"After that, they went on again."
- JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit

(repeat about a million times until you put the book down and go find something entertaining, like Wodehouse)

"There's Always Golf!" -P.G. Wodehouse

Golf, like measles, should be caught young...

Victor Hugo to his publisher about his new book:
?

Answer:
!

Its been around long enough, I'm quite certain, that no one will ever be able to establish who said it first. Even a lot of what Aritstotle, Plato, and Socrates have attributed to them was not necessarily original to them...we just have them on record.

Likely to be true for attributes of Socrates, less likely for Plato and Aristotle.
Although public discourse was popular with the Greeks and provided "method" for their musings (Plato's dialectic w/ Glaucon), stealing a reference was tantamount to stealing bread. Academic banishment was quite popular then.

True, but I really meant that we (Westerners) tend to neglect the fact that many other cultures existed outside of the Greco-Roman world. And each of these traditions has its own set of "wisdom sayings" and intillectuals. Aristotle may not have plagerized, but he may have been coming to the same conclusions that someone in another ("silent") part of the world already had. People in science often independently "rediscover" brilliant phenomena.

It's all about PR. If you can give voice to the discovery and reach more people, you will be credited even though someone may have made the same discovery years earlier. (Amerigo Vespucci (sp) kinda proved that beyond any doubt.) :) I have no problem with Michael Crichton getting the attribute. I just wanted to mention that it has been a pretty popular idea in other circle for a lot longer than Mr. Crichton has been writing.

But back to the original saying....I just read a section from Wade Davis' "Passage of Darkness" in which he uses a similar "absence of proof" saying with no attribution....it is just that common a saying. We will never know the true author.

BTW, truly an excellent read. It lays out the idea that a combination of cultural influence and pharmaceutical substances are responsible for the Haitian Zombie phenomenon. Neither alone can explain it. (It is the more academic telling of the "Serpent and the Rainbow" story.) Very nice work as far as demystifying one of Hollywoods favorite horror stories. I'd like to see a similar treatis on Witches, Werewolves, Vampires, etc. I'm sure they exist, but I have yet to find anything of Davis' calliber.

The synchronicity of ideas.


"The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect. with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt and skin were all of the same colour. He had been eight years upon a project to extract sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers......"

Jonathan Swift
Gulliver's Travels

You can't out-think someone who isn't thinking....
-- unknown

Never touch a running system :p

Heard on NPR a coupla weeks ago:

"He who hath wife and children hath given hostages unto fortune."

--- Francis Bacon

"Come on, where'd you get that? Sears?" - Steve Ballmer in Pirates of Silicon Valley while trying to convince an innocent man to give him his tie while going to the bathroom. Bill Gates was late for an important meeting, and forgot his tie.

A great moment really.

"Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer"

- Sun Tzu

Anyone seen my good buddy Bill G.?....

"That's very profound... Where did you profind it?" - darkpaw - 2002
"Cheap as chips" - Bargain Hunt KING David Dickinson - 2001-ish
"Mad as a box of frogs"
"Mad as a bottle of chips"

For the Americans who aren't in the know, chips over here in the UK mean the ones you get from a Fish and Chip shop, not the ones in a foil bag that come in flavours like Cheese & Onion... (That could be a quote in it's own right!)

I've always loved this one from my Social 30 (Grade 12, years ago) class.

"If at 18 you are a capitalist, you have no heart. If at 65 you are a communist, you have no brain." - Sir Winston Churchill

"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" -- Yeats

"We don't want to be like Windows," said Greg Joswiak Apple's vice president of hardware product marketing. "We want to do everything better. We are intent on creating the greatest computers and the best computing experience in the world. And we are the only ones who can say that with a straight face."

The more you run away, is just the farther you have to walk back!

~ Jessica Renee' Kane



When afflicted, love can allow thee to groan, but not to grumble.

~ William Gurnall

"When life gives you a lemon, wing it right back and add some lemons of your own."

Whoever knows where that comes from is cool. :)

a couple I picked up in the greater Tuna area of Texas:

"It's hotter than a pregnant field mouse in a wool sock!"

'If Heaven has a dress code then I'm walking to Hell in my Tony Llama's."

"I always liked you.....but not very much."

(from Red, White, and Tuna)

I'm cool.

That would be Mr Bill Watterson writing for Calvin.