26

"The average age of the (NASA) systems engineers, the controllers on the day of the moon landing was 26."
- Al Gore

atheist

"Left to themselves evil people will do evil things and good people will do good things. If you want good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
- Steven Weinberg

how they read you

"A con artist isn't a good talker. A con artist is a good listener."
- Maria Konnikova, PhD

Hell's Angel

on acting

"You live with rejection."
- Kevin Spacey

on love

"If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me."

- W.H. Auden

deep

"We don't know the depth of someone until they are challenged."
- Kevin Spacey

text

"Writers know that they are writers even before they can hold a pencil."
- Sandra Cisneros

Donald Gay Trump

No words were changed.

symbol of the pure Aryan race

Myron's 5th century BC Discobolus (Discuss Thrower) was bought by the Nazis for a record breaking five million lire as at least Adolph Hitler believed Germans were direct Greek decedents.

Image source here.

Please advise if you know the current value of 1938 lira.

giver of bliss

"You never identify yourself with the shadow cast by your body, or with its reflection, or with the body you see in a dream or in your imagination. Therefore you should not identify yourself with this living body, either."

- Shankara (A.D. 788-820),

Image source here.

unbidden mirth

"God is a comedian performing before an audience that is afraid to laugh."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

An earlier reference to comedy and church here.

a place to buy a suit in Hong Kong

Website here.

an early appeal of theatre

You could laugh which was forbidden in church.

AKT1

The links between cannabis use and psychosis has long been of interest to scientists, with studies in recent times indicating that a gene called AKT1 affects the likelihood of cannabis users developing a psychotic disorder. More here.

book a night in Van Gogh's Arles

For $10 here.

my worst times are when I'm not writing

"You don't have to go looking for suffering if you want to be a writer. It'll find you soon enough."
- Philip Roth

the end of Scottish culture

Hendrick ter Brugghen, Bagpipe Player, 1624

An earlier reference to the Battle of Culloden here.

on history

"May my son study history, for it is the only true psychology, and the only true philosophy."
- Napoleon to the duke of Reichstadt at St. Helena

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

- John F. Kennedy

école de Honfleur

Eugène Boudin, Festival in the Harbor of Honfleur (1858), came from the school that contributed to the look of the Impressionists.

Japanese toilet

physics superheros

“Understanding is a kind of ecstasy”
- Brian Cox quoting Carl Sagan

Before games

"I vomited."
- Jim Kelly, NFL Hall of Fame QB

eureka

"' I do not depend on figures at all. I try an experiment and reason out the result, somehow, by methods which I could not explain.' And so it was that by testing 1,600 different materials, from coconut fibre to fishing line and even hair from a colleague's beard, Edison finally found a particular type of bamboo which could be used, in carbonized form, as the filament in the first proper incandescent light bulb. He demonstrated it on New Year's Eve 1879 at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey."
- The Economist December 5th 2015

Energy

"We never walk. We run."
- Hong Kong axiom

Image by Nero Chan

oral hygiene

Martin Amis explains that he spent $30,000 of a writing advance to fix his teeth.

road trip

Joke

"I have a Knight inside of me. Cirrhosis of the liver."
- SNL

Image source here.

fish

"What leadership is about is not just swimming with the current."
- Bernie Sanders

disturbed and disturbing

"He took his troubles everywhere he went."
- On President James A. Garfield's assassin Charles J. Guiteau.

U.S. Marine Corps dictum

"When facing a problem: improvise, adapt, overcome."

Earlier references to improvisation here and here.

5'3"

"You can't trust short men as their brains are too close to their bottoms."
- Noël Coward

Lilliputian Ludwig van Beethoven image source here.

Security staff search an Elvis impersonator during the start of the street carnival in Cologne, Germany. Associated Press

steep like tea

"I never plan. Life gives us too many interesting corners to go around. And you never really know what's around that corner."
- Michael McKean

A contrary reference to planning here.

"Alcatraz for Millionaires"

Image source here.

This post tile quotation is by Jack Nicholson on Monaco.

I don't buy it

" ... (a high school coach) told me that the people you get to know (in university) will dictate the rest of your life - the contacts you make at this stage in your life will be your contacts for life. I bought that."
- Jack Cowin, Chancellor, University of Western Ontario , p. 32 Alumni Gazette

shadow and form

Edward Hopper's "House by the Railroad" inspired the Bates' house in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho."

advertising truism

"We don't have any money, so now we have to think."
- Unattributed

Inherent Vice

The object contains the seeds of its own destruction, as in metallic based quilt dyes.

“I remember sitting with George Lucas ... and we were full of dreams,” said Coppola. “We talked about the amount of money we would want to have someday—enough to have a Ferrari and have everything, but not so much that people would hate you and kidnap your kids—a lot but not too much. We decided it was $20 million. Now George has $6 billion.”
- Francis Ford Coppola here.

on disco

"You have to dance."
- Mick Jagger

football

About 100 million people watch the Super Bowl in America versus 300 million Europeans who watch the European football championship. 

jazz spirit

"If you don't improvise, you disappear very quickly."
- Sir Richard Branson

Can a negative be proven?

"You Can Prove a Negative. It is widely believed that you can't prove a negative. Some people even think that it is a law of logic—you can't prove that Santa Claus, unicorns, the Loch Ness Monster, God, pink elephants, WMD in Iraq and Bigfoot don't exist. This widespread belief is flatly, 100% wrong."
- Source: Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania here.

The Loch Ness Monster does not exist because it's claimed water home is a glacial lake only ten thousand years old.

arsenic and mercury

John Dryden, 1856

Robert Howlett succumbed to the hazards of early photography at the age of 27.

Ch-Check It Out

An earlier reference to Neil deGrasse Tyson here.

on pain

[Lawrence has just extinguished a match between his thumb and forefinger. William Potter surreptitiously attempts the same.]

William Potter: Ooh! It damn well 'urts!

T.E. Lawrence: Certainly it hurts.

Officer: What's the trick then?

T.E. Lawrence: The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.

bronze bull

Isidore-Jules Bonheur
Standing Angus Bull, model second half 19th century

Image source here.

An earlier Bull reference here.

a chef's life

"Your Friday and Saturday pay for your week. You never know what you're gonna get Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday."
- Ben Knight, restauranteur 

Bill Gates discusses music

Here.

among the first outdoor painters

Eugène Boudin, Women on the Beach at Berck, 1881

"Everything that is painted directly and on the spot has always a strength, a power, a vivacity of touch which one cannot recover in the studio ... three strokes of a brush in front of nature are worth more than two days of work at the easel."

Image source here.

the best chef in the world commits suicide

Story here.

Home of the Pope

Châteauneuf-du-Pape

"The essence of cool, after all, is not giving a fuck."
- Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw, p. 119