bray•duh•min @brayduhmin - Tumblr Blog

A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

Clive James

We suffer a great deal today from the bogus certainties and precisions of the pseudo-sciences which include all the social sciences including economics.

John James Cowperthwaite

#Hong Kong #cowperthwaite #pseudoscience

Men never wore shorts when I was young. There are few things I would rather see less, to tell you the truth. I'd just as soon see someone coming toward me with a hand grenade.

Fran Lebowitz

#shorts #fashion #Fran Lebowitz

The problem isn't the Quran, nor the Bible, two badly written, incoherent and soporific novels, but the believer who reads the Quran or the Bible like one reads an instruction manual on how to assemble an Ikea shelf.

Stephane “Charb” Charbonnier, the editor of Charlie Hebdo who was killed in the Jan. 7 attack

#quran #bible #charlie hebdo #charb #religion

I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization as the church has done so often in human history.

Cardinal Francis George

#religion #history

“But that terrible article arose out of a moral swamp that still festers even following the article’s retraction. It spoke to and reflected and sought to capture one of the most hysterical panics of our time: the idea that largely middle-class women at some of the best universities in the United States are stalked by danger, hunted by rapists, threatened by a foul, free-floating culture of violation.

It’s this madness that we must now challenge. And it will require more than a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism dean to do that. It will require all of us picking apart victim feminism, advocacy research, the demonization of men (especially of the frat variety), the culture of misanthropy, and the modern urge to trash both due process and civil rights in the name of hunting down a new breed of Emmanuel Goldsteins: jocks, lads, college guys. All of these are the ingredients, not only of Erdely’s sorry excuse for reporting, but also of the still extant, still profoundly damaging moral panic about rape.”

Brendan O’Neill, "The Real Problem With Rolling Stone's Campus Rape Fiasco"

#politics #rape culture #moral panic

The President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too.

Andy Warhol

#beauty #coke #mundane

#royalty

Prunella Scales as "H.M.Q." in Alan Bennett's A Question of Attribution

Sir Anthony Blunt, a British art historian and Soviet spy, discusses art with his sovereign. Does she know his secret?

#royalty

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 tips on how to write a good short story

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things–reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them–in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

#Kurt Vonnegut #writing

Only the sentimental believe in teachable moments. For the rest of us there is only disaster recovery.

Jack Shafer

#journalism

To a large extent, the Spider-Man story is the story of a person who’s survived a toxic industrial accident, and his attempts to cope with the aftermath of it.

Cory Doctorow

#Cory Doctorow #Spider-Man