leonard Cohen

8/28

Quod volumus credimus libenter ( We always believe what we want to believe)

8/31

"Violence isn't what separates men. It's how far you're willing to go."    - Forrest (Lawless)

" Where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence." - Gandhi

" The weakest of all weak things is a virtue that has not been tested in the fire." - Mark Twain

" In times of peace, the warlike man attacks himself." - Nietzsche 

" Don't hit at all if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting ; but never hit softly." - Theodore Roosevelt

" may i feel said he " by e e cummings

Tess IV by Fabian Perez

may i feel said he

(i'll squeal said she

just once said he)

it's fun said she

(may i touch said he

how much said she

a lot said he)

why not said she

(let's go said he

not too far said she

what's too far said he

where you are said she)

may i stay said he

(which way said she

like this said he

if you kiss said she

may i move said he

is it love said she)

if you're willing said he

(but you're killing said she

but it's life said he

but your wife said she

now said he)

ow said she

(tiptop said he

don't stop said she

oh no said he)

go slow said she

(cccome?said he

ummm said she)

you're divine!said he

(you are Mine said she)

                     

Children of the Corn

     
  "When I started trying to follow the industrial food chain—the one that now feeds most of us most of the time and typically culminates either in a supermarket or fast-food meal—I expected that my investigations would lead me to a wide variety of places. And though my journeys did take me to a great many states, and covered a great many miles, at the very end of these food chains (which is to say, at the very beginning), I invariably found myself in almost exactly the same place: a farm field in the American Corn Belt. The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by a single species: Zea mays, the giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn.

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.


 Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget‟s other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget “fresh” can all be derived from corn.


To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)—after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you‟d still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline
fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it‟s in theTwinkie, too.) There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn.This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in Produce on a day when there's ostensibly no corn for sale you'll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce‟s perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself—the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built—is in no small measure a manifestation of corn. And us? "


                              The Omnivore's Dilemma - A Natural History of Four Meals
                                                       Michael Pollan

My Next Life - Woody Allen

Voyeur by  h.koppdelaney

  

"In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people's home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!"

                                                                 - Woody Allen - 

A Nice Cup of Tea - George Orwell

If you look up 'tea' in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.

This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.
When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial. Here are my own eleven rules, every one of which I regard as golden:

• First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays — it is economical, and one can drink it without milk — but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase 'a nice cup of tea' invariably means Indian tea.

• Secondly, tea should be made in small quantities — that is, in a teapot. Tea out of an urn is always tasteless, while army tea, made in a cauldron, tastes of grease and whitewash. The teapot should be made of china or earthenware. Silver or Britanniaware teapots produce inferior tea and enamel pots are worse; though curiously enough a pewter teapot (a rarity nowadays) is not so bad.

• Thirdly, the pot should be warmed beforehand. This is better done by placing it on the hob than by the usual method of swilling it out with hot water.

• Fourthly, the tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right. In a time of rationing, this is not an idea that can be realized on every day of the week, but I maintain that one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.

• Fifthly, the tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea. In some countries teapots are fitted with little dangling baskets under the spout to catch the stray leaves, which are supposed to be harmful. Actually one can swallow tea-leaves in considerable quantities without ill effect, and if the tea is not loose in the pot it never infuses properly.

• Sixthly, one should take the teapot to the kettle and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours. Some people add that one should only use water that has been freshly brought to the boil, but I have never noticed that it makes any difference.

• Seventhly, after making the tea, one should stir it, or better, give the pot a good shake, afterwards allowing the leaves to settle.

• Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup — that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one's tea is always half cold before one has well started on it.

• Ninthly, one should pour the cream off the milk before using it for tea. Milk that is too creamy always gives tea a sickly taste.

• Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.

• Lastly, tea — unless one is drinking it in the Russian style — should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tealover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water.
  
  Some people would answer that they don't like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again.

These are not the only controversial points to arise in connexion with tea drinking, but they are sufficient to show how subtilized the whole business has become. There is also the mysterious social etiquette surrounding the teapot (why is it considered vulgar to drink out of your saucer, for instance?) and much might be written about the subsidiary uses of tealeaves, such as telling fortunes, predicting the arrival of visitors, feeding rabbits, healing burns and sweeping the carpet. It is worth paying attention to such details as warming the pot and using water that is really boiling, so as to make quite sure of wringing out of one's ration the twenty good, strong cups of that two ounces, properly handled, ought to represent.


                                        - George Orwell - Evening Standard, 12 January 1946.