December 2009
4 posts
1 tag
No decade has destroyed my business model
Paul Krugman calls this decade The Big Zero: “the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing”. Rebecca Mead at The New Yorker bemoans this decade’s lack of a name, even calling our failure to come up with a popular name a “troubling harbinger”.
When Odysseus was captured by the man-eating giant cyclopes Polyphemus, Odysseus wisely said his name was οὔτις...
1 tag
I am what I am
The credits for Avatar were almost over when I noticed a middle age couple making a bit of a commotion walking down the stairs to exit the movie theater. The woman was having a lot of trouble making her way down, and the man assisting her (I assume he was her husband) kept loudly complaining that “she won’t see a doctor” about whatever it was that inhibited her movement. Her...
3 tags
The end of lying
The movie The Invention of Lying takes place in an alternate reality where no one has ever lied. The people in this movie are no more ethical than people in real life, but concept of not telling the truth is beyond all of them. When unsuccessful writer Mark Bellison (played by Ricky Gervais, who also wrote and directed) inexplicably discovers his ability to lie, the whole world believes whatever...
“It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual...”
– Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick