The Rat | |
Friday, April 30, 2004
( 9:21 PM ) The Rat Those categorized as landlords were shot, hanged, beheaded, battered to death, nailed to the walls of buildings or buried alive. Sometimes, in winter, the victim was dressed in a thin cotton garment and water was poured over him while he stood outside in sub-zero temperatures. This method of death was called 'wearing glass clothes.' Burying victims alive in the snow was called 'refrigeration.' A third method was dubbed 'opening the flower.' The victim was buried in a pit with only his head exposed which was then smashed, laying open his brains. —Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine # Posted by The Rat @ 9:21 PM Wednesday, April 28, 2004 ( 1:28 PM ) The Rat STORY OF MY LIFE. # Posted by The Rat @ 1:28 PM ( 11:41 AM ) The Rat FOR SALE ON EBAY. This is great. Via Eve. # Posted by The Rat @ 11:41 AM Friday, April 23, 2004 ( 3:59 PM ) The Rat KITCHEN COCKTAILS, via Modern Drunkard magazine. # Posted by The Rat @ 3:59 PM ( 3:40 PM ) The Rat SNORT! # Posted by The Rat @ 3:40 PM Wednesday, April 21, 2004 ( 5:48 PM ) The Rat "Bataille was a good and kindly man. His unselfishness and generosity were boundless. He was as unlike a man of letters as could be." —Roger Caillois in an interview with Gilles Lapouge, June 1970 # Posted by The Rat @ 5:48 PM Tuesday, April 20, 2004 ( 10:28 PM ) The Rat THIS WEEK'S HOROSCOPES are brilliant. # Posted by The Rat @ 10:28 PM ( 10:26 PM ) The Rat The idea of death took up permanent residence within me in the way that love sometimes does. Not that I loved death, I abhorred it. But after a preliminary stage in which, no doubt, I thought about it from time to time as one does about a woman with whom one is not yet in love, its image adhered now to the most profound layer of my mind, so completely that I could not give my attention to anything without that thing first traversing the idea of death, and even if no object occupied my attention and I remained in a state of complete repose, the idea of death still kept me company as faithfully as the idea of my self. —Time Regained # Posted by The Rat @ 10:26 PM Monday, April 19, 2004 ( 9:35 AM ) The Rat [A] week before Shade's death, a certain ferocious lady at whose club I had refused to speak on the subject of 'The Hally Vally' (as she put it, confusing Odin's Hall with the title of a Finnish epic), said to me in the middle of a grocery store, 'You are a remarkably disagreeable person. I fail to see how John and Sybil can stand you,' and, exasperated by my polite smile, she added: 'What's more, you are insane.' —Pale Fire # Posted by The Rat @ 9:35 AM Saturday, April 17, 2004 ( 1:20 PM ) The Rat OOOOH... # Posted by The Rat @ 1:20 PM ( 1:15 PM ) The Rat YOUR JOKE HERE. To celebrate the sixth birthday of the revolutionary treatment, American men who pay for six Viagra prescriptions will get a seventh for free—the latest marketing stunt in the competitive drug industry. # Posted by The Rat @ 1:15 PM ( 1:12 PM ) The Rat THESE FINDINGS clearly don't apply to Asian families. Just take the Rat's word on this one. [Dr Terri Apter's] four-year study in which she witnessed 124 quarrels between 23 mother and teenage daughter pairs said that the rowing was not an indication that the relationship was a bad one. She said the familiar description of "going through a phase" was not helpful either in explaining what was happening. Even when arguments were intense both mothers and daughters learned from the experience, she said. The rows were really about daughters showing that they were growing up and changing, not about the matters of "control" that the quarrels seemed to be about. # Posted by The Rat @ 1:12 PM ( 1:07 PM ) The Rat CHEAP WINE REVIEWS. This is brilliant. Via Eve. Thunderbird's "Serve Cold" (750 ml, $2.79, 17.5%), "The American Classic," was a complex and aggressive wine from the first sniff. "The stale farts of an aging Times Square hooker," noted Brandon, seeking vivid metaphors for the barbaric attack, "or the odor of vomit-soaked sewer grates." Mike found the nose urinary with a hint of Windex. To me, it was a quivering bouquet of Nyquil, rotten grapefruit, and horseradish. The odors were heavy like sun on a headache, like varnish on an open sore. The flavor was hauntingly scolding, like Mom's cooking sherry. Quick and staccato, without subtlety, the flavors attacked: Vaseline, allegations of lime, Triaminic and bacon grease, a pile of bum yak on Burnside, a diesel train crashing into a baby duck, rancid Mountain Dew, a backalley dumpster's burnt caramel apple. My God, the horror! It was like waking up in a tire fire. # Posted by The Rat @ 1:07 PM ( 12:56 PM ) The Rat COP WINS DOUGHNUT-EATING CONTEST. # Posted by The Rat @ 12:56 PM Wednesday, April 14, 2004 ( 6:40 PM ) The Rat [I]n 1928 or thereabouts first-year students could be divided into two species—two races, I might almost say—law and medicine on the one hand, letters and natural sciences on the other... The apprentice doctors and lawyers had a profession ahead of them. Their behaviour reflected their delight in having left school behind and assumed a sure place in the social system. Midway between the undifferentiated mass of the lycee and the specialized activity which lay before them, they felt themselves in, as it were, the margin of life and claimed the contradictory privileges of the schoolboy and of the professional man alike. Where letters and the sciences are concerned, on the other hand, the usual outlets—teaching, research-work, and a variety of ill-defined 'careers'—are of quite a different character. The student who chooses them does not say good-bye to the world of childhood: on the contrary—he hopes to remain behind in it. Teaching is, after all, the only way in which grown-ups can stay on at school. Those who read letters or the sciences are characterized by resistance to the demands of the group. Like members, almost, of some monastic order they tend to turn more and more in upon themselves, absorbed in the study, preservation, and transmission of a patrimony independent of their own time: as for the future savant, his task will last as long as the universe itself. So that nothing is more false than to persuade them that they are committed; even if they believe that they are committing themselves the commitment does not consist in accepting a given role, identifying themselves with one of its functions, and accepting its ups and downs and the risks in which it may involve them. They still judge it from outside, and as if they were not themselves part of it. Their commitment is, in fact, a particular way of remaining uncommitted. Teaching and research have nothing in common, as they see it, with apprenticeship to a profession. Their splendours reside, as do also their miseries, in their being a refuge, on the one hand, or a mission, on the other. —Tristes Tropiques # Posted by The Rat @ 6:40 PM Thursday, April 01, 2004 ( 3:27 PM ) The Rat LET US PRAISE THE LOWLY RAT. Let us, indeed. # Posted by The Rat @ 3:27 PM |