We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Post Created June 14th 2013
Posted June 15th 2013
assange-media news is an illusion
julian assange-he beleives we should know-what are his thoughts on wikileaks? he supplies a server for those who have a message or information they want to share with those who want to listen
Video Published on Mar 21, 2013
The official trailer for We Steal Secrets. Julian Assange. Bradley Manning. Collateral murder. Cablegate. WikiLeaks. These people and terms have exploded into public consciousness by fundamentally changing the way democratic societies deal with privacy, secrecy, and the right to information, perhaps for generations to come. We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks is an extensive examination of all things related to WikiLeaks and the larger global debate over access to information.
Collateral Murder in Iraq by WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks Decoded Footage Taken From Helicopter Where The Firing Came Down On Unarmed People-Two from Reuters with Cameras.
This Video Is Not Part of The Film “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks”The Following Explains The Above Video.
Published on Aug 16, 2012
Update: On July 6, 2010, Private Bradley Manning, a 22 year old intelligence analyst with the United States Army in Baghdad, was charged with disclosing this video (after allegedly speaking to an unfaithful journalist). The whistleblower behind the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, has called Mr. Manning a ‘hero’. He is currently imprisoned in Kuwait. The Apache crew and those behind the cover up depicted in the video have yet to be charged. To assist Private Manning, please see bradleymanning.org.
5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff.
Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-sight, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured.
After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own “Rules of Engagement”.
Consequently, WikiLeaks has released the classified Rules of Engagement for 2006, 2007 and 2008, revealing these rules before, during, and after the killings.
WikiLeaks has released both the original 38 minutes video and a shorter version with an initial analysis. Subtitles have been added to both versions from the radio transmissions.
WikiLeaks obtained this video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. We have analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material. We have spoken to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident.
WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work.Published on June 5, 2013
Stephen Colbert interviews the director of We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks,
Alex Gibney-a documentatarian.
DemocracyNow.org – Alex Gibney’s new documentary, “We Steal Secrets” bills itself as “the Story of WikiLeaks,” but our guest Jennifer Robinson — a legal advisor to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange — claims it misses key facts. “This is a film about WikiLeaks, about the largest leak in history,” Robinson says. “It touches on very important issues about journalism, whistleblowing. But unfortunately, I do not think this film does [those issues] justice … The film does not recognize threats WikiLeaks faces from potential U.S. prosecution.”EVERY ONE HAS THEIR OWN OPINIONS ABOUT WHAT IS RIGHT OR WRONG REGARDING WIKILEAKS. I AM ONLY PROVIDING THIS PRESENTATION. MAKE UP YOUR OWN MINDS. I KNOW WHAT I FEEL ABOUT THIS AT THE PRESENT TIME. I LIVE WITH SOMEONE WHO IS DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED TO MY FEELINGS ON THIS. THE DEBATE IS OPEN. WE DO LIVE IN A FREE SOCIETY. AT LEAST THAT IS WHAT OUR CONSTITUTION SAYS IN THE U.S. I WOULD LIKE TO SEE THE WORLD AS ONE-AT PEACE-AND FREE!QUOTATIONS by JULIAN ASSANGE:
“…judgements which are not based upon the truth can only lead to outcomes which are themselves false.” — Julian Assange
“Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice.
If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find.
If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types whos hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes.
The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering.
Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them.” ― Julian Assange
“What we know is everything, it is our limit, of what we can be.” ― Julian Assange
“The sense of perspective that interaction with multiple cultures gives you I find to be extremely valuable, because it allows you to see the structure of a country with greater clarity, and gives you a sense of mental independence.” ― Julian Assange
“Non-conformity is the only real passion worth being ruled by.” ― Julian Assange
“You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can’t lead to a good conclusion.” ― Julian Assange
Meryl Streep Talks From Serious to Funny
Barnard 2010 Commencement Speaker and More
Post Created June 6th 2013
Created by Jk the secret keeper
Posted June 7th 2013I seem to be having an addiction growing toward listening to great commencement speeches. It is that time of the year. Who better to listen to than Meryl Streep with her list of films and the number of nominations for an Academy Award for Best Actress. I’ve followed her ever since I saw her in the Wendy Wasserstein play: Uncommon Women. She was brilliant and our baby cat is named after one of my favorite characters from it: Carter. She was the super-intelligent, outstanding and just the kind of weird I love and Meryl’s character was the self assured, beautiful, intelligent, you wished to be gay, character. She moved me in that role and I have been a follower and fan ever since. Of course when she was the run-away mother in Kramer vs Kramer, you hated her and you wanted her to go away. The same, when she played a bigot in the film “Julia” with Jane Fonda. But then came The Deer Hunter and her career just kept getting better and growing bigger and larger from that point on. Her speech follows on video after poster and the transcript follows after the video. I have also added a 4 parts video of Meryl Streep as a guest on Inside the Actors Studio. All four are very funny and worth the listen. It is a younger Meryl but quite brilliant with her humour. Following those is a video with Meryl’s many voices and saved for last, Nora Ephron paying a very humourous tribute to Meryl. Do ENJOY! Jk the secret keeper
Thank you, all. Thank you, President Spar, Ms. Golden, President Tilghman, Members of the Board of Trustees, distinguished faculty, proud swelling parents and family, and gorgeous class of 2010. If you are all really, really lucky, and if you continue to work super hard, and you remember your thank you notes and everybody’s name; and you follow through on every task that’s asked of you and also somehow anticipate problems before they even arise and you somehow sidestep disaster and score big. If you get great scores on your LSATS, or MSATS, or ERSATS or whatever. And you get into your dream grad school or internship which leads to a super job with a paycheck commensurate with responsibilities of leadership or if you somehow get that documentary on a shoe-string budget and it gets accepted at Sundance and maybe it wins Sundance and then you go on to be nominated for an Oscar and then you win the Oscar. Or if that money-making website that you designed with your friends somehow suddenly attracts investors and advertisers and becomes the go-to site for whatever it is you’re selling, blogging, sharing, or net-casting and success shinning, hoped-for but never really anticipated success comes your way I guarantee you someone you know or love come to you and say, “Will you address the graduates at my college?” And you’ll say “Yeah sure, when is it? May 2010? 2010? Yeah sure, that’s months away and then the nightmare begins. The nightmare we’ve all had and I assure you, you’ll continue to have even after graduation, 40 years after graduation. About a week before the due date, you wake up in the middle of the night, “Huh, I have a paper due and I haven’t done the reading, Oh my god!”
If you have been touched by the success fairy, people think you know why. People think success breeds enlightenment and you are duty bound to spread it around like manure, fertilize those young minds, let them in on the secret, what is it that you know that no one else knows, the self examination begins, one looks inward, one opens an interior door. Cobwebs, black, the lights bulbs burned out, the airless dank refrigerator of an insanely over-scheduled, unexamined life that usually just gets take-out. Where is my writer friend, Anna Quindlen when I need her? On another book tour.
Hello I’m Meryl Streep, and today, Class of 2010 and I am really, I am very honored, and humbled to be asked to pass on tips and inspiration to you for achieving success in this next part of your lives. President Spar, when I consider the other distinguished medal recipients and venerable Board of Trustees, the many accomplished faculty and family members, people who’ve actually done things, produced things, while I have pretended to do things, I can think about 3,800 people who should have been on this list before me and you know since my success has depended wholly on putting things over on people. So I’m not sure parents think I’m that great a role model anyway.
I am however an expert in pretending to be an expert in various areas, so just randomly like everything else in this speech, I am or I was an expert in kissing on stage and on screen. How did I prepare for this? Well most of my preparation took place in my suburban high school or rather behind my suburban high school in New Jersey. One is obliged to do great deal of kissing in my line of work. Air kissing, ass-kissing, kissing up and of course actual kissing, much like hookers, actors have to do it with people we may not like or even know. We may have to do it with friends, which, believe it or not is particularly awkward, for people of my generation, it’s awkward.
My other areas of faux expertise, river rafting, miming the effects of radiation poisoning, knowing which shoes go with which bag, coffee plantation, Turkish, Polish, German, French, Italian, that’s Iowa-Italian from the bridges of Madison county, bit of the Bronx, Aramaic, Yiddish, Irish clog dancing, cooking, singing, riding horses, knitting, playing the violin, and simulating steamy sexual encounters, these are some of the areas in which, I have pretended quite proficiently to be successful, or the other way around. As have many women here, I’m sure.
Women, I feel I can say this authoritatively, especially at Barnard where they can’t hear us, what am I talking about? They professionally can’t hear us. Women are better at acting than men. Why? Because we have to be, if successfully convincing someone bigger than you are of something he doesn’t know is a survival skill, this is how women have survived through the millennia. Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending or acting is a very valuable life skill and we all do it. All the time, we don’t want to be caught doing it but nevertheless it’s part of the adaptations of our species, we change who we are to fit the exigencies of our time, and not just strategically, or to our own advantage, sometimes sympathetically, without our even knowing it for the betterment of the whole group.
I remember very clearly my own first conscious attempt at acting. I was six placing my mother’s half slip over my head in preparation to play the Virgin Mary in our living room. As I swaddled my Betsy Wetsy doll I felt quieted, holy, actually, and my transfigured face and very changed demeanor captured on super-8 by my dad pulled my little brother Harry to play Joseph and Dana too, a barnyard animal, into the trance. They were actually pulled into this nativity scene by the intensity of my focus. In my usual technique for getting them to do what I want, yelling at them would never ever have achieved and I learned something on that day.
Later when I was nine, I remember taking my mother’s eyebrow pencil and carefully drawing lines all over my face, replicating the wrinkles that I had memorized on the face of my grandmother whom I adored and made my mother take my picture and I look at it now and of course, I look like myself now and my grandmother then. But I do really remember in my bones, how it was possible on that day to feel her age. I stooped, I felt weighted down but cheerful, you know I felt like her.
Empathy is at the heart of the actor’s art. And in high school, another form of acting took hold of me. I wanted to learn how to be appealing. So I studied the character I imagined I wanted to be that of the generically pretty high school girl. I researched her deeply, that is to say shallowly, in Vogue, in Seventeen, and in Mademoiselle Magazines. I tried to imitate her hair, her lipstick, her lashes, the clothes of the lithesome, beautiful and generically appealing high school girls that I saw in those pages. I ate an apple a day, period. I peroxided my hair, ironed it straight. I demanded brand name clothes, my mother shut me down on that one. But I did, I worked harder on this characterization really than anyone I think I’ve ever done since. I worked on my giggle, I lightened it. Because I like it when it went, kind of “ehuh” and the end, “eheeh” “ehaeaahaha” because I thought it sounded child like, and cute. This was all about appealing to boys and at the same time being accepted by the girls, a very tricky negotiation.
