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Shakespearean Love Mug

Miss Cellania — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 02:07:42 +0000

“Doubt that the stars are fire,
doubt that the sun doth move,
doubt truth to be a liar,
but never doubt I love.”

William Shakespeare had a lot to say about love, and many of those things are right here on the Shakespearan Love Mug from the NeatoShop. What a great gift to express your feelings for Valentine’s Day! Or anytime at all, if you want to be really classy. The Shakespeare Mug is just one of many message mugs for all occasions at the NeatoShop. Order yours today!

Link

Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, or There’s Something About Mary?

Miss Cellania — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:59:02 +0000

It’s time for another movie quote quiz from mental_floss! In today’s Lunchtime Quiz, you are challenged to sort your Farrelly Brothers films. You’ll be given quotes, and you try to recall if each is from Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, or There’s Something About Mary. I’ve seen two of the three, but I kept mixing them up and scored only 36%. You will do better! Link

Anchorman, Zoolander, or Blades of Glory?

Miss Cellania — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:07:19 +0000

It’s not a case of “if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” but rather a case of “if you like this kind of movie, the odds are good that you’ve watched all three of these films.” In today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, you’ll be given movie quotes from Zoolander, Anchorman, or Blades of Glory. The challenge is to remember which film each is from. Let us know how you do on his one! Link

Singles, Reality Bites, or Empire Records?

Miss Cellania — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 16:55:54 +0000

You may have seen all the movies of the ’90s, but that’s been a few years now. Test your memory with today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. You’ll be given 12 different movie quotes, and for each one, decide whether it’s from Reality Bites, Empire Records, or Singles. I scored 42%, which is honestly not bad for someone who hasn’t seen any of the movies. Link

Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture

Alex — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 12:13:22 +0000

If the Industrial Age was ruled by industrialists and the Atomic Age was epitomized by nuclear scientists working in secret government installations, then the Information Age we live in today is surely the era of the geek.

Just take a look at the titans of industries (computer nerds), Hollywood blockbusters (comic book superheroes), and pop culture (Interweb memes) - they're all geeky! But in order to live under the reign of our new geek overlords, one must learn to speak like one.

Stephen H. Segal (no, not that one) is our guide in learning geekspeak. He has compiled and edited some 200 of the most powerful and oft-cited quotes from geek culture. His book, Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teaching of Nerd Culture by Quirk Books, is not only an invaluable guide into geekdom (or is it geekhood? Help me out here, nerds!), it's also indispensable if you have to go undercover and penetrate a secret geek society.

For example:

"Fear leads to anger; Anger leads to hate; Hate leads to suffering." - Yoda, The Phantom Menace

Yoda was paraphrasing the first great African American geek, George Washington Carver, who said a century ago: "Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater."

Carver, a scientist plying his trade in a time when the intellectual inferiority of black people was simply assumed, knew something about suffering. Born into slavery, kidnapped as an infant, threatened repeatedly with lynching throughout his life, and rejected from school after school due to his race, Carver eventually went on to become one of the best-known American researchers in the biological and agricultural sciences.

Widely rumored to be gay, Carver spent his life confronting and overcoming the fears of others, earning an iconic place in geek history. Yoda might be the fictional guru we like to quote, but Carver is the real one whose life reverberates through our culture.

"The spice must flow." - Dune

Economic systems are bigger than people. That's why distribution of the precious mind-expanding spice, mélange, that is the lifeblood of galactic society in Frank Herbert's Dune must continue unimpeded. That's why, when Paul Atreides - the young nobleman who finds himself hailed as a prophesied savior - asserts his messianic will over the hitherto-powerless throngs of poor wretches living amid the spice mines of Arrakis, he causes commerce to grind to a standstill across a thousand planets, bringing the entire universe to heel.

Just as the spice is Herbert's thinly veiled stand-in for oil, gold, or any commodity that greases the wheels of earthly progress, its necessity highlights the inherent danger of linking any one such commodity with the maintenance of a particular status quo - whether cheap gas for our cars or cheap clothes at Wal-Mart.

