The power of words

Excellent (very long) article with author Alan Moore. Here are a couple of quotes about words that stood out to me:

Magic and language are practically the same thing, they would at least have been regarded as such in our distant past. I think it is wisest and safest to treat them as if they are the same thing. This stuff that you are dealing with – words, language, writing – this is dangerous, it is magical, treat it as if it was radioactive.

If you want to expand people’s consciousness, give them better language, wider language, new words. Learn to love words, learn to delight over a new word that you’ve found.

In praise of lazy

“Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.” -Walter Chrysler

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Fantastic book from one of my favorite authors. Here is a short anecdote from the book. It is a conversation between Nobody Owens (Bod) and Nehemiah Trot a poet and ghost. in this passage Bod ask Trot about revenge.

“..Oh I had my revenge, Master Owens, and it was a terrible one. I wrote, and had published a letter…I would henceforth write not for them, but only for myself and posterity, and that I should, as long as I lived publish no more poems — for them! Thus I left instructions that upon my death my poems were to be buried with me, unpublished, and that only when posterity realized my genius…only then was my coffin to be disinterred, only then could my poems be removed from my cold dead hand, to finally be published to the approbation and delight of all. It is a terrible thing to be ahead of your time.”

“And after you died, they dug you up, and printed your poems?” [asked Bod]

“Not yet, no. But there is plenty of time. Posterity is vast”

Get The Graveyard Book on amazon

Don Hewitt’s secret to success

Even the people who wrote the Bible were smart enough to know, ‘tell them a story.’ The issue was evil in the world, the story was Noah…Now the Bible knew that and for some reason or another I latched on to that.

Watch CBS Videos Online

Read more about Don Hewitt

Exhibit B

History can never be made by one man we must smash this one quickly
History is made only by the masses of the people this is clear
Even a cursory glance at the falasfallacious presentation
of history by the American capitalist system will demonstrate just this

Take George Washington as bad as he is
Put him in the middle of Valley Forge by himself surrounded
by the British he can do nothing

Take Martin Luther King as righteous as he is
Put him in the middle of Birmingham by himself, speaking out against racism
He would be lynched

But you take this same King, you take this same Washington
Put them in Valley Forge, put them in Alabama
Surround them with thousands of people who have the same ideas they do
Willing to make those ideas reality and the situation changes drastically

Exhibit B, Speaker unknown
Edutainment – BDP

A couple quotes about happiness

Happiness is not having what you want. It is wanting what you have. -Unknown

Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times. -Unknown

find more quotes on being happy here.

Going all the way

I heard Val Kilmer interviewed once. He was talking about meeting Marlon Brando on the set of “The Island of Dr. Moreau.” He told a story about knocking on the door of Brando’s trailer, being told to come in, and opening the door to find Brando at his makeup table, wearing a caftan, an upside down fruit bowl on his head, applying white pancake base to his cheeks. Seeing the look on Kilmer’s face, Brando said, “Yes, we’re going aaall the way on this one.”

via Pulpnoir