The Antoninos

É possível viajar de avião com um passe de Metro.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Xanadon't

(numa rua em Bruxelas)

Quando acordei a meio da noite, aquela presença impôs-se-me com o medo de uma constância inescapável. Lembrei-me disto: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Ivan_Ilyich

Tardar futuro

And we came to the land of Cyclopes,
lawless savages who leave everything
up to the gods. These people neither plow nor plant
[...]
They have no assemblies or laws but live
in high moutain caves, ruling their own
children and wives and ignoring each other.

Odyssey, Homer

"Lowbrows need highbrows and honour them just as much as highbrows need lowbrows and honour them. This too is not a matter that requires much demonstration.

You have only to stroll along the Strand on a wet winter’s night and watch the crowds lining up to get into the movies. These lowbrows are waiting, after the day’s work, in the rain, sometimes for hours, to get into the cheap seats and sit in hot theatres in order to see what their lives look like. Since they are lowbrows, engaged magnificently and adventurously in riding full tilt from one end of life to the other in pursuit of a living, they cannot see themselves doing it. Yet nothing interests them more. Nothing matters to them more. It is one of the prime necessities of life to them — to be shown what life looks like.

And the highbrows, of course, are the only people who can show them. Since they are the only people who do not do things, they are the only people who can see things being done.

This is so — and so it is I am certain; nevertheless we are told — the air buzzes with it by night, the press booms with it by day, the very donkeys in the fields do nothing but bray it, the very curs in the streets do nothing but bark it — “Highbrows hate lowbrows! Lowbrows hate highbrows!” — when highbrows need lowbrows, when lowbrows need highbrows, when they cannot exist apart, when one is the complement and other side of the other! How has such a lie come into existence? Who has set this malicious gossip afloat?

There can be no doubt about that either. It is the doing of the middlebrows. They are the people, I confess, that I seldom regard with entire cordiality. They are the go–betweens; they are the busy–bodies who run from one to the other with their tittle tattle and make all the mischief — the middlebrows, I repeat. But what, you may ask, is a middlebrow? And that, to tell the truth, is no easy question to answer. They are neither one thing nor the other. They are not highbrows, whose brows are high; nor lowbrows, whose brows are low. Their brows are betwixt and between".

Virginia Wolf

O bébé já está a tocar à campainha, empurrou o umbigo da mãe para fora.

Uma Guiness é um pão líquido.
Uma Guiness com broa deve alimentar uma pessoa durante vários dias.

Queria saltar leve como a bola,
mas não me deixam:
esperei 39 minutos pelas notícias no jornal.

mas deixaram-nos a estádios de boas selecções:
esperamos por onze melhores que nós.

mas tiraram as vossas camisas para celebrar:
esperamos pela nossa substituição.

mas que nos treinassem para adultos:
esperamos pelos terços para que demos a prata.

mas já não apontamos arbítrios livres:
esperamos do jogo mais do que a vida e a morte.

mas marcaram cada homem ao fado do futebol:
esperamos em vão subir a libero.

mas não me deixam, nem uma vez:
esperamos no prolongamento para vos pôr fora-de-jogo.

mas porque respeitamos o adversário:
esperamos claramente a cada jogo que seja o final.

mas não me deixam, e não é justo:
esperei penalti nítido, mister.

If the people believe there is an imaginary river out there, you don't tell them there's no river there.
You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.

Nikita Khrushchev to Richard Nixon

Antikythera

Um instrumento absolutamente magnífico a que se adiciona uma história incrível de descoberta.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeJz2kvkEvM

"[I] longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words".

The real life of Sebastian Knight, Vladimir Nabokov

"I was born in a land where the idea of freedom, the notion of right, the habit of human kindness were things coldly despised and brutally owtlawded.
Now and then, in the course of history, a hypocrite government would paint the walls of the nation's prison a comelier shade of yellow and loudly proclaim the granting of rights familiar to happier states;
but either these rights were solely enjoyed by the jailers or else they contained some secret flaw which made them even more bitter than the decrees of frank tyranny...
Every man in the land was a slave, if he was not a bully; since the soul and everything pertaining to it were denied to man, the infliction of physical pain came to be considered as suficient to govern and guide human nature...
From time to time a thing called revolution would occur, turning the slaves into bullies and vice versa...
A dark country, a hellish place, gentlemen [...]"

The real life of Sebastian Knight, Vladimir Nabokov

I would gadly live with a third of my wealth
And have those men back who perished in Troy
Far from the bluegrass pastures of Argos.

Odyssey, Homer