Boston’s Banditos Misteriosos is organizing a water gun battle with a Revolutionary War theme. It will take place on Saturday, August 16, and you can sign up for it on their site.

They explain:

The summer is heating up, thus, it is with pride that Banditos Misteriosos announces the Revolutionary Water Gun Fight.

Consider this event the combination of a good old fashioned water gun fight and the revolutionary battle of our forefathers.

Staying true to Boston’s historical roots, this water gun fight shall focus on two armies, marching and meeting each other for a battle in a specific location.

Specifics
———-

Army Assignment:
Participants will be asked to register for event beforehand on the Banditos Misteriosos website (http://www.misteriosos.org). The registration form will be up by Monday, July 28th. The night before the event, emails will be sent out with army assignment and meet up location.

Supplies:

- 1 empty water gun of your choice.
- At least 2 FILLED two-liter bottles (bring more if you desire!)
- 1 back-pack to hold water bottles.
- 1 bottle of bubbles.
- 1 either red or blue shirt (depending on army assignment).
- Any other revolutionary paraphernalia you don’t mind getting wet (hats, flutes, etc)
- As always, your fighting vigor and a bandana!

[Urban Prankster]

In 2005, a team of U.S. researchers developed a comprehensive model of sustainable happiness change that integrated the major lines of the subjective well-being literature. The result was a theory which proposed that up to 50 per cent of one’s happiness was rooted in a genetically determined set-point, 10 per cent was related to circumstantial factors (nation of residence, demographics, culture, income, etc), and the remaining 40 per cent was determined by intentional activities such as pursuing goals, looking at things optimistically, and being physically active.

-Research Digest Blog

Man will become better when you show him what he is like.

-Anton Chekhov

we frequently hear it said, "Oh, I could not believe so-and-so, because I should be wretched if I did." When an ostrich buries its head in the sand as danger approaches, it very likely takes the happiest course. It hides the danger, and then calmly says there is no danger; and, if it feels perfectly sure there is none, why should it raise its head to see? A man may go through life, systematically keeping out of view all that might cause a change in his opinions, and if he only succeeds -- basing his method, as he does, on two fundamental psychological laws -- I do not see what can be said against his doing so. It would be an egotistical impertinence to object that his procedure is irrational, for that only amounts to saying that his method of settling belief is not ours. He does not propose to himself to be rational, and, indeed, will often talk with scorn of man's weak and illusive reason. So let him think as he pleases.

-Charles S. Peirce, "The Fixation of Belief"

My little son, when you could command marvels

Without mercy, outstare the wearisome

Dragon of sleep, I rejoiced above all—

A stranger well-received in your kingdom.

On those pristine fields I saw humankind

As it was named by the Father; fabulous

Beasts rearing in stillness to be blessed.

The world’s real cries reached there, turbulence

From remote storms, rumour of solitudes,

A composed mystery. And so it ends.

Some parch for what they were; others are made

Blind to all but one vision, their necessity

To be reconciled. I believe in my

Abandonment, since it is what I have.


-Geoffrey Hill, "Funeral Music"

It has to be cold
So the breath turns white,

And then mother, who's fast enough
To write his life on it?

_____


This is the last summoning.
Solitude--as in the beginning.

A zero burped by a bigger zero--
It's an awful licking I got.

And fear--that dead letter office.
And doubt--that Chinese shadow play.

Does anyone still say a prayer
Before going to bed?

White sleeplessness.
No one knows its weight.


-Charles Simic, "White"

6. Cosmology is the girl that doesn't really date, but has lots of hot friends. Some people date cosmology just to hang out with her friends.

Physical Theories as Women

[via Seed]

The cult of non-judgmentality has now grown to the point where you can't imply judgment of someone or something else. (Not that there's no judgmentality in our culture; far from it. But like everything else, it's unequally applied.) Lee is so certain that not owning a TV, or saying so, is an act of judgment that he has to preemptively erase that judgment. It isn't just wrong now that someone say "I don't like your conduct"; it's now apparently bad that someone else might partake in conduct different then your own, and in presenting an alternative to your conduct appear to be judging it. This is a culture of self-obsession taken to its logical conclusions.

-L'Hôte

Never be frightened at your own faintheartedness in attaining love, and meanwhile do not even be very frightened by your own bad acts. I am sorry that I cannot say anything more comforting, for active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams.

-Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1.2.4

“He was then an old man, and unquestionably intelligent. He spoke just as frankly as you, humorously, but with a sorrowful humor. ‘I love mankind,’ he said, ‘but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams,’ he said, ‘I often went so far as to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience. As soon as someone is there, close to me, his personality oppresses my self-esteem and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I can begin to hate even the best of men: one because he takes too long eating his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps blowing his nose. I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me, ‘ he said. ‘On the other hand, it has always happened that the more I hate people individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity as a whole.’"

-Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1.2.4

I carried my life, like a stone,
in a ragged pocket, but I
had a true weaving song, a sly
way with rhythm, a healing tone.

-Jay Wright, "The Healing Improvisation of Hair"

Keats was a large-souled, warmhearted, altogether companionable person, but the tragedy of his death was that he did not have a chance to outgrow his youthful devotion to "poetry" - to the idea of it, I mean. You cannot devote your life to an abstraction. Indeed, life shatters all abstractions in one way or another, including words such as faith or belief. If God is not in the very fabric of your existence for you, of you do not find Him (or miss Him!) in the details of your daily life, then religion is just one more way to commit spiritual suicide.

