Daily Archives: December 7, 2012

What I learned this week, December 7, 2012

Posted on by Bill Chance

25 literary girls who’ll break your heart

tender

LINDA_FIORENTINO

30 movie girls who’ll break your heart

5 landmarks you probably didn’t know about in Downtown Dallas

Though I was familiar with four of these (I noticed the hidden Houston street ramp during Ciclovia Dallas) I have never been to Lubben Plaza. I’m going to have to give it a shot – that one sculpture, The Harrow, looks really cool.

When They’re Grown, the Real Pain Begins

All of that changes when they are grown. They fall in love, break their hearts, apply for jobs, leave or lose the jobs, choose new homes, can’t pay the rent for those new homes and question their choice of profession. They forge their way, all just outside of your helping reach. Then, when bad things happen, they need you like crazy, but you discover that the kind of help you’ve spent 25 years learning how to give is no longer helpful.

¡Que rico un café Flor de Caña!

Es café macerado en ron, posee todas las propiedades organolépticas del ron, pero tiene grado de alcohol

Es café macerado en ron, posee todas las propiedades organolépticas del ron, pero tiene grado de alcohol

Coffee flavored with Flor de Caña – this is truly the best of all possible worlds.

America Leads World in Energy Revolution

The U.S. is already reaping the benefits of new energy extraction techniques, but other gas-rich nations are having trouble achieving similar results. The basic obstacles are the same everywhere: environmental worries, government hangups, and a lack of technical expertise and infrastructure related to fuel extraction.

The 40 Greatest Villains Of Literature

As always, “Blood Meridian” is up there. Look at it this way, “Blood Meridian” is written by the same guy that wrote “No Country for Old Men.” And the people that made the list included Judge Holden and they left Anton Chigurh off. I’ve read both books… I can see why.

chigurh

Judge Holden (Blood Meridian)

Author: Cormac McCarthy

Year: 1985

Judge Holden is, apparently, a real, historical figure, though evidence is minimal. After reading Blood Meridian, we’d suggest that we hope he was entirely made-up, seeing as Holden is the devil incarnate, leading a pack of criminals into robbery, rape and murder, throwing in a touch of paedophilia along the way. A seven-foot monster, with pale white skin, McCarthy paints him as almost supernatural in ability, but also in badness. A true villain of the peace in every way.

The 40 coolest characters in literature

A great list… and the don’t come any cooler than Ignatius J. Reilly.

Ignatius J. Reilly

Ignatius J. Reilly

Ignatius J. Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces)

Author: John Kennedy Toole

Quite possibly the funniest character in modern literature, the larger than life Ignatius J. Reilly deplores the modern world and its pop culture leanings. He dresses in a hunting cap, flannel shirt, baggy pants and scarf, and spends the entire novel criticising everyone and everything around him. He would no doubt despise the thought of being considered cool. Such disregard to these conventions makes him, inadvertently, very cool.

$10k college degrees are on to something

Higher education costs are inflated by bloated bureaucracies and bills paid with other people’s money. Universities employ professors too busy with research to spend much time teaching. They sink vast sums into money-losing intercollegiate sports. And they spend lavishly on marketing efforts to build prestige and buck up their college rankings.

Then, after deciding what they need to spend, they price accordingly. Their tuition is a function of this bloat and government’s willingness to subsidize them.

Workmen on the Roof

Posted on by Bill Chance

God buries His workmen but carries on His work.
—-Charles Wesley

“Any fool can write a book and most of them are doing it; but it takes brains to build a house.”
—- Charles F. Lummis

“Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property. Father, however, preferred the roof: In his white, light-woolen three-piece suit, white fedora cocked back on his head, for luck, he spent many of his waking hours on the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, observing, through binoculars, the amazing progress of construction in the Valley – for overnight, it seemed, there appeared roads, expressways, sewers, drainage pipes, “planned” communities with such names as Whispering Glades, Murmuring Oaks, Pheasant Run, Deer Willow, all of them walled to keep out intruders, and, yet more astonishing, towerlike buildings of aluminum and glass and steel and brick, buildings whose windows shone and winked like mirrors, splendid in sunshine like pillars of flame; such beauty where once there had been mere earth and sky, it caught at your throat like a great bird’s talons, taking your breath away. ‘The ways of beauty are as a honeycomb,’ Father told us, and none of us could determine, staring at his slow moving lips, whether the truth he spoke was a happy truth or not, whether even it was truth.”
—-Joyce Carol Oates

“For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; as though there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.”
—-Eugene Ionesco