Snippets (people)
Things to use or delete. See Snippets.
Bricktop Smith
Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith, better known as Bricktop, (August 14, 1894 – February 1, 1984) was an American dancer, jazz singer, vaudevillian, and self-described saloon-keeper who owned the nightclub Chez Bricktop in Paris from 1924 to 1961, as well as clubs in Mexico City and Rome. She has been called "...one of the most legendary and enduring figures of twentieth-century American cultural history."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_%22Bricktop%22_Smith
Magic
It is an experience common to all men to find that, on any special occasion, such as the production of a magical effect for the first time in public, everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Whether we must attribute this to the malignity of matter or to the total depravity of inanimate things, whether the exciting cause is hurry, worry, or what not, the fact remains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevil_Maskelyne_(magician)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valdemar_Poulsen
Hibakusha
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibakusha
Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and Homo Deus, answers questions about the future of humanity:
"Today more people die from eating too much than from human violence, which is an amazing achievement. In the past, the main economic assets were material – wheat fields, gold mines, slaves. War made sense because you could enrich yourself by waging war against your neighbours. Now the main economic asset is knowledge, and it’s very difficult to conquer knowledge through violence."
Racist history of Portland
Gideon Worthy
- Gideon Worthy, Glyph Warden
Joseph Swetname
Joseph Swetnam (died 1621) was an English pamphleteer and fencing master. He is best known for a misogynistic pamphlet and an early English fencing treatise.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Swetnam
Rachel Speght
Rachel Speght (1597 – death date unknown) was a poet and polemicist. She was the first Englishwoman to identify herself, by name, as a polemicist and critic of gender ideology. Speght, a feminist and a Calvinist, is perhaps best known for her tract A Mouzell for Melastomus (London, 1617). It is a prose refutation of Joseph Swetnam's misogynistic tract, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women, and a significant contribution to the Protestant discourse of biblical exegesis, defending women's nature and the worth of womankind. Speght also published a volume of poetry, Mortalities Memorandum with a Dreame Prefixed (London, 1621), a Christian reflection on death and a defence of the education of women.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Speght
Francis Galton on Order in Apparent Chaos
"Order in Apparent Chaos: I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the ‘Law of Frequency of Error.’ The law would have been personified by the Greeks and deified, if they had known of it. It reigns with serenity and in complete self-effacement amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob, and the greater the apparent anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. It is the supreme law of Unreason. Whenever a large sample of chaotic elements are taken in hand and marshalled in the order of their magnitude, an unsuspected and most beautiful form of regularity proves to have been latent all along.“ -- Sir Francis Galton, Natural Inheritance, 1889
Research Spotlight: Victor Barranca and Applied Mathematics (Part I)
http://daily.swarthmore.edu/2018/05/01/research-spotlight-victor-barranca-and-applied-mathematics/
von Kleist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_von_Kleist
On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking In the first of his larger essays, On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking (Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden), Kleist claims that most people are advised to speak only about what they already understand. Instead of talking about what you already know, Kleist admonishes his readers to speak to others with "the sensible intention of instructing yourself." Fostering a dialogue through the art of "skillful questioning" is the key behind achieving a rational or enlightened state of mind. And yet, Kleist employs the example of the French Revolution as the climactic event of the Enlightenment era whereby man broke free from his dark and feudal chains in favor of liberty, equality, fraternity. It is not that easy though for Kleist. Man cannot simply guide himself into the future with a rational mind as his primary tool. Therefore, Kleist strongly advocates for the usefulness of reflection ex post facto or after the fact. In doing so, man will be able to mold his collective consciousness in a manner conducive to the principles of free will. By reflecting after the fact, man will avoid the seemingly detestable inhibitions offered in rational thought. In other words, the will to power has "its splendid source in the feelings," and thus, man must overcome his "struggle with Fate" with a balanced mixture of wisdom and passion.
Stephen Colbert on Trump
"He looks like a microwave circus peanut that somebody rubbed on a golden retriever."
George Washington, miserable prick
"We are sure, we are absolutely positive, that George Washington was a miserable prick. But when he spoke, he spoke for all of us, with a great conscience."
-- Penn Jillette
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV7UXp1Yqlw
Nate Bucklin mix
- "Billboard Love" by Uncle Bonsai
Nicky Case
Mister Elk and Mister Seal
- Cavalcade of Excitement
Lee Hays
Arlo Guthrie called the late Lee Hays "one of the few men I've known in this world who was not only an inspiration to me, but showed me that it's possible to do for yourself what you intend to do for the rest of the world."
Lillian Schwartz
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_Schwartz - 20th-century American artist considered a pioneer of computer-mediated art and one of the first artists notable for basing almost her entire oeuvre on computational media. Many of her ground-breaking projects were done in the 1960s and 1970s, well before the desktop computer revolution made computer hardware and software widely available to artists.
Aloysius Lilius
Talent
"Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work."
- Stephen King
The Selfish Living
"The living are so selfish. They can think of nothing but themselves."
- The Tudors: Season 4, Episode 4
People
- Charles Xavier Thomas (nonfiction) - Arithmometer (nonfiction)
- Étienne Bézout (nonfiction)
- Nicolas Malebranche (nonfiction)
- Jean Prestet (nonfiction)
- Jacques de Billy (nonfiction)
Odilon Redon
His work represents an exploration of his internal feelings and psyche. He himself wanted to place "the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible".
A telling source of Redon's inspiration and the forces behind his works can be found in his journal A Soi-même (To Myself). His process was explained best by himself when he said:
"I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased."
- Redon, Odilon (1988). Odilon Redon: the Woodner Collection. Washington, D.C.: Phillips Collection. unpaginated. OCLC 20763694.
Fortune Tellers: Ayn Rand, Kurt Vonnegut & Aldous Huxley
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGuk9o8uZBc
- "Nothing means anything." - Kurt Vonnegut
Elliott Erwitt
- Nikita Krushchev and Richard Nixon, Moscow, 1959.
- Glassmakers of Herat
Jimi Hendrix
Fay Cluff Brown
Fay Cluff Brown (1881-1968) was a physicist and inventor who created and supervised the development of educational exhibits, most notably in the Museum of Science and Industry at New York City’s Museums of the Peaceful Arts. Much of his scientific research focused on the element selenium. Early in his career, Brown invented a device using selenium, which translated printed text into sound.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_82/May_1913/Scholarship_and_the_State
Peter Struycken
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Struycken
Wooley
"Commodore Woolsey was of middle height, sailor-built, and of a compact, athletic frame. His countenance was prepossessing, and had singularly the look of a gentleman. In his deportment, he was a pleasing mixture of gentleman-like refinement and seaman-like frankness. His long intimacy with frontier habits could not, and did not, destroy his early training, though it possibly impeded some of that advancement in his professional and general knowledge, which he had so successfully commenced in early life. He was an excellent seaman, and few officers had more correct notions of the rules of discipline. His familiar association with all the classes that mingle so freely together in border life, had produced a tendency, on his excellent disposition, to relax to much in his ordinary intercourse, perhaps, but his good sense prevented this weakness from proceeding very far. Woolsey rather wanted the grimace than the substance of authority. A better-hearted man never lived. All who sailed with him loved him, and he had sufficient native mind, and sufficinet acquired instruction, to command the respect of many of the strongest intellects of the service."
— James Fennimore Cooper, Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melancthon_Taylor_Woolsey
Cassady on Graham
Neal Cassady summed up Bill Graham on sight: "He was out on the street checking tire treads to see if they’d picked up any nickels."
Blowing Mad: Neal Cassady and Music