Often success in one area precludes succeeding in the other. And along with all my other exterior choices, I worked on my, what actors call, my interior adjustment. I adjusted my natural temperament which tends to be slightly bossy, a little opinionated, loud, a little loud, full of pronouncements and high spirits, and I willfully cultivated softness, agreeableness, a breezy, natural sort of sweetness, even shyness if you will, which was very, very, very effective on the boys. But the girls didn’t buy it. They didn’t like me; they sniffed it out, the acting. And they were probably right, but I was committed, this was absolutely not a cynical exercise, this was a vestigial survival courtship skill I was developing. And I reached a point senior year, when my adjustment felt like me, I had actually convinced myself that I was this person and she, me, pretty, talented, but not stuck-up. You know, a girl who laughed a lot at every stupid thing every boy said and who lowered her eyes at the right moment and deferred, who learned to defer when the boys took over the conversation, I really remember this so clearly and I could tell it was working, I was much less annoying to the guys than I had been, they liked me better and I like that, this was conscious but it was at the same time motivated and fully-felt this was real, real acting.
I got to Vassar which 43 years ago was a single-sex institution, like all the colleges in what they call the Seven Sisters, the female Ivy League and I made some quick but lifelong and challenging friends. And with their help outside of any competition for boys my brain woke up. I got up and I got outside myself and I found myself again. I didn’t have to pretend, I could be goofy, vehement, aggressive, and slovenly and open and funny and tough and my friends let me. I didn’t wash my hair for three weeks once. They accepted me like the Velveteen Rabbit. I became real instead of an imagined stuffed bunny but I stockpiled that character from high school and I breathed life into her again some years later as Linda in the “Deer Hunter.” There is probably not one of you graduates who has ever seen this film but the “Deer Hunter” it won best picture in 1978 Robert De Niro, Chris Walken, not funny at all. And I played Linda, a small town girl in a working class background, a lovely, quiet, hapless girl, who waited for the boy she loved to come back from the war in Vietnam. Often men my age, President Clinton, by the way, when I met him said, “Men my age, mention that character as their favorite of all the women I’ve played.” And I have my own secret understanding of why that is and it confirms every decision I made in high school. This is not to denigrate that girl by the way or the men who are drawn to her in anyway because she’s still part of me and I’m part of her. She wasn’t acting but she was just behaving in a way that cowed girls, submissive girls, beaten up girls with very few ways out have behaved forever and still do in many worlds. Now, in a measure of how much the world has changed the character most men mention as their favorite is, Miranda Priestly.
Now as a measure of how the world has changed. The character most men mention as their favorite. Miranda Priestly. The beleaguered totalitarian at the head of Runway magazine in Devil Wears Prada. To my mind this represents such an optimistic shift. They relate to Miranda. They wanted to date Linda. They felt sorry for Linda but they feel like Miranda. They can relate to her issues, the high standards she sets for herself and others. The thanklessness of the leadership position. The “Nobody understands me” thing. The loneliness. They stand outside one character and they pity her and they kind of fall in love with her but they look through the eyes of this other character. This is a huge deal because as people in the movie business know the absolute hardest thing in the whole world is to persuade a straight male audience to identify with a woman protagonist to feel themselves embodied by her. This more than any other factor explains why we get the movies we get and the paucity of the roles where women drive the film. It’s much easier for the female audience because we were all grown up brought up identifying with male characters from Shakespeare to Salinger. We have less trouble following Hamlet’s dilemma viscerally or Romeo’s or Tybalt or Huck Finn or Peter Pan — I remember holding that sword up to Hook — I felt like him. But it is much much much harder for heterosexual boys to identify with Juliet or Desdemona, Wendy in Peter Pan or Joe in Little Women or the Little Mermaid or Pocohontas. why I don’t know, but it just is. There has always been a resistance to imaginatively assume a persona, if that persona is a she. But things are changing now and it’s in your generation we’re seeing this. Men are adapting… about time…they are adapting consciously and also without consciously and without realizing it for the better of the whole group. They are changing their deepest prejudices to regard as normal the things that their fathers would have found very very difficult and their grandfathers would have abhorred and the door to this emotional shift is empathy. As Jung said, emotion is the chief source of becoming conscious. There can be no transforming of lightness into dark of apathy into movement without emotion. Or as Leonard Cohen says pay attention to the cracks because that’s where the light gets in. You, young women of Barnard have not had to squeeze yourself into the corset of being cute or to muffle your opinions but you haven’t left campus yet. I’m just kidding. What you have had is the privilege of a very specific education. You are people who may able to draw on a completely different perspective to imagine a different possibility than women and men who went to coed schools.
How this difference is going to serve you it’s hard to quantify now, it may take you forty years like it did me to analyze your advantage. But today is about looking forward into a world where so-called women’s issues, human issues of gender inequality lie at the crux of global problems from poverty to the AIDS crisis to the rise in violent fundamentalist juntas, human trafficking and human rights abuses and you’re going to have the opportunity and the obligation, by virtue of your providence, to speed progress in all those areas. And this is a place where the need is very great, the news is too. This is your time and it feels normal to you but really there is no normal. There’s only change, and resistance to it and then more change.
Never before in the history or country have most of the advanced degrees been awarded to women but now they are. Since the dawn of man, it’s hardly more than 100 years since we were even allowed into these buildings except to clean them but soon most of law and medical degrees will probably also go to women. Around the world, poor women now own property who used to be property and according to Economist magazine, for the last two decades, the increase of female employment in the rich world has been the main driving force of growth. Those women have contributed more to global GDP growth than have either new technology or the new giants India or china. Cracks in the ceiling, cracks in the door, cracks in the Court and on the Senate floor.
You know, I gave a speech at Vassar 27 years ago. It was a really big hit. Everyone loved it, really. Tom Brokaw said it was the very best commencement speech he had ever heard and of course I believed this. And it was much easier to construct than this one. It came out pretty easily because back then I knew so much. I was a new mother, I had two academy awards and it was all coming together so nicely. I was smart and I understood boiler plate and what sounded good and because I had been on the squad in high school, earnest full-throated cheerleading was my specialty so that’s what I did but now, I feel like I know about 1/16th of what that young woman knew. Things don’t seem as certain today. Now I’m 60, I have four adult children who are all facing the same challenges you are. I’m more sanguine about all the things that I still don’t know and I’m still curious about.
What I do know about success, fame, celebrity that would fill another speech. How it separates you from your friends, from reality, from proportion. Your own sweet anonymity, a treasure you don’t even know you have until it’s gone. How it makes things tough for your family and whether being famous matters one bit, in the end, in the whole flux of time. I know I was invited here because of that. How famous I am. I how many awards I’ve won and while I am I am overweeningly proud of the work that, believe me, I did not do on my own. I can assure that awards have very little bearing on my own personal happiness. My own sense of well-being and purpose in the world. That comes from studying the world feelingly, with empathy in my work. It comes from staying alert and alive and involved in the lives of the people that I love and the people in the wider world who need my help. No matter what you see me or hear me saying when I’m on your TV holding a statuette spewing, that’s acting.
Being a celebrity has taught me to hide but being an actor has opened my soul.
Being here today has forced me to look around inside there for something useful that I can share with you and I’m really grateful you gave me the chance.
You know you don’t have to be famous. You just have to make your mother and father proud of you and you already have. Bravo to you. Congratulations.
“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” ― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
“Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.” ― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables and Reflections
“I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.” ― Vincent van Gogh
Whimsical Serendipity
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Videos Created by Jennifer Kiley
Created May 31st & June 1st 2013
Posted June 1st 2013
Dedicated To Shawn: EARLY BIRTHDAY PRESENT—HAPPY BIRTHDAY on JUNE 3rd
carter the lion—HAPPY EARLY BIRTHDAY MOM SHAWN—JUNE 3rd
“As I look out at all of you gathered here, I want to say that I don’t see a room full of Parisians in top hats and diamonds and silk dresses. I don’t see bankers and housewives and store clerks. No. I address you all tonight as you truly are: wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers, and magicians. You are the true dreamers.” ― Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret
“Flowers lead to books, which lead to thinking and not thinking and then more flowers and music, music. Then many more flowers and many more books.” ― Maira Kalman
“These paper boats of mine are meant to dance on the ripples of hours, and not reach any destination.” ― Rabindranath Tagore
“Do you know a better time than the present for igniting your dreams?” ― Carolyn Tody, Author and Artist, A Whimsical Holiday for Children
“Vital lives are about action. You can’t feel warmth unless you create it, can’t feel delight until you play,can’t know serendipity unless you risk.” ― Joan Erickson
“Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked.” ― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures
“But in Friendship, being free of all that, we think we have chosen our peers. In reality, a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another, posting to different regiments, the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting—any of these chances might have kept us apart… — C.S. Lewis
“In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations – that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted… Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes.” ― Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
“It’s a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn’t even know you were aiming for.” ― Lois McMaster Bujold
Love Between You and Intelligent Life
Creating Love With Computers
TED Talk: April 26th 2013
Started Creating Early May 2013
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Finished Creating May 27th 2013
Posted May 27th 2013
Can a techno gadget love you back if you love your techno gadget?
SPOILER ALERT!
I watched the TV version on Twilight Zone of Ray Bradbury’s short story: “I Sing the Body Electric.” Season 3 Episode 35 (available on HULUPLUS.) It gave me a view into the question whether a human can love a computer who responds in kind with the love the human is seeking. In Bradbury’s story, a family of three young children have lost their mother. A father has lost his wife. He loves his children deeply. But he worries they will be denied the attention they need while he is working long hours to make a living. The son has what he believes is the answer. A magazine with an advertisement: “I Sing the Body Electric” is the motto of the company Facsimile Limited. “To parents who worry about inadequate nurses in schools, who are concerned about the moral and social development of their children, we have perfected an electronic data processing system, in the shape of an elderly woman. A woman built with precision with the incredible ability of giving loving supervision to your family.”
The family investigate the truth behind the ad. Two of the children and the dad are enthusiastic but one child is overwhelmingly reserved and does not want this to happen. She runs away and her father goes after her. While the two are away, the other two children discuss what they have seen and how they can build the person they want. There final decision is to proceed on their own to create their idea of the perfect “grandmother.” It is done.
On the perfect day outside, while the three children are playing, a woman comes walking down the sidewalk toward them, carrying a suitcase. She stops in front of them. The inquisition begins. The children discover she is their creation. Those who created her are thrilled, the other child rejects her and runs into the house.
It takes time but after a traumatic incident the girl finally accepts their new grandmother. It seems after losing her mother, she feared everyone would abandon her. Their promises were not reassurance enough for the young girl to feel safe opening up her feelings to someone new. Once she realized her new grandmother would never leave and she could trust it, she hugged her new grandmother who hugged her in return. A hug filled with love, real, true love. It was as real as any love that could be shared between humans.
Can you make a machine that can love?
SPOILER ALERT!
In the film “Blade Runner,” Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, falls in love with a replicant, Rachel, played by Sean Young. At first he doesn’t know she is a replicant and she doesn’t know either. He does his replicant test on her, which she is aware that he is doing. They fall for each other, even though they discover she is a machine. Basically, it makes no difference to either of them. He falls in love with her anyway. Her feelings are confused but there is a mutual attraction.
Deckard is part of law enforcement seeking four replicants who hijacked a spaceship and returned to Earth to seek their maker, to find out why they exist and why they must die. They have a termination date built in their system, set for a specific length of time. Not all replicants are aware of this determination but the ones that are want to know the answer like most humans do, why do I have to die.
