 |
|
| FriendFeed is the easiest way to share online. Learn more » |
趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands) › Comments
"I have a problem with faggots." - http://rhysworks.blogspot.com/2009...
I cringe when i hear people use the word "gay" as an insult, too. And when you query them they insist no they're not being homophobic. WHAT??!
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
Con: Assume that they don't know what "homophobic" means (it does have four syllables!). After all, if they're busy insulting homosexuals, they're either pretty dumb or pretty ignorant...or just pretty hateful.
- Walt Crawford
Broadband - a right or a luxury? - http://pvlddirectorsblog.typepad.com/kathy...
I can't help but think that the Australian government's plan to implement a National Broadband Network is going to be undermined by their proposed filter.
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
Where I am now - http://glendalarke.blogspot.com/2009...
Ohhhh...
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
Making sense of Emissions Trading — it doesn’t - http://spotrick.wordpress.com/2009...
Good points.
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
That state dinner couple - http://kottke.org/09...
This is what I already do. I don't care enough about "celebrities" to read/watch/talk about what they're doing.
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
Ben, Port Macquarie - http://www.thisisoz.com.au/blog...
Cute :)
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
(title unknown) - http://happyantipodean.blogspot.com/2009...
Heh. What can one say to this, but w00t!!! :P
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
Yikes! Note to self: don't go to Adelaide in the next 4-5 months
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
How to Build a Gaming PC [PDF Guide] - http://www.makeuseof.com/tag...
Gaming PC builders who follow me, what do you reckon of this? :)
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
The Internet, Triviality, and Kierkegaard: Hubert Dreyfus’ On the Internet - http://subjectobject.net/2009...
A bit to ponder...
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
Staedtler Australia ceases pencil production - http://www.penciltalk.org/2009...
Now how would I find out information like this, if not for the WWW and RSS?? I wonder what pencils ARE made in AU?
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
I like it!
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
A visit to Daunt Books - http://kimbofo.typepad.com/reading...
Another reason to go back to London...
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
Farmville = 56 million - http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_n...
Have resisted playing Farmville because I didn't want to spend even more time on Facebook!
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
On Adirondack trails - http://www.vianegativa.us/2009...
Beautiful!
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
Beautiful!
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
Twitter & blogs as ways of knowing - http://scienceblogs.com/confess...
Definitely in the middle.
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
Definitely in the middle.
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
bookporn #43: heffers, cambridge - http://idlethink.wordpress.com/2009...
M: remember this place?? Mmmmm....
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
M: remember this place?? Mmmmm....
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
Microsoft Courier - http://bookbook.com.au/2009...
"ebooks are approaching their iPod moment" - i for one can't wait!
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
mmm need to get more mooncake supplies. i want a double yolk lol
- rachael
Ya I don't mind double yolk either, must have yolk!
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
from email
‘ve got your number - http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2009...
Felissimo 500 Colour pencil set launches worldwide! - http://www.penciltalk.org/2009...
Can't imagine myself "subscribing" to buy pencils, somehow...
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
What's your favorite opening line of a book?
James Stanbridge, Cheryl Jones, αnnα vαȵ scoyoç and 42 other people liked this
"We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold."
- laura x
That would have been mine too.
- Jàson Puçkett
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
- laura x
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun."
- D0r0th34
"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." I have so many!
- laura x
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." [One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez ]
- Pierre Lindenbaum
"On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition, and Astrology."
- Catherine Pellegrino
"The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel."
- s t e v e
"In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit" is pretty good.
- s t e v e
Catherine's +1
- D0r0th34
Does it have to be a single sentence? Or can we define a "line" as more than one sentence?
- Katy S
Yes, I love Catherine's. And Pierre's. And Katy, I think you can define it however you like.
- laura x
Ooh, yeah, if it's multiple sentences, I like the openings to Notes from the Underground, Invisible Man, and Trainspotting. :)
- Rachel Walden
Yeah, I was tempted to quote the whole opening paragraph, up to the part where it starts going on about the governess's wound.
- Catherine Pellegrino
Children's Book (Margaret Mahy's The Haunting): "When, suddenly, on an ordinary Wednesday, it seemed to Barney that the world tilted and ran downhill in all directions, he knew he was about to be haunted again."
- Katy S
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
- Abigail
YA Book (Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents): "But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats."
- Katy S
Other (Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan): "Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping arch, each one half way over its neighbour until,...
more...
