Nullifidian Quotes

A fantastic (and huge) list of atheist and agnostic quotes from such diverse sources as St Augustine and Obi-Wan Kenobi. I'm only about halfway through it, but my favourite so far for beautiful turn of phrase is the following:

'I can't believe in the God of my Fathers. If there is one Mind which understands all things, it will comprehend me in my unbelief. I don't
know whose hand hung Hesperus in the sky, and fixed the Dog Star, and scattered the shining dust of Heaven, and fired the sun, and froze
the darkness between the lonely worlds that spin in space.'

- Gerald Kersh (1911-1968), British author, journalist

Selective Recall

George Lucas is surprised that the AFI is granting him a lifetime achievement award for such a small filmography. Though he himself conveniently made the list even shorter:

'If you think about getting their award for a body of work but you think of `Star Wars' as one movie, then I've only done three movies, and the only achievement is I actually finished `Star Wars,'' Lucas said.

Three, hmm.

Star Wars (the series as one)
THX1138
American Graffiti...

Sounds about right to me!

(I sat through the Holiday Special TWICE. Can we expect an upcoming "nomination" from The Hague for Crimes Against Humanity?)

Not Dead Yet

I have a new blog for my reading list; this one comes with no archives and (at the mo') only two entries, but I'm already loving it, for entries like this:

Nic called while stuck in race traffic to say, 'Hey, if you ever go over to the dark side and become a Sith; and I have to fight you with a light saber over hot lava; and I cut off your leg; and you start to burn, I promise to go ahead and kill you all the way instead of watching you burn and then walking away.'

That is why she is my best friend.

Hear, Hear (or Read, Read, in this case)

eye Magazine presents a critique of and a counterpoint to a conservative periodical's "most harmful books" list:

...the harmful nature of many books on Human Events' shit list -- selected by a 'panel of 15 conservative scholars' -- can't really be quantified in the loss of human life or destruction of property; rather, the selected books have been deemed most harmful because they dared to question the individual's God-given right to accumulate maximum wealth despite the social consequences and to go home and be cared for by a dutifully subservient wife. (However, none of the books is so harmful as to escape the grasp of capitalism; the list comes complete with purchase links to Amazon.com.)

Only one of the books on the list -- Adolph Hitler's Mein Kampf -- has a direct body count attached to it, but even with millions left dead in its wake, the academics who devised the list still deemed it only the second most harmful book of the past 200 years. It was beaten out by Marx and Engels' The Communist Manifesto, which suggests that, given the choice, conservatives would prefer to face the gas chamber than pay workers a fair wage.

Publicity, uh, Schmublicity

Cute quote from the Times' gossip column:

Doug Liman, the director of 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith,' at the Garden of Ono last week, talking about the publicity-abetting gossip frenzy surrounding the movie's stars, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie:

'We could have promoted this movie without that. If this were 'Swingers,' I probably would have been grateful if Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau had a gay affair that people were speculating about, but a movie that has our advertising budget, we didn't need Us Weekly to promote us.'

Giving Your Right Arm For Freedom

A nice (if grisly) counterpart to those earlier NYTimes story is the capper to this one:

Body Parts From Jet Hit a Long Island Home

A man's leg and part of his spine came crashing onto the roof of a woman's home in Nassau County near Kennedy International Airport yesterday morning, and a short while later the man himself was found dead in the wheel well of a South African Airways jetliner that had just landed.

The woman's initial reaction was probably a lot calmer than mine would have been:

"I thought it was a really sick joke," said Ms. Hearne, a special education teacher. But when she realized that human remains were in her yard, she called the police. The impact made a hole the size of a watermelon in her garage roof, she said, but no one was hurt.

But what really impressed me was her reaction. To be honest, I expected to hear moaning about the damage to her house, or (totally understandable) squeamishness about what she found, but instead she said,

"I'm very grateful to be from this country," she said, "and to have never experienced the desire to flee my homeland."

Wow.

Another Banner Day for the Bush Administration

A New York Times editorial states:

According to a poll, most Americans believe that the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent. As Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist in charge of the United Nations' Millennium Project, put it so well, the notion that there is a flood of American aid going to Africa 'is one of our great national myths.'

The United States currently gives just 0.16 percent of its national income to help poor countries, despite signing a United Nations declaration three years ago in which rich countries agreed to increase their aid to 0.7 percent by 2015. Since then, Britain, France and Germany have all announced plans for how to get to 0.7 percent; America has not. The piddling amount Mr. Bush announced yesterday is not even 0.007 percent.

What is 0.7 percent of the American economy? About $80 billion. That is about the amount the Senate just approved for additional military spending, mostly in Iraq. It's not remotely close to the $140 billion corporate tax cut last year.

Having read Bill Maher's kickass When You Ride Alone, You Ride With Bin Laden, these figures weren't news to me, but that doesn't make them less head-shakingly sad.

Yet more Bush-inspired head-shaking (I'm getting dizzy here!) at the revelation that:

A Bush Aide Softened Greenhouse Gas Links to Global Warming

A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

Finally, we switch from head-shaking to nail-biting: After Lowering Goal, Army Falls Short on May Recruits

Even after reducing its recruiting target for May, the Army missed it by about 25 percent, Army officials said on Tuesday. The shortfall would have been even bigger had the Army stuck to its original goal for the month.

On Friday, the Army is expected to announce that it met only 75 percent of its recruiting goal for May, the fourth consecutive monthly shortfall in the number of new recruits sent to basic training. Just over 5,000 new recruits entered boot camp in May.

But the news could have appeared worse. Early last month, the Army, with no public notice, lowered its long-stated May goal to 6,700 recruits from 8,050. Compared with the original target, the Army achieved only 62.6 percent of its goal for the month.

*coughcoughDRAFTcough* Ahem. Excuse me!

Seriously, though, when (not if) the Armed Forces do restart their draft, screw the old lottery system. I say crack open those electronic voting boxes and look up DMV records - Bush voters and SUV drivers? Form an orderly line in front of the draft board office.