Yarns Found

In the LIght

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:58:00 +0000

Eric Heller, in The Disinherited Mind, tells of the Munich clown whom he characterizes as "one of the greatest of the rare race of metaphysical clowns...." He recounts how he once enacted the following scene: the curtain goes up and reveals darkness; and in this darkness is a solitary circle of light thrown by a street-lamp. Vallentin, with his long-drawn and deeply worried face, walks round and round this circle of light, desperately looking for something. "What have you lost?" a policeman asks who has entered the scene. "The key to my house." Upon which the policeman joins him in his search; they find nothing; and after a while he inquires: "Are you sure you lost it here?" "No," says Vallentin, and pointing to a dark corner of the stage: "Over there." "Then why on earth are you looking for it here?" "There is no light over there," says Vallentin.

Electric Fences and Cows

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:45:00 +0000

E.B. White was amused to learn from a farmer friend that many electrified fences don't have any current running through them. The cows apparently learn to stay away from them, after that you don't need the current. "Rise up, cows!" He wrote. "take your liberty while despots snore.

Source: Hackers & Painters, Paul Graham

Barreling Down the Hill

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:55:00 +0000

When the poet Ruth Stone was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields when she would feel and hear a poem coming at her over the landscape. She said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her. When she felt it coming – ‘cause it would shake the earth under her feet – she knew that she had only one thing to do: run like hell to the house as she was chased by this poem. The whole idea was to get to a paper and pencil fast enough so that when this poem came through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. There would be other times she wouldn’t be fast enough. She’d be running and running back to the house, the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it. She said it would continue on through the landscape looking for another poet. And then there were times when she would almost miss it. She would reach out with her hand and catch it by the tail and pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on a page. In these instances, the poem would come up on the page complete and intact – but backwards. The last word to the first.

Source: Elizabeth Gilbert, TED 09

No Time to Loose Gardening

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:38:00 +0000

The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, 'In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!'

Clarke and Asimov

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:21:00 +0000

According to Arthur C. Clarke, one day in the late 1960s he and Isaac
Asimov shared a New York taxicab. During the ride they agreed that
Clark was the world's leading science fiction writer and
second-ranking nonfiction science writer, while Asimov was the leading
science writer and second-ranking science fiction writer.

Robert Heinlein, the third member of the "trinity" of science fiction
writers who dominate the postwar growth of the genre, was not in the
cab, so Clarke and Asimov did not have to deal him in.

Source: Emmet Labs
Sent in By: Jason

The Oak Beams at New College

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:37:00 +0000

New College, Oxford, is of rather late foundation, hence the name. It was founded around the late 14th century. It has like other colleges, a great dining hall with big oaks beams across the top, yes? These might be two fee square, forty five feet long.

A century ago, so I am told, some busy entomologist went up into the roof of the dining hall with a penknife and poked at the beams and found that they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College Council, who met in some dismay, because where would they get beams of that caliber nowadays.?

One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be on college lands some oak. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country. So they called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked him about oaks.

And he pulled his forelock and said, “Well sires, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”

Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the college was founded, a grove of oaks ha been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down for one Forester to the next for five hundred years. “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”

A nice story. That’s the way to run a culture.

Author: Gregory Bateson, anthropologist/philosopher
Source: How Buildings Learn

The Chinese Farmer

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:32:00 +0000

There is an ancient Chinese story, still known to most East Asians today, about an old farmer whose only horse ran away. Knowing that the horse was the mainstay of his livelihood, his neighbors cam to commiserate with him. "Who knows what's good or bad?" said the old man, refusing their sympathy. And indeed, a few days later his horse returned, bringing with it a wild horse. The old man's friends came to congratulate him. Rejecting their congratulations the old man said, "Who knows what's good or bad?" And, as it happened, a few days later when the old man's son was attempting to ride the wild horse, he was thrown from it and his leg was broken. The friends came to express their sadness about the son's misfortune. "Who knows what's good or bad?" said the old man. A few weeks passed, and the army came to the village to conscript all the able-bodied men to fight a war against the neighboring province, but the old man's son was not fit to serve and was spared.
Author: Richard Nisbett

