"At Best Buy reading about 802.11 draft N routers. Basically it sounds like it peels off your face and replaces it with the internet. Sold!"

- Jason Shellen (via Twitter)
April 5, 2007

A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.

                   --J. B. Priestley

(About 95% of my great quotes come from my Uncle Larry who keeps putting irresistible ones at the ends of his nightly emails. Thanks, Larry!)

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

There's an important difference between a "bottom-up" approach and a "bottoms-up" approach.

-- Jesse James Garrett
who I now want to buy a drink for...

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.               

--Isaac Asimov

Jon Carroll on skydiving and other things one might have on a list of wished for adventures:

I've never seen the appeal of experiencing death right up until technology says, oops, second chance after all. I know, I know, it's liberating and exhilarating. So is escaping from North Korea, but I don't want to do that either.

I don't know if I would attend CES again. If any of you have wondered, as I did last year, whether or not you should go, ask yourself this:

How much do I like flatscreen televisions?

- Tycho of Penny Arcade

There ain't no use in dyin' 'fore yer time. Lots of folks is walkin' 'round jes' as dead as they'll ever be.

                                         --Alice Caldwell Rice

(My fabulous Uncle Larry is an apparently never-ending source of great quotations!)

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

          --Dorothy Nevill

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

-Eleanor Roosevelt, diplomat and writer
(1884-1962)

Now this is a border fence I can actually get behind... ;)

[Thanks to Uncle Larry for sharing this exciting news]

"The only bitter thing I like is Campari and myself."

- Eugenio Jardim,
at the bar at Jardiniere last night

I will give you an Indian burn later when I'm eating your Apple Jacks.

- Robert Allen
June 25, 2007

“I am inclined to think, sir, that perhaps the two most valuable and satisfactory characteristic products of American civilization are the librarian, on the one hand, and the cocktail on the other. I will not attempt, sir, the delicate question of deciding which is best, but I am given to understand that some of us have sampled both and found them equally satisfactory and equally stimulating.”

—Croydon (England) Public Librarian L. Stanley Jast, responding on behalf of overseas visitors to a welcoming address by Louisiana Purchase Exposition President David Francis, at the first session of ALA Annual Conference, Oct. 17, 1904, held at the St. Louis World’s Fair.

[many thanks to American Libraries Direct, newsletter of the American Library Association, for calling my attention to this excellent quote]

I work for a company which I don't talk about on my personal blog for all the usual non-Googleability and separation of personal & professional life reasons, however, every now and then something has to slip across the line.

After the seasonal dessert reception at a big conference where we had some mighty amazing decorations:

"We ate the piano, Jim and I."

    - Jean A.
    January 2007

Football incorporates the two worst elements of American society: violence punctuated by committee meetings.

                                        --George F. Will

I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean.

                                          --P. G. Wodehouse

Our universe is simply one of those things that happen from time to time.

                           --Edward Tryon

"[Better Luck Tomorrow is] the MTV version of Crime & Punishment."

- Sacha Arnold
June 2007

I xeroxed their record and I taped it to my pants.

- Spenser Thompson on fandom, during a What Was Your First Concert? conversation
June 23, 2007

There is clearly much left to be done, and whatever else we are going to do, we had better get on with it.   

--Rosalynn Carter

Google doesn't really strike me as a Libra...

- Buzz Andersen
May 21, 2007

Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
                                             --Dalai Lama

"So, you know how on the New York Times website there's that most emailed list on the right-hand side? And it's all bullshit articles about bullshit and y'know kitties?"
-Joe Gratz

"Yes."
- Dinah

April 8, 2007

I am a small forest creature.

- Joseph C. Gratz, Nov 19th, 2006