If you spent all your time wandering around the world, gasping at everything and saying, “How wonderful! How amazing! I’ve woken up after a 100 million centuries, what a trip!”, people would think you were a bit odd, and you might even get arrested. We do, of course, have an ordinary life to get on with, we do have a living to earn. We’ve got to earn our living being a solicitor, a lavatory cleaner, or something like that. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile, from time to time, shaking off the anesthetic of familiarity, and awakening to the wonder that is really all around us all the time. So, how are we going to shake off the anesthetic?
We can’t actually go to another planet, but fortunately we do not need to. Because we can go to regions of our own planet which are so unfamiliar that it almost might be another planet.
Richard Dawkins in Waking Up in the Universe
I have had the fortune of traveling to many distant countries, including New Zealand, the Czech Republic, Greece, and Turkey. As such, I can say that Dawkins perfectly describes the experience of visiting new regions of the planet as “shaking off the anesthetic of familiarity.” Many people that have the means to travel afar never do because they’re afraid to draw out the IV and wake up in a new, less familiar world. It’s too bad, because it’s one of the most valuable experiences I’ve had. Leaving the country not only demolished my egocentric tendency to think of my life in the States as “normal,” but also gave me a humbling perspective of my place in the world.
To this day, the memories of my travels help me shake off the anesthetic of familiarity and remember how beautiful this planet, this universe, really is, and how privileged I am to have had the chance to visit, even if for but a fleeting moment in time.
White space for me is a very important element in graphic composition. It is really the white that makes the black sing. White, in typography, is what space is in Architecture. It is the articulation of space that gives Architecture the perfect pitch.
Masimo Vignelli in The Vignelli Canon
I want a green-energy bubble. I want so many people throwing crazy dollars at every idea, in every garage, that we have 100,000 people trying 100,000 things, five of which might work, and two might be the next green Google. But I don’t want a Manhattan Project of 12 people in Los Alamos. I want it to be like the IT revolution: everyone becoming a programmer. Only in this case, it’s everyone becoming a green innovator. What IT was to the 80s and 90s, ET, energy technology, will be to the early 21st century.
Thomas Friedman, speaking to Foreign Policy
The 2008 VMAs were unprofessional, poorly planned and difficult to watch. The quality of the VMAs has been going downhill at a fast clip. At this rate, in a few years they will be held in a back alley in West Hollywood, hosted by a former member of O-Town, feauring 5 second performances by American Idol rejects.
God help us all.
Stephanie K in TORTURE Part II: Death by Boredom
I have no issue with family entertainment, but Mom… Dad… there’s a reason they put Vegas far from the civilized world in the middle of a desert. IT’S BECAUSE NORMAL PEOPLE DO NOT BEHAVE LIKE THIS.
People leave their lives when they get to Vegas, they transform into tremendous assholes. It’s hard to read that sentence without thinking I’m somehow predisposed to not like these people, but I do… because I’m one of them… as regularly as humanly possible.
Vegas is Sin City. It’s an delectable adventure designed to swallow you whole and then spit you out in a haze of smoke and a a stench of booze. When Vegas is done with you, you’ll be broke, exhausted, and reeking of strippers.
Hell yes.
Via the Rands Vegas System
Rands wrote this more than six years ago, but it still rings true.
In two weeks, my best friend Stephanie is coming to visit me in San Francisco—which, by the way, is incredible so far—and then we are headed to Vegas for the weekend. A lot of people don’t get it, but we love the place. Once we stayed for four nights straight and decided that it was too much fun for one sitting. However, anything less than four nights is, as Rands describes it, a “delectable adventure.”
The Mirage is our destination, Olives is where we’ll stop for lunch, and Tryst and Tao are THEE clubs to make “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” come true. Can’t wait!
Think of something from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there.
After all, you really were there at the time, weren’t you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren’t there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn’t make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, read it again until it does, because it is important.
Steve Grand in Creation: Life and How to Make It
The combined market share for, say, Firefox 3 and Safari 3 is larger than the overall market share for Mac OS X. Plenty of developers write desktop software that only works on the Mac — why aren’t more people writing web apps that only work in truly modern web browsers? The first one to do it is going to be a sensation.