Sveinbjorn Thordarson's Website

Í dag fékk ég ímeil með lista af fræðilegum atburðum og fyrirlestrum í Edinborg í vikunni framundan. Mér þótti eftirfarandi einstaklega merkilegt:

4.00 pm, Godfrey Thomson Hall, Moray House. Professor Geoffrey Pullum (Linguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh): "Adjectives and Demons: Teaching Grammar, Teaching Style, and the Writing of Dan Brown". [Language Teaching Forum, Moray House School of Education]

Stundum skammast ég mín svo hrikalega fyrir akademíu...

The propect of open-ended growth in the quantity of goods, services and people is in any case hardly a conservative vision. Though the eradication of involuntary poverty remains a noble cause, the project of promoting maximal economic growth is, perhaps, the most vulgar ideal ever put before suffering humankind. The task of conservative policy is not to spread the malady of infinite aspiration, to which our species is in any case all too prone, but to keep in good repair those institutions and practices whereby human beings come to be reconciled with their circumstances, and so can live and die in dignified and meaningful fashion, despite the imperfections of their condition.

-- John Gray, "An Agenda for Green Conservatism"

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It must always have been seen ... by political economists, that the increase in wealth is not boundless: that at the end of what they term the progressive state lies the stationary state, that all progress in wealth is but a postponenement of this, and that each step in advance is an approach to it. ....

I cannot ... regard the stationary state of capital and wealth with the unaffected aversion so generally manifested towards it by political economists of the old school. I am inclined to believe that it would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement on our present condition. I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing and treading on each other's heels which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, are anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. The northern and middle states of America are a specimen of this stage of civilization in very favourable circumstances ... and all that these advantages seeem to have yet done for them ... is that the life of the whole of one sex is devoted to dollar-hunting, and that of the other to breeding dollar-hunters...

-- John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Vol. 2

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Úr Orwell on the English language

Fyrir ekki svo löngu síðan sótti ég og horfði á kvikmyndina Shock Waves (1977) bara á grundvelli Plot Summaríunnar á IMDB:

Visitors to a remote island discover that a reclusive Nazi commandant has been breeding a group of Zombie soldiers.

Myndin var slöpp, enda gömul og low-budget. Nú kemur í ljós að það er nýkomin út norsk kvikmynd sem heitir Død snø:

A ski vacation turns horrific for a group of medical students, as they find themselves confronted by an unimaginable menace: Nazi zombies.

Taglínan fyrir myndina er: Ein! Zwei! Die!

Ég verð fyrir miklum vonbrigðum ef þetta verður ekki besta kvikmynd allra tíma.

San Francisco Examiner, John C. Dvorak, 19 Feb. 1984

The nature of the personal computer is simply not fully understood by companies like Apple (or anyone else for that matter). Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the equation — as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I don't want one of these new fangled devices.

Spillingardans, spillingardans,
á Alþingi ráðamenn dansa þennan vals.
Gróðafíkn og nautnafans,
kapítalistar andskotans.

Íslenskir ráðamenn þeir eru svín
á meðan alþýðan biður um mat
Neyðaróp fólksins eru fyrir þeim grín,
þeir sitja og troða á sig gat

Það er tími til kominn að henda þeim út,
um hálsinn berum við rauðan klút.
Hendum þeim fyrir hundana, látum þá drekka hland,
og hér mun rísa fyrirmyndarland.

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