November 21, 2010

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I bet we all in this room live about the same. We eat about the same and sleep about the same. We pretty much drive a car for 10 years. All this stuff doesn’t make it any different. I will watch the Super Bowl on a big screen television just like you. We are living the same life. I have two luxuries: I get to do what I want to do every day and I get to travel a lot faster than you.

Warren Buffett.

Notorious

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Notorious. Highly recommended. We’re back in quality Hitchcock territory after that last fiasco. Grant recruits the scandalous socialite Bergman as a fellow spy. They go down to Rio and struggle with how far to take their work and their love. The highlight for me was the party/wine cellar scene (which starts with a famous shot). The ingenious tension in this comes from the simple issue of whether there is enough champagne, and thus, is there time/cover to sneak into the wine cellar? And there’s the clever screenwriting where Bergman excuses herself to request that the band play Brazilian music instead of waltzes, which also refreshes the soundtrack for the subsequent cellar snooping. And I tell you what: Bergman is an incredible actress–maybe my favorite female film star? I like Grant in this one, too. I’ve long been ambivalent about him on screen, but I like that this role seems to have a touch of menace underneath, and a little less confidence. Great movie. Ebert says.

Purloined Letters: Are we too quick to denounce plagiarism?

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A brief essay James R. Kincaid in The New Yorker, January 20, 1997. I like this bit, quoting Helen Keller:

It is certain that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read, because what I read becomes the very substance and text of my mind.

That’s found in her autobiography, where she goes on to say:

Consequently, in nearly all that I write, I produce something which very much resembles the crazy patchwork I used to make when I first learned to sew. This patchwork was made of all sorts of odds and ends–pretty bits of silk and velvet; but the coarse pieces that were not pleasant to touch always predominated. Likewise my compositions are made up of crude notions of my own, inlaid with the brighter thoughts and riper opinions of the authors I have read. It seems to me that the great difficulty of writing is to make the language of the educated mind express our confused ideas, half feelings, half thoughts, when we are little more than bundles of instinctive tendencies. Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design. But we keep on trying because we know that others have succeeded, and we are not willing to acknowledge defeat.

Purloined Letters: Are we too quick to denounce plagiarism?

November 20, 2010

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The market knows nothing about my feelings. That is one of the first things you have to learn about a stock. You buy 100 shares of General Motors (GM). Now all of a sudden you have this feeling about GM. It goes down, you may be mad at it. You may say, “Well, if it just goes up for what I paid for it, my life will be wonderful again.” Or if it goes up, you may say how smart you were and how you and GM have this love affair. You have got all these feelings. The stock doesn’t know you own it.

The stock just sits there; it doesn’t care what you paid or the fact that you own it. Any feeling I have about the market is not reciprocated. I mean it is the ultimate cold shoulder we are talking about here.

Warrren Buffett on the emotional void of the stock market.

Excerpt from Jay-Z's New Book 'Decoded': Cristal's Diss of Hip-Hop - TIME

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The same goes for other brands: Timberland and Courvoisier, Versace and Maybach. We gave those brands a narrative, which is one of the reasons anyone buys anything: not just to own a product, but to become part of a story. […] It wasn’t just a premium champagne anymore — it was a prop in an exciting story, a portal into a whole world. Just by drinking it, we infused their product with our story, an ingredient that they could never bottle on their own.

Excerpt from Jay-Z's New Book 'Decoded': Cristal's Diss of Hip-Hop - TIME

November 17, 2010

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Hang around people who are better than you all the time. You do pick up the behavior of people who are around you. It will make you a better person. Marry upward. That is the person who is going to have the biggest effect on you. A relationship like that over the decades will do nothing but good.

Warren Buffett. And if you can’t find/identify people who are better than you, you’re probably an asshole.