- Katy S
Oh! Oh! "So there I was, tied to an altar made from outdated encyclopedias, about to get sacrificed to the dark powers by a cult of evil Librarians."
- Rachel Walden
"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times..."
- Alex Scoble
"The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed."
- Yolanda
DJF: Yep, the Sword in the Stone.
- Catherine Pellegrino
"Dildo, that's what my old man called me. Dildo Dunphy."
- Oracio
Yolanda! YES!
- ha3rvey (Ho)^3
from fftogo
A screaming comes across the sky.
- Wayne Loftus
"The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category. He's got esprit up to here. Right now he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachno-fiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a...
more...
- Jàson Puçkett
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his...
more...
- Mistletoe Glen
In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game...
more...
- Wayne Loftus
When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.
- s t e v e
+1 Aden and Steve.
- Jàson Puçkett
I'm so enjoying the vision of everyone running around literally in the stacks or figuratively in Google Books. . .
- laura x
+1 Million Laura X. Mine: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." (Edit: +1 Million to Yolanda too!)
- Haggis (Sean Loyless)
"I never thought it would happen to me."
- MVB (Grinch of FF)
He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.
- Wayne Loftus
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.
- Mistletoe Glen
AARDVARK (70 Deram Nova SDN 17) - AARDVARK (LP)......................£130 . (It's the first entry in the Record Collector's Price Guide)
- Iain Baker
"Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantlepiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirtcuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture marks. Finally, he thrust...
more...
- Katy S
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Neuromancer
- Alex Scrivener
Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York; / And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house / In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
- s t e v e
Chandler didn't write opening lines, he wrote opening paragraphs. But that's because his sentences are never long.
- DJF
DJF, is that from a "Friends" novelization? ;)
- s t e v e
"Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice's Lenten fast in the desert."
- DJF
DJF - I LOVE that novel. Now I'm going to have to dig it out of my books and re-read it.
- Katy S
Nonfiction (Aristotle's On Rhetoric): "Rhetoric is the counterpart to Dialectic."
- Katy S
I CELEBRATE myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.
- Steve C
"124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children."
- Derrick
Glen Campbell, is that Tristram Shandy? It feels like it.
- DJF
@laura x, mine's the same as yours. :)
- Ayşe E.
Derrick - Beloved?
- Yolanda
Also, *fistbump* to Harvey, Sean, and RAP.
- Yolanda
Steven Lawson: :P
- DJF
The first one is Tristram Shandy; the second is Winnie The Pooh.
- Mistletoe Glen
"Data communication has become a fundamental part of computing."
- Todd Hoff
+1 to Jason. Beat me to it.
- Jason Wyttenbach
"The gutters of Manhattan teemed with the brackish slurry indicative of a significant though not incapacitating snowstorm three days prior, making it seem that God had tripped over Hoboken and spilled his smog-flavored slurpie all over the damn place."
- MikeAmundsen
"I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor...
more...
- Katy S
"The world is everything that is the case." I have never quite grasped even that one line, but have always loved it.
- s t e v e
Yolanda, yeah Beloved. Wrote my master's thesis on it. That book changed my life.
- Derrick
"I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies."
- Kirsten
Seconding Neuromancer. Gives me shivers every time I read it.
- Jason Griffey
from twhirl
The "great opening lines" thread is on io9, but the discussion about how the "dead channel" image has changed since Gibson wrote it is in the comments on BoingBoing: http://www.boingboing.net/2008...
- DJF
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
- pea
"It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed." - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
- Ryan Massie
"The primroses were over." (Watership Down; and mostly because it matches the last line.)
- Deborah Fitchett
By the ghost of Alfred Appel, how could I forget "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."
- s t e v e
I thought I'd see what the first line was to Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," one of my favorite novels. It is: "When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's _The Thieving Magpie_, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta." Now that may not be a great first line, but it is a *perfect* Murkami sentence.
- s t e v e
"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon." James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss. (This one's actually rather famously a best first line among crime fic fans. Many can recite it by heart, even after many drinks.)
- barbara fister
"On morning of the day he disappeared, David Elliot awoke, as he did every weekday, at precisely 5:45 A.M."
- Steven Perez
"The deliverator doesn't take shit off of no one."
- Chrimmus Tad
"He was born with a gift of laughter, and a sense that the world was mad."
- Shevonne
'She was a black-eyed murderer.'
- Akiva Moskovitz
"She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. It is 1941. Another war has begun." + Pierre's too !!