Rachel is not part of the group of four. But she needs answers, too. She doesn’t know how upgraded she actually is. One being that she doesn’t have a termination date and that she is a replicant until Deckard finds that out through his tests. They meet at the Doctor’s office, who is the creator of the replicants. She lives with the Doctor in a Platonic relationship. Deckard is seeking answers as well from the Doctor. After Deckard talks to the Doctore, one of the four replicants kill the Doctor because he doesn’t give him the answers he wants. Which makes absolutely no sense.
At the end, Deckard and Rachel go off together, not before he finishes his assignment of terminating the four rebellious and violent rogue replicants.
So a good ending of love found between a human and a computer machine, who had developed the ability to love in the way of a human.
Doug Carmean, a computer architect at Intel, explores the relationships between people and computers in this TED Talk: Creating Love With Computers. He is trying to answer questions regarding computers and humans.
Does a computer have an ability to use it’s processors toward being able to love a human?
Computers are as complex as a human.
Machines have the capacity to love but they are sociopaths.
Would the machines want to run our lives?
Doug has put a team together of people. A requirement to be part of the team is you have to have emotions. Examples are psychologists, artists, etc.
Want to build set of tools that will build up communications.
Taking the sinister aspects out of it.
Communication: IM. Email. Messaging.
Look at the emotional part of it.
Combined with pronoun usage. You can tell a lot about the usage of pronouns.
Responding with long texts. If you get a note and respond too slow or too fast it will determine what is happening with you.
Theory of mind: Build a notion of the way people will respond to communications.
Treat people the way they want to be treated not the way you want to be treated.
Looking at loneliness.
Showing photo that reminds you of that person in order to develop a familiarity.
Believe that eventually that machine will love.
Some of the ideas looked at in this video. It would be a wonder to develop such a machine that would be able to have an interactive relationship with a human as a human would have with another human. Think of what it would do for loneliness and the multitude of possibilities this would create.
Something that has been pondered throughout time through imagination and the actual construction of an interaction between a data machine and a human.
I am quite interested in seeing where the possibilities will lead.
Why can’t a human feel attached to a computer, replicant, the way we would relate to another human and not feel a difference?
Is it possible to take the development of computer to human that far into a real system that worked as it would in someone’s imagination? By Jennifer Kiley
awash with water one lone tree’s reflection
The Seekers — Colours of My Life
QUOTATIONS on CHANGING/GROWING/IDENTITY:
(Can Humans Love Machines?)
(Can Machines Love Humans?)
“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” ― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
“Let go of certainty. The opposite isn’t uncertainty. It’s openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow.” ― Tony Schwartz
“We are all equal in the fact that we are all different. We are all the same in the fact that we will never be the same. We are united by the reality that all colours and all cultures are distinct & individual. We are harmonious in the reality that we are all held to this earth by the same gravity. We don’t share blood, but we share the air that keeps us alive. I will not blind myself and say that my black brother is not different from me. I will not blind myself and say that my brown sister is not different from me. But my black brother is he as much as I am me. But my brown sister is she as much as I am me.”
― C. JoyBell C.
“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.” ― Alan Cohen
“I think that the best kind of change, is the change that comes from the inside and begins it’s way out until it emerges on the outside; a change that is born underneath then continues and spreads until it has reached the surface. That’s a true change. A powerful change. And I have found that while we are emerging, changing into something glorious; it is actually us becoming who we really are. A water lily is born underneath the water, inside the soil at the bottom of the river or lake. And the water lily has always been a water lily for that whole time that it was sprouting out of the wet soil, reaching up through the dark water towards the sunlight, stretching and grasping for the surface; where it then buds and blooms on the outside in the sunshine. It doesn’t bud and bloom on the surface and then try to reach down below into the soil.” ― C. JoyBell C.
“It is in this darkness that I have found all light— somehow become so bright, a shooting star on a stormy night.” ― Coco J. Ginger
“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” ― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
“Let go of certainty. The opposite isn’t uncertainty. It’s openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow.” ― Tony Schwartz
“Love only grows by sharing. You can only have more for yourself by giving it away to others.” ― Brian Tracy
“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.” ― Alan Cohen
“Imagining…is better than remembering something”
POST CREATED BY JENNIFER KILEY
ILLUSTRATED by j. kiley
Created May 23rd 2013
Posted May 24th 2013
garp book cover
“Imagining something is better than remembering something.” — John Irving
garp and helen outside house predisastered
“Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat.” — Garp, “The World According to Garp”
“Oh FUCK the longings and agonies of youth.” – T.S Garp
garp and helen on bleechers
Q: What is your thoughts on the future of books? asking John Irving “If you are careful,’ Garp wrote, ‘if you use good ingredients, and you don’t take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard, sane.”
“You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I’m going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life.” — John Irving; The World According To Garp
glenn close as jenny fields in “the world according to garp”
“A part of adolescence is feeling that there’s no one else around who’s enough like yourself to understand you.” — T.S. Garp, The World According to Garp
dean of garp’s school has head injury. jenny is telling him about how she conceived garp. he is shocked. his verbal response, being in a state of shock, “you raped a dying man!” now you will have to read the book or see film to find out why this is so hysterically funny.
Between Helen and Garp, the Under Toad became their code phrase for anxiety. Long after the monster was clarified for Walt (‘Undertow, dummy, not Under Toad!’ Duncan had howled), Garp and Helen evoked the beast as a way of referring to their own sense of danger. When the traffic was heavy, when the road was icy – when depression had moved in overnight – they said to each other, ‘The Under Toad is strong today’.
‘Remember’, Duncan asked on the plane, ‘how Walt asked if it was green or brown?’
Both Garp and Duncan laughed. But it was neither green nor brown, Garp thought. It was me. It was Helen. It was the color of bad weather. It was the size of an automobile.” — John Irving in The World According to Garp
helen at gym watching wrestling practice
John Irving – 2009 National Book FestivalThe World According To Garp
The Hotel New Hampshire
The Cider House Rules
A Prayer From Owen Meanie
In Own Person
Last Night In Twisted River“You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.” — John Irving, The World According to Garp
The amazing John Lithgow as Roberta Muldoon in “The World According to Garp,” a film based on John Irving’s novel of the same name. The 1982 movie includes John Lithgow as a transsexual ex-football player, Robin Williams as the writer T. S. Garp, and Glenn Close as Garp’s mother. Lithgow’s heartfelt performance won him an Academy Award nomination! The trailer from YouTube.
garp with roberta muldoon former football player on nfl now jenny’s bodyguard
“Imagining something is better than remembering something.” — John Irving, The World According to Garp
“Perhaps in every writer’s life there needs to be that moment when some other writer is attacked as unworthy of the job.” — John Irving, The World According to Garp
“Don Whitcomb would remember that Garp told him what the act of starting a novel felt like. ‘It’s like trying to make the dead come alive,’ he said. ‘No, no, that’s not right – it’s more like trying to keep everyone alive, forever. Even the ones who must die in the end. They’re the most important to keep alive.’ Finally, Garp said it in a way that seemed to please him. ‘A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases,’ Garp said.” — John Irving, The World According to Garp
Before we go to the story of the under toad I would like to quote one of my favorite lines from the book and the film. Garp says it to his son, Duncan, who is inside a baby carriage at the time. “Don’t be a baby Duncan, say ‘Da-Da.’ This line makes me laugh every time I hear it. Now to the Under Toad.
The Under Toad Is Strong Today
It was Walt’s fourth summer at Dog’s Head Harbor, Duncan remembered, when Garp and Helen and Duncan observed Walt watching the sea. He stood ankle-deep in the foam from the surf and peered into the waves, without taking a step, for the longest time. The family went down to the water’s edge to have a word with him.
“What are you doing, Walt?” Helen asked.
“What are you looking for, dummy?” Duncan asked him.
“I’m trying to see the Under Toad,” Walt said.
“The what?” said Garp.
“The Under Toad,” Walt said. ” I’m trying to see it. How big is it?”
And Garp and Helen and Duncan held their breath; they realized that all these years Walt had been dreading a giant toad, lurking offshore, waiting to suck him under and drag him out to sea. The terrible Under Toad.
Garp tried to imagine it with him. Would it ever surface? Did it ever float? Or was it always down under, slimy and bloated and ever-watchful for ankles its coated tongue could snare? The vile Under Toad.
Between Helen and Garp, the Under Toad became their code phrase for anxiety. Long after the monster was clarified for Walt ( “Undertow, dummy, not Under Toad!” Duncan had howled), Garp and Helen evoked the beast as a way of referring to their own sense of danger. When the traffic was heavy, when the road was icy – when depression had moved in overnight – they said to each other, “The Under Toad is strong today.”
“Remember,” Duncan asked on the plane, “how Walt asked if it was green or brown?”
Both Garp and Duncan laughed. But it was neither green nor brown, Garp thought. It was me. It was Helen. It was the color of bad weather. It was the size of an automobile.
(Excerpt from The World According to Garp by John Irving)
garp and helen in bed pre-cheating maybe
“‘Death, it seems,’ Garp wrote, ‘does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.’” — John Irving; The World According to Garp (1978)
The World According to Garp by John Irving
The World According to Garp is a comic and compassionate coming-of-age novel that established John Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation. A worldwide bestseller since its publication in 1978, Irving’s classic is filled with stories inside stories about the life and times of T. S. Garp, novelist and bastard son of Jenny Fields—a feminist leader ahead of her time. Beyond that, The World According to Garp virtually defies synopsis.
John IRVING on InnerVIEWS with Ernie Manouse “Another thing I noticed while rereading was how clear Irving’s writing is, sentence by sentence. Critics don’t give Irving much credit for his prose style, maybe because his zany plots and characters overshadow it. (Or maybe it’s his enthusiastic use of italics and exclamation points.) But I was impressed by how gracefully he writes, even when he’s being “unsubtle.” There is a transparency to his exposition that is not easy to achieve, but Irving does nothing to draw attention to his effort. In contemporary fiction, this lack of preciousness is rare. Irving’s style has only become simpler over the years. It’s almost as if he decided to keep his prose straightforward so that his plotting could become more elaborate.” — Hannah Gersen, ”Collision Courses and Castration Anxiety: Rereading John Irving.”
helen in black could be when she is telling student she has to end their affair
roberta hugging jenny
garp reading mom’s jenny fields book
“Jenny had read enough stories to know that hers didn’t sound like the good stories in her memory. She wondered what could be wrong, and she frequently sent Garp on errands to the few bookstores that sold books in English. She wanted to look more closely at how books began; she had quickly produced over three hundred typed pages, yet she felt that her book never really started.” — John Irving, The World According to GarpThe World According to Garp (John Irving 1978)
This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields—a feminist leader ahead of her times. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes—even of sexual assassinations. It is a novel rich with “lunacy and sorrow”; yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust. In more than thirty languages, in more than forty countries—with more than ten million copies in print—this novel provides almost cheerful, even hilarious evidence of its famous last line: “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”
garp in drag at his mom’s memorial service. no men allowed.
“A few windows are open, a few refrigerators are humming. There is the faint, trapped warble from some televisions tuned in to The Late Show, and the blue-gray glow from the picture tubes throbs from a few of the houses. To Garp this glow looks like cancer, insidious and numbing, putting his world to sleep. Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer’s irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn’t reading.” — John Irving, The World According to Garp
garp with roberta at jenny’s memorial
“Imagining something better than remembering something.” — John Irving, The World According to Garp
“He wrote once that a novel was ‘only a place for storage – of all the meaningful things that a novelist isn’t able to use in his life.’” — John Irving, The World According to Garp
garp in bed depressed
John Irving talks sex, social misfits, and writing
Why do you keep returning to the politics of sexual identity in your work?
