Thursday, February 26, 2009

Links!



- Interspecies Friendship Alert! I had seen this a while back but seems like I somehow neglected to post it. Baby hippo befriends elderly tortoise. (thanks, RT!)

- Think you're having a bad day? Check out the snippets posted on F*** My Life. Terrible and awkward, and simultaneously hilarious. Kind of like the British version of The Office.

- I really enjoyed this article on Leonardo da Vinci, who, among other things, was a legendary procrastinator:
"If there is one conclusion to be drawn from the life of Leonardo, it is that procrastination reveals the things at which we are most gifted — the things we truly want to do. Procrastination is a calling away from something that we do against our desires toward something that we do for pleasure, in that joyful state of self-forgetful inspiration that we call genius."
Of course, da Vinci was diagramming inventions centuries ahead of their time rather than, say, drinking coffee and scouring the internet for pictures of baby animals. The devil's always in the details.

Seems like my own procrastinating spirit is more in tune with Kurt Vonnegut:
[When Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope] "Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around."

4 comments:

S said...

Great links! I know I'll be spending some time procrastinating on the F*** my life site. Speaking of artists...are you going to see the Shepard Fairey show?

Anonymous said...

I love that KV quote. I've checked out the fmylife site before and I can't help but wonder if some people are making that stuff up.

eileen said...

Yeah, I also doubted the veracity of some of the FML posts. They are absurd!

I definitely will go see the Shepard Fairey show at some point. The ICA is so close to where I live that I really should go more often, especially because it's free on Thursday nights.

Anonymous said...

Oh, the latter comment just brought back a (cocktail-induced) college memory. I'll tell you about it next time I see you in June!