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copyright 2009 Joel Rossol.  All rights reserved.

Castle Cove along the great ocean road.  Sorry it’s not a PERFECT stitch… I didn’t have the luxury of a tripod on this trip.

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There isn’t alot to say about Jarman’s “Book of Poisonous Quotes”… other than it is a great resource to guarantee you have a witty remark for almost any occasion.  Fortunately, I’ve been keeping track of my favorites and wanted to share them all with you:

On Critics:

• I love criticism just so long as it’s unqualified praise. – Noel Coward
• Any fool can criticize, and many of them do. – C. Garbett
• Critics are probably more prone to cliches than fiction writers who pluck things out of the air. – Penelope Gilliatt
• Criticism is prejudice made plausible – H.L. Mencken

On the Creative Arts / Fashion:

• Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them. – Bill Vaughan
• On Miniskirts – Never in the history of fashion has so little material been raised so high to reveal so much that needs to be covered so badly.  – Sir Cecil Beaton
• A Dress has no purpose unless it makes a man want to take it off. – Francoise Sagan
• If you have to talk about fashion, then you are not in it – Michaele Vollbracht.
• There will be little change in men’s pockets this year. – Wall Street Journal (1948)

On Modern Art:

• Modern art is when you buy a picture to cover a hole in the wall and then decide the hole looks much better.
• the more minimal the art the more maximum the explanation.
• How vain painting is — we admire the realistic depiction of objects which in their original state we don’t admire at all – Blaise Pascal
• Everyone wants to understand painting.  Why don’t they try to understand the singing of the birds?  People love the night, a flower, everything which surrounds them without trying to understand them.  But painting — that they must understand. – Pablo Picasso
• This is either a forgery or a damn clever original – Frank Sullivan

On Literature:

• There is one good kind of writer — a dead one.  – James T. Farrell.
• Literature is mostly about having sex, and not much about having babies;  life is the other way round. - David Lodge
• An optimist is one who believes everything he reads on the jacket of a new book.

On Drama / Plays:

• I don’t like propaganda in the theater unless it is disguised so brilliantly that the audience mistakes it for entertainment. - Noel Coward
• Opening night is the night before the play is ready to open – George Jean Nathan
• A playwright is a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form – August Strindberg.

On Film / Acting:

• The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. – Alfred Hitchcock
• The words “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of the movies. – Pauline Kael
• Hollywood – a town that has to be seen to be disbelieved – Walter Winchell
• A celebrity is a person whose name is in everything except the phone directory
• A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well-known, and then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized. - Fred Allen

On the Media:

• Newspaper strikes are a relief – Princess Anne
• Journalism is the only job that requires no degrees, no diplomas, and no specialized knowledge of any kind. – Patrick Campbell
• People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with the news. – A.J. Liebling
• Freedom of the press is guaranteed to those who own one. - A.J. Liebling
• If you read alot of books, you’re considered well read.  But if you watch a lot of TV, you’re not considered well viewed.

On Politics:

• Politics is the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
• If God had been a Liberal, we wouldn’t have the Ten Commandments — We’d have the Ten Suggestions – Malcom Bradbury
• What the liberal really wants is to bring about change which will not in any way endanger his position. – Stokely Carmichael.
• Fascism is Capitalism in decay – Nikolai Lenin
• Congress is so strange.  A man gets up to speak and says nothing.  Nobody listens — and then everybody disagrees. – Boris Marshalov

On the Sexes:

• What men desire is a virgin who is a whore - Edward Dahlberg
• A woman reading ‘Playboy’ feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual – Gloria Steinem

Wow, I really wish I would have read a piece like this before going to lawschool.  I never looked at the law as an intrusion into religious and personal reality before.  Very interesting, albeit disturbing.

What is culture? Sometimes we use that word as the opposite of economics or law. Here I mean something very specific. Culture, as James Davison Hunter put it, is the power to name reality.

If you doubt that, think about divorce for a minute…

When the law actually endorsed unilateral divorce, it changed the terms of everybody’s marriage. Now the happily, romantically married may not notice this in practice. But not only the bad marriages, but the so-so marriages, the good-enough marriages were and are profoundly affected by the law — not only directly, but by the cultural changes in the public understanding of marriage that the law only partly caused and but certainly reinforced and institutionalized.

If you have a right to divorce at will, what you lose is the right to make an enduring marriage — at least if you live in consensual (shared) reality.

I can still hold the view that divorce is wrong — that I have no right to divorce because I made a vow to stay married. But with the advent of unilateral divorce, my views became a privatized view of marriage, not part of the shared reality defined by the law. We privatized this view of marriage precisely when the law privileged the progressive view of divorce.

Maybe you think this was a good change. I will not stop to argue the point now. What I’m trying to point to (for those geniuinely striving but challenged to understand my argument) is that the law mattered. And that the consequences of this legal change was not, in a simple sense, the expansion of liberty, but a change in power, driven in significant part by the cultural power of the law’s power to name reality…

So yes, if you follow the analogy to divorce, parents will still be able to teach their children their own views about what marriage is. But the law will be constantly repudiating that view in a number of public visible ways. Parents are having a very hard time fighting the progressive views of sexual culture, enshrined at law, in any number of ways. This will make it much harder.

When people say the “law is an educator,” that’s true, but it doesn’t go far enough. In this case, the law is an arbiter of reality: Who is really married? Who is really divorced? Who is having an out-of-wedlock child? Who, for that matter, is committing adultery?

The law’s power to name reality matters.

via The Amazing Power of The Culture (Part 3) – Maggie Gallagher – The Corner on National Review Online.

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Wow.  Tough talk… but I like it.

Take something as small as Obama’s need for a word-for-word script, just to answer questions at press conferences. His teleprompter dependency is simply unprecedented. Any Republican president would be laughed out of the room with that kind of hand-holding from Axelrod, or Bill Ayers, or Michelle, or whoever is dictating the words behind the scenes. No wonder Obama is considered eloquent. Like a talking head on TV he constantly needs his writers to feed him the words, so he can pay total attention to his acting style. But even his acting is degenerating in front of our eyes: Obama is turning Obombastama. You can tell from the tone of hysteria creeping into his operatic baritone. Maybe they need to switch that reverb circuit back on? That should impress all the lickspittles of the White House press.

via American Thinker: Obama’s essence.

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According to Obama’s own standards… Obama is out of touch.

WASHINGTON – The economy is fundamentally sound despite the temporary “mess” it’s in, the White House said Sunday in the kind of upbeat assessment that Barack Obama had mocked as a presidential candidate.

What’s worse is that the dow is roughly 2000 points lower NOW than when McCain said the same thing 4 months ago.  I wonder how many of McCain’s critics will be equally critical of Obama for essentially identical statements.

Just kidding.  Of course they won’t.

via White House says economy is sound despite ‘mess’.

click image for larger version.

Saw the court/legal district, and then headed over to the SHOPPING district!  WOW!