When I finished “The World According to Garp” in 1978, I was naïve enough to think that I will never write about this subject again; that our intolerance of our own sexual differences will surely go away, and that Garp will be seen someday as a relic of the post-sexual-liberation days, when men and women still literally were killing one another. In that book, a man is killed by a woman who hates men. His mother is murdered by a man who hates women. It’s a kind of dual sexual-assassination story, a cynical way of saying: well you think there was a sexual revolution, how come men and women hate each other?
But there isn’t anything that extreme in your latest novel.
True, but it’s still the same damn subject. It’s still about our obstinate intolerance to sexual differences. It explores our lingering suspicion, distrust, dislike, and non-acceptance of our sexual identities.JOHN IRVING’S novel, “In One Person”, is narrated by Billy Abbot, a bisexual author, who recalls coming of age in a small New England town in the 1950s. As a thoughtful, tormented teenager, Billy takes a fancy to various people, such as his stepfather, his friend’s mother, the captain of the school wrestling team, and the local librarian, Miss Frost (who reveals to Billy an important secret about her own identity). The mood of the latter half of the book darkens when Billy moves to New York in the 1980s and witnesses the tragic fallout of the AIDS epidemic.
Mr Irving published his debut novel “Setting Free the Bears” in 1968. But it was “The World According to Garp”, his fourth book, which made him an internationally renowned bestselling author. Four of his books have been adapted for the screen, including “The Cider House Rules”, for which Mr Irving won an Academy Award for the adapted screenplay in 2000In a conversation with The Economist, Mr Irving talks about discovering his own sexual identity as a teenager, how Ronald Reagan ignored the AIDS epidemic, and why he always champions the outsider in his novels.
What interested you in giving a voice to a bisexual male in this novel?
I think there is often a “what if” proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels. I find my way into a lot of characters by thinking ‘what would that be like?’ The character of the sexual misfit—someone out of step with what society’s expectations of sexual relationships are—is very familiar to me.
Did you ever think you might be bisexual?
Growing up in the ’50s and ’60s, I spent more time imagining sex than actually having it. There was a period in that time where I was frightened of half of my sexual fantasises. I was attracted to my friend’s mothers, and I did have an occasional crush on a boy in the wrestling team. [But] I liked girls in my life, and it proceeded in a normal, unchallenged course.
Why do you keep returning to the politics of sexual identity in your work?
When I finished “The World According to Garp” in 1978, I was naïve enough to think that I will never write about this subject again; that our intolerance of our own sexual differences will surely go away, and that Garp will be seen someday as a relic of the post-sexual-liberation days, when men and women still literally were killing one another. In that book, a man is killed by a woman who hates men. His mother is murdered by a man who hates women. It’s a kind of dual sexual-assassination story, a cynical way of saying: well you think there was a sexual revolution, how come men and women hate each other?
But there isn’t anything that extreme in your latest novel.
True, but it’s still the same damn subject. It’s still about our obstinate intolerance to sexual differences. It explores our lingering suspicion, distrust, dislike, and non-acceptance of our sexual identities.
Do you represent outsiders and social misfits because mainstream culture fails to? Or do they simply have more nuances as characters?
Both. It’s not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who on the surface are instantly sympathetic. I guess I’m always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them.
Did having an absent father growing up help you to fictionalise him in your novels?
That’s a great way to put it. I use to tease my mother when I decided that I wanted to be a writer, and say: well if you don’t tell me things about who my dad was, I’m going to just make things up. I wouldn’t say this made me a writer. But it was constructive as a teenager to be left to my imagination about who this guy was.
What influence did Dickens have on you?
“Great Expectations” was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write. They were safe people to imitate. There was no way I could sound like Dickens or Hardy if I tried.
What writers from New England influenced your work?
Melville made a huge impact on me. Reading him encouraged me to write about what I most feared, or what I hope never happens to me or anyone I love. I think in every novel of mine there is cloud which you, the reader, knows is coming. Well that comes from Melville.
“In One Person” describes the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. What’s your opinion of how the Reagan administration responded to the crises?
For seven out of eight years of his presidency, Regan did not utter the name of the disease. What is even more incriminating is that it’s hard to imagine that we ever had a president—or will ever have again—who personally knew as many gay guys as he did. He was in the movie business for Christ’s sake. The attitude was: it’s only drug addicts and gay guys who are getting this disease. That wasn’t just said among heartless homophobes, it was actually said by people who were in Reagan’s administration, while Reagan maintained a silence.
Did you have many friends who died of AIDS?
Yes. I was living in New York in the 80s, and as a straight guy I had many gay friends, but I also had friends that I subsequently found out were gay, because they were dying. Similarly, parents found out about their children being gay, because they were dying from AIDS.
When you finished writing “The Cider House Rules” in 1985, were you hopeful that attitudes to abortion rights in the United States would change?
No. I thought this is going to get worse. That minority of people who hate abortion rights, they will always hate it. It’s no surprise that most people in the United States who oppose abortion rights also oppose gay rights too. It’s coming from an element of sexual disapproval. Their attitude is, I don’t like this, therefore it shouldn’t be allowed. It’s what I call in America, the old prohibition instinct: you don’t like drinking, nobody should do it, you don’t like abortion, no one should have one.
What do you rate as the most technically important aspect to your novels?
I think my approach with writing toward a pre-existing ending, knowing what a story is before I begin the first chapter.
Are you referring to your method of writing the last line of the novel first?
Sometimes it can be the last line, maybe the last few paragraphs, or even the last couple of pages. I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.
This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields, a feminist leader ahead of her time. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes, even of sexual assassinations. It is a novel rich with lunacy and sorrow, yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust. In more than thirty languages, in more than forty countries–with more than ten million copies in print–this novel provides almost cheerful, even hilarious evidence of its famous last line: “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”
garp quote: “we are all terminal cases” over jenny fields nurse’s uniform
How I’d sell The World According to Garp in a few sentences
It is a gripping book that connects you to every character in the story. In the end, it manages to encompass and successfully interweave themes that are central to the politics and societal issues of both the old and modern worlds and it explores paradigms of feminism and sexual roles in a concentrated manner.
Read it.
Be advised, though. This book is not for those who are prone to lightheartedness at the mention of bodily limbs gone awry/gone, period.
For those of you who would rather watch a story play out on the big screen, there’s a 1982 film based off the book starring Robin Williams as T.S. Garp, the namesake of the novel, and Glenn Close as his mother, Jenny Fields.
“They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.” — John Irving
“Life is an X-rated soap opera.” — John Irving, The World According to Garp
QUOTATIONS by JOHN IRVING:
“…but writers, Garp knew, were just observers – good and ruthless imitators of human behavior” — John Irving from The World According to Garp. (I can’t stress how important this quotation is to me. J.I.)
garp says: i’ll stay up and think weird thoughts for awhile
“Not only were certain types of arrogance tolerated by the society of the Steering School, certain kinds were encouraged; but acceptable arrogance was a matter of taste and style. What you were arrogant about had to appear worthy- of higher purpose- and the manner in which you were arrogant was supposed to be charming.” — John Irving, The World According To Garp u
“Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness – in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough. ” — John Irving
“I feel like Irving has a sense of reality that is so spot on, despite the fact that his subject matter feels almost fantastical. How he manages to meld these opposing qualities in such an imaginative way is just beyond my understanding, but man does it make for good reading.”– Unknown
“She felt if she ever had children she would love them no less when they were twenty than when they were two; they might need you more at twenty, she thought. What do you really need when you’re two? In the hospital, the babies were the easiest patients. The older they got, the more they needed; and the less anyone wanted or loved them.” — John Irving (The World According to Garp)
“If you don’t feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn’t very vital” -John Irving
“In this dirty minded world you are either somebody’s wife or somebody’s whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other. I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone. That made me a sexual suspect. Then I wanted a baby, but I didn’t want to have to share my body or my life to have one. That made me a sexual suspect too.” — John Irving, The World According to Garp
“There are always suicides among people who are unable to say what they mean.” — John Irving
“As for Jenny, she felt that women—just like men—should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.” — Jenny Fields (The World According To Garp)
“Garp has to die; it’s what the book is about, a double assassination of a mother and her son. More to the point: a woman who is killed by a woman-hating man and a man who is killed by a woman who hates men.” — John Irving, on the end of The World According to Garp.
“It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.” — John Irving (The World According to Garp)
“I may have written this novel twenty years ago, but I go back there almost every day—back to those fears. Even the smallest detail of The World According to Garp is an expression of fear; even the curious pockmark on the face of the Viennese prostitute—it is also an expression of that most terrible fear. “The silvery gouge on her forehead was nearly as big as her mouth; her pockmark looked to Garp like a small, open grave.” A child’s grave …
When Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. “I lost one, too,” they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn’t lost any children. I’m just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. — John Irving
“Garp would say that the autobiographical basis – if there even was one – was the least interesting level on which to read a novel. He would always say that the art of fiction was the act of imagining truly – was, like any art, a process of selection.”– Unknown
“He wrote Helen that a young writer needs desperately to live with someone and he had decided that he wanted to live with her; even marry her, he offered, because sex was simply necessary but it took too much of one’s time if one had to be constantly planning how one was going to get it. Therefore, Garp reasoned, it is better to live with it!
Helen revised several letters before she finally sent him one that said that he could, so to speak, go stick it in his ear. Did he think she was going through college so rigorously so that she could provide him with sex that was not even necessary to plan?” — from Garp — John Irving
“Don’t you want to know how I die?” Garp asked them.
They didn’t say anything.
“I kill myself,” Garp said, pleasantly. “In order to become fully established that seems almost necessary. I mean it, really,” Garp said. “In the present fashion, you’ll agree this is one way of recognizing a writer’s seriousness? Since the art of the writing doesn’t always make the writer’s seriousness apparent, it’s something necessary to reveal the depth of one’s personal anguish by other means. Killing yourself seems to mean that you were serious after all. It’s true,” Garp said, but his sarcasm was unpleasant and Helen sighed; John Wolf stretched again. “And thereafter,” Garp said, “much seriousness is suddenly revealed in the work—where it had escaped notice before.” — From “The World According to Garp,” by John Irving
”Your memory is a monster; you forget – it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you – and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!” — John Irving – The World According To Garp
“Human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions.” — Garp in The World According to Garp by John Irving
“It is an important distinction to note that she looked not only as if she had taken good care of herself, but that she had good reason to have done so … She looked to be in such total possession of her life that only the most confident men could continue to look at her if she looked back at them. Even in bus stations, she was a woman who was stared at only until she looked back.” — The World According To Garp
“a manner betraying both carelessness and intense perfection” — Unknown
The Mystery of Storytelling
TED Talk Julian Friedmann @ TEDxEaling
Post written and Created by Jennifer Kiley
Post Created May 20th 2013
Posted May 23rd 2013
The World According to Garp by John Irving
The first book I read of John Irving. It was turned into a film and there is nothing about this book or film that follow the rules of how Americans always get there Happy Endings. It is a brilliant book and a film I wasn’t sure I liked when I first saw it. Reason is that so much was left out from the book. Eventually, though I realized that the film was quite unique on its own. So I love both book and film and we are not talking about sentimental happy endings or all is good and nothing bad ever happens. This has so many surprises. If you haven’t read the book or seen the film I highly recommend both.