"He who controls the spice controls the universe," says the evil Baron Harkonnen elsewhere in Herbert's epic, and it's a lesson that Paul takes to heart, bringing an entire monolithic structure of ingrained corruption down on the heads of those whose only real job was maintaining it.

Economic systems are bigger than people ... except when they're not.

"This is an imaginary story. But then, aren't they all?" - Alan Moore, Superman: Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow?

From the 1950s through the 1980s, DC Comics would occasionally publish Superman stories based on offbeat scenarios that weren't part of the ongoing continuity of the regular monthly serial. The editors distinguished these fun hypothetical tales (President Superman! Superman's bratty kid! Superman and Batman as adopted brothers!) by noting on the cover: "An Imaginary Story" - as opposed to the "Real" continuing saga of the familiar Superman.

Yet this terminology begs the obvious question, which DC finally allowed postmodern comics pioneer Alan Moore to pose in the introduction to Superman #423. Yes, indeed, they are all imaginary stories - a fact that can get lost sometimes by the devoted fan of any serial set in a long-running, carefully consistent fictional world.

DC, its rival Marvel Comics, the Star Trek franchise: all these massive narrative constructs created fans who frequently loved cataloging and cross-referencing the details of the world as much as they loved the characters themselves. That's one big reason why geeks often get so upset at the news that their favorite fictional property is going to be "rebooted" for a new audience.

But the thing is, that's precisely how a legend grows and endures - by being retold again and again. Would anyone remember Hercules today if the Greek storyteller who first spun his tale insisted on maintaining creative control? If the fifteenth-century balladeer who sang rhymes about Robin Hood had been able to force all those who came after him to refrain from spinning their own variations, would Maid Marian or Richard the Lionheart have ever shown up?

As hard as it may be to look at a long-running quasi-epic and admit, "You know, this was awesome, but I'm bored - let's start over and do it differently," there's probably no better way to take a regular old good story and elevate it to the realm of timeless myth.

"I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit." - Ripley, Aliens

Movie logic frustrates most geeks. It just doesn't make sense for the people in a horror film to go one by one to investigate that strange noise in the dark - that didn't work out so well for the last five people, did it? It's stupid for the evil overlord to capture the intrepid hero and then leave him alone in a room full of convenient tools; any overlord with a brain would just kill the guy right off. All too often, Hollywood characters choose the more dramatic path through hardship rather than the smart one.

This was why the Alien films were such a breath of fresh air. Ripley, faced with a planetary colony full to overflowing with unstoppably murderous alien beasts, actually understood what she was up against. Never mind tryinng to safely capture an alien - it wasn't going to happen. Ripley pushed instead for the Occam's Razor method of problem-solving: simple, overwhelming, effective.

Thus "take off and nuke the site from orbit" has become geek shorthand for putting a decisive end to any dangerously messy problem. Overkill? Maybe. But sometimes you just have to be sure.

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." - Joshua, War Games

There is a word, a concept, in Zen Buddhism that doesn't quite translate perfectly into the English language: Mu.

Mu is the response given by a Zen monk to a question that cannot be meaningfully answered. It suggest that the question's premises are not real, that there is a state of emptiness that lies beyond yes and no, that the asker should unask the question - indeed, that anyone who would ask such a question in the first place might well to question his entire perspective on life.

Though the word was never uttered in the 1984's seminal teen-computer-hacker-political-thriller War Games, the idea lies at the heart of the conflict that fuels the movie: a new Pentagon supercomputer that controls the nation's nuclear codes is caught up in a relentless war-game simulation trying to answer the question, "How can the United States win a nuclear war?"

We all know it's a flawed question - the whole point of the Cold War arms-race theory of "mutual assured destruction" was that, in a world of opposing superpowers, the sheer volume of weaponry is meant to deter the use of any nukes at all. But back in 1984, when computer networks were new and exotic, it seemed entirely reasonable to worry that an artificial intelligence might start firing missiles based on the inhuman outcome of an algorithm. Of course, the computer finally found its Zen.

What about you - can you tell when it's time to remove yourself from a defective board game?

Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture, edited by Stephen H. Segal, is painstakingly gathered and interpreted by a diverse team of hardcore nerds who've spent years poring over the most beloved texts of the modern-day imagination. Beginning with some 200 of the most powerful and oft-cited quotes from movies ("Do, or do not - there is no 'try'"), television ("The truth is out there"), comics ("With great power comes great responsibility"), science, the Internet, and more, Geek Wisdom offers illuminating insights into the eternal truths to be found therein. Yes, this collection of mini-essays is by, for, and about geeks - but it's just so surprisingly profound, the rest of us would have to be dorks not to read it.

Stephen H. Segal is the Hugo Award winning senior contributing editor to Weird Tales, the world's oldest fantasy/sci-fi/horror magazine, and an editor at Quirk Books. His geek portfolio includes work for Tor Books, Viz Media, WQED Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Melon. A native of Atlantic City, he lives in Philadelphia.

Geek Wisdom is available at Amazon | Official page at Quirk Books

Too Soon to Tell

John Farrier — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 12:47:27 +0000

There’s a story that Zhou Enlai, the premier of Communist China from 1949-1976, was once asked for his impressions of the long term effects of the French Revolution. Zhou famously responded that it was “too soon to tell”, which has been taken as a testament to the value of having an expansive view of history and China’s intellectual history of doing so. The problem with this anecdote is that it’s not true:

The former premier’s answer has become a frequently deployed cliché, used as evidence of the sage Chinese ability to think long-term – in contrast to impatient westerners.

The trouble is that Zhou was not referring to the 1789 storming of the Bastille in a discussion with Richard Nixon during the late US president’s pioneering China visit. Zhou’s answer related to events only three years earlier – the 1968 students’ riots in Paris, according to Nixon’s interpreter at the time.[...]

At a seminar in Washington to mark the publication of Henry Kissinger’s book, On China, Chas Freeman, a retired foreign service officer, sought to correct the long-standing error.

“I distinctly remember the exchange. There was a misunderstanding that was too delicious to invite correction,” said Mr Freeman.

He said Zhou had been confused when asked about the French Revolution and the Paris Commune. “But these were exactly the kinds of terms used by the students to describe what they were up to in 1968 and that is how Zhou understood them.”

Link (registration required) via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Indiana University

Motivational Posters from the Band of Brothers

Miss Cellania — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 13:19:38 +0000

Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division is a group of World War II heroes you might know from the book or the miniseries Band of Brothers. They fought at the D-Day Invasion, the Battle of the Bulge, and Operation Market Garden, and liberated concentration camps, yet they came home and went on with their lives. No one knew much about what they did until the book came out. But these men gained quite a bit of wisdom from their war experiences, tempered by age, which they gave us in their stories. The Art of Manliness took some of those quotes and made them into a series of awesome motivational posters. Link -via Gorilla Mask

Who Said It: Hunter or Charlie?

Miss Cellania — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 22:56:23 +0000

If you’ve been keeping up with actor Charlie Sheen’s very public meltdowns, or if you are a fan of Hunter S. Thompson’s philosophical remarks, you should do well on this quiz. You’ll be given a quote, and all you have to do is decide which man said it. Simple! I got 12 out of 15 right. Link

The Movie Quote Generator Quiz

Miss Cellania — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 16:46:14 +0000

They call me Mister Neatorama!

Which movie was this quote from?

This toy from the Surrealist is a movie quiz in that you are challenged to recall what movie the quote is from. But the quote is not quite the same, because it’s also a generator that will insert words of your choice into those quotes. Have fun with the Movie Quote Generator Quiz either way! Link -via the Presurfer

Jack Kennedy or Jack Donaghy?

Miss Cellania — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 18:55:00 +0000

Jack Kennedy was president of the United States from January 1961 to November 1963. Jack Donaghy is a character on the TV show 30 Rock. In today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, you’ll be given quotes, and you decide which Jack said it. It’s not as easy as you think -especially for someone who either hasn’t seen the TV show or can’t remember the presidency. I scored 67%, because I haven’t seen the TV show. Link

The Movie Quote Quiz

Miss Cellania — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 19:19:40 +0000

We just love to quote our favorite movies. Think you’ll do well when someone else picks the films? That’s the challenge in today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. You’ll be given a movie quote, and you have to decide what movie it’s from. Simple! I scored 80%, far better than the current average. Link

Winston Churchill Motivational Posters

Alex — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:50:19 +0000

The Art of Manliness blog has an excellent post turning the wits of Winston Churchill into stylish motivational posters.

