#Paul ford

[citizenscreen]

A studio portrait of CBS television stars, circa 1965. (L-R back row) John McGiver, Sterling Holloway, Yvonne De Carlo, Paul Ford, and Fred Gwynne; (front row) Julie Newmar, Cara Williams, and Tina Louise.

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

[explore-blog]

All you have to do is look at a tree—any tree will do—to see how badly our disciplines serve us. Evolutionary theory, botany, geography, physics, hydrology, countless poems, paintings, essays, and stories—all trying to make sense of the tree. We need them all, the whole fragile, interdependent ecosystem. No one has got it right yet.

Paul Ford on why interdisciplinarity will win the future. A quarter millennium ago, William Blake nailed it: "The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. Happy people, the kind who eat sandwiches together, are boring. They don’t buy much. Their smartphones are six versions behind and have badly cracked screens. They fix bicycles, then they talk about fixing bicycles, then they show their friend, who just came over for no reason, how they fixed their bicycle, and their friend says, “Wow, good job,” and they make tea. That doesn’t seem like enough to build a town square on.

God Did the World a Favor by Destroying Twitter

[ulrichgebert]

Die immer wieder ganz besonders niedliche Eheanbahnungskomödie The Matchmaker können wir diesmal als außerordentlich verspäteten Gedenkfilm für Robert Morse (hier angekündigt) und als Auftakt der Feirlichkeiten zum 90. Geburtstag von Shirley McLaine (am 24. April) verwenden, sowie als Vorbereitung fürs Musiktheater.

[oldshowbiz]

Sterling Holloway and Paul Ford

[luxe-pauvre]

To stop this from happening again, I have come up with a personal Theory of Stuffness, a way to structure and understand my local stuff ecosystem, especially the digital stuff. I divide Stuffworld into the Object (drum machine), the Enhancements (all the extras), and the Experience (sick beats). Another example: The Object is the phone. The Enhancement is the Spotify app. The Experience is that of listening to music. In the past, you might buy a record player and spend 10 years curating a collection of really good jazz albums. You'd read the liner notes and learn new things over time, boring your friends in the process. Now you pay a fee, and some approximation of every bit of recorded jazz is just there on every device that plays sound. It used to take a lifetime of reading reviews and trips to the record store, or going to jazz clubs, and a ton of money. Now the cost approaches free. This is the Great Stuff Discontinuity. You just parachute in, like my kids playing Fortnite. What I was doing with my drum machine was trying to skip learning, attempting to buy talent and accomplishment by configuring my workstation. That's the promise of buying stuff for your stuff: The Enhancements will make the Experience so much better and give you more of the power of the Object. (Am I serious about all this? Well, I was desperate for a grammar to understand what I was doing on Amazon and eBay.) The Object did not give me the Experience I wanted, despite all the Enhancements. But let's not waste it, right? It does no good if it joins the rat king of USB cables and old laptops in the closet. So I've limited myself to one sample and one track, trying to figure out how music works. And doing that—going into student mode, humbling myself before the task of making just one passable beat without using a ton of reverb—has almost instantly made me a better listener, a greater appreciator of the talents of others. I've started to pick songs apart as I commute, suddenly aware of filter sweeps across the drum loops or where they cut the bass before the chorus. If I can't buy talent, at least I can understand its supply chain.

Paul Ford, A Grand Unified Theory of Buying Stuff

[dorawinifredread]

[letterboxd-loggd]

Advise & Consent (1962) Otto Preminger

June 3rd 2023

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[Tessentee Road]

* * * *

"In their graceless state the godless are supposed to be allergic to places of terror and emptiness. Foxholes, Ground Zero, outer space—all locations, I’ve been told, where you won’t find atheists. “Clay is fashioned into vessels,” reads the 11th chapter of the Tao Te Ching (written 2,500 years after Noah’s flood carved out the Grand Canyon), “but it is on their empty hollowness that their use depends.”

[From one of my all-time favorite essays, "Just Like Heaven" by Paul Ford] 

[erstwhile-punk-guerito]

[insidecroydon]

Now available! Podcast with stories behind Croydon headlines

The latest episode of the Croydon Insider is now available, discussing the stories behind the headlines… The Croydon Insider proudly remains a politician-free zone – so what gets discussed here cuts through the spin and BS that you’ll hear in the Town Hall chamber or read in your MPs’ monthly virtue-signalling emails. In this episode, our panel of Inside Croydon readers and community activists…

[younes-ben-amara]

البطلُ مهدي مالك (مغربي 41 سنة) فاقد للحركة أَلَّفَ كتابين؛ وأنت ذكِّرني مرة أخرى ما عُذرك لئلا تكتب؟

ما هذه المجموعة من المختارات تسألني؟ إنّها عددٌ من أعداد نشرة “صيد الشابكة” اِعرف أكثر عن النشرة هنا: ما هي نشرة “صيد الشابكة” ما مصادرها، وما غرضها؛ وما معنى الشابكة أصلًا؟! 🎣🌐 🎣🌐 صيد الشابكة العدد #80 🎣🌐 صيد الشابكة العدد #80🔌🧠 جدير بالاطلاع🍲 العِلم (قصة حائزة على نوبل 2023) لا يطعمك لا في بلاد عربستان ولا في بلاد العم سام في حال لم تُسوِّق لنفسك🥣 الآن هل العلم بيوكّل عيش في مكان آخر؟ بلاد…

[beautsentences]

"As with most people on Earth, shame is a part of my life, installed at a young age and frequently updated with shame service packs." - Paul Ford

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Every five or six minutes, someone in the social sciences publishes a PDF with a title like “Humans 95 Percent Happier in Small Towns, Waving at Neighbors and Eating Sandwiches.” When we gather in groups of more than, say, eight, it’s a disaster. Yet there is something fundamental in our nature that desperately wants to get everyone together in one big room, to “solve it.” Our smarter, richer betters (in Babel times, the king’s name was Nimrod) often preach the idea of a town square, a marketplace of ideas, a centralized hub of discourse and entertainment—and we listen. But when I go back and read Genesis, I hear God saying: “My children, I designed your brains to scale to 150 stable relationships. Anything beyond that is overclocking. You should all try Mastodon.”

God Did the World a Favor by Destroying Twitter

[ghassanrassam]

1956 Marlon Brando is an Okinawan translator for American Glenn Ford