I will warn you that this TED Talk starts out rather brutal in talking about the expectations of a screenwriter, in having a script accepted, which I would say could be applied to writers in a general manner. The rejection words are quite a deal more prevalent according to the speaker of this TED Talk. It happens that he is an agent. A very good one after you get past his opening statements. Don’t fall off the mountain until you listen to more of the video. It’s not that he becomes more encouraging but he does have some rather good points to tell writers, screen or otherwise.
He talks a great deal about writers and writing. The thoughts of famous writers come up. What they think is important for a writer to know. Language. Storytelling. Most famous writers will tell you, of course, to write from out of your own experiences. When asked if there is a formula to writing, the answers come back to some of the origins of storytelling. For example: Campfire tales. Some ingredients to storytelling: Pity. Fear. Catharsis. Beethoven’s approach to a happy ending comes up. His theory is: Suffering. Struggle. Overcoming.
I must say that I am only giving you an overall view of what was talked about on this video. Listening to the video will give you a great deal more. So I shall continue.
Why do we need stories? It all started with Cave paintings. One goes out into the woods to kill a wild animal. Prehistoric caves were the first cinema. They rehearse there fear by looking at the cave paintings. The same is true with the audience in today’s theatres. What do we do to the audience to make it so they have experiences?
Now, this next point, I have a friend who will get a laugh out of this one. It seems that American films love to have happy endings. Did I mention the speaker is British? Well, yes he is. He feels that no one can compete with the American film maker. They have more money and bigger stars. That may be so in American and how the world reacts to the US stars but I feel that British and Australia actors, male and female, are much better. More interesting to watch and to listen to. I rather hate it when a Brit is cast in a role and must lose their British accent for the part. I always wish that they would change the character into someone British so that the actor would be able to speak in their normal tongue.
But back to American film makers, they like accessible characters and once again, they like to have sentimental happy endings. One of the parts that take away the anticipation of what kind of ending will happen that will surprise you rather than being able to breath a sigh of relief that all’s well that ends well. I know from sudden shocking experiences from watching British Television shows or Films, main characters die. And you/I am shocked and saddened that a character that I looked forward to seeing again later is now dead or they lose the love of their life. No, so the British do not appease the audience, nor do they hold your hand and say: “Don’t worry, everything is going to be alright. Everything will be perfectly fine.” I mean, just look at Mary Poppins, she always leaves at the end and you really don’t want her to, but she does. Now in the movie, the happy ending is that the family find their way back to each other. How I won’t say, you have to see the film, if you haven’t already.
This interview will counter the theory that Americans always write for the Happy Ending. Maybe that is why I fell in love with the first novel I read that John Irving wrote (It wasn’t his 1st Novel by my first one I read of his): “The World According To Garp.” He doesn’t hold back on what happens to his characters. it is a great novel to start with. It will make you a guaranteed fan, unless you’re brain dead. He shows his brilliance as a writer in “GARP.” Every turn of the page a surprise. Quite magical and diverse and he loves BEARS, Gizzlies. {{{Smile}}}
Next issue is Dialogue: American movies have 2/3rds less dialogue. Also, Americans have lower levels of expectation in their educations. Basically, I think he was saying that a great many Americans are rather stupid and often more ignorant, also. He has his point there. A lot of Americans are not that bright. They, also, tend to be dangerous and vote for the wrong people at elections. So, in American films, there is a tendency to tell their stories in a much more visual way. An audience believes what they see. They do not believe what they hear. Scenes are also shorter in American films. They cut off a bit from the beginning and the ending of a scene to make the audience figure out what happens. They want the audience to work for it. It does give them something to do while the film just shows the ridiculous. There is so much garbage produced today. It is quite rare to find the GEM.They do occasionally exist. But it is like what Kurt Cobain says: “I liked it better when I didn’t have money. You’d walk into a shop and find something unique that sets off in your imagination, that you just want to possess that object, but you aren’t sure you can afford it. Then you find out you can but barely. So you buy it, and it becomes the treasure that you so rarely find. Now when you have all the money you have ever needed you lose those moments of discovery. Because you can afford everything and anything you want. Those special moments have been lost forever.”
Well, in the film industry, those moments have mostly been lost forever. The majority of films given the “Green Light” and then made mostly turn out to be crap. That is very disappointing and you are not really sure who you can trust anymore who will be offering you a gem or fake jewelry. You’re on your own. I will never lie here. If I find a film that I find that is fascinating and brilliant, I will be sure to tell you and encourage you to definitely see it. But keep in mind those treasures are becoming more and more difficult to find in the sand. You need more than a metal detector these days.
Next topic comes up around discussing Diana Rigg: Worse reviews ever book. When writing a screenplay or writing anything, there are a lot of rejections. Not only that, but you will be rejected by people who are less talented then you are. He apologizes and asks that “writers please forgive us agents.Remember us when you make it.”
Writers, after they make it, can say: “Only we are the storytellers.” And the writers thinking to themselves: “Very High and Mighty Agents Think That They Have the Power.”
Now if what I have written makes you curious and you’d like to know more, then I would suggest you will enjoy this speaker’s TED Talk on this video on “The Mystery of Storytelling.” I love routing through the TED Talk library to find the gems. This is one of them. And trust me, even in the TED Talks, there are not many that shine, either. “The Mystery of Storytelling ” does and the next one I am going to present does, also. You will like the concept behind that one also. It’s a rather curious subject matter, that causes your mind to ponder and some who I feel who will want the possibility it discusses to have to inside/outside chance of an underlying truth to it.
I’d say that one will be released from “the secret keeper in the next few days. I am the walking wounded and did several work ups on posts before I went in for some surgery. This is the year of the scalpel for me but don’t worry I promised to “POST A POST-A-DAY” and I will. Some of the time I may draw from some of my favorite POSTS, just updated and added onto. Everyone grows in their thinking and hopefully I will as well and be able to add more now from where I was then when one of my ideas became a post in need a growing but it had to have a beginning somewhere. Let’s hope that works. Or maybe I will heal in short spurts and moments when my mind and body work and creativity is alive and well inside of me.
So, press the play button and enjoy this TED Talk on “The Mystery of Storytelling.” Writer or not, everyone usually loves a good story and Julian Friedmann tells a good one on this Video. Hope you can get passed his opening comments, because once done, the video has a great deal to say that is quite brilliant and worth the listen. ENJOY. BE PATIENT AND LET THE FOOTAGE ROLL.
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” ― Philip Pullman
“Every great love starts with a great story…” ― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.” ― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
“There are books full of great writing that don’t have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story… don’t be like the book-snobs who won’t do that. Read sometimes for the words–the language. Don’t be like the play-it-safers who won’t do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.” ― Stephen King
“Funny how a beautiful song could tell such a sad story” ― Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key
“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.” ― Willa Cather
“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.” ― Doris Lessing, Under My Skin
“You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.” ― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus [My comment about the book "The Night Circus"---EXCEPTIONAL. Discovered through a "Like" page on FB. Rented through library, then begged for it as a Christmas Present. It is a MAGICAL, MYSTICAL, METAPHYSICAL book, that should be read by all who find the MYSTERIOUS fascinating. It is up there with the EXCEPTIONAL few books that hold you HYPNOTICALLY in the ETHER and will not let you go until the very end. And I am not sure if you are released even then. THE NIGHT CIRCUS is high on my list of originality in storytelling. HIGHLY RECOMMEND. May even have done a review of it after the first time I read it. It was a rush read job b/c I didn't own the book then but did get it as a present. Now I want to read it again. Don't have it on Kindle so it has been hidden due to some rearranging and organizing of my writing space and overhauling it with a new couch for my recoveries. Can't do stairs for awhile. So I get to relax a bit and get to catch up on reading books I've wanted to spend time with and to veg out a bit with old and new films I have wanted to watch.] NEXT!
“No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
“Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.” ― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
TIME TO TAKE MY DRUGS TO KNOCK OUT THE PAIN AND MY BRAIN AT THE SAME TIME AND OFF INTO STRUGGLING TO STAY AWAKE OR TO GIVE INTO SLEEP. I AM AFRAID TO SAY THAT THE SLEEP STATE SO FAIR HAS WON OUT ON ME. THE DRUGS THE HOSPITAL AND DOC/SURGEON PRESCRIBED KNOCK ME ON MY ASS. I AM BARELY ABLE TO KEEP MY EYE LIDS FROM STAYING OPEN. I SUPPOSE THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT BUT OH HOW I HATE TO SURRENDER. ENJOY THE VIDEOS. THEY ARE INSIGHTFUL AND SHARE THE INNER WORKINGS OF JOHN IRVING THE AUTHOR/WRITER AND ON THE TED TALK AN AGENT WHO IS HONEST BUT UNFORTUNATELY FINDS US LIVING IN A WORLD WHERE THE IMAGINATION IS NOT HONOURED IN THE MANNER TO WHICH IT IS DUE AND SURFACE CRAP SO FAR FROM BEING CREATIVE IS WHAT WE ARE FINDING IT REPLACED WITH. IT IS THE RUINATION OF THE WORLD OF ART. WE HAVE TO STAY STRONG AND KEEP REMINDING PEOPLE THAT ART IS THE SAVING GRACE OF OUR CIVILIZATION AND IF IT GOES SO GOES CULTURE AND THAT WHICH HOLDS IT TOGETHER. EVER HEARD OF SODOM AND GOMORRAH? WELL, IF YOU HAVEN’T I WOULD LOOK IT UP. WHEN YOU LOSE YOUR CENTER ALL COLLAPSES AROUND YOU. jk the secret keeper By Jennifer Kiley POWER TO THE CREATIVE UNIVERSE/MULTIVERSES. YEAH !
