Sunday, August 21, 2005

Quotes

Compiling quotes seems to be quite common on the web. Not something I deliberately search for, but when they turn up, usually dispel any clouds of confusion or the rain of despair at

Mark Hughes

keep rolling there are some gems.....this one reminds me of Vonnegut:

A good half of the men you deal with in the Army are psychopaths. There's a pretty hefty overlap between the military population and the prison population, so I knew plenty of guys like Junior in Miami Blues and Troy in Sideswipe. Like, some of these other Tankers I knew used to swap bottles of liquor with infantrymen in exchange for prisoners, and then just shoot 'em for fun. I used to say, 'Goddamn it, will you stop shooting those prisoners!' And they would just shrug and say, 'Hell, they'd shoot us if they caught us!' Which was true, they used to shoot any Tankers they captured. So that sort of behavior became normal to them, and I used to wonder, 'What's gonna-happen to these guys when they go back into civilian life? How are they gonna act?' You can't just turn it off and go to work in a 7-11. If you're good with weapons or something in the Army, you're naturally gonna do something with weapons when you get out, whether it's being a cop or a criminal. These guys learned to do all sorts of things in the Army that just weren't considered normal by civilian standards.

-Charles Willeford

So does this. Maybe I've got Vonnegutitis :

"Actually I always thought that programming was quite similar to sex. The first time you do it you have no idea what you're doing. It seems like men think about it more than women. Doing it in a large group makes things far too complicated, since no person will know exactly where their part is supposed to fit, though some people claim that it'll give you better results. Doing it by yourself is what most students end up doing. It will take a lifetime to master it. There's no one right way to do it, but a number of wrong ways. People who have never tried it think that those of us who practice it daily are deviants. It's fun. It takes a lot of energy. It can keep you up late at night. It can make you miss classes. Do it too long and you'll go blind. Finally, once you get it on your mind, it's hard to concentrate on anything else.": - Joseph Hewitt (pyrrho12#hotmail.com) in rec.games.roguelike.development

This :

Gardner has come across a good number of chewed and mutilated (but nonetheless living) opossums in his day, which he says suggests that playing possum really does work.
Except sometimes--as Gardner recently learned when called to consult on a criminal case involving a restaurant worker who'd been arrested for torturing an opossum. The reporting police officers were sure that the creature's neck had been broken, since it just lay there with its eyes wide open, drooling. "When it woke up," Gardner. reports, "it looked at them and passed out again." A classic case, except for the ending: To put the animal out of its misery, the cops tenderly placed it beneath a tire of their patrol car and drove over it.

Which goes to show, I guess, that nature can arm you against your enemies, but when you come up against someone who wants to do you a favor, you're on your own.

-Patrick Clinton, Outside Magazine, April 1995