portrait

Here’s the official U.S. Naval Reserve photo of an 18 year old John Coltrane, the pioneering jazz saxophonist. Coltrane, who would later collaborate with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, was photographed in mid-1945 following his voluntary enlistment as an apprentice seamen.

From The Smoking Gun.

barf

"Sao Paulo is a city that feels like Los Angeles threw up on New York."

warrior

"If you can wear Arab kit when with the tribes you will acquire their trust and intimacy to a degree impossible in uniform."
- T.E. Lawrence, 1917

"If they do their job right, they'll put themselves out of business."

Is giving away money -- and lots of it -- really the best way to change the world? A look at the Gates Foundation here.

do you drink too much?

checkyourdrinking.net

networking

"Acting schools are about networking."
- Fred Willard

suicide note

A 35-year-old Massachusetts man published a 1,905 page suicide note before shooting himself on the steps of a church. Story here.

business acumen

Paul Newman: There are 18 of us and we do $163 million per year.

Robert Redford: That's funny. I'm making $18 and I employ 163 million people.

Post-Impressionist

Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers, 1888

"I shut my eyes in order to see."
- Paul Gauguin [1848-1903]

micro macro

"Good art deals with the micro to explain the macro. There's something in the very small minutia of life that tells us about the big big picture we see everyday. The more specific and creative and revelatory you are in the micro, the more powerful the macro will be."
- Philip Seymor Hoffman [born 1967]

1.23%

Bono charity spends more on wages than good causes:

According to a report in the US the global charity took in £9.6million in public donations in 2008, the latest year for which US public tax records are available.

A meagre £118,000 was split between three charities – while more than £5million was spent on executive and employee salaries.

bueno

"Learn a foreign language and become a better person."
- Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer

disgust

Robin Williams opens up:

"You know, I was shameful, and you do stuff that causes disgust, and that's hard to recover from."

food at facebook

weather

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"Ten months of bad weather followed by two months of winter."

"the greatest novel ever written."

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1873

nude

"Before there was a Secret Service to put a damper on such frolics, President John Quincy Adams regularly bathed nude in the Potomac."
- Emily Yoffe

airplane

"He who controls the skies controls the war."
- Hermann Göring

lazy

"I was born lazy. I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can't go beyond possibility."
— Mark Twain

Teetotalism

"I only do drugs so I can drink more."
- Dennis Hopper [1936-2010]

effervescent life of Paris

Édouard Manet, La Servante de Bocks, 1879

21st Century Enlightenment

office

Where Sir Richard Branson gets work done on Necker Island.

Time Travel

A website that allows you to pick a date and travel there via video:

http://yttm.tv/v/1970

success

"No man is really changed by success. What happens is that success works on the man's personality like a truth drug, bringing him out of the closet and revealing what was always inside his head."
- Albert Goldman

oblivious bidding

"IN 2008 just over $270m-worth of art by Damien Hirst was sold at auction, a world record for a living artist. By 2009 Mr Hirst’s annual auction sales had shrunk by 93%—to $19m—and the 2010 total is likely to be even lower. The collapse in the Hirst market can partly be ascribed to the recession."

The Economist article here.

retirement

"You don't retire. The business retires you."
- Michael Caine

big wave

"Listening to music makes me slow down."
- Laird Hamilton [born 1964]

a play in one act

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” says Nell in Samuel Beckett’s [1906-1989] “Endgame.”

ism

"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur."
- Reputedly said by George W. Bush to Tony Blair

low tide

"You never know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out."
- Warren Buffet

idiot

"I'd rather say nothing and be thought an idiot than open my mouth and remove all doubt."
- Mark Twain

GBP

[Xinhua/Reuters Photo]

Jeff Koons' "Stacked" sold at auction for 2,841,250 GBP

groups of seeds

Click to enlarge.

halloween is around the corner

impressively trained and dedicated men

Riding a moose, 1900.

"[Theodore] Roosevelt's example, his style, and his administrative methods made it easy as it was necessary for him to persuade dozens of impressively trained and dedicated men to enter the service of the federal government. In an earlier generation, such men had scorned public life, largely then the preserve of the party faithful who in the discharge of their duties too rarely exhibited purpose, intelligence or energy. Determined to invigorate government, Roosevelt gave public office a fresh mission, 'to look ahead and plan out the right kind of civilization ... to develop from ... wonderful new conditions of vast industrial growth.' His youth and vigor, his zest in experience and in people, captured the imagination of his contemporaries and of younger men who might otherwise have been content, as their fathers had been, with careers in law firms, banks and executive suites. Roosevelt's practice of delegating responsibility to those he trusted also attracted his recruits. Just as he believed in using the full powers of his office, so did he urge them to use theirs."
- John Morton Blum, The Progressive Presidents, p.45

rattus

"Well at breakfast; dead at lunchtime."
- Bubonic plague, circa mid-17th century London

Quisling

Soldier holding gun to the head of a collaborator caught in the liberation of Rennes. Photograph by Bob Landry, 1944.

on directing

"I hire you. You know what you're doing. I know what I'm doing. Let's go make a movie."
- Morgan Freeman on Clint Eastwood's directing philosophy where single and second takes are common where the industry average can be five of six takes.

on self-direction

"When you direct yourself, you usually have a crappy director."
- A thirty-two year old Jack Nicholson, photographed in 1969