Silver Linings Playbook & The Stigma of Bipolar
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Film Review taken from Salon
Post Created with a short comment at the end
by jk the secret keeper
Posted 05.01.13
Bradley Cooper, star of Silver Linings Playbook, an Oscar-nominated film about a man living with bipolar disorder. His recent film is making progress toward removing the stigma of mental illness. I am changing the two words to Mentally Creative or Mentally Interesting. The medical community is trying to move away from diagnosing Bipolar or other issues with the brain as “Mental Illness.” They are Brain illnesses or diseases. They are not behavior problems or mental problems. Not should they be stigmatized. When you have the flu you treat it in order to get better. When you have Bipolar you treat it so that you have a better control of what is causing the patient to exhibit the brain illness. There are a variety of ways to treat bipolar as there are people that have that brain dis-ease. I don’t use medications with the exception of one. My thoughts are that you treat bipolar the way that is best for you. I try to work on what helps me keep it under better control. I am still new at it and not very good at following the ways that work the best. But bipolar tends to make you stubborn sometimes. That I have to work on, also. But to stigmatize anyone for having something they were born with or inherited or just woke up one day and there it is bipolar or any other brain illness. You don’t back away from someone with cancer or Parkinson’s or any other physical ailment. Well, bipolar is a physical part of you that is not functioning in a manner in which makes your life easier to live. by jk the SK
Silver Linings Playbook is a film that is a personal movie for David O’Russell and when the group all came together to do the film, it became a personal movie for all of them. Tiffany, played by Jennifer Lawrence, serves as a catalyst and she’s the first person who actually sees who Pat is. Pat is played by Bradley Cooper. That’s the thing that this film has done, people around this country who have seen this film say “this film actually sees who I am” because bipolar is heavily stigmatized, its not a very treatable disease and it’s a condition that is diagnosed way too late. So hopefully, a movie like this will help it become less stigmatized in the onset. The best thing about this movie is that it will be able to reach out and make people feel included. ~ Bradley Cooper
I watched the film last night. My reaction immediately was to think of a way to make a film, write the script for a film, where instead of the mentally creative or mentally interesting being the center and the ones stigmatized, that it wouldn’t be that way at all, instead those that are stigmatized are the folks we consider “normal,” they are the ones we feel uncomfortable around and they are the ones who are put in the outskirts of society and the ones who are stigmatized. If you think about it, those who have bipolar feel uncomfortable around people who are “normal,” those who think they are above those who have problems with the brain. Bipolar isn’t a behavior problem or a mental illness, which I find to be an offensive term. Those with bipolar have the fortunate or unfortunate DNA or the brain misfirings that cause some of the “bipolar reactions” the world has toward bipolar or any other person who is mentally interesting or mentally challenged. Why do “normal” people feel that they have any better a grasp on the truth of life on how to live it than someone who has been “blessed” with the gift of bipolar.
Bipolar is something that is extremely difficult to live with, where every moment or split second could change in your reaction to your world and the way you relate to the people around you. You can fly off the handle and lose your temper from a slight change in your environment. Is that really something to be afraid of? I don’t think so. “Normal” people have moods, also. Yes, bipolar, there are mood changes, the thoughts race around your mind because you have so many ideas firing off in your brain at any given time. Life is exciting. Creating art is a major benefit that can be quite satisfying and comes at one in a rapid firing sort of way. It can be exhilarating. But in that same split second you may find yourself triggered by something you are unaware of that pushes you close to the edge of falling into a dark hole. And most times, you aren’t going to be able to catch a hold of something that will keep you from falling in. It’s an endless fall, like in Alice In Wonderland, except she eventually reaches the bottom and there usually is light there. Bipolar, the lights have gone out.
Finding your way in the dark, when you are feeling nothing but pure tortuous emotional, physical, psychological and spiritual pain, is overwhelming and blinding. Eventually, bipolar will take you to the edge that starts the voices up that make you want to kill yourself or harm yourself. If you have found a discipline when you reach this bottom level like writing or creating art, you usually start that up immediately. And you keep writing or doing your visual arts until you create something that satisfies your opinion that you have succeeded. This may be enough to level you out temporarily and you then may be able to sleep. But even then, you turn on the Walkman with the ear buds in, so not to disturb anyone else with the loudness of your music. The loudness is so that you can only hear the sound of the music and nothing else. It doesn’t usually shut out the death march. That goes on. The thoughts haunt you but you must think them. Bipolar takes you on a journey until you fall asleep.
Hopefully by morning the feelings are under control. Of course, that sleep may take you to 15 or more hours from when you close your eyes. It’s the only way to get back on track. Most likely you haven’t had any sleep in the past day or two. The benefits are that you may not go down that road of bipolar. If you are fortunate you may go down the high one where what you create makes you feel giddy and everything is delightful and light and the demons are sleeping, which means they are leaving you alone. In that bipolar world everything is happy and you laugh and you want the classical or light music to play and you want to create the uplifting poems or stories or art. You want to keep doing projects, to keep creating. So why is the world so afraid of that.
Being mentally creative or interesting isn’t contagious and bipolar people as a rule could care less about harming anyone else except maybe themselves depending on the mood. The mentally creative have been given a stigmatic bum’s rap for the violence of those who take guns and go off on the innocent of the world. Those people are not doing that because they have a brain disease, they are doing that because they are violent individuals or groups that hate themselves and the people that are in their world. Bipolar tends to want to just take care of themselves and stay away from people that judge them. They may yell suddenly and then settle down and forget about it and may want to throw things when they get frustrated but mostly they don’t have any thoughts of hurting anyone and if they get into a down spiral it is usually themselves they are wanting to harm.
So stigma is all in the mind of those who are afraid of people being real and usually afraid of themselves being real. The “normal” people don’t want their reality being touched by anything that might resemble the actual behavior of someone who is alive in any way that might make them have to have a real thought or feeling. I don’t think “normal” people know what they are. Aren’t they usually following the latest dogmatic leader that tells them how to think and how to feel about someone they don’t like. And what about all those people that don’t want to make the rich pay their fair share of taxes because in their “normal” brains they think that it might be them someday who is rich and when they get there they don’t want to have to pay high taxes. I would say the “normal” are the ones who are a bit deluded and can’t think for themselves. And the ones who are bipolar or any other mentally creative individual are the free thinkers and the ones who don’t judge and the ones who want to help support the world and all the people in it.
Maybe it is about time to take a closer look at who the good guys are and who are the ones fucking up the world. And it’s about time to stop stigmatizing and showing people with mentally creative brains as a threat to the safety of society and to see them as contributors in the way of artists and those with original ideas who will move the society and culture forward. Yes, we may get off the path every so often but doesn’t everyone need to do a walk about now and again. Stop judging everyone and start co-existing in peace. Accept difference don’t try to make everyone identical to who you are.
by Jennifer Kiley
HERE IS A REVIEW FROM SALON FOR THE FILM: SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK
Friday, Nov 16, 2012 01:01 PM EST
“Silver Linings Playbook” is gold
Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence face love and mental illness in the rich, manic new romantic comedy
By Andrew O’Hehir
We get thrown right into the middle of Pat Solitano Jr.’s troubled life story, without any of the usual context or background. Played by Bradley Cooper in a major departure from his customary sleek pretty-boy roles, Pat is the unhinged, overly intense and not always likable protagonist of David O. Russell’s manic, inventive and rewarding “Silver Linings Playbook.” When we first meet him, he’s standing in the corner of his spartan room in a Baltimore mental hospital, talking to himself. His mom, played by the terrific Australian actress Jacki Weaver, has shown up from Philadelphia to sign him out, against doctor’s orders and without having consulted her husband. What did Pat do that got him locked up in the first place? What’s going on with this family? Why do Pat’s wife and the school where he used to teach have restraining orders against him?
Answers to those questions won’t come into focus for a while, although you may rapidly reach the conclusion that the doctors were right and Pat would be better off heavily medicated and under psychiatric care. Back in the family’s Philly neighborhood, with its slightly desperate upper-fringe-of-the-working-class feeling, Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro) has no idea his younger son is returning home. One of the best and unarguably funniest roles of De Niro’s recent oddball supporting career, Pat Sr. fronts as an Italian-American tough guy but is more like a barely glued together mass of neuroses, a failing bookie with a penchant for disastrous side bets and an intense OCD relationship with the Philadelphia Eagles. (His wardrobe gets better and better as the movie progresses; I can’t stand football, but I want Pat Sr.’s Eagles-green cardigan.)
As for Pat Jr., whose apparel frequently involves a shapeless gray track suit topped with a black garbage bag – so he can sweat off weight as he runs – his first item of business is studying up on the high-school English syllabus his estranged wife, Nikki, is teaching, in hopes of impressing her at some unspecified future date. (Nikki plays an important role in Pat’s story, but almost entirely through her absence.) This leads, however, to Pat flinging a copy of “A Farewell to Arms” through a closed window at 4 o’clock in the morning, and awakening his parents with a maniacal rant against Ernest Hemingway. (He refuses to apologize, blaming Hemingway. Pat Sr. says, rather mildly, “Tell Ernest Hemingway to come down here and apologize to us in person.”) I can’t help detecting a genre commentary of sorts here, whether it originates with Russell (who also wrote the script) or Matthew Quick, author of the original novel: Hemingway was writing one kind of story, which purports to depict the tragedies of the real world in the 20th century and does not demand a happy ending. This is the other kind of story.
In fact, “Silver Linings Playbook” is a romantic comedy, even if it doesn’t feel like one at first. Furthermore, it’s a rom-com that succeeds in revitalizing that discredited genre where so many others have failed, injecting it with the grit and emotion of realist drama rather than with amped-up whimsy or social satire or montages of people walking on the beach while whiny emo-pop plays on the soundtrack. As he did with the boxing movie in “The Fighter,” Russell proves that you can breathe new life into one of the hoariest forms in the Hollywood lexicon. He takes a movie where everyone in the audience knows how it will end and makes us suspend our disbelief and fall in love all over again. (After an entire decade in the indie-film wilderness following his 1999 breakthrough with “Three Kings,” Russell seems to have found himself a niche reinventing classic movie genres.)
It helps, of course, that we’ve got a dynamite couple to fall in love with. Russell has long had a flair for unexpected casting combinations, but I really didn’t expect Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence to be such a combustible duo. (Yes, in real life, there’s a significant age spread between these two: Cooper is 37 and Lawrence 22. At the risk of sounding like a total sexist pig, it doesn’t play that way on-screen.) Finally getting unleashed from his immensely lucrative “Hangover” roles and a series of tepid leading-man movies, Cooper gives a twitchy, physical, marvelously alive performance as Pat Jr., who’s barely aware how poor his impulse control is and doesn’t seem to notice that his face is often marred with mysterious scars and bruises. As for Lawrence, she’s been in so many movies lately that she’s in danger of being overexposed but I only wish her chaste and cautious performance as Katniss Everdeen had one-third of the fire she shows here as Tiffany, a grieving widow going through a spectacular meltdown of her own.
There have been dozens if not hundreds of other movies about two damaged people who find each other, and quite a few that try to wring bittersweet laughs out of the painful struggle with mental illness. But it’s always wonderfully satisfying to see a conventional or archetypal story structure handled with this level of craft and enthusiasm. “Silver Linings Playbook” never feels like a movie you’ve seen before, even if Pat and Tiffany’s ultimate destination is clear the moment they meet. It seems clear to us, of course, but not to them; Tiffany assumes he’ll just be another entry on her long list of recent sexual partners, while Pat clings like a drowning man to the idea that his marriage to the invisible Nikki – which ended in an act of disturbing violence, as we eventually learn – can still be redeemed.
During Tiffany and Pat’s disastrous first date (which Pat insists isn’t a date, because he’s getting back together with Nikki any day now) they eat Raisin Bran at a diner while she regales him with steamy tales about sleeping with all her co-workers (male and female) at her last job. Pat isn’t literally wearing his garbage bag in that scene, but he might as well be. All the crockery ends up on the floor, along with the remnants of Raisin Bran, and we’re left with the realization that these two people are falling in love but may be too screwed-up to deal with it – a phenomenon that afflicts many of us at one time or another, from you and me to David Petraeus and that lady with the upper arms.