I'd like to see Brett and Kate McKay of AoM Blog turn these favorite Churchill quotes of mine into a poster:

Bessie Braddock: Sir, you are drunk.
Churchill: And you, madam, are ugly. But in the morning, I shall be sober.

and

Lady Nancy Astor: Winston, if I were your wife, I'd poison your tea.
Churchill: Nancy, if I were your husband, I'd drink it.

Link

Modern Observations of Young People

Johnny Cat — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:26:55 +0000

Bang It Out posted this list of 55 “Random Thoughts of People Our Age” that contains a lot of true, yet funny things about the age of blooming technology, and the social awkwardness of living in that world as a blooming person. A few gems:

#11. I think everyone has a movie that they love so much, it actually becomes stressful to watch it with other people. I’ll end up wasting 90 minutes shiftily glancing around to confirm that everyone’s laughing at the right parts, then making sure I laugh just a little bit harder (and a millisecond earlier) to prove that I’m still the only one who really, really gets it.

#25. While driving yesterday I saw a banana peel in the road and instinctively swerved to avoid it…thanks Mario Kart.

#29. Shirts get dirty. Underwear gets dirty. Pants? Pants never get dirty, and you can wear them forever.

#32. Whenever I’m Facebook stalking someone and I find out that their profile is public I feel like a kid on Christmas morning who just got the Red Ryder BB gun that I always wanted. 546 pictures? Don’t mind if I do!

#44. I like all of the music in my iTunes, except when it’s on shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs in my iTunes.

All people have little truths about modern life they like. Any of these strike your funny bone, or any to add?

Link

(Image: Wikipedia) Thanks, Jared!

10 Quickie Quotes About Twitter

Alex — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:26:44 +0000

For more Bizarro, definitely checkout Dan Piraro’s website and blog

Love it or hate it, Twitter has certainly taken the web by storm. In just a few short years, the social networking/micro-blogging website has grown to be one 50 most popular website in the world.

As much as I am fascinated with Twitter (though I’m a bad Twitterer, Neatorama’s Official Twitter is not as frequently updated as the blog), I’m more interested about what other people say about Twitter.

Here’s a quickie 10 most interesting Twitter Quotes (some are from people who, ironically, don’t tweet):

"oh this is going to be addictive" – Dom Sagolla, Twitter co-creator

“The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful” – Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard law professor and Internet expert (Source)

“Twitter lets me hear from a lot of people in a very short period of time.” – Robert Scoble, blogger (Source)

“Using Twitter for literate communication is about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite ‘The Iliad.’" – Bruce Sterling, science fiction writer and journalist (Source)

"Whoever said that things have to be useful?"
– Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder and
CEO

"For the uninitiated, here’s how Twitter works – I have no f***ing idea. I have no idea how it works – or why it is." Jon Stewart, comedian and host of The Daily Show

"Facebook is to 2007 as Twitter is to 2009. It’s the most open communication platform out there" – Roger Kondrat, social media consultant (Source)

"The people drawn to Twitter are people on the cutting edge, the real nerds who are resentful of the fact that the general population have found and taken over Facebook" – Steve Dotto, host of Dotto Tech (Source)

"HI TWITTERS . THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY" – Oprah, yes that Oprah, on Twitter

"Ummm . . . I don’t think it’s as big of a dilemma as people seem to think. We haven’t focused on it yet and I can’t say for sure how it’s going to work." – Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder and CEO, on how Twitter will make money

Top 100 Funny Quotes

Robert Birming — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 23:16:34 +0000

A list of more or less funny quotes by famous persons such as Albert Einstein, Fredrick Nietzsche, Sarah Silverman and George Carlin (above photo).

Link – via ebr303