There is no truth

There is no truth, you know? It's not about locking up all the bad guys. It doesn't work like that. There are no bad guys. There are no good guys. It's not 'grey' either. It's just that the truth shifts according to each person you talk to, and as the truth shifts it gets obscured on another layer of agenda. Intelligence is about being able to see accurately in any one moment why someone is doing something. On either side of that moment in a different circumstance, you may not be able to interpret what you've seen. But if you can get a chance at it just once, then you may have a chance at interpolation. If you never see it, you'll never be able to guess anything.

...

There is no truth because it's lost in the fourth dimension of time, and just when you think you understand it, it's passed. The game's a kaleidoscope.



 - Dan (The Situation, 2006)

A neutron walks into a bar and orders a beer. He drinks the beer and asks the bartender: "What do I owe you?"

The bartender answers: "For you, no charge."

In vino de veritas

“It is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety.”

- Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincy, 1856.

Ascension

The blunt edge of the axe came swinging right at me

I dodged and I rolled but still it connected

Square on the side of my head, hard it came.

I remember the ground giving way below my feet

And falling without end, faster until I hit the street

I remember thinking everything was OK

I'd pick myself up and make him feel sorry

But soon I realised I could see nothing but black.

I panicked and I felt fear rising up in my chest

I blinked but felt nothing; I couldn't feel my tongue

I tried moving my fingers but they refused to oblige

And I knew I'd be dead soon because I didn't feel the snow

Get colder and colder as the night wore on.

Then I slept. For a night and a day and a night

When I awoke, I was in heaven

Around me was white, warm and quiet

I knew I was dead because I felt no anger

No regrets; no ill will at the person who'd caused this.

I felt a touch, warm and soft

I opened my eyes to an angel's face

She was dressed all in white; a halo around her head

With soft eyes and hair that flowed like water

She smiled and asked how it was that I felt

I nodded and smiled and felt very dumb

She said I was lucky and I couldn't agree more

With all my sins I surely belonged in hell.

She said it was OK, that the Almighty forgave all

All one needed to do was to forgive all too.

I told her she was the most beautiful angel I'd seen

She blushed and grew quiet and then floated away

I tried to get up and follow but I couldn't move a muscle

That's when the man in a white coat and stethoscope walked in.

- Anonymous.

Calculus Made Easy (2nd Edition prologue)

Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it

should be thought either a difficult or a tedious task for any other fool

to learn how to master the same tricks.

Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are enormously difficult.

The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics--and they

are mostly clever fools--seldom take the trouble to show you how easy

the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to

impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the

most difficult way.

Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach

myself the difficulties, and now beg to present to my fellow fools the

parts that are not hard. Master these thoroughly, and the rest will

follow. What one fool can do, another can.

Love means nothing to the tennis crowd.

The Mower / Philip Larkin

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Thanks, Sajithetta! :)

Excerpts from "Predator and Prey - Nature Strikes a Balance" by Ullas Karanth

Primitive human hunter-gatherers, occurring at low densities before they discovered fire, tools, agriculture and animal husbandry were truly a part of natural animal communities. People who now live at high densities in and around forests but depend on agriculture, animal husbandry, the market economy and medical care for their survival are not a part of such natural animal communities anymore, howerver primitive their lifestyles may appear to be to outsiders.

------------------------------

The puny human hunter who poses grandly with a tiger, which he has shot, is, in fact, exhibiting this deep-rooted sense of inferiority that we all feel in the presence of a mighty predator.

What He Said

What could my mother be

to yours ? What kin is my father

to yours anyway ? And how

did you and I meet ever ?

But in love.

Our hearts have mingled

like red earth and pouring rain. Chempulapeyarinar

["poet of red earth and pouring rain"] Kuruntokai 40

अर्ज़ कीजिये...

नींद नही आती, उनके ख्याल आते रहते हैं;

वोह हैं कौन, यह किसी को मालूम नही|

नींद नही आती, उनके ख्याल आते रहते हैं;

वोह हैं कौन, किसी को मालूम नही|

जब उनकी नज़र इस पर गिरेगी,

मालूम हो जाएगा उनको कि यह तो उन्ही की बात हो रही हैं|

Altaira Morbius: Where have you been? I've beamed and beamed.
Robby: Sorry, miss. I was giving myself an oil-job.
Altaira Morbius: Robby, I must have a new dress, right away.
Robby: Again?
Altaira Morbius: Oh, but this one must be different! Absolutely nothing must show - below, above or through.
Robby: Radiation-proof?
Altaira Morbius: No, just eye-proof will do.
Robby: Thick and heavy?
Altaira Morbius: Oh, no, Robby. It must be the loveliest, softest thing you've ever made for me, and fit in all the right places, with lots and lots of star sapphires.
Robby: Star sapphires take a week to crystallize properly. Would diamonds or emeralds do?

