In the 24 cases where driver age was reported or readily inferred, the drivers included those of the ages 60, 61, 63, 66, 68, 71, 72, 72, 77, 79, 83, 85, 89—and I’m leaving out the son whose age wasn’t identified, but whose 94-year-old father died as a passenger. These “electronic defects” apparently discriminate against the elderly, just as the sudden acceleration of Audis and GM autos did before them.
— Theodore H. Frank on the Toyota sudden acceleration problem.
When I told my parents I was an American studies major, they were like, ‘That’s fantastic! Did you read Mark Twain?’ ‘No, I didn’t.’ ‘What did you read?’ ‘Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Michel Foucault.’ ‘They don’t sound American!’ ‘They’re not.’
—Conservative gadfly Andrew Breitbart on his education.
Nuclear waste is miniscule in size—one Coke can’s worth per person-lifetime of electricity if it was all nuclear, Rip Anderson likes to point out. Coal waste is massive—68 tons of solid stuff and 77 tons of carbon dioxide per person-lifetime of strictly coal electricity.
— Stewart Brand , editor of the Whole Earth Catalog , on the differences in energy sources.
Most of today’s popular methods of building your vocabulary have an explicitly instrumental mind-set, avowing that if you learn lots of new words, you will get something tangible for your trouble. Few people, it seems, are thought to be content with learning new words merely to have something pleasant to think about. Knowing that there’s a word — groak — for staring silently at someone while they eat, perhaps in the hope that they will give you some food, or that the word undisonant denotes the sound that waves make when crashing on the shore will gain you nothing except the joy of knowing it. Is this not enough?
— Ammon Shea on vocabulary.
You’re talking about a man born to Dickensian tin-shanty poverty in General Santos City, a dry-baked scab on the Philippine nation’s equatorial bottom. You’re talking about a man who spent every hour of his childhood stomach-hungry, shoeless, and stinking. A man whose father abandoned the home when he was a toddler, stayed away for many years, showed up one day for several hours, just long enough to cook and eat his son’s dog, then vanished again.
— Andrew Corsello on Manny Pacquiao, a boxer who—unless your dad ate your dog—had a much rougher childhood than you did.
Additional Sources: Marginal Revolution ; more than 95 theses ; The Browser
