Things People Said: March 2007

The true meaning of blogs

Indie Pete: Give a man your ear and he complains for a day.
Indie Pete: Teach a man to blog and he kvetches for a lifetime!

-- R. Stevens, Diesel Sweeties #1708

Labels: blogging, indie pete, kvetching, r stevens

[ 28 March 2007 7:11 am submitted by Unknown | 0 comments | Post your own? ]

And a Jurassic Park quote

Yoshi might not have bit you if you hadn't just called him a girl. But hey, if you're gonna go, might as well go with a smile and a Jurassic Park quote.

-- Caption to Dr. McNinja, issue 5, page 34

Labels: comics, dr mcninja, funny

[ 27 March 2007 6:51 am submitted by Unknown | 0 comments | Post your own? ]

The difference

Further, the letter claims that "ODF is closely tied to OpenOffice and related products" (bad!) while OOXML "reflects the rich set of capabilities in Office 2007" (good!). A more even-handed sentence might read: ODF is an XML-based dump of the internal data structures of OpenOffice, while OOXML is an XML-based dump of the internal data structures of Microsoft Office.

-- Håkon Wium Lie, Microsoft's amusing standards stance

Labels: Håkon Wium Lie, odf, ooxml, standards

[ 13 March 2007 10:31 pm submitted by Unknown | 0 comments | Post your own? ]

Cartoon Law X

For every vengeance there is an equal and opposite revengeance. This is the one law of animated cartoon motion that also applies to the physical world at large. For that reason, we need the relief of watching it happen to a duck instead.

-- From the Cartoon Laws of Physics

Labels: cartoon, physics, vengeance

[ 08 March 2007 11:05 pm submitted by Unknown | 0 comments | Post your own? ]

A strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy

Eleven years ago, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, one of the outstanding poets of our time, enlightened this audience with his word. Since then, the Europeans of good will - and sometimes those of bad, as well - have been struck, with ever greater force, by the unearthly tidings of Latin America, that boundless realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend. We have not had a moment's rest. A promethean president, entrenched in his burning palace, died fighting an entire army, alone; and two suspicious airplane accidents, yet to be explained, cut short the life of another great-hearted president and that of a democratic soldier who had revived the dignity of his people. There have been five wars and seventeen military coups; there emerged a diabolic dictator who is carrying out, in God's name, the first Latin American ethnocide of our time. In the meantime, twenty million Latin American children died before the age of one - more than have been born in Europe since 1970. Those missing because of repression number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, which is as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala. Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their children who were furtively adopted or sent to an orphanage by order of the military authorities. Because they tried to change this state of things, nearly two hundred thousand men and women have died throughout the continent, and over one hundred thousand have lost their lives in three small and ill-fated countries of Central America: Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. If this had happened in the United States, the corresponding figure would be that of one million six hundred thousand violent deaths in four years.

-- Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Lecture 1982

Labels: fantasy, Gabriel García Márquez, latin america, lecture, magical realism, south america

[ 5:18 pm submitted by Unknown | 0 comments | Post your own? ]