The New #2

The Prisoner Reboots the Panopticon for 21st Century | The Underwire from Wired.com: 

"'We're run by the Pentagon, we're run by Madison Avenue, we're run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don't revolt we'll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche.... As long as we go out and buy stuff, we're at their mercy.
'We all live in a little Village,' McGoohan concluded in the same interview. 'Your Village may be different from other people's Villages, but we are all prisoners.'"

There is a new Prisoner mini-series coming up.  I love the original, but will give the new one a chance.  A Prisoner for today could be great.

yeah, about that...

I demand
consistency
from others
that I do not
myself deliver.
I demand
devotion
that I myself
don't show.

how are you?

Polish culture: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy)

Polish culture: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy)

Witkiewicz's plays, unappreciated and largely misunderstood before World War II, were rediscovered in Poland in the 1960s and 70s. Largely characterized by a tone of parody, Witkacy reveals his derisive abilities in them with great force. All the literary references in the plays seem to reflect these abilities. What we have here is both mockery of the rhetoric of the Romantic and Young Poland movements, as well as a parody of motifs drawn from Ibsen and Strindberg, Shakespeare and Wyspianski, Rittner and Conrad. In Witkacy's works, humor almost always becomes macabre, a burlesque tone - an invariable ingredient of Witkiewicz's plays - combines with fantasy. Bitter irony and sarcasm strongly color the represented world, in which seriousness and "elevated" philosophical discourse are mixed perfectly with, and complement, the comedic tone. Konstanty Puzyna, in his classic introduction to the first full edition of Witkiewicz's plays, classified the writer as an exponent of the avant-garde current in European playwriting. Puzyna highlighted certain similarities with Expressionism, wrote about the parallels between Witkacy's plays and Alfred Jarry's UBU ROI, referred to the writer's poetic as Surrealist.

Polish culture: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy)

Polish culture: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy)

Witkacy wrote of drama that it should be akin to "the brain of a madman presented on stage."

and who can disagree with that?

Cool Scientist Alert

Why Did Western Drs. Promote Tobacco While the Nazis Fought Cancer?
| Health & Medicine
| DISCOVER Magazine: 

"It seems you have endless curiosity.

I’m amazed by people who don’t ask questions constantly. I was raised to think that the good life is asking questions and then always realizing that there are infinitely many more questions and that basically what we know is an infinitesimal part of what we might know. I’m interested in human suffering. I’m interested in the big, unanswered questions—in the massive infinity of ignorance that we swim in."