Susan Boyle: Wild Horses

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy made a pretty bad movie, but I’ll give credit where credit is due: the opening sequence is quirky and I love it!

Rachel Adedeji – “Stop Crying Your Heart Out”

This is a great dramatic version of a song whose original (by Oasis) is rather boring.

Simon’s Cat “TV Dinner”

I absolutely adore cats. Watch this video to see why.

And for a dubious comparison, check out the brains of this puppy:

Pride: A Quote to Ponder

Tonight I had a fabulous conversation with an extremely charming person, and in passing he mentioned that he considered Pride to be a vice. I absolutely disagree (I think pride is one of the highest virtues one can have). However, I didn’t have much time to fully explain my disagreement, so I used Aristotle’s idea of the Golden Mean instead.

The Golden Mean, on a very basic level, is the idea that there’s a desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and one of deficiency. In the case of Pride, the excess would be hubris or narcissism or conceit, while the deficiency would be meek or self-effacing or perhaps self-hate. There is a middle ground where one can and should feel proud of their achievements, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that whatsoever.

Ayn Rand fully saw other ramifications for the virtue of pride. Here is a quote from The Virtue of Selfishness:

The virtue of Pride can best be described by the term: “moral ambitiousness.” It means that one must earn the right to hold oneself as one’s own highest value by achieving one’s own moral perfection—which one achieves by never accepting any code of irrational virtues impossible to practice and by never failing to practice the virtues one knows to be rational—by never accepting an unearned guilt and never earning any, or, if one has earned it, never leaving it uncorrected—by never resigning oneself passively to any flaws in one’s character—by never placing any concern, wish, fear or mood of the moment above the reality of one’s own self-esteem.

Randy Nyman’s “Here to Here”

Someone recommended that I listen to Randy Nyman’s soundtrack to “The Piano” and I liked a lot of the aspects to it. This song in particular stuck out because of it’s contagious rhythm. But I, who isn’t really a big saxophone fan, found the choice of instrument way too harsh. I think the song could be really great if played by some sort of string instrument… like a fiddle. But as I said, what stuck out was the rhythm.

Mika’s “We Are Golden”

“We Are Golden” is the first amazing track from Mika’s new album The Boy Who Knew Too Much. It’s pretty representative of the entire albums tone and style: flamboyant, quirky, and irresistibly happy. For those who fell in love with Life in Cartoon Motion, this second album will not disappoint.

Lang Lang Plays Liszt’s Liebestraum No. 3

A Quote to Ponder: John Steinbeck

I’m rereading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden for a possible research paper on Taoist influences in Steinbeck’s writing.

…we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water?

Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fenced, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back. Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free? Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.

Quote to Ponder – Vladimir Nabokov

I was wandering around in Barnes and Nobles today, not looking for anything in particular, just enjoying browsing the book shelves. I found a very pretty Everyman book: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I read it a couple of years ago and was horrified and sickened. The strange thing about the novel is that it’s beautifully written, however the subject matter is hard to deal with. This book is not one that I recommend to friends, just so I can avoid an awkward conversation after they’ve read it. Anyways, I cracked the front page just to read the opening lines (since it’s pretty memorable) and here it is:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

My favorite line is the Lo-lee-ta line. Why? Look at what Nabokov is describing and notice how you form the words in your mouth. “the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” In this description, almost every word he uses mimics what he is describing. I wanted to see if there was a cool word to describe the phenomenon. It seems related to reduplication, ideophone, and onomatapeia but they are more concerned with a particular word rather than something stretching across an entire sentence. Nevertheless, it’s a pretty neat trick.