A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Unsolicited Advice

A friend who lives in Palo Alto goes out for a daily walk. He was striding along happily one day when he was stopped by a woman, a complete stranger, riding a bicycle. She informed him that walking wasn’t a sufficient cardiovascular workout. Pointing toward the bleachers at a nearby playing field, she instructed him to start climbing them as part of his exercise. Which he now dutifully does.

Perfectly Palo Alto, which is the kind of place where you can mind other people’s business for their own good. I guess that’s what people hate about us liberals, too.
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