notes.husk.org. tagged quote.

2012-02-01

post/16876558017

quote 20:20:05

“ Under the rules in place today, any nerd, any withdrawn, bookish kid, can have Asperger syndrome. ”

Benjamin Nugent: I Had Asperger Syndrome, Briefly, from the New York Times.

This is one of a series of posts at the NY Times about the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the fifth (DSM-5 for short), which narrows the definition of autism (and Asperger syndrome) significantly. This particular post is well worth a read. (Thanks, Molly.)

2012-01-31

post/16839532341

quote 22:49:06

“ I’m someone who would rather return to a city that he’s visited many times before than visit a new city. I don’t know many people who are like that; I like going back to the same place over and over, for years. Because it yields a different experience. If I were the sort of person who went all over the world and only visited each city once, that would be a different sort of experience. I find to really get into a city, I have to go back again and again, and get deeper and deeper into the history and texture of the place. ”

William Gibson, interviewed at The Verge.

Whether it’s a sign of that same desire to burrow under the surface of the city, or just because I have a lack of imagination, I’ve found myself visiting the same places repeatedly: New York five times, now (and more to come, I’m sure), Berlin twice (and, again, I’d love to return), Paris perhaps four times (with more yet to see), San Francisco (three times before I moved here), and of course London (multiple times before I moved, and then ten years of infatuation). I like Gibson’s justification, anyway.

2012-01-30

post/16758996658

quote 13:47:05

“ I’m genuinely interested in seeing the human race escape the planet and go exploring. Speaker Gingrich would like to be elected. ”

Warren Ellis on Newt Gingrich, Space Realism and Future America at Motherboard.

post/16755128380

quote 10:24:05

“ Cars spend just 5 percent of their lives in motion. ”

A diverting statistic from Between the Lines, a feature on parking in that city from Los Angeles magazine.

2012-01-27

post/16596658651

quote 21:52:45

“ Twitter made an important announcement this week regarding their ability to filter content across jurisdictions. The ensuing conspiracy theories and hand-wringing in certain corners of the internet were depressingly predictable, and as I tweeted this morning:
If you’re upset by twitter’s per-country filtering announcement, you know much less about doing business online than you think you do.
But posting such a thing without laying out “things you should know about doing business online” is, frankly, smug and irritating. So, here goes. ”

Simon Batistoni: What you need to know about Twitter’s new filters.

Well worth a read, because he knows what he’s talking about.

2012-01-24

post/16425008238

quote 21:48:05

“ We have to stop building cities as if everyone is 30 years-old and athletic. ”

Gil Peñalosa, quoted in The 8 to 80 Problem: Designing Cities for Young and Old by John Lorinc for The Atlantic Cities.

post/16422264693

quote 21:01:18

“ Aren’t Oscarbatory films like The Artist, Hugo, and Midnight in Paris the high brow equivalent of the Transformers, easing the viewer into the same warm nostalgia bath, just with the particulars adjusted to reflect a different audience’s adolescent fixations? Might they even be even more meretricious because they rely on the borrowed auras from the canonical works/figures they reference (Méliès rather than Mégatron) to activate feelings of barely-earned recognition, which somehow invokes in the audience the false spirit of learning, or at very least, the smug satisfaction of the pub trivia warrior? ”

Todd Serencha, via perpetua.

I think this might be a more forceful statement of what I was nudging towards. (I’ve seen all three - but none of the Transformers films - and enjoyed them all, but I still take his point. They just happen to be catering to my tastes.)

Also, I have to remember “Oscarbatory” for next year.

post/16419615205

quote 20:09:05

“ I think TV is pushing ahead. It used to be we make TV on video and they remake it on 35mm. We all now work in high-def, we all have the same cameras. You can get things made the same year you think of it, rather than 12 years later. We can make three Sherlock films in the time it takes Hollywood to have lunch. ”

Steven Moffat, answering “Isn’t choosing British TV over Hollywood nuts, career-wise?” in an interview in the Guardian: ‘There is a clue everybody’s missed’: Sherlock writer interviewed.

post/16418780837

quote 19:51:06

“ A library is not simply the books and the computers and the resources, but it’s actually a place where there aren’t four or five conversations going on. It’s a place where children can read and be on their own, and that’s invaluable. But they want to turn our library into some sort of retail outlet. ”

Alan Bennett, quoted in the Paris Review: Alan Bennett on ‘Smut’, by Jonathan Gharraie.

2012-01-16

post/15976001965

quote 23:45:05

“ Uggie, the cute Jack Russell terrier in the movie, has been featured extensively, perhaps exhaustively, on TV chat shows. Why? Because like the two other principals, Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo, he speaks no English, but is at least not expected to. Dujardin has nowhere near enough English to carry a TV interview, so he has been reduced to mugging and doing wacky animal impressions, and there have been rumours that producer Harvey Weinstein is worried that reminders of the film’s Frenchness will be a turn-off. Nonetheless, The Artist may well turn out to be the first French film to win best picture at the Academy Awards, but it will have achieved this triumph by keeping schtum, by being silent and reversing the talkie revolution. ”

Peter Bradshaw: Is The Artist’s awards momentum a dramatic comedy of errors?

notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.