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The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20110202152015/http://bertramonline.com/

1 day ago

BERJAYA

And, also, looking for a proofreader.

8 days ago

Chinglish!

Chinglish at its very best. From Language Hat

  • My Porsche? Forgot I even owned one, says Pennant “Jermaine Pennant was contacted by his former club Real Zaragoza recently after he abandoned a Porsche at the railway station in the Spanish city five months ago – and promptly forgot that he owned it.” Obscene (especially when you realize that said player is not even anywhere close to being a ‘star’.)

    # 13 days ago

  • The banality of everyday life “At work, time is money. You work hard, performing your tasks efficiently but with a bored detachment. Tapping at the keys of a computer, you churn out meaningless words and numbers; on the assembly line you churn out shoddy goods in the name of mass production. It never occurs to you that before it became labour, work was creative, the pleasure taken in it offsetting the hours of effort. It never occurs to you that once people had control over how and when they worked. Lacking creative work and control, you have only wages to ameliorate your labour. […] Waking from a doze, you turn off the TV and crawl up to bed. Before sleep you consider tomorrow’s routine: same shit, different day. You don’t think that there’s a better way to live. You don’t think you have the power to change things. Yet the house of cards is built on your complicity. We have a world of pleasures to win, and nothing to lose but boredom. You sleep. You don’t dream.”

    # 13 days ago

14 days ago

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

Guy Debord

15 days ago

New York City has extreme wealth and extreme poverty. Today, the wealthiest 1 percent of city residents has 44 percent of all income in the city, a share nearly four times as great as 30 years ago.

The rotten Big Apple

  • North American Dialects On Twitter and YouTube: “Using data from the Atlas of North American English (ANAE) by William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg combined with his own research, linguist Rick Aschmann created the detailed map above to show regional dialects throughout North America. One of the coolest features is that he’s linked over 600 YouTube videos to the map, so that clicking a region will take you to video clips of (mostly famous) people raised in that area so that you can hear a sample of the dialect.” Fascinating.

    # 16 days ago

19 days ago

BERJAYA

Per Bak Jensen: På sporet af troen

21 days ago

Link

Oy.

21 days ago

Link

(via Shiraz Socialist)

  • Lennon the rebel, Bono the wonk “We need more high-profile dissidents to challenge mainstream power. This makes it all the sadder that Bono and many other celebrities only reinforce this power in their capacity as faux experts. Where have all the celebrity dissidents gone? It’s not a complicated task. All Lennon was saying was to give peace a chance. “

    # 21 days ago

21 days ago

Adriaen van de Velde: The beach at Scheveningen, painted 1658.
BERJAYA

22 days ago

Link

Via Airforce Amazons

22 days ago

The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov had a rule: if you show a gun in the first act, by the time the curtain falls, it has to go off. For weeks and months, that gun, the weapon of angry rhetoric and intemperate rabble rousing, has been cocked and loaded in plain view on the American stage; Saturday morning outside a shopping mall in Tucson, Arizona, it went off again and again and again.

Michael Winship

22 days ago

Link

Still a magical, wonderful song and performance.

  • Atheism and the Enlightenment: In the name of godlessness: “This is the message of Mr Blom’s book, hinted at but left unstated until the closing chapters. He believes the Enlightenment is incomplete, betrayed by its self-appointed guardians. Despite all the scientific advances of the past two centuries, magical thinking and the cultural inheritance of Christianity remain endemic.” But let us set about finishing it, then.

    # 22 days ago

  • Tony Judt: My Endless New York:
    New York — a city more at home in the world than in its home country — may do better still. As a European, I feel more myself in New York than in the European Union’s semi-detached British satellite, and I have Brazilian and Arab friends here who share the sentiment.
    To be sure, we all have our complaints. And while there is no other city where I could imagine living, there are many places that, for different purposes, I would rather be. But this too is a very New York sentiment. Chance made me an American, but I chose to be a New Yorker. I probably always was.

    # 22 days ago

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