Quotes

Quoted The Parable of the Sower by Octavia ButlerOctavia Butler
Saturday, February 1, 2025

WE HAD A FIRE TODAY.
As a 50 year old with a 13 year old daughter living in Octavia Butler’s neighborhood of Altadena, CA, it was eerie when I re-read The Parable of the Sower last summer. Today following the devastating Eaton Fire, the opening of chapter four just doubles down on the dystopia in which we’re living.
Quoted Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith by Walter Winchell (Naugatuck Daily News)

Red Smith was asked if turning out a daily column wasn't quite a chore. ... "Why no," dead-panned Red. "You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed."
---Walter Winchell, April 6, 1949 in the Naugatuck Daily News, p4, column 5

Index card typed in red ink with the Red Smith quote from Winchell

If opening up your veins at the typewriter and bleeding means something with respect to writing, then it must surely mean all the more when typing with a red ribbon on a Remington 666 typewriter which gives the type slugs the appearance of being covered in blood.

Red Smith quote typed in red ink on an index card which is coming out of the platen of a Remington 666 typewriter

Quoted a post by Letterform Archive (@letterformarchive@typo.social)Letterform Archive (@letterformarchive@typo.social) (typo.social)
This box of 600+ specimen cards holds a complete snapshot of the last metal type foundries in Germany. Produced 1958–1971, the Schriftenkartei (Typeface Index) represents the final effort to catalog all the country’s typefaces in production at the time. The cards are useful for researchers and designers as they share a common format and show complete glyph sets. Thanks to Michael Wörgötter, a set of these cards is now in our collection, and his high-res scans are online. https://letterformarchive.org/news/schriftenkartei-german-font-index/

This Schriftenkartei represents a fascinating example of a card index (#zettelkasten) as a database. This one obviously had a very narrow range of topics.

+ = winning!

Annotated About by Mandy BrownMandy Brown (A Working Library)
books are a means of listening to the thoughts of others so that you can hear your own thoughts more clearly. ❧
to which I might add:

And annotation helps you save those thoughts, share them with others, and further refine them.

Quoted Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else by Jordan Ellenberg (Penguin Press)
You don’t make a bagel by first baking a bialy and then punching out the center. No—you roll out a snake of dough and join the ends together to form the bagel. If you denied that a bagel has a hole, you’d be laughed out of New York City, Montreal, and any self-respecting deli worldwide. I consider this final.
Not exactly a QED sort of proof, but I’ll take it as an axiom. 🙂
Quoted by Jeremy KeithJeremy Keith (adactio.com)

I love my website. Even though it isn’t a physical thing, I think it might be my most prized possession.

It’s a place for me to think and a place for me to link.

A stark statement to make about one’s website. I feel exactly the same way.
 
 
Replied to a tweet by Kevin M. Kruse (Twitter)
Let’s be honest. If you’re going to have someone sign a Dr. Seuss book that isn’t Theodor Geisel, at least get someone truly consequential—and for a good reason.

Front inside cover of Dr. Seuss' book Green Eggs and Ham with Sam and a plate of food on the right and an inscription dated 11/19/94 "Chris, Keep Hope Alive!" above the signature of Jesse Jackson

Quoted The Californian Ideology by Richard Barbrook & Andy Cameron (Mute)
We need to debate what kind of hypermedia suit our vision of society - how we create the interactive products and on-line services we want to use, the kind of computers we like and the software we find most useful. We need to find ways to think socially and politically about the machines we develop. While learning from the can-do attitude of the Californian individualists, we also must recognise that the potentiality of hypermedia can never solely be realised through market forces. We need an economy which can unleash the creative powers of hi-tech artisans. Only then can we fully grasp the Promethean opportunities of hypermedia as humanity moves into the next stage of modernity. ❧
As true today as it was 25 years ago.
Quoted from Lecture 2 of The City of God (Books that Matter) by Charles Mathewes (The Great Courses)
Augustine [of Hippo] knew the power and the danger of idolatry and celebrity. And he knew the danger of both was first to permit the idolater to offload the duty of thinking onto their idol. And second to seduce the celebrity, in turn, into thinking his fans have nothing insightful to say. That treatment of a fellow human, a fellow christian, would be not the achievement of theology but the avoidance of it. And he went out of his way in his life and in his words to forestall such approaches.