There’s no point denying that “Silver Linings Playbook” is shameless cornpone, given that the bumpy course of Pat and Tiffany’s romance includes such elements as a ballroom dancing competition, a crucial showdown between the Eagles and the Dallas Cowboys and a parlay bet orchestrated by Pat Sr. that links the two. Not to mention a deceptive epistolary exchange straight out of classic French theater. But where most American romantic comedies are either made by talentless hacks or by Hollywood pros who can barely conceal their contempt for the material and the audience, this one was made by a leading American director at the height of his powers who’s paying attention to every emotional beat, every cut and every frame. Great cinema? Hell, I don’t know. But one of the most satisfying movies, that much is for sure.
ADDED NOTE BY jk the secret keeper: I need to watch the film again. Somewhere in the middle I thought the film was over and dropped off and came back before the film was over. So I watched the beginning and the end but missed the middle. My partner, Shawn, thought the film was great. What I saw I agree with her. Make a lot of noise in the middle of the night. So you get woken up by someone yelling and he happens to be bipolar. I don’t think that’s enough to threaten to someone that their behavior is going to get them thrown back into the institution. Only in America does one live under that threat if one is not strictly staying in between the lines. Freedom is another word for nothing left to shout about. SINCE WHEN. THERE ARE LOTS OF THINGS TO SHOUT ABOUT. Why do we have to be quiet to keep ourselves from being locked away. I do realize, and I am not going to give away a spoiler, that the main character has done something that makes the law question his behavior more carefully but the extreme I think everyone takes it seems too extreme to me and especially in society those who are different in their brain and act differently. These are not the dark ages and those with brain problems don’t deserve to be treated as lesser citizens. GO RENT THIS FILM. IT IS A QUIRKY ROMANTIC COMEDY. THE ACTORS ARE BRILLIANT. JENNIFER LAWRENCE DESERVED HER ACADEMY AWARD AND IT DESERVED TO BE NOMINATED FOR BEST PICTURE AT THE ACADEMY AWARDS. jk the secret keeper
“If I can’t feel, if I can’t move, if I can’t think, and I can’t care, then what conceivable point is there in living?” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“When you are mad, mad like this, you don’t know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else’s reality, it’s still reality to you.” ― Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life
“Creativity is closely associated with bipolar disorder. This condition is unique . Many famous historical figures and artists have had this. Yet they have led a full life and contributed so much to the society and world at large. See, you have a gift. People with bipolar disorder are very very sensitive. Much more than ordinary people. They are able to experience emotions in a very deep and intense way. It gives them a very different perspective of the world. It is not that they lose touch with reality. But the feelings of extreme intensity are manifested in creative things. They pour their emotions into either writing or whatever field they have chosen” ― Preeti Shenoy, Life is What You Make It
“It was as if my father had given me, by way of temperament, an impossibly wild, dark, and unbroken horse. It was a horse without a name, and a horse with no experience of a bit between its teeth. My mother taught me to gentle it; gave me the discipline and love to break it; and- as Alexander had known so intuitively with Bucephalus- she understood, and taught me, that the beast was best handled by turning it toward the sun.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It’s fun and it’s frightening as hell. Some patients – bipolar type I – experience both extremes; other – bipolar type II – suffer depression almost exclusively. But the “mixed state,” the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression’s paranoid self-loathing.” ― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family
“Compared to bipolar’s magic, reality seems a raw deal. It’s not just the boredom that makes recovery so difficult, it’s the slow dawning pain that comes with sanity – the realization of illnesss, the humiliating scenes, the blown money and friendships and confidence. Depression seems almost inevitable. The pendulum swings back from transcendence in shards, a bloody, dangerous mess. Crazy high is better than crazy low. So we gamble, dump the pills, and stick it to the control freaks and doctors. They don’t understand, we say. They just don’t get it. They’ll never be artists.” ― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family
“Crazy isn’t a condition it’s a place and it exists somewhere between Love and Oblivion” ― Stanley Victor Paskavich
I am recording a post that takes us back in time to show when the little ones Poe, Parker and Carter were climbing around barely but they are the loves of our life. This is then. I will be including in the first video I post a visit into arriving at the NOW. They were born April 22nd 2012. The second one will be a video made two days ago. Shawn made a beautiful video for their birthday. I wanted to compare the two videos together to see how they have changed. Both are on this Post and easily found. I started this on FB but decided it belonged on The Secret Keeper. I am opening up and letting you in to a precious part of our world. Our Animals.
Our Love Child is Carter, the one with the white bib, also nick-named Sparky. He is the Zen Master of our home. The most gentle of bears until yesterday when he tried to give Saki, our Amazon Parrot, a bear hug. He was swiftly removed and pointedly reprimanded for his behavior.
carter being pensive while daydreaming
Saki is a toy to him but he knows he is not allowed such freedoms of his instinctual nature to manifest itself. The three kittens will learn like our other cats, that it is unacceptable behavior at all times. Respect the Beak or Beware of the Pain. Saki has been quite good about not demonstrating what Respect The Beak really means but if she must, SHE MUST. I will not hold her back if it ever came to that.
saki
saki hanging five
Beware the Beak: Has anyone out there been bitten by an Amazon Parrot when she really means it? Trust me it is extremely painful and can go down to the bone. LOTS OF PAIN INVOLVED. Saki protects me by biting me to alert me I am in danger. Which actually, in most cases, not true. Her bites can be casual or go deep into flesh and hurt like Hell. One needs to clean out carefully and make the wound bleed if it is not already doing so. Her beak goes in so deep and the opening closes so fast. Lesson for the day. BEWARE of the BEAK. :-) We ♥ all our babies furry & especially feathery.
chin love their bliss spots
sagan aka buddha baby
willow — an extremely special chin — she is watching over us in the mist
On April 22nd 2013, their one year old Birthday. We had quite the adventure with them. A special treat: Shawn set up our playpen for our chinchillas to romp around in. The first time for the kittens Poe, Parker and Carter to witness this exciting newness. The chins had always been too small to be allowed to use it. It would have been too easily for them to slip through. They are now big enough and the kittens are old enough to experience the excitement and show respect at the same time.
carter the wise
poe parker on top carter to left
carter in his box
carter with brother poe snuggling and huggling 960×720
Of course, Parker decided he was going to jump over the top and join Sagan and Sundance as they ran around. It was momentarily okay until Parker reached out one of his paws to place on top of either Sagan or Sundance. I missed this happening. That is how quickly Shawn responded and whisked Parker out of the playpen. Now that the test trial is over with the playpen, we will have to enact the play time for both kittens and chins more often. Well, the video is a treat Shawn created that shows in stills how the kittens went from wee little creatures to almost full grown ones.
Carter is the one with the white bib and I must admit the favorite of many. But all are unique in their own forms of expression. We were blessed with being given a stray kitten herself, Gatsby, just over a year ago and a week later finding out we were going to be blessed with kittens also. They all filled a gap of many cats we lost over the years from a certain damned disease that effects so many people and only so recently a cat named Spootie-paws.
Spootiepaws Regal
She was my almost constant lap cat for many years but still too few not to miss her terribly when she had to be taken from us. We had to decide her death. And yes, the dreaded disease of Cancer took her also. Surgery didn’t help except to give us two more weeks with her. I posted the gorgeous picture of her just above and I will post one of her rather silly ones also. We love our animals so deeply. Enjoy What Shawn did with this video. She surprised me with the song she chose to cover as a soundtrack. I will hint that it is from the Broadway Show “RENT.” jk the SK
The photo of our Great and Powerful “Spootie-paws” – our most majestic of kitties, shows how regal she could be and also how she can have those silly moments, too. I wrote a poem for her after she had to be put to death. She went from touching my nose at the Animal Shelter where I picked her out as the one we wanted to take home so she could join our family. She loved Shawn and rather tolerated me but slowly we got close. A brief moment here and there on my foot stool to take a nap. Gradually, she worked her way up to my lap over the early years and eventually it was seldom that she wasn’t in my lap always, while tried to type on my laptop, my comments for FB and eventually my blog the secret keeper and of course when I was working on my creative writings, emails and dissertations about one cause or another. All my lap kitties seemed to disappear into the mist at a rather rapid pace. Now there are none.
spootie-paws rather silly and hitting the catnip in our old kitchen. now it is complete new but she never got to enjoy the new one
But something seems to be happening with Sigmund lately. He just started snuggling up close to me in bed and loves to get under the covers. He, also, runs to the bathroom when I head that way so he can get a drink of water at the faucet. I’ve taught several of our cats and kittens to enjoy drinking fresh water in that way. always the water is set just short of dripping so they do get enough water to drink
sigmund snuggling with shawn
sigmund posing in basket
Schroeder does like to snuggle next to me.
schroader after play with degues bubble and squeak
Now that we have a new couch Spike snuggles right next to my thigh or if my legs on up on the couch, Spike likes to intertwine between my ankles. It is great to have the warmth of a cat on a cold winters night.
spike’s towering during imaginary mountain climbing or maybe a tree or two
spike with soyer
this is sanji our smaller version of a totally black lion. he’s big brother and protector to all the kittens and mom gatsby
I miss altogether not having any dogs. Shawn and I had dogs from the start of our relationship up until we had to have Chaucer, our very last dog put to death. It was a difficult decision but it was the right one. Who doesn’t feel guilty when that decision has to be made. It is a fucking difficult and almost impossible decision to make. When their mental faculties are intact but their bodies are not.
chaucer our terrier looked like this when she was planning on how to teach out Amazon Parrot Saki learn how to bark. And she learned the lesson all so well. Too bloody extremely WELL
when chaucer was a puppy before she was abandoned in a state park totally on her own. but she was found and we adopted her. she was a happy cheerful escape artist of the keenly cute kind. no matter what we did with the fence. it didn’t keep her in
Anyway, as you can see I found the two photos I was thinking about that make Spootie in one look Magnificently Regal and in the other like she had been hitting the NIP far above the normal use. Catnip is a part of nature and so far they haven’t banned that and made it illegal. I suppose the government doesn’t care much if cats are stoned and out of control of their well controlled senses. As you can see Spootie-paws is on display and I found the poem that I wrote shortly before her death and dedicated to her. She was and is a part of my soul.
spootie-paws lying over computer keyboard
Spootie-paws Memory Poem
reached out and touched my soul by j. kiley (c) jennifer kiley 2013
QUOTATIONS on CATS:
“The only escape from the miseries of life are music and cats…” ― Albert Schweitzer
“What greater gift than the love of a cat.” ― Charles Dickens
“A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.” ― Ernest Hemingway
“The smallest feline is a masterpiece.” ― Leonardo da Vinci
“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.” ― Jean Cocteau
“Cats can work out mathematically the exact place to sit that will cause most inconvenience.” ― Pam Brown
“Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.” ― Robertson Davies
“Cats are connoisseurs of comfort.” ― James Herriot, James Herriot’s Cat Storie
“I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through.” ― Jules Verne
“I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.” ― Hippolyte Taine
“Holding this soft, small living creature in my lap this way, though, and seeing how it slept with complete trust in me, I felt a warm rush in my chest. I put my hand on the cat’s chest and felt his heart beating. The pulse was faint and fast, but his heart, like mine, was ticking off the time allotted to his small body with all the restless earnestness of my own.” ― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
“What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats?” ― Henry David Thoreau
“That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.” ― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
“There are several cats smoothly moving about, which helped me greatly to relax, for I have always felt that no house is wholly bad where there are cats, and conversely, where there are several cats, a house is bound to be wonderfully charming.” ― Hans Holzer, The Ghost Hunter
In my letter this week, I want to tell you some important things you need to know about the relationship between myself and another member of the group. It came to me that it would make sense for you to get to know me through other members of the group. I speak of two groups, the one you and I meet with every Tuesday and there is the all important group that live inside my own head. Where to begin? I thought I would be talking to you about Angie today.
