real-time micro weblogging

With tons of tasks that need to be done withing a few hours, I finally began tweeting. Seems to be funny.

Doubt

Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.

A woman was gossiping with a friend about a man she hardly knew. That night she had a dream. A great hand appeared over her and pointed down at her. She was immediately seized with an overwhelming sense of guilt. The next day she went to confession, and she told the old parish priest the whole thing.
“Is gossiping a sin? Father, tell me, have I done something wrong?”
“Yes! Yes, you ignorant, badly brought-up female! You have borne false witness against your neighbor, you have played fast and loose with his reputation, and you should be heartily ashamed!”
So the woman said she was sorry and asked for forgiveness. “Not so fast! I want you to go home, take a pillow up on your roof, cut it open with a knife, and return here to me!”
So the woman went home, took a pillow off her bed, a knife from the drawer, went up the fire escape to the roof, and stabbed the pillow. Then she went back to the old parish priest as instructed.
“Did you gut the pillow with the knife? What was the result?”
“Feathers,” she said. “Feathers everywhere, Father!”
“Now I want you to go back and gather up every last feather that flew out on the wind!”
“Well, it can’t be done. I don’t know where they went. The wind took them all over.”
“And that is gossip!”

- You haven't the slightest proof of anything.
- But I have my certainty, and armed with that, I will go to your last parish, and the one before that if necessary. Trust me, Father Flynn, I will do what needs to be done, though I'm damned to Hell!
- I can't say everything, you understand? Even if you can’t imagine the explanation, Sister, remember there are things beyond your knowledge. Even if you feel certainty, it is an emotion, not a fact. I've done nothing wrong. I care about the boy.
- Why? ‘Cause you smile at him and you sympathize with him, and you talk to him as if you were the same? You're a cheat.
- I can fight you.
- You'll lose.

If he was open,

For a moment, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso thought what an infinite relief it would be to tell the whole story from the beginning, about this extraordinary, singular, astonishing, and never-seen-before case of the duplicate man, the unimaginable became reality, the absurd reconciled with reason, the final proof that for God nothing is impossible, and that the science of this century is, as someone said, a fool. If he did so, if he was open, then all his previous troubling actions would be explained, including those that had been, as far as Maria da Paz was concerned, aggressive, rude, or disloyal, or that had, in short, offended against the most elementary common sense, that is to say almost all his actions. Then harmony would be restored, all errors and mistakes would be unconditionally and unreservedly forgiven. (omission) Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's well-intensioned thought vanished as quickly as it came. It's been said thousands of times before that there's no point crying over spilt milk, the problem in this case is what has happened to the jug, which lay shattered on the floor.

José Saramago, tr. Margaret Jull Costa, The Double (Harvest Books, 2004), pp. 167-168

It's all well and good to talk about happy endings, but

You never mean to let me down, but you do.

Yeah, I guess I do.

You know, it's all well and good to talk about happy endings, but if a person can't deliver, if you keep screwing up, well, eventually I guess he kinda just have to say 'f**k you' or words to that affect.

Or is it a new trick?

With these empty faces of ours, with these sheared craniums, with these shameful clothes, to take a chemical examinations. And obviously it will be in German; and we will have to go in front of some blond Aryan doktor hoping that we do not have to blow our noses, because perhaps he will not know that we do not have handkerchiefs, and it will certainly not be possible to explain it to him. And we will hardly be able to stand still on our feet. But have the Germans such great need of chemists? Or is it a new trick, a new machine "pour faire chier les Juifs"? Are they aware of the grotesque and absurd test asked of us, of us who are no longer alive, of us who have already gone half-crazy in the dreary expectation of nothing?

Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (London: Everyman's Library, 2000), p. 122

Anything that happens, happens.

Anything that happens, happens.



Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.



Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.



It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though.

Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless, Introduction

Blue Screen on Bird's Nest

The magnificently notorious MicroSoft blue screen at the opening ceremony of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games in "Bird's Nest" Stadium. People say it was shown for almost an hour. LOL