“The world, dear Agnes, is a strange affair.”

Theodore Dalrymple is outraged to be asked his ethnicity by officialdom - but remembers that it is our social duty to grin and bear insults http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001697.php (January 23, 2008).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

Sola la miseria è senza invidia nelle cose presenti.
Fourth Day, Introduction
The Decameron (c. 1350)

Narration for Crash! (1971), a short film by Harley Cokeliss
Context: I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape.
We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.

Source: Heidi

Advice to a young John Mayer, when Mayer was first attacked in the tabloids
Young, Richard (July 19, 2007) "John Mayer MSM Interview, v.2007" http://johnmayer.yuku.com/sreply/226966/t/John-Mayer-MSM-Interview-v-2007.html MyStupidMouth.com Retrieved July 25, 2007.

Letter to Nathanael Greene (12 October 1782), as quoted in Sketches of the Life and Correspondence of Nathanael Greene http://books.google.com/books?id=pLZSAAAAcAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s, page 342

Source: The Beach