-Christian Wiman, "Notes on Poetry and Religion"

Camus, in my opinion, was also a Cathar, a pure one, and if he rejected God it was out of love for God because he was not able to justify Him. The last novel written by Camus, The Fall, is nothing else but a treatise on Grace - absent grace -

-Czeslaw Milosz

Poetry is not written out of despair, which in its pure form is absolutely mute. The poetry that seems to come out of despair - Larkin's "Aubade," for instance, late Plath - is actually a means of staving it off. A negative charge, simply by virtue of realizing itself, of coming into existence, becomes a positive charge. Whole lives happen this way, sustained by art in which, at some deep level, life is denied. There can be real courage in such lives and art, though it is very easy to move from engaging despair to treasuring it, to slip from necessity into addiction. This is when poetry's powers begin to fail.

-Christian Wiman, "Notes on Poetry and Religion"

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

-Albert Camus

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him).

-George Orwell

Flannery O'Connor - The Church and the Fiction Writer

[via Fort of Sand]

Nonsense

[via it loved to happen]

Planet Earth - Inversed

‘We sometimes feel, in following the words and behavior of some of the characters of Dostoevsky, that they are living at once on the plane we know and on some other place of reality from which we are shut out.’

-T.S. Eliot

Freedom is incompatible with happiness.

-Introduction to The Brothers Karamazov, by Malcolm V. Jones

The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows. (BK 238)

-Kafka, 1917 aphorisms

A bird's eye view of Russia

Dostoevsky's notes for chapter 5 (book number wasn't listed) of The Brothers Karamazov

[via Wikipedia]

The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it.

—The Catcher in the Rye original book jacket copy, possibly partially written by Salinger

The only way not to break a friendship is not to drop it.

-Julie Holz

[exploding dog]

The imitative art is an inferior who marries an inferior, and has inferior offspring.

-Plato

The Particle Zoo: Subatomic Particle Plush Toys

"If you are in a hurry, I think the tachyon ones arrive before you order them."
-Cosmic Variance

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- A deadline should be set for the withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces from Iraq, and the pullout could be done by 2011, an Iraqi government spokesman said Tuesday.

Ali al-Dabbagh said any timetable would depend on "conditions and the circumstances that the country would be undergoing." But he said a pullout within "three, four or five" years was possible.

"It can be 2011 or 2012," al-Dabbagh said. "We don't have a specific date in mind, but we need to agree on the principle of setting a deadline."

[via The Daily Dish]

I think the essential question that neuroscience has to answer is why, when I interact with someone, I don't think it's my brain talking to their brain. I'm talking to Tom Wolfe, and you're listening to Mike Gazzaniga, right? We instantly convert to that: I give you an essence right off the bat.

-Seed

It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object. Philosophically considered, therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance and the other in a dusky and lurid glow.

-Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Losing a Language

A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back
yet the old still remember something that they could say

but they know now that such things are no longer believed
and the young have fewer words

many of the things the words were about
no longer exist

the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree
the verb for I

the children will not repeat
the phrases their parents speak

somebody has persuaded them
that it is better to say everything differently

so that they can be admired somewhere
farther and farther away

where nothing that is here is known
we have little to say to each other

we are wrong and dark
in the eyes of the new owners

the radio is incomprehensible
the day is glass

when there is a voice at the door it is foreign
everywhere instead of a name there is a lie

nobody has seen it happening
nobody remembers

this is what the words were made
to prophesy

here are the extinct feathers
here is the rain we saw


-W.S. Merwin

I have a faith in language. It's the ultimate achievement that we as a species have evolved so far. (I don't mean that I think we are the only species with a language.) It's the most flexible articulation of our experience and yet, finally, that experience is something that we cannot really articulate.... That's the other side, one of those things that makes poetry both exhilarating and painful all the time. It's conveying both the great possibility and the thing that we can't do.

-W.S. Merwin

Rowling's never met an adverb she did not like!

-Stephen King

Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

-1984

The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you…Because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it.
_____

Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas


-William Deresiewicz, The Disadvantages of and Elite Education

[via an ecstasy of particulars]

jobsintown.de adv

[via Inspire me, now!]

WALL-E Easter Eggs
[via Kottke]

Yet the consolations of poetry, as “Posthumous Keats” reminds us, last only as long as the poem lasts. The sublimity of the odes did not stop Keats from suffering in body and mind, or from cursing the fate that allowed him to taste the pleasures of life and art so intensely, only to snatch them away. “Keats, of all poets, cannot be divided between the artist and the man,” Plumly writes. But in a sense it is precisely the violent sundering of the artist and the man that is Keats’s tragedy. The poet saw autumn as fulfillment, the season that “set budding more, / And still more, later flowers for the bees, / Until they think warm days will never cease.” The man died in winter, in a foreign country, certain that his work had not kept the promises his imagination made. “Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream?” he asked in one of his last letters home. “There must be,” he decided. “We cannot be created for this sort of suffering.

[Adam Kirsch]
[via morethan95theses and 3quarksdaily]