Or he could finish his cigarette and suddenly catch sight of the person he has been waiting for, and wave.

Or he could be grabbed by burly plainclothesmen and whisked away with a bag over his head.

Or he could realize he is alone and unfold a large reproduction of “Irises” by Van Gogh, which he daintily attaches to the wall.

While I was waiting for my coffee, I examined once again the particular water-stain on the wall behind the counter.
The more I looked at it, the more it resembled a chef tossing a pizza in the air—a good-natured, chortling chef with a pointy moustache and chef's hat, amused at his own untiring knack of pizza-tossing, and loving nothing better than the tossing of pizza dough forever. And that's how he became a water-stain behind the counter of a café.

“D.B. Cooper” was actually the name of an early suspect in the case; the perpetrator had identified himself as “Dan Cooper”, and the police already knew of a man with a criminal record whose name happened to be “D.B. Cooper”, so they went and harassed him unnecessarily and threw his name out there to be reported in the papers. But you see what happened: the name “D.B. Cooper” is so much more storyworthy than “Dan Cooper”, so it stuck in the popular imagination.

It occurred to me, as it probably has to everyone, that this hijacker may actually have called himself “Dan Cupid”. Is that not possible?

They spent millions of dollars trying to find this guy, detectives, trackers, navy experts, at one point a division of soldiers was sent out to comb the area, stumbling over corpses of long-dead, irrelevant murder victims in caves, etc. They would find a skull and get excited, hoping it was that of “D.B. Cooper”, but then the scientists would report that it was just some unimportant person that had been killed probably by some random maniac.

“Yeah, uh-huh, whatever. Where's D.B. Cooper? Where? Where!?”

Imagine if your friend had been murdered and left in some cave but the authorities didn't care because they were so messed up about D.B. Cooper.

“Yeah, whatever. D.B. Cooper stole money. Do you not know what that means? He made us look like dicks”, they explain.

One thing about this story of Facebook selling millions upon millions of shares is the idea that its principle value might be in the user information that it can sell.

That would be self-reported info about "Snuffles" and "Yummity Cat" and other people, whose habits and entertainment preferences and so on are of particular interest to manufacturers, I have no doubt!

One in ten of all UK pets have their own Facebook page, Twitter profile or YouTube channel, and more than half of UK pet owners are sharing photos of their pets online.
— The Telegraph

So—
Obama Backs GOP Into Limbaugh-Shaped Corner

With one phone call, President Obama has forced the Republican candidates for president into a Sophie’s Choice with potentially far-reaching implications: Do they stand up to Rush Limbaugh, who made divisive comments about a law student this week, or do they stand up for a highly influential conservative leader who’s embarrassed the Republicans who’ve crossed him in the past?
.... [bla bla bla] ...
Santorum appears not to be following that advice. In an interview with CNN Friday, Santorum dismissed Limbaugh’s comments, but didn’t condemn them.
“He’s being absurd, but that’s you know, an entertainer can be absurd,” Santorum said. “He’s in a very different business than I am.”
... [etc.] ...
“When CNN tried to get Romney to comment on Limbaugh he walked right by our camera,” tweeted Jim Acosta Friday.

After the death of N.—designated in newspapers only as “the passing of N.”, which rather took the sting out of it—people turned to L. for some comment.
And L. said:
—Horrendous fuckhead; glad he's dead.
And they said:
—Can you say something a bit more positive than this, this seems a little negative? Thanks?
And he said:
—Yes, I guess I can say something a bit more positive, sure. It was a wonderful thing, like a dream come true, imagining N.'s final weeks—a fully deserved ordeal, torments of sweat, piss, fear and pain! I can't imagine anything more perfect, really ... just perfect. The only fly in the ointment, as far as I can see, is that I'm sure they gave him a lot of morphine towards the end. Shouldn't have done that: he may have missed some really terrible moments that would have caused him to reflect even further, in what was left of his brain, on the true meaninglessness of his whole life as a project and the complete memory hole into which his name will fall within the next year or so, and, well, too bad. But all in all, the type of death and its timing couldn't have been better.
How's that?

Labels: How....

The biennial “Aachener Membran Kolloquium” (AMK), organised by the Chair of Chemical Process Engineering at RWTH Aachen University, continues to be the international conference on industrial membrane applications.

Labels: Quotations