An unfortunately funny quote from eight years ago about Bush’s plan for reducing oil prices:
Gov. George W. Bush of Texas said today that if he was president, he would bring down gasoline prices through sheer force of personality, by creating enough political good will with oil-producing nations that they would increase their supply of crude.
“I would work with our friends in OPEC to convince them to open up the spigot, to increase the supply,” Mr. Bush, the presumptive Republican candidate for president, told reporters here today. “Use the capital that my administration will earn, with the Kuwaitis or the Saudis, and convince them to open up the spigot.”
The root cause of my procrastination, in technical terms, is this: I’m lazy. Extremely lazy.
Don’t judge, pal—you’re lazy, too. It’s why you procrastinate. When there’s a difficult, disagreeable, or tedious chore that needs to get done, guess what? You don’t want to do it. So you don’t. Until you have to.
It’s just that simple, my slothful friend. And guess what else? The trick to overcoming procrastination is even simpler. Ready? Here it is:
Get off your fat badonk and stop procrastinating. Right now. No, not after the Gilmore Girls rerun ends. Now now.
Will you do this? No. You will not. You will dabble at the crossword for a while. Later, you might get a yogurt. Eventually, you’ll start reading pointless crap on the Internet. You see, you’re doing it as we speak! Because: You are lazy.
Understand that this will never, ever change. You will always be lazy, and you will always procrastinate.
Humor… is urgent work. It’s an attempt to say important things in a special way that regular writers aren’t getting said in a regular way—or if they are, it’s so regular that nobody is reading it.
I used to do this in middle school for fun, but it’s pretty funny that an adult is recommending it.
Encyclopedias are a vital part of many school libraries…. [They] represent the philosophies of present day humanists. This is obvious by the bold display of pictures that are used to illustrate paintings, art, and sculpture…. This makes it important that the materials we place before our children are free from … that which would inflame passion. [We] are not battling a plot that captivates minds but are looking for erroneous information, sensual pictures, and unchaste details…. One of the areas that needs correction is immodesty due to nakedness and posture. This can be corrected by drawing clothes on the figures or blotting out entire pictures with a magic marker. This needs to be done with care or the magic marker can be erased from the glossy paper used in printing encyclopedias. You can overcome this by taking a razor blade and lightly scraping the surface until it loses its glaze…. [Regarding evolution,] cutting out the sections is practical if the portions removed are not thick enough to cause damage to the spine of the book as it is opened and closed in normal use. When the sections needing correction are too thick, paste the pages together being careful not to smear portions of the book not needed for correction.
—Ray Martin, “Reviewing and Correcting Encyclopedias” in Christian School Builder (1983) as quoted in Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things (1997), pp. 138-9.
In a waiting room yesterday I had the pleasure of listening to these profound pontifications from a loud-mouthed fat man in an orange shirt. I find it interesting how opinionated we can be on subjects where we obviously have very little understanding.
“I just can’t see things getting any better in this country. Oil is at, what, $130 a barrel? Greed. It’s all greed.”
“The farmer’s ain’t growing any food for us anymore — they’re growing it all for fuel!”
“Why do they keep raising the price of diesel? I have a diesel motorhome. It makes everything more expensive because trucks use diesel. It’s a damn shame. It’s just uncalled for.”
“Oil ain’t ever going down. We’ve got a President who makes money off oil, and he’s not going to let the price go down.”
When looking at my Wells Fargo bank account online, I noticed the link “Send Us Suspicious Email.” I thought that was an odd request, but I went ahead and did it since they asked.
[N]ot putting cupholders in a car is a serious mistake. I read a couple of years ago that Volvo had to redesign all its cars for the American market for this very reason. Volvo’s engineers had foolishly thought that what buyers were looking for was a reliable engine, side-impact bars, and heated seats, when in fact what they craved was little trays into which they could insert their Slurpees.
Fire and Knowledge aims to be thoughtful and challenging through quotes, links, commentary and essays.
Topics include science, religion, politics, literature, history and technology. As someone said, there are no uninteresting subjects, only uninterested people.