Playboy Interview: Steven Jobs (1985)
http://www.txtpost.com/playboy-interview-steven-jobs/
If, for some reason, we make some giant mistakes and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about 20 years. Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening.
(via Instapaper)
It’s the Economy, Dummkopf! [longform.org]
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/09/europe-201109?currentPage=all
The German government gives money to the European Union rescue fund so that it can give money to the Irish government so that the Irish government can give money to Irish banks so the Irish banks can repay their loans to the German banks. “They are playing billiards,” says Enderlein. “The easier way to do it would be to give German money to the German banks and let the Irish banks fail.”
(via Instapaper)
When I got to Laban Rata I met a couple named Sasha. Meaning that I met a man and a woman in a relationship and were both named Sasha. They offered me hot coffee and light banter but believe me when I say that I’m not totally sure that the incident really happened. Just hours ago three friends and I started the hike up Mount Kinabalu and we stayed together for the first few hours. I had left them behind as we got higher. Then the mist came and I heard birdsong from a distance but never see any birds. From behind me I could hear people and a group of dark haired, foreign looking folk, walked single file and passed me while singing and humming in unison. Higher on I saw leafless trees on a barren moss covered rocks, a stark contrast from the rain forest we were in when we started the journey. Everything seemed strange to me. By the time I reached Laban Rata I was wet, cold wearing only my pants and white tee while everyone else had waterproofed jackets on. I got in found the closest chair and just laid there. Not sure if anything was real. The delirious seldom have the mental capacity to work out reality. Then Sasha and Sasha sat next to me, we had a pleasant chat and I remember asking them how strange it was that they both had the same name. They were surprised that I thought it was unusual. Later on my friends got there and I never saw the couple anymore.
Sexy Beast by Brendan Kiley - Features - The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/sexy-beast/Content?oid=2190805
If Buster is a boy, he’ll have a special tentacle (the third to the right, going clockwise, from the front of its mantle) that is both an arm and a dick. And, since the suction cups on octopuses* also function as taste buds, his special tentacle will be an arm and a dick and a tongue—making all octopus sex fisting and intercourse and cunnilingus, simultaneously.
(via Instapaper)
Dept. of Currency: Penny Dreadful : The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_owen?currentPage=all
Since 1998, the company has conducted an annual currency poll, which always shows that Americans still love pennies and would prefer to continue getting rid of them by collecting them for months or years and then paying Coinstar to put them back into circulation, instead of getting rid of them once and for all by having the Mint stop making them.
(via Instapaper)
Silvio Berlusconi’s Hedonism : The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/06/110606fa_fact_levy?currentPage=all
I asked if I could meet with Berlusconi. Ventura thought for a moment and replied, “Would you consider having plastic surgery first?” It wasn’t so that I could look like a velina, he explained; he would feel better about arranging the meeting if I had my face messed up, because then there would be a better chance of the Presidente keeping his hands to himself.
(via Instapaper)
http://www.esquire.com/features/john-lasseter-quotes-0611-2
“We realize that we are better together than we are apart,” Lasseter says, and although he could be talking about the message of any of his movies, he’s talking about the communal process by which they’re made. But that’s what makes Lasseter who he is and Pixar what it is: He has created the moral universe in his films by inhabiting the moral universe of his films.
(via Instapaper)
GQ - THE ABORTIONIST - 906S-000-005
http://www.maryellenmark.com/text/magazines/gq/906S-000-005.html
What? You don’t like him? He offends you? You don’t find his provocations endearing? Well, you’re stuck with him. Who else is going to walk where the guns have been drawn? How many other doctors will make themselves targets? David Gunn is gone, departed, like a spirit, like smoke. The others, more and more of them, are reluctant. They don’t show up. They quit, they get tired, they grow old. Doc is your new hero. He is old, yes… he is tired, yes… he just doesn’t quit. He can’t quit. His resistance, his defiance -they are not based in ideology, or cause, but in himself, his character, his troubled and troubling history.
(via Instapaper)
The Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei : The New Yorker
http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/24/100524fa_fact_osnos?currentPage=all
By this point, all four of the videographers with Ai that day had followed him into the police station and were recording the questioning. Three of the cameras were squeezed into the room at odd angles, while the fourth poked its lens in through the window. Then a third police officer arrived, with his own video camera, and began taping Ai and his entourage. Finally, he was joined by another police officer, carrying yet another video camera, and he, too, began to tape. Looking at the scene, I realized that Ai had inverted the usual logic of art and politics: instead of enlisting art in the service of his protest, he had enlisted the apparatus of authoritarianism into his art.
(via Instapaper)
