Comedian Robin Ince, on po-faced academic study of low culture: There is something far more joyous in scrutinising low-brow culture than in examining the high-brow. The incongruous mix of writing about post-Freudian analysis within the context of oedipal mother worship when it concerns Jess Franco’s Bare-Breasted Countess is so much more entertaining than reading another academic analysing TS Eliot’s The Waste Land... Necronomicon magazine included Deep Throat: Pornography as Primitive Pleasure and Marco Ferreri: Sadean Cinema of Excess. I’d just watch the films if I was you, or read a book about string theory. (From The Bad Book Club.)
Frankly, there are things in Narnia which are nothing to do with religion. They are to do with being out of date. As with Tolkien, there are ideas there which haven't yet faded sufficiently into the past to become valuable antiques. (Guy Kewney)
I never ever ever ever ever want to live in a boarding house -- and by logical extension in one of those stupid hippie commune houses where everyone pools their money from their jobs at the incense store and grows vegetables using refortified, sustainable, organic faeces and then gets into a fist fight about who gets to eat the last Pop Tart because there's no individual property (and because modern 'hippies' are really, really dumb). (Goodreads review)
Hippies in suits are the worst kind of hippies. (@grodaeu)
It is a sort of acknowledgment of God, just in case there happens to be one. (Stanley Green, the "protein man" of Oxford Street, of his nightly prayer.)
There should be nothing easy about scepticism. It’s not about pointing and laughing at people who believe crystals are magic. It’s about challenging ideas that may be deeply embedded in our society and causing real harm to real lives. (@lecanardnoir)
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States... nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge". (Isaac Asimov)
Telling me you’ve done a course doesn’t cut it in the grown-up world. (Simon Myerson KC)
Most family memories do eventually end up for sale in secondhand stores, or moldering in garages, or eventually thrown away. (Danny Lavery, slate.com)
We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself. (@ProfBrianCox)
In America, amateur costuming is a rite of passage. (William Lee Adams)
A moral injunction can't simultaneously be compulsory and optional. (Philosopher Ben Colburn paraphrasing Tolkein.)
Somehow, strange old shoe-repairers and run-down hardware shops that seem to have almost no customers survive when others go down. I think it likely they are run by visitors from another dimension... (Fin Fahey about the shop on Newington Green)
More here, and links to the rest.
