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A Mind Like a Clock
The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo. The Fool’s thoughts regarding the Duke in Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett
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Strange and Terrible Things
She walked quickly through the darkness with the frank stride of someone who was at least certain that the forest, on this damp and windy night, contained strange and terrible things and she was it. Regarding Granny Weatherwax in Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett
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The Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or…
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Humanity in the proper perspective
What I love best about the land here? It puts humanity in the proper perspective. I love the sense that we’re a bunch of fleas arguing about who owns the dog. http://womanontheverge.typepad.com/fibertribe/2006/05/uoughtah_been_t.html
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Daughters
Irini performed the final part for all of us: stepped forward, knelt on the pavement, and, holding her skirt decent in the wind, bent and kissed Grandma’s forehead. It seemed only right–she was the one who knew Grandma best, these last days. It’s the role of daughters to move ever away from their mothers (and…
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An apt description of Greek/Roman Myths
Who is to say that prayers have any effect? On the other hand, who is to say they don’t? I picture the gods, diddling around on Olympus, wallowing in the nectar and ambrosia and the aroma of burning bones and fat, mischievous as a pack of ten-year-olds with a sick cat to play with and…
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How true…
No society can work unless its members feel responsibilities as well as rights. Layard, Richard. Happiness: Lessons from a new science. New York: Penguin Press, 2005. 92.
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This sounds familiar…
You did what you were told or you didn’t get paid, and if things went wrong it wasn’t your problem. It was the fault of whatever idiot has accepted this message for sending in the first place. No one cared about you, and everyone at headquarters was an idiot. It wasn’t your fault, no one…
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The Politics of Harry Potter
Rowling removes the technological complications of the contemporary world not out of nostalgia for cultural stability, but to reveal that, without the veneer of technology, the world wrestles with the same social and political questions in the 1990s as it did in the 1790s. Rowling returns to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French…
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On Children’s Literature
The great subversive works of children’s literature suggest that there are other views of human life besides those of the shopping mall and the corporation. They mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, unconventional, noncommercial view of the world in its simplest and purest form. They appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within all…