Some Random Thoughts and Quotes

• Your life is your archive, and your archive is your life.

  - J Bradford DeLong

• Who better to push your buttons than the ones who installed them.

  - Jerry Ervin

• Don't wear Calvin Klein until he FEEDS HIS MODELS!

  - Andy Austin, misc.fitness.weights

• "Hookt awn fonix werkt fore me!"

  - Rifle River, misc.fitness

• "Were Race Bannon and Dr. Quest domestic partners ?"

• My family puts the fun in dysfunctional

  - Mike Reaser, soc.motss

• "i've met the enemy, up close and personal. they gave birth to me."

  -- p.b. murphy, soc.motss

• We had 12.9 gigabytes of (Microsoft) PowerPoint slides on our network. And I thought, "What a huge waste of corporate productivity." So we banned it. And we've had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since we banned PowerPoint. Now, I would argue that every company in the world, if they would just ban PowerPoint, would see their earnings skyrocket. Employees would stand around going, "What do I do? Guess I've got to go to work."

  -- Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems:

• When the anthropologists dust off the 1980s and 1990s and look at the productivity dip, they're going to blame [Microsoft] Office. I banned PowerPoint from my company and we've had the best two quarters we'ver ever had in the history of the company. I want to give everybody plastic Mylar sheets and all the pens they need to scribble on them. And I said use what I call the [Sun cofounder] Bill Joy font. You can see where he licked his thumb and erases; it's so much faster.

  -- Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems:

• "Here, just take the damn marble, grasshopper, I'm going rompin'".

  - Danny Ingram, soc.motss

• "I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror, like his passengers."

  -

• "Y'know, back before every college town had a gay bar, we joined the Young Republicans."

  - Scott Harris, soc.motss

• "I gave a talk to the Human Rights Campaign Fund in Washington two years ago. It was just after we lost the military issue and there were 800 people in the Washington Hilton in black tie and I said, 'I just want to ask all of you who are out to your employers to put your hands up, and all of you who are out to your parents to put your hands up.' And there was a scattering of hands, and I said, 'Will all the rest of you please leave now and come back when you've done that because I don't know what the fuck you're doing here at a dinner for gay rights when you haven't done the first thing that's necessary.'"

  - Andrew Sullivan, editor of The New Republic, in POZ magazine.

• "Your own understanding of cause/effect relations is deeply twisted. [You] continually fail to discern between the logical concepts of conjunction and implication, and you mistake illustrations and anecdotes for evidence."

  - a pretty good flame from a posting cross-posted to most of Usenet.

• "The problem with fundimentalists insisting on a literal interpretation of the bible is that the meaning of words change. A prime example is "Spare the rod, spoil the child." A rod was a stick used by shepards to guide their sheep to go in the desired direction. Shepards did not use it to beat their sheep. The proper translation of the saying is "Give your children guidence, or they will go astray." It does not mean "Beat the shit out of your child or he will become rotten" as many fundimentalist parents seem to believe.

• "When racists try to use such doublespeak terms as "political correctness" for human decency, they have revealed their true colors as far as I'm concerned."

  - poster to alt.fan.rush-limbaugh

• "I get sick of listening to straight people complain about, 'Well, hey, we don't have a heterosexual-pride day, why do you need a gay-pride day?' I remember when I was a kid I'd always ask my mom: 'Why don't we have a Kid's Day? We have a Mother's Day and a Father's Day, but why don't we have a Kid's Day?' My mom would always say, 'Every day is Kid's Day.' To all those heterosexuals that bitch about gay pride, I say the same thing: Every day is heterosexual-pride day! Can't you people enjoy your banquet and not piss on those of us enjoying our crumbs over here in the corner?"

  -San Francisco comedian Rob Nash.

• "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people; Humanism is the notion that all people are human. The Empathy Principle: feel what other people feel in response to your actions."

  - Carolyn Fairman (cfairman@leland.Stanford.EDU) in a.f.r-l

• "We must rid the world of the destructive notion that tragedy awaits unless we rigidly control sexuality with harsh, arbitrary rules; instead, we must demand that sexuality be governed by love and responsibility. This is gay liberation's enduring message."

  -Editorial in the Boston-based gay magazine The Guide, September 1998.

• "Lesbian and gay people are a permanent part of the American workforce, who currently have no protection from the arbitrary abuse of their rights on the job. For too long, our nation has tolerated the insidious form of discrimination against this group of Americans who have worked as hard as any group, paid their taxes like everyone else, and yet have been denied equal protection under the law."

  - Coretta Scott King

• "The departing kiss [such as in an airport] is too often snatched away from us by strictures of het society. We cannot know the sweet melancholy and affectionate contemplation that it typically, even gloriously, evokes. Instead, if we are bold enough to plant one on our honey, we might know paranoia or fear. Alternately, we might know the firmness of our political convictions. A straight couple, after all, can kiss each other good-bye at an airport and it is seen by all (including themselves) as an expression of their love. But a gay couple does so, and it is seen by all (including us; it is unavoidable) as an expression of our politics, or at the very least, our subversion. After all, we are visibly undermining the status quo; we are proclaiming that we're here, we're queer, and all that."

  - Ken Lovering, Identity, Anchorage, Alaska's LBG magazine, March 1997

• ...war in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics.

  - Chris Hedges, commencement speech, Rockford College, May 2003

• "No one is less-than-human."

• "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

  - Edmund Burke

• "We all need some therapy, because somebody came along and said "liberal" means soft on crime, soft on drugs, soft on Communism, soft on defense, and we're gonna tax you back to the Stone Age because people shouldn't have to go to work if they don't want to. And instead of saying "Well, excuse me, you right-wing, reactionary, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-eductaion, anti-choice, pro-gun, 'Leave it to Beaver' trip back to the fifties," we cowered in the corner and said "Please, don't hurt me." No more."

  - ‹The West Wing