somethingchanged:

inothernews:nevver:  Fish Stuck in Fence / Ike’s Aftermath

from "American Gods", by Neil Gaiman

“I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not.  I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed.  Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkly lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.  I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass.  I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in the drive-in movie theaters from state to state.  I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative.  I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.  I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds.  I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.  I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars.  I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.  I believe in the personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do.  I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive.  I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.  I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly.  I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too.  I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies.  I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.  I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
Quote:

He was one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years,” Ulin said. “He is one of the main writers who brought ambition, a sense of play, a joy in storytelling and an exuberant experimentalism of form back to the novel in the late ’80s and early 1990s. And he really restored the notion of the novel as a kind of canvas on which a writer can do anything.End quote.

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This happens every election cycle. Every four years. This is what we do. We’ve got an energy crisis. We have an education system that is not working for too many of our children and making us less competitive. We have an economy that is creating hardship for families all across America. We’ve got two wars going on — veterans coming home not being cared for — and this is what they want to talk about. This is what they want to spend two of the last 55 days talking about. You know who ends up losing at the end of the day? It’s not the Democratic candidate. It’s not the Republican candidate. It’s you, the American people, because then we go another year or another four years or another eight years without addressing the issues that matter to you. Enough. I don’t care what they say about me, but I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage and swift-boat politics. Enough is enough.End quote.

Barack Obama (via azspot) (via pile)
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david:
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Quote:

Pro-life Conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don’t want to know about you, they don’t want to hear about you, no nothing. No neonatal care, no daycare, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you’re pre-born, you’re fine. If you’re pre-school, you’re fucked.End quote.

(via jstn)
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syntheticpubes:(via jacobd)
This should be required reading for every incoming liberal arts major in every single class every single day.  This problem isn’t exclusive to the fine arts.  (see: creative writing, academia, et. al.)

somethingchanged:

syntheticpubes:(via jacobd)

This should be required reading for every incoming liberal arts major in every single class every single day.  This problem isn’t exclusive to the fine arts.  (see: creative writing, academia, et. al.)

Grant Morrison: Yeah! Because it’s the obvious, isn’t it? Again, this isn’t a mystical concept, because I’m not a mystical person sometimes. I got into magic to see if it was real. If someone says, “Ok, a demon will appear if you do this spell,” I just say, “Bullshit.” So, I did this spell, and then the demon appeared. So I had to revise my vision of what the world was and how it worked. Again, that’s another element of magic for me, trying to figure out, why do these things happen—what are we doing to our nervous systems to make us believe a demon has entered the room? It became to me about the actual “nuts and bolts” of it, not the fantastic thing or the mystic thing or the names of angels. I became interested in what’s actually going on.
Publisher's Weekly: But you tried it out, and a demon did appear?
Grant Morrison: Yeah!
Publisher's Weekly: Wow.
Grant Morrison: And it wasn’t anything like I expected a demon to be. It was a gravitational point that pulled everything in the room toward it. It really, actually, made you feel like you were sick. It wasn’t really like anything I believed a demon might be, but it had an actual effect.
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