Source: Geography of Thought

The Conrad Cantzen Shoe Fund

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:36:00 +0000

The Conrad Cantzen Memorial Shoe Fund is a special fund administered by The Actors’ Fund of America. In 1945, actor Conrad Cantzen bequeathed his estate to The Actors’ Fund with the stipulation that it should be used to help actors purchase shoes so they did not appear "down at the heels" when auditioning. Mr. Cantzen believed that a good pair of shoes made a great first impression on casting directors. Mr. Cantzen felt that performers were more confident when auditioning in new shoes.

Bet on the Future

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 01:25:00 +0000

The Rockefeller Center in New York is, in my opinion, one of the most inspiring buildings in the world.

Like most things, the inspiration comes not so much from the thing itself, but the stories that surround it - and like all the best stories [and yes, alright, go on then, brands too] it has many lovely little pieces that all, somehow, fit together.

John D Rockefeller leased the space from Columbia University in 1928 to build a venue for the Metropolitan Opera.

Then, in 1929, the biggest stock market crash ever happened, for reasons that no one can really explain, and the USA entered the Great Depression.

The Metropolitan pulled out of the project and Rockefeller faced a very serious decision.

"It was clear that there were only two courses open to me. One was to abandon the entire development. The other to go forward with it in the definite knowledge that I myself would have to build it and finance it alone."
He decided to push ahead as the sole financial backer of the biggest development project in the history of the world.

It gave thousands of people hope, and jobs, throughout the Depression.

Rockefeller had no promised tenants for the building, but happened to have an interest in an emerging technology called radio.

Thus 30 Rock became the bleeping heart of the America's mass media industry.

Rockefeller, by all accounts, hated popular music - he was into opera - but he gave the leg up needed for RCA and NBC and the beginnings of a popular mass culture.

He hired Samuel 'Roxy' Rothafel, an infamous silent film and show impresario, to conceptualise and open Radio City Music Hall.

[Roxy once said: Don't give the people what they want - give them something better.]

Rockefeller made one of the biggest bets in history, at the very beginning of the worst economic crash of modern times, on the future.

Source: Talent Imitates, Genius Steals

Author: Faris Yakob

Oniomania

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 15:53:00 +0000

Not so much the desire
for owning things
as the inability to choose
between hunter or emerald
green, to buy
just roses, when there are birds
of paradise, dahlias,
delphinium, and baby's breath.
At center an emptiness
large as a half-off sale table.
What could be so wrong
with a little indulgence?
To wander the aisles of fresh
new good things knowing
any of them could be hers?
With a closet full of shoes
unworn back home,
she's looking for love
but it's not for sale —
so she grabs three of
the next best thing.

Author: Peter Pereira

Source: What's Written on the Body

Fly Fishing

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 15:47:00 +0000

Author Norman Maclean grew up in Montana. He taught English at the University of Chicago for many years, and built a cabin in Montana, near the Big Blackfoot River, and he spent every summer there.

After he retired from teaching, at the age of 70, he wrote his famous autobiographical novella, A River Runs Through It, which was published in 1976 by the University of Chicago Press. It was the first work of fiction the press ever published, and it was a huge best-seller, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It begins:

"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman."

Author: Garrison Keillor

Source: The Writer's Almanac

Holding onto Paradise

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 03:43:00 +0000

I hear a mocking cackling in the foliage above ... Suddenly, a nearby tree shakes with commotion. Two ring-tiled, white-whiskered monkeys are playing tag. Zooming in through my view finder, I notice something odd: the branches appear to be sprouting bran muffins.

I pick on of the muffins off the ground. It's brown and woody. It feels like it was baked in a buttered tray at 350 degrees for two hours too long. Not only is the muffin rock hard, it's also hallowed out, as through someone had flipped it over and scooped out all the insides. The shell's interior bears scratch marks and a couple of fibrous veins.