Forbidden Planet (1956)

Anagram Poetry

Toilets
by T.S. Eliot

Let us go then, to the john,
Where the toilet seat waits to be sat upon
Like a lover's lap perched upon ceramic;
Let us go, through doors that do not always lock,
Which means you ought to knock
Lest opening one reveal a soul within
Who'll shout, "Stay out! Did you not see my shin,
Framed within the gap twixt floor and stall?"
No, I did not see that at all.
That is not what I saw, at all.

To the stall the people come to go,
Reading an obscene graffito.

We have lingered in the chamber labeled "Men"
Till attendants proffer aftershave and mints
As we lather up our hands with soap, and rinse.




Likable Wilma
by William Blake

Wilma, Wilma, in thy blouse,
Red-haired prehistoric spouse,
What immortal animator
Was thy slender waist's creator?

When the Rubble clan moved in,
Was Betty jealous of thy skin,
Thy noble nose, thy dimpled knee?
Did he who penciled Fred draw thee?

Wilma, Wilma, burning bright, ye
Cartoon goddess Aphrodite,
Was it Hanna or Barbera
Made thee hot as some caldera?

Is a Sperm Like a Whale?
by William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a sperm whale, sperm?
Thou art more tiny and more resolute:
Rough tides may sway a sea-bound endotherm,
But naught diverts thy uterine commute.
Sometime too fierce the eye of squid may glint
And make a stout cetacean hunter quail;
Methinks 'twould take much more than bilious squint
To shake thee off the cunning ovum's trail.
Yet still thou art not so unlike, thou two,
Both coursing through a dark uncharted brine
While fore and aft there swims thy fellow crew;
And note this echo, little gamete mine:
As whales spray salty water from their spout,
So with a salty spray dost thou come out.

- Courtesy of http://www.modernhumorist.com/

I fell in love.
She wasn't there to catch me.
Now I'm hurt and have to crawl out all by myself.

- Anonymous

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out
Don't you know it's gonna be all right
All right, all right.

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We're doing what we can
But when you want money
for people with minds that hate
All I can tell is brother you have to wait
Don't you know it's gonna be all right
All right, all right.

You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it's the institution
Well, you know
You better free you mind instead
But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow
Don't you know it's gonna be all right
All right, all right.

- Lennon/McCartney

Apne dil ki baat unse keh nahi sakte, bin kahe bhi ji nahi sakte.
Ae Khuda aisi takdir bana, woh humse khud akar kahe, hum aap ke bina reh nahi sakte.

- Anonymous

A Painted House by John Grisham

Drownings were not uncommon, and all my life I’d heard colorful tales of grown men caught in shifting sandbanks and being swept away while entire families watched in horror. Calm waters could somehow turn violent, though I’d never witnessed this myself. The mother of all drownings supposedly took place in the St. Francis, though the exact location varied according to the narrator. A small child was sitting innocently on a sandbar when suddenly it shifted, and the child was surrounded by water and sinking fast. An older sibling saw it happen and dashed into the swirling waters, only to be met with a fierce current that carried him away, too. Next, an even older sibling heard the cries of the first two, and she charged into the river and was waist-deep before she remembered she couldn’t swim. Undaunted, she bravely thrashed onward, yelling at the younger two to hold steady, she’d get there somehow. But the sandbar collapsed entirely, sort of like an earthquake, and new currents went in all directions.The three children were drifting farther and farther away from shore. The mother, who may or may not have been pregnant, and who may or may not have been able to swim, was fixing lunch under a shade tree when she heard the screams of her children. She flung herself into the river, whereupon she, too, was soon in trouble.The father was fishing off a bridge when he heard the commotion, and rather than waste time running to the shore and entering from that venue, he simply jumped headlong into the St. Francis and broke his neck. The entire family perished. Some of the bodies were found. Some were not. Some were eaten by the channel cats, and the others were swept out to sea, wherever the sea was. There was no shortage of theories as to what finally happened to the bodies of this poor family, which, oddly, had remained nameless through the decades. This story was repeated so that kids like myself would appreciate the dangers of the river. Ricky loved to scare me with it, but often got his versions confused. My mother said it was all fiction. Even Brother Akers managed to weave it through a sermon to illustrate how Satan was always at work spreading misery and heartache around the world. I was awake and listening very closely, and when he left out the part about the broken neck, I figured he was exaggerating, too.

