Silence equals nonexistence. If I don’t raise my voice, it’s like I never existed. — Margaret Cho
The Elements of Style Rap
Ernest Hemingway on Symbolism
There isn’t any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
There Is No Digital Divide
We all know poor people are on the wrong side of an uncrossable technological chasm known as the "digital divide." Their lack of iPads and data plans and broadband is just one more way they’re doomed to stay poor right up until they become the shock troops of the zombie apocalypse, am I right?
Overheard
When Did We Forget Our Dreams?
xkcd: “The solution doesn’t involve watering down my every little idea and creative impulse for the sake of someday easing my fit into a mold. It doesn’t involve tempering my life to better fit someone’s expectations. It doesn’t involve constantly holding back for fear of shaking things up. . . .”
Click through to read the whole thing . . .
It’s Not Nice to Make Fun of People’s Clothes
I picked up a red striped T-shirt on sale at Old Navy. My son saw it and it seemed to me that he chuckled a little bit.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“Where’s Waldo?” he said.
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
“Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?”
Jules had drifted over from across the room. “I’ve never heard that,” he said. “‘Time is a goon’?”
“Would you disagree?” Bosco said, a little challengingly.
There was a pause. “No,” Jules said.
It’s not easy in a book to communicate the passage of time . . . you can write a book that takes place over a long period of time, but what I mean is to communicate the passage of time so the reader feels it rushing by, which Jennifer Egan has done.
Highly recommended!
Memorial Day
Hi everybody! It’s me, Lightning!
It’s Memorial Day and I just wanted to say don’t forget dogs on Memorial Day because dogs also serve in the armed forces and sometimes they get killed but they also stop a lot of people from getting killed.
— Lightning 
Aside
thinkpurpose: 3 questions about purpose for Monday mornings
Illusions of Patterns and Patterns of Illusion
In 1978, [Leonard] Koppett revealed a system that he claimed could determine, by the end of January every year, whether the stock market would go up or down in that calendar year. [Koppett’s system] worked for eleven straight years, from 1979 through 1989, got it wrong in 1990, and was correct again every year until 1998. But although Koppett’s predictions were correct for a streak of eighteen out of nineteen years, I feel confident in asserting that his streak involved no skill whatsoever. Why? Because Leonard Koppett was a columnist for Sporting News, and his system was based on the results of the Super Bowl, the championship game of professional football. Whenever the team from the (original) National Football League won, the stock market, he predicted, would rise. Whenever the team from the (original) American Football League won, he predicted the market would go down. Given that information, few people would argue that Koppett was anything but lucky. Yet had he had different credentials — and not revealed his method — he could have been hailed as the most clever analyst since Charles H. Dow.
Aside
Joel Goode: 5 Tips To Get Unstuck When You Hit a Plateau
Nicholas Sparks
I got a job description via email from a recruiter named Nicholas Sparks.
Like most jobs I get from recruiters, 1) it was unrelated to my actual experience; and 2) it was nowhere near where I live.
I wrote back anyway to say, “I’ve never enjoyed you as a novelist and I’m glad to see you’ve gone into another line of work.”
From Science Fiction to Everyday Life in Just a Few Years
This is the world we live in now. It’s one where computers improve so quickly that their capabilities pass from the realm of science fiction into the everyday world not over the course of a human lifetime, or even within the span of a professional’s career, but instead in just a few years.
Case Study: One Programmer is Better Than 80
When I was working at the Boeing Company in the mid-1980s, one project with about 80 programmers was at risk of missing a critical deadline. The project was critical to Boeing, and so they moved most of the 80 people off that project and brought in one guy who finished all the coding and delivered the software on time. I didn’t work on that project, and I didn’t know the guy, but I heard the story from someone I trusted, and it struck me as credible.
Aside
I am a holder of nonconformist ideas. You are a crackpot.
Jim Parsons
‘Big Bang Theory’s’ Jim Parsons comes out as gay — latimes.com
Never heard of him, never seen the show, but do you really expect me to believe that the guy in this photo is gay?
Derrick Williams
My boy saw Derrick Williams out and about the other night . . . Williams is from La Mirada (like me!), so it wouldn’t be unusual to spot him in the SoCal area.
“You’re Derrick Williams, right?” the boy said.
“No, that’s not me,” Williams replied.
Williams was cleverly disguised in an Arizona basketball hoodie and Minnesota Timberwolves sweatpants. Oh, and he’s 6-foot-8.
Masked Intruder
Cat and Dog