A plaque identifies the tree as a sapucaia. In season, the cupcakes grows packed with a half dozen seeks shapes like orange segments. At ripeness, these burst through the base, scattered on the ground. Impatient young monkeys sometimes punch into an unripe muffin and wrap their fingers around a fistful of nuts. Because their cognitive faculties are not developed enough to understand that extracting their paws requires letting go of the nuts, they end up dragging their sapucaia handcuffs around for miles.

In English, those sapucaias are called paradise nuts.

Source: The Fruit Hunters

Author: Adam Gollner

A Political Exodus from Clarksville

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:53:00 +0000

Gerald Daugherty used to live in the hip and shady section of Austin known as Clarksville. When he became active in a campaign against a proposal to build a light rail system in town, Daugherty put NO LIGHT RAIL bumper stickers on his car and on his wife’s Mercedes. That apparently didn’t go over too well in Democratic and pro-rail Clarksville. Somebody “keyed” the Mercedes at the local grocery and for good measure punched out the cars turn signal lights. Was Daugherty sure the damage had been politically motivated? Not really. But then one morning he found his car coated with eggs. “There must have been two dozen eggs all over my car,” he remembered. “Splattered. And then deliberately rubbed on the ‘No Rail’ bumper stickers. You knew where that was coming from.” So Daugherty sold his house in a precinct that gave George W. Bush only 20 percent of the vote against Al Gore. He bought a place in a precinct where two out of three people voted Republican in the same election. Two years later, Daugherty became the only Republican elected to the county governing body. His move out of Clarksville, he admits, was a political exodus. He left a place where he “stuck out like a sore thumb” and moved to a neighborhood that was more ideologically congenial. He reasoned, “you really do recognize when you aren’t in step with the community you live in.”

Source: The Big Sort
Author: Bill Bishop

Six Word Stories

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 20:32:00 +0000

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

Author: Margaret Atwood

Source: Wired

Thanks to: Jason Li

Thomas Jefferson's Dinners

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 03:02:00 +0000

Thomas Jefferson circumvented the boarding house factions during his presidency by inviting legislators to the White House for dinner, no more than a dozen at a time. He sat them at a large, round table, both to nullify questions of status in seating and to preclude private conversations. The wine was imported and plentiful. Jefferson's French chef was "his best ally in conciliating political opponents." Servants weren't allowed in the room - the president served out of a dumbwaiter near his chair - so the legislators felt free to speak in confidence. Jefferson wouldn't mix Federalists and Republicans, but he would use the dinners to cross over the boarding house factions in both parties.

Source: The Big Sort

Author: Bill Bishop

The Three Stonecutters

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 02:56:00 +0000

Once upon a time, there was a traveler who came upon three individuals working with stone. Curious as to what the workers were doing with the stones, the traveler approached the first worker and asked, “What are you doing with these stones?” Grumpily and without hesitation the worker quickly responded, “I am a stonecutter and I am cutting stones.”

Not satisfied with this answer, the traveler approached the second worker and asked, “What are you doing with these stones?” The second worker paused for a moment, sighed, but smiled a little and then explained, “I am a stonecutter and I am trying to make enough money to support my family.”

Having two different answers to the same question, the traveler made his way to the third worker and asked, “What are you doing with these stones?” The third worker stopped what he was doing, bringing his chisel to his side. He looked at the traveler with a beaming smile on his face and declared, “I am a stonecutter and I am building a cathedral.”

Source: Maloonamy

Pavolv's Other Finding

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 21:41:00 +0000

In one of his lesser-known experiments, the great Russian psychologist Pavlov discovered that a dog could be driven to a state of neurosis, trembling, urinating and defecating, if the signal it had been trained to respond to were sufficiently confused. If a bell which had come to be associated with food suddenly became the herald of an empty place, the dog could, after a few examples of this, be reconditioned to accept a state of food-less affairs. But if there was total irregularity in the proceedings, the creature would no longer know what to think: confused by the mysterious connection between the food and its non-appearance, between bells that sometimes meant one thing and sometimes another [though always the opposite of what one expected] the dog would slowly slide into a form of canine insanity.

Author: Alan de Botton

Source: The Romantic Movement

Ariadne's Thread

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 21:35:00 +0000

It was perhaps no coincidence that she had always been fascinated by the story of Ariadne's thread. The ancient Greek myth recounted the arrival of Theseus in Crete, where he was to be imprisoned and meet his end in the labyrinth-shaped palace of the fierce Minotaur. But before being put away, Theseus was glimpsed by the hot-blooded Ariadne, one of the daughters of King Minos, who fell in love with the handsome youth and resolved to rescue him from his cruel fate. Risking her own safety, she slipped the young man a ball of string which he might use to trace his way back out of the labyrinth. Love being tightly linked to gratitude, when Theseus managed to kill the beast and escape the maze, he reciprocated the princess's feelings and fled Crete with beloved Ariadne in tow.

Author Alan de Botton

Source: The Romatic Movement

A Bullfinch's Melody

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 21:17:00 +0000

A baron fell in love with a woman who lived near his castle in Rosenau near Coburg, Germany. At first, the girl didn't really take his love seriously. So he decided to serenade the girl from beneath her window at sunrise ever day, but the girl continued to rebuff him.

He then came up with the idea to gather all the young wild bullfinches nesting on the castle grounds and teach them to whistle a melody. If you train them the right way, bullfinches are very gifted at whistling melodies. So he trained the birds, released them, and invited the girl to come for a walk in the palace gardens. The birds were everywhere and were singing exactly the same tune he had played on his guitar beneath her window and, of course, she fell in love with him. If you go to these gardens today, you can till find traces of this love song from over 250 years ago in the birds' melodies. It's been transmitted through time. The love has become eternal.

Source: Broken Screen

Gas Rationing

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 03:55:00 +0000

On November 26 1942, President Roosevelt announced the United States would begin a national gas rationing campaign on December 1st. All Americans had to display a sticker in their car window saying what category of gas ration they had. Everyone started out at "A," which got people about four gallons a week. Local rationing boards were set up to assign a "B" or "C" ration to people who needed more gas if they could prove it was necessary for their work.

The campaign made propaganda posters that asked, "Is This Trip Necessary?" or said, "When you ride ALONE you ride with Hitler! Join a Car-Sharing Club TODAY!" Along with the gas rations, the national speed limit was set at 35 mph.

The gas rationing wasn't a result of a gas shortage. The United States was self-sufficient in oil and was actually a major exporter of petroleum. But the Japanese had taken over the rubber plantations in the Dutch East Indies that produced 90 percent of America's raw rubber, and there was no synthetic rubber. The government was afraid that if everyone kept driving, they would wear out tires that couldn't be replaced. The factories and the entire war effort would come to a halt. So the United States' first national gas rationing campaign was a roundabout way to conserve rubber.

Source: The Writer's Almanac

The Jukebox

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 17:41:00 +0000

On November 21, 1889 the Jukebox made its debut at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco. It was called a "nickel-in-the-slot player" and was built by the Pacific Phonograph Co. Later that year, jukeboxes were installed in other places around the city and on ferries that traveled back and forth across the bay between San Francisco and Oakland.

The jukebox consisted of an electric phonograph inside a free-standing oak cabinet. The technology for amplifiers hadn't been perfected yet, so there were headphones, which looked like stethoscopes. Up to four people could listen to a song at any given time. In 1927, the Automatic Musical Instruments Company introduced the first jukebox with amplifiers.

Jukeboxes changed the music business. Many early radio programs refused to play country, blues, or jazz, but jukeboxes made that music available in taverns, restaurants, and diners, and on Army bases. Eventually, country, blues, and jazz joined the music of Tin Pan Alley as pop music.

Source: The Writers Almanac

Practice Makes Perfect

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:57:00 +0000

The Beatles - John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr - came to the US in February 1964, starting the so-called "British Invasion" of the American music scene. The interesting thing is how long they had already been playing together. Lennon and McCartney began in 1957. (Incidentally, the time that elapsed between their founding and their greatest artistic achievements - arguably Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the White Album - is 10 years.) In 1960, while they were still a struggling school rock band, they were invited to play in Hamburg, Germany.

"Hamburg in those days did not have rock'n'roll music clubs. It had strip clubs," says Philip Norman, who wrote the Beatles' biography, Shout! "There was one particular club owner called Bruno, who was originally a fairground showman. He had the idea of bringing in rock groups to play in various clubs. They had this formula. It was a huge nonstop show, hour after hour, with a lot of people lurching in and the other lot lurching out. And the bands would play all the time to catch the passing traffic. In an American red-light district, they would call it nonstop striptease.

"Many of the bands that played in Hamburg were from Liverpool," Norman continues. "It was an accident. Bruno went to London to look for bands. But he happened to meet a Liverpool entrepreneur in Soho, who was down in London by pure chance. And he arranged to send some bands over. That's how the connection was established. And eventually the Beatles made a connection not just with Bruno, but with other club owners as well. They kept going back, because they got a lot of alcohol and a lot of sex."

And what was so special about Hamburg? It wasn't that it paid well. (It didn't.) Or that the acoustics were fantastic. (They weren't.) Or that the audiences were savvy and appreciative. (They were anything but.) It was the sheer amount of time the band was forced to play. Here is John Lennon, in an interview after the Beatles disbanded, talking about the band's performances at a Hamburg strip club called the Indra: "We got better and got more confidence. We couldn't help it with all the experience playing all night long. It was handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over. In Liverpool, we'd only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing."

The Beatles ended up travelling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962. On the first trip, they played 106 nights, of five or more hours a night. Their second trip they played 92 times. Their third trip they played 48 times, for a total of 172 hours on stage. The last two Hamburg stints, in November and December 1962, involved another 90 hours of performing. All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, they had performed live an estimated 1,200 times, which is extraordinary. Most bands today don't perform 1,200 times in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is what set the Beatles apart.

"They were no good on stage when they went there and they were very good when they came back," Norman says. "They learned not only stamina, they had to learn an enormous amount of numbers - cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock'n'roll, a bit of jazz, too. They weren't disciplined on stage at all before that. But when they came back they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them."

Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Source: Guardian

Baby Shoes

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:06:00 +0000

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

Author: Ernest Hemingway

Source: On time with no where to go

Moral Majority

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:33:00 +0000

Evangelist Billy Graham began his career in Los Angeles in 1949, holding revival meetings in circus tents. He crusaded against communism, but he opposed segregation, and became friends with Martin Luther King, Jr. He refused to join the religious right's Moral Majority, saying, "I'm for morality, but morality goes beyond sex to human freedom and social justice."

Source: Gairrson Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac"

On The Days I am Not My Father

noreply@blogger.com (Leland) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:30:00 +0000

I don't yell. I don't hold inside
the day's supply of frustrations.
My hands stay open all day.
I don't wake tired and sore,
dazed from senseless, panicking
dreams. On the days I am not
my father I hold my son
when he cries, let him touch my face
without flinching, lie down with him
until he falls asleep, realize
that just because he has a sharp tongue,
just because he's sometimes mean,
just because he's smarter than me
doesn't mean he'll become my father.

On the days I am not my father
holding you is enough until
holding you is no longer enough
for either of us. I listen well.
I let things go unfinished,
in an order I didn't plan.
My mouth is relaxed. My teeth
don't hurt. My face stays
a healthy shade of pink all day.
On the days I am not my father
I don't fill the silence with my own
irrational rants. I don't resent
the voices of others. I don't make fun
of you to make myself feel better.

On the days I am not my father
I don't care who wins
or loses. The news can't ruin
my day. I water plants.
I cook. I laugh at myself.
I can imagine living without
my beard, with my hair cut,
without the fear of looking
too much like my father. On the days
I am not my father I romp
and play, I don't compare myself
with everyone else, the night
is always long enough, I like
how much I am like my father.

Source: Scott Owens' The Fractured World