The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.
- Marcel Pagnol (French Writer, Producer and Film Director, 1895-1974)
How to build a cathedral, on BBC iPlayer. (UK only)
The Sufi is…
Drunk without wine; sated without food; distraught; foodless and sleepless; a king beneath a humble cloak; a treasure within a ruin; not of air and earth; not of fire and water; a sea without bounds. He has a hundred moons and skies and suns. He is wise through universal truth – not a scholar from a book.
–Rumi
I also just had to post this track of Martha’s called Lizards. It’s absolutely beautiful, and it features her boyfriend Ben on banjo.
Here’s a song I recorded recently, called “Dying Sun”. It’s written and played by my friend Martha. As I record more of her stuff, I’ll post it on this blog. Download it here.
Horizon’s beautiful Isfahan set on Flickr, brought to my attention by LOLhistory.
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere.
I’m revising for some exams, and I’m trying to use the Memory Palace method, which interestingly I first heard about in connection