"Milk! Bloody milk!"
Feb. 21st, 2005 01:11 amIs there something about February? 5 breakups in about a week. I don't think i'd realized i knew 5 peers who were in relationships.
Saturday i read Perelandra. Sunday i read all the nonfiction pieces for my MAT class, napped, read Wide Sargasso Sea. It's bad that i actually find myself wearying of reading. But then i remember what hell it was when i was taking classes that required me to use other parts of my brain. For better or for worse, i really am an English major. [This is the ride I'm on. This is the ride I want.]
We finished Season 1 Blackadder. There is so much to love about that season, but the seasons that follow are so much better written and Blakadder ceases to be repulsive (which is really the biggest black mark against the first season).
The entry with
mpoetess' Blackadder LJ icons is dead, so i went searching 'cause i'm a dork. So for those of of us who've seen the whole series, there is:
a_cunning_plan (many 4th season LJ icons linked to here)
LJ icons *is dead from Blackadder II*
AIM icons
And of course, the scripts (much easier than buying the book)
And not really related: *stabs, a lot*
Exceprts from MAT readings (bold emphases mine):
Saturday i read Perelandra. Sunday i read all the nonfiction pieces for my MAT class, napped, read Wide Sargasso Sea. It's bad that i actually find myself wearying of reading. But then i remember what hell it was when i was taking classes that required me to use other parts of my brain. For better or for worse, i really am an English major. [This is the ride I'm on. This is the ride I want.]
We finished Season 1 Blackadder. There is so much to love about that season, but the seasons that follow are so much better written and Blakadder ceases to be repulsive (which is really the biggest black mark against the first season).
The entry with
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
LJ icons *is dead from Blackadder II*
AIM icons
And of course, the scripts (much easier than buying the book)
And not really related: *stabs, a lot*
Exceprts from MAT readings (bold emphases mine):
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language—so the argument runs—must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes. Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.Edit: *loves on my dad*
[...]
When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use the words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you.
-George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"
The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past.
-John Berger, "Ways of Seeing"
Every explorer names his island Formosa, beautiful. To him it is beautiful because, being first, he has access to it and can see it for what it is.
[...] the Grand Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer's mind. Seeing the canyon under approved circumstances is seeing the symbolic complex head on, The thing is no longer the thing as it confronted the Spaniard; it is rather that which has already been formulated—by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon. As a result of this preformulation, the source of the sightseer's pleasure undergoes a shift. Where the wonder and delight of the Spaniard arose from his penetration of the thing itself, from a progressive discovery of depths, patterns, colors, shadows, etc., now the sightseer measures his satisfaction by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the preformed complex.
-Walker Percy, "The Loss of the Creature"
e-mail, Subject: Gay marriage: how does Buster the Bunny differ from Homer Simpson?
Because Buster is on PBS, his broadcasters have to worry about the official public interest and can't show gay marriage. Because Homer is on FOX, owned by that right-winger Rupert Murdoch, they can show anything they want, so Homer's sister-in-law will marry her (female) love tonight.