The way she acted in group today was just a bit dramatic. I try to be understanding. I know about suicide. If it isn’t in my daily or weekly vigil when I sit with my mind I wouldn’t understand why she gets so obsessed with it. Her’s is different than mine. I think through the process, always living through the sensations of dying. But mine is more like the third act of a Shakespeare play. Except Juliet wakes up in time.
Mr. Xxx plays directly into her manipulation. She is not the only member of the group that has suicide on their speed dial. I, sincerely, want to be more compassionate but when someone takes up all the group time continuously, leaving no room for anyone else to talk. It gets tiring to listen. Call it selfish. Well, it is. I talk to Mr. Xxx about it and he tells me I am being insensitive. Well, excuse me, but it is my therapy time, too. I’m not the only one who will tell you they feel abandoned and also have strong feelings and thoughts of suicide.
Mr. Xxx has his two favorites and fuck the rest of us. It puts a giant wedge between our therapist and all of us inside of me. We feel neglected and ignored and abandoned. It isn’t really cool if a therapist repeats the habits of one’s childhood caregivers. He’s great at fucking people up. But Fuck this. I decided I don’t want to think about group any more. Except to say that you need to rescue us. I will speak for myself. I am mentally creative. The other terms I reject. I know I am bipolar and have a list of other mentally creative ways of using my mind but I need to be rescued.
I need to find my soul. It got buried underneath an ocean of invisibly blocked tears. If I ever get to a place when I am able to cry when I allow myself to own my sadness, Noah better be ready to build another arc. You think Alice got washed away in Wonderland. My pool of tears far exceed the norm. Since I was a kid and the tears were made to stop, I feel ashamed when even the slightest hint that a tear is going to escape the corner of my eye. I freeze. I become so embarrassed. I am so afraid for anyone, even myself sometimes, if I should get caught crying.
I can only cry at death. It breaks me down. I am so vulnerable to only specific deaths. My doctor died a few years ago. She was younger than I am now. It was a shock to everyone who knew her. I use to see her every week. It was a particularly bad time emotionally and mentally. Every suicidal method of escape had to be hidden from me. That meant I had to see her every week to pick up my psyche meds. She was my supplier. I’d get my meds. We’d talk. I felt we were getting close. Then I would meet with my psychotherapist after I saw Anne. Yes, her name was Anne. That’s what makes your name so nice. I love the sound of it.
It is so difficult for me to trust anyone. It seems I am a curse to them. They just keep dying. And they are always so young and have full lives to live. We just don’t know when death is coming for us. A woman I loved deeply, died so suddenly. I never thought the pain would ever be bearable. I think it’s bearable because the feelings are in hiding. I am taking my chances with you. I want to be open with you. Call it a compulsion. Something echos in my head about you. A voice calls to me. It’s coming from inside of you. You want me to be connected to you. I’m not sure why but you want to get to know me. If that is true, I feel exactly the same way. The feeling is strong that we are meant to know each other. We are meant to get close. I think we will. Let’s just give it some time. When the moment is right, we’ll know it. It will be like fireworks. Everyone will notice.
One last thing I want to be perfectly clear, I am a lesbian and I have alters, other personalities. They all come with DID, dissociative identity disorder, and still I am blessed with bipolar, too. I go high. I go low. I change into different personalities, never knowing who might pop out. It is a curse and a blessing. I got the positive, the creative energy DNA. It gave me other blessings, also. I’ll save those for another time.
My most pronounced alter is Brad. He gets really protective. His rages scare the shit out of anyone at the other end of his outbursts. I promise he will respect you. I won’t let him get angry with you ever. He does listen to me most of the time. The abusers helped create them, the group. The first one born is Marnie. She was abused while we were just a baby, barely able to walk. Our bastard of a father abused her until we were a teenager. The last time was when he attacked us and we fought back but we don’t remember winning. We buried that memory for years.
Why do you have that effect on me. You have cast a spell on me. An Honesty spell. Ask me anything. I’d give you the truth. Maybe I better stop now. I told you far too much. This is going to kick back on me. I can feel the triggers ready to shot me full of regret. But I want you to get to know me. Next time we talk, it’s going to be about you. I want to get to know you. As much as you are willing to share. I know you shrinks don’t like to share much but I am someone you can trust. I would never abuse your trust.
I want to close this letter with a poem I wrote that I thought would be revealing. It is the first poem I have written since I started seeing Mr. Xxx, other than the one I wrote about Princess Diana after she was killed. I am trusting you not to laugh. It is rather primitive but also raw and revealing. I think getting to know you has inspired me to start to write again. It is scary for me to share this but I want you to read it. I’d like to know what you think of it. Keep in mind it has been a long time. I wrote this a few days ago. I will leave it at the end of the letter.
I don’t expect you to respond to my poem after you read it. It is only given to you so you will see what is going on inside of me. Something that may help you to understand a deeper part of who we are inside. Try not to be a critic. Instead look at the feelings and the pain of the betrayal that confused my whole life and created who I am or who we are. That almost kept us from staying alive. But we fought through their trying to destroy us. We wouldn’t let them. Even though they tried really hard to steal every part of us away so we wouldn’t even know who we were and who we are now. The last part of the poem, I am not entirely sure we know the answer to that, the who we are bit. Keep this in mind while you read it. What is contained in the poem is what I have been trying to work out now and have been working on since I started this trip as a teenager.
Don’t worry, I will tell you more as the weeks go by and we get to know you. We really do want you to know us. Somehow I think everyone wants someone important to them, to know who they are and to mean something special to them. You are one of those people to me. I want someday to be important to you as I am finding that you are becoming important to me. It makes life more meaningful somehow. To share your self with someone else. Someone you love and care about and to hope and have them care and love you back. It is a special feeling to share that with someone. It is happening inside of me with you. Someday, I would like it if you knew that about me. Someday, I hope you will.
Well, I better stop now or I will write more than I mean to write and say too much and scare you away. So, until our next moment of honesty I will say I care about you, even though I don’t know you well. You just give off something that makes a person want to care. Read my poem with an open mind and open heart. Good-bye for now.
Regards,
Madison This is to ensure that I write these in the strictest of confidence.
To Annie,
At this moment I am not trying to be a coward, but I feel if I hold back now or never send this to you, then I am freeing myself up to write whatever I wish without need of censorship. Maybe someday, when I am feeling more familiar with just who you are and what you might mean to me, this parameter will be altered and a copy of this and future letters will be relayed to you. For now I want to maintain secrecy, to protect you, Annie, and to protect myself from over testing the boundaries between us and to record the development of our relationship.
I want Annie Haskell to trust me. I want you to know I am trying to protect you and also myself from any humiliation. Writing to you in this way frees up my words as I speak them onto the page. Some future date, if I feel trusting enough, I will release to you what I have written in honesty. Right now, I will keep my words confidential. On my honour, no others shall see these pages, I promise you that.
Regards,
Madison Taylor.
Madison Tayler’s Fantasy of Annie Haskell’s Office as a Psychoanalyst. Not real.
“Who am I
The writer
The lover
The thinker
Or the fool for not hearing
The silence for not screaming
The feelings trying to explode
Where was the awareness?
We say quietly
Welcome to the surface
Now what needs to be done?
Releasing the energy ensnared
For decades amongst twisted webs
The voice is seeking freedom
Holding onto multiple secrets
Of rape
Of abuse
Of wanting love
Of not wanting sex
Of not wanting sexual arousal
Of creating a world locking us inside our mind
Of leaving the outside one behind
Of living a fake life
Of a fake person
Of a puppet we sent out to represent
To hide in plain site
Where no one would find us
Or know our hiding place
We learned to be safe
That world no longer protects us
It has changed
We are learning
Beginning to live
Finding answers to questions
Finding our place
In a world we have a right
To live in
We are here
Wanting to be alive
We chose life.”
labyrinth of a wandering wonderland where madison, scottie and their cats, Sparky, Patrick and Toker, love to escape to
QUOTATIONS from: LETTERS of IMPORT: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
“A Dream
The beginning always starts out with a dream.
It is all a dream
And we are all players
In our own nightmares”
— Madison Taylor
“For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”
~Michael Drayton~
(1563-1631)
“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
Christopher Marlowe for “Hero and Leander”
“A therapeutic relationship is often more psycho-emotionally intimate than a marriage, or a romantic attachment. I know things about my patients that they would never dream of revealing to their spouses or families. Why is that? One word — trust. If you do not have a connection with a therapist, you cannot trust them. If you do not have trust, you will not expose yourself, and if you do not expose your innermost being, what good is the therapy?” — unknown but ask any great therapist
“Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…whether much that is glorious–whether all that is profound–does not spring from disease of thought…” — Edgar Allan Poe
QUOTATION on SECRETS:
“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” ― Roald Dahl
Bill Hicks—It’s Just A Ride
Post Created by jk the secret keeper
Posted 04.12.13
These videos of Bill Hicks humour is guaranteed to make you laugh your ass off or totally piss you the hell off. Which ever way it goes he is worth listening to. He died young from cancer but while alive he spoke his own truth which made every issue of his day as funny as hell and made the absurdity of some of the important issues show their true light. If you can take a joke and don’t mind a bit of language that a great many of us use in private will not mind his use and expression of his particular flavour of language. I know for myself I have a difficult time not using his language. Sometimes it is the only way to make a point. He is missed. He was like a combination of Lenny Bruce and George Carlin but in actuality he was more like himself. And if he were alive today he would still have a huge following and still be hysterically funny and much needed to tell the truth about what is going on in the world and how fucked up it all is. Especially now that we have lost George Carlin. WARNING: NOT FOR EVERYONE’S TASTE or CUP OF TEA. ENJOY IF HE IS YOURS!!!
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” ― Albert Einstein
“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” ― Mae West
“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.” ― Narcotics Anonymous
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” ― Jane Austen
“Anyone who thinks sitting in church can make you a Christian must also think that sitting in a garage can make you a car.” ― Garrison Keillor
“Whenever I feel the need to exercise, I lie down until it goes away.” ― Paul Terry
“I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” ― Woody Allen
“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
“I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally. ” ― W.C. Fields
“Reality continues to ruin my life.” ― Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
“The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four people is suffering from a mental illness. Look at your 3 best friends. If they’re ok, then it’s you.” ― Rita Mae Brown
“Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources” ― Albert Einstein
“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.” ― Charles Bukowski
“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
“There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.” ― Oscar Levant
“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t know the answer” ― Douglas Adams
“Life’s hard. It’s even harder when you’re stupid.” — John Wayne
“When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.” ― Albert Einstein
“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” ― E.B. White
“I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.” ― Mae West
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks
:-) We ♥ all our babies furry & especially feathery.
It’s Just A Ride
