It was so 13 year old angst and the tears and the shaky voice just leapt up and out, and the grown ass man hiding inside my brain was like, "Holy shit, you are losing it crybaby."

My former boss, Jim Fawcette, used to say that if you asked a group of Porsche owners what they wanted they’d tell you things like “smoother ride, more trunk space, more leg room, etc.” He’d then say “well, they just designed a Volvo.”

back in the day (about a year ago) various techie friends started to declare themselves social media gurus because they decided to hang out on Twitter and Facebook all day

The next time Pinnochio tries pulling the wool over your eyes, clog his lie-hole with a handful of truth-fist.

Looking at the old man, he wonders, how many more of the tiny switches in his head would need to be flipped the wrong way round to move him from “eccentric and sometimes difficult” to “burden on society?” Not many, he figures.

How's a man supposed to work under these conditions? Ample free time, money in the bank, a supportive girlfriend. This is no way for a man of letters to live. Hardship. Suffering. These are the cornerstones of artistic achievement!

we are not resting on laurels or other vegetation

"You're not like born again or anything, are you?" she asked me earnestly.

I thought for a moment. "Well, not really. It's just beautiful, don't you think?"

"I think it's--I don't know, it scares me," she said gently, moving her knees slightly back and forth in the bathwater, the ripples sending the soapy water highup the sides of the thin plastic tub. She sat up, her breasts hanging drenched and heavy on her chest. "That kind of language," she continued softly, "always makes me think that maybe in another lifetime I was burned at the stake." She splashed her face with water. "That stuff gives me the creeps.

"...Talking about God just seems so pointless." There was a pause as she figured out what she meant. "It's like drilling a well right by a river, you know? The water's already there; you don't have to dig for it. Whatever is good or valuable about religion is always around us. You don't have to go to church for it. To be honest, churches give me the willies. Whenever I go inside one, I feel like the whole place is pleading to some outside force, you know? Like God or whatever is outside of us, withholding the goods. I don't really buy that idea--that someone up on a hill is doling out favors, but only if we ask in a really really nice way. I don't buy it, do you?"

...Amazing, I thought, how instantly I could feel I didn't know Christy at all, and how little I felt she knew me.

There is this place deep inside where I feel I am connected to everything, not just trees and grass and dogs but buildings and stairways, rocks and sidewalks. It's a deathly quiet place that I guess I've never shared with anyone and probably couldn't, a place that is cold sober when my body is stumbling drunk, another consciousness that sits still like an antenna in tune with some other part of the galaxy. It was this part of me that I wanted to bring to our wedding, a centered space from which I could send out my oaths. I imagined that this secret antenna was my connection to whatever eternity might be and was the part of me that Christy alone perceived and loved. But in the dark of the motel room, I realized that whether I was married or not, no one would ever know all of me; my truest self would always be estranged and alone. I was incapable of expressing my limited screwball faith and I knew that, even if I could, I'd box it in so dramatically it would be trivialized.

Plenty of smart people seem to make that leap and don't see the inherent conflict in straight people getting married wearing mixed fibers and then eating shrimp cocktail.

caladri

Would these people would claim that sex within (heterosexual) marriage is adultery if the marriage wasn't consecrated in their own church? If not, they've relinquished control over marriage anyway.

digitaltaska

This is a company so obsessed with UI and user experience that it hasn’t yet introduced something as basic as copy and paste on the iPhone 2.0 because, as is rumored, it hasn’t quite nailed a proper UI pattern.

So my theory is that regardless of the outcome of this election the US eventually drifts towards a multi-state solution wherein California secedes (or re-asserts it's independence, depending on your perspective) and joins up with the Pacific Rim economies. The New England states do basically the same thing with the EU and the upper Midwest moves it's capital to Chicago and builds out sort of a USA-lite type of nation around that. The rest of the country goes to hell and joins the 3rd world, except for Texas, which is the interesting part. Texas embraces the concept of “limited government” to the extreme, suspending all environmental and societal controls. It basically turns into hyper-China where lawlessness and disorder are rampant, but profits are insanely high. The rest of the country abandons oil, but Texas decides to ride it all the way into the ground and partners with Venezuela to this end. Lots of kids coming out of business school talk about “doing time” in Texas while they try to cash in on the situation, but most of them end up limping back to the East or West coast with lungs full of soot and all strung out on speed or adderall or modafinil or all three.

When a press release is laced with words like "handbag," "sophisticated," and "vibrates," it's clearly targeting the fairer sex.

This is as close as it gets to a miracle in twenty-first-century identity design.

Q. How come old photographs are always black and white? Didn't they have color film back then?
A. Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It's just that the world was black and white then. The world didn't turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.
Q. But then why are old paintings in color?! If the world was black and white, wouldn't artists have painted it that way?
A. Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane.
Q. But... But how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn't their paints have been shades of gray back then?
A. Of course, but they turned colors like everything else did in the '30s.
Q. So why didn't old black and white photos turn color too?
A. Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?

When you put a creative effort out there, it sure has a tendency to bounce back and do all kinds of weird things to your goals, your relationships, your ideas, your fears, your everything. McLeod Residence has probably been the single most difficult, scary, and interesting endeavor of my life so far.

It was discovered that a woman who paid a South Korean company to create five clones of her pitbull Booger was Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming who escaped British authorities in 1977 after abducting a Mormon missionary, securing him to a bed with mink-lined handcuffs, and raping him three times.

It’s amazing how many sociopaths are out there dashing around, playing entrepreneur, and yelling into a phone about drilling-down — with what appears to be no idea how to actually get something amazing to market.

They sing themselves little songs and tell themselves little stories over ciabatta sandwiches and Excel, rhapsodizing about their personal Candyland where everybody starts using their goofy product because… just…because. It’s crazy. And it’s everywhere.

...An idea is no more useful than a coupon for a bag of sugar; show me the finished cake, then we’ll talk.

The bottom line is that if you don’t have an amazing, passionate idea and the means to make it superb, you’re probably just a douchebag with an expensive phone. And a stack of NDAs.