- 'Like' robot (frɐnc)
"It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future..." Gene Wolfe - The Book of the New Sun, and "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now." Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow.
- Christopher A Carr
"Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith."
- Bill Hooker
"It was the day my grandmother exploded." - Iain Banks, The Crow Road
- Cameron Neylon
from twhirl
“One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to...
more...
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
"If you're going to read this, don't bother" - Choke, Chuck Palahniuk
- Louis Simoneau
and @Shevonne, gotta love Sabatini. Captain Blood may have been the most fun I've ever had reading a novel.
- Louis Simoneau
"The story so far:" - Restaurant at the End of the Universe
- teh Dork Knight aka Kenny
"In a hole there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."
- Peter Bromberg
"Tyler gets a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun into my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die." - Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk; and "It began as a mistake." - Post Office by Charles Bukowski (the king of one-liners)
- Ahsan Ali aka. Slick
Do poems count? "April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain."
- Victor Ganata
"in the beginning,"
- chaz2b
"to wound the autumnal city." — Samuel Delany, Dhalgren. I read this book right after the 9/11 attacks, so that line has etched itself deep into my brain.
- Victor Ganata
@Louis Yes! Sabitini is amazing. It's funny why I read "Scaramouche." It's cause of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," and I'm glad that I did. At the time it came out, it was competing with Dumas' "Counte of Monte Cristo."
- Shevonne
"I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents..."
- Josh Haley
from iPhone
chapter one
- (jeff)isageek
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. (S. Beckett - Murphy)
- diego morelli
"Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, where the right way was lost."
- Jandy, ConcertMaven of FF
"It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out!" - with a respectful nod towards Snoopy
- Morgan Haley
"We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck." from Feed by M. T. Anderson
- Katy S
"Congratulations on your decision to join the forces of darkness..."
- Amber, Random Time Lord
Agree with Abigail. LOVE the opening line of Pride and Prejudice.
- Lis Miller
Just to be difficult... my favorite closing line of any book... "Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone...
more...
- Jason
Jason, as I recall that's the last line of the preface. Of course, I did exactly what he says not to do, but I still love living in the West.
- laura x
"On a Thursday night in early autumn she nearly committed adultery, was within minutes of consummating it, or within touches, kisses; it was difficult to measure by time or by her mouth and tongue and hands, or by his." -Timing of Sin by Andre Dubus
- Meredith
"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board."
- αnnα vαȵ scoyoç
laura x - yes! i didn't have a copy here... i just googled the text.. I couldn't remember if it was the preface or the ending of the whole book.
- Jason
"When shall we three meet again? In Thunder , Lightning or in Rain?" "When the Hurlyburly's done." "When the battles Lost and Won." "That will be ere the Set of Sun."
- Marg Uerite
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...
- Nathan Jelf-Mannion
"Holy $#|+!"
- awd
'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.'
- Matt Groshong
八卦一下，各位现在手边放着的是啥饮料？这时候，又在忙啥事情呢？
我正喝着白茶，边算着数。
- Aang
白开水，刚回完一封给老大的邮件，茫然中...
- K.D.
白开水, 看FF, Twitter
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
酸奶，刚看完这个http://www.tianya.cn/publicf...
- Paul
哈，楼上有新人~~~
- K.D.
芸窗不会是在深圳吧？
- Aang
这个时间，MM出没的黄金时间呢lol 楼上都是.....
- K.D.
白开水，做icon...
- 拓 | wavesand
水
- Neo Lee
wordpress不是都自动安装的么，我以为这东西不用装 :(/
- xiawinter
以后是不是该改称佛陀为“校长”了？？“西天教育”学校校长！
- K.D.
累了，去弄杯咖啡
- xiawinter
奶茶，写信中……
- 微笑の迪妮莎
屈臣氏桶装水（冰），多任务并行处理中
- Shaun Wang
冻的冰水, 看美剧......鼠标给拿跑了, 郁闷死了
- Rat2
白开水，刚做液相色谱进了一针，回来看看FF。
- viv
可乐，薯片
- kelvin
凉茶，葡萄，刚打完游戏……
- dimjoker
刚到家 看到楼上强插 水
- sG
Why I hate tones - http://www.wakinggiants.net/blog...
NB: I don't hate tones :)
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
Return to Gilead - http://normblog.typepad.com/normblo...
Ok, i have to read this. Loved Gilead.