Monty Python's the Meaning of Life

Hello, and welcome to 'The Middle of the Film', the moment where we take a break to invite you, the audience, to join us, the film-makers, in 'Find the Fish'. We're going to show you a scene from another film and ask you to guess where the fish is, but, if you think you know, don't keep it to yourselves. Yell out so that all the cinema can hear you. So, here we are with... 'Find the Fish'.

-----------------------------------

Hope that there`s intelligent life somewhere out in space, cause there`s bugger all down here on Earth!

Jeeves in the Offing

Are you asking me to believe that Sir Roderick Glossop got up one morning, gazed at himself in the mirror, thought he was looking a little pale and said to himself, "I need a change. I think I'll try being a butler for awhile"?'

Fools Die by Mario Puzo - my favourite part

After long evenings working on the schedule of books to be reviewed and whom to give them to, Osano would drink from the bottle of whiskey he kept in his desk and give me long lectures on literature, the life of a writer, publishers, women and anything else that was bugging him at that particular time. He had been working on his big novel, the one that he thought would win him the Nobel Prize, for the last five years. He had already collected an enormous advance on it, and the publisher was getting nervous and pushing him. Osano was really pissed off about that. “That prick,” he said. “He told me to read the classics for inspiration. That ignorant fuck. Have you ever tried to read the classics over again? Jesus, those old fuckers like Hardy and Tolstoy and Galsworthy had it made. They took forty pages to let out a fart. And you know why? They had their readers trapped. They had them by the balls. No TV, no radio, no movies. No traveling unless you wanted cysts over your asshole from bouncing around on stagecoaches. In England you couldn’t even get fucked. Maybe that’s why the French writers were more disciplined. The French at least were into fucking, not like those English Victorian jerkoffs. Now I ask you why should a guy with a TV set and a beach house read Proust?”

I’d never been able to read Proust, so I nodded. But I had read everybody else and couldn’t see TV or a beach house taking their place.

Osano kept going.“Anna Karenina, they call it a masterpiece. It’s a full-of-shit book. It’s an educated upper-class guy condescending to women. He never shows you what that broad really feels or thinks. He gives us the conventional outlook of that time and place. And then he goes on for three hundred pages on how to run a Russian farm. He sticks that right in there as if anybody gives a shit. And who gives a shit about that asshole Vronsky and his soul? Jesus, I don’t know who’s worse, the Russians or the English. That fucking Dickens and Trollope, five hundred pages were nothing to them. They wrote when they had time off from tending their garden. The French kept it short at least. But how about that fucking Balzac? I defy! I defy! anybody to read him today.”

He took a slug of whiskey and gave out a sigh. “None of them knew how to use language. None of them except Flanbert, and he’s not that great. Not that Americans are that much better. That fuck Dreiser doesn’t even know what words mean. He’s illiterate, I mean that. He’s a fucking aborigine. Another nine-hundred-page pain in the ass. None of those fucking guys could get published today, and if they did, the critics would murder them. Boy, those guys had it made then. No competition.” He paused and sighed wearily. “Merlyn, my boy, we’re a dying breed, writers like us. Find another racket, hustle TV shit, do movies. You can do that stuff with your finger up your ass.” Then, exhausted, he would lie on the couch he kept in his office for his afternoon snooze.

Hakuna Matata!

Hakuna Matata! What a wonderful phrase

Hakuna Matata! Ain't no passing craze

It means no worries for the rest of your days

It's our problem-free philosophy

Hakuna Matata!

Hakuna Matata?

Yeah. It's our motto!

What's a motto?

Nothing. What's a-motto with you?

Those two words will solve all your problems

That's right. Take Pumba here

Why, when he was a young warthog...

When I was a young wart hog

Very nice

Thanks

He found his aroma lacked a certain appeal

He could clear the savannah after every meal

I'm a sensitive soul though I seem thick-skinned

And it hurt that my friends never stood downwind

And oh, the shame He was ashamed

Thought of changin' my name What's in a name?

And I got downhearted How did ya feel?

Every time that I...

Hey! Pumbaa! Not in front of the kids!

Oh. Sorry

Hakuna Matata! What a wonderful phrase

Hakuna Matata! Ain't no passing craze

It means no worries for the rest of your days

It's our problem-free philosophy!