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
Hand Sanitizer - http://www.bookn3rd.com/?p=580
¡Ay caramba!
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
Do you buy a newspaper every day or have a daily subscription? If so, which one?
Alex Scoble and John Dupuis liked this
The New York Times.
- Stephen Francoeur
Two per day: Globe and Mail and Toronto Star.
- John Dupuis
John, you're hardcore. How long is your commute?
- DJF
daily subscription
- Mary Carmen
Nope. Haven't bought a newspaper daily, ever. We sometimes get the weekend papers - they get used for um pets' toilet.
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
I haven't bought a newspaper in ages. I found that when I did subscribe to one it just went to the recycle bin after it wasn't read for weeks.
- Alex Scoble
All the same info is available on the web.
- Alex Scoble
They have the USA Today and NY Times on campus free for students, faculty, and staff. I pick up the Times.
- Derrick
Going by the way they self-identify, I subscribe to the weekly newspaper The Economist.
- DJF
When they say, "Nationwide Home Delivery!" for the NYT, they do not really mean it. You cannot even buy it in Cody on the day it comes out. We get a whole slew of local papers at the library, though some of them come a day late. When I was at Iowa, I used to raid the pile of Wall St. Journals that got left for the business students in the sorority near my house. They did not seem to miss them.
- laura x
Newspapers in Montreal are atrocious. (and I'm 3rd generation newspaperman in this town). I do it all online, and as much as possible from independent news sources like Guerilla News Network.
- jambina
recently canceled subs to weekend papers as they were going unread.
- suelibrarian
No. News via the web or not at all for me.
- Neil Saunders
Just canceled sub to the LA Times at the beginning of the month because I couldn't afford it. First time in over 25 yrs. I am either not getting a paper delivered or buying one. It's weird and I'm still not used to it.
- Admiral Anika
My wife does - I don't read it myself. - Bakersfield Californian
- Brent - Loving Life
NY Times (daily) subscriber, also The Economist, if that counts
- carolh
Daily subscription to the South Bend Tribune. I'm not saying we READ it, mind you, as it's largely dreck, but it seems important to pretend to be up on local events. We also get the Sunday NYT, of which we read a slightly larger percentage.
- Catherine Pellegrino
DJF, my commute is actually pretty brutal (1hr+) but I tend to read books. Hence my lust for a Kindle. As for the newspapers, I'm still prefer them for breakfast reading and I usually get through a significant part of the Globe in the morning. The Star I end up reading at lunch at work (free copies on campus) whereas the home copy is mostly read by my wife. Believe it or not, both my teenaged sons read the paper in the morning and often at dinner too. Yes, we're a hardcore, old school family.
- John Dupuis
Daily sub: San Francisco Chronicle. Considering the local paper (Tri-Valley Herald)--but it's really a local edition of another county's paper, and fairly pathetic. (There's a free weekly, which isn't bad; of course we read that.)
- Walt Crawford
Nope, internet only. Have been thinking about taking a Sunday paper, but the local ones are abysmal.
- Jaclyn
I read the local paper online every morning (for which I would probably pay if the papers could figure out a reasonable fee). Formerly the Springfield (MA) Republican; currently the Raleigh News & Observer. :-) I always liked news, but never (since I was a child) liked the print. Too cumbersome, and don't like newsprint on my paws.
- Stephanie_Happy2010!
Chris: I trust WaPo's coverage isn't as rabidly rightwing as their cartoonists seem to be (at least the ones the Chron reprints). Stephanie: Good newspapers, using soy ink on recycled paper, got rid of the newsprint-on-hands issue a long time ago. (The Chron may be wrinkled at times, but it doesn't shed ink.)
- Walt Crawford
The Economist is the only newspaper I subscribe to. It is not only how they describe themselves, but also a good description of their content. We should be format neutral in making these judjements nowadays. For daily news I use customized Google News and Google alerts. There are only certain things I need to follow daily, for everything else I can wait until the weekend.
- Michael Habib
anyone know any library managers who have PLNs and use all the tools we know and love?
got mine as far as setting up a twitter account but that was it."No time"
- suelibrarian
i'd like to learn from other library managers... but i can't think of (m)any who have PLNs
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
Sriracha Caramels - http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog...
Bizarre. Not sure if I'm game to try this recipe...
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
Fuyang; Into the Backwoods - http://benross.net/wordpre...
This makes me want to go to China...
- 趙美鈴 (Con Wiebrands)
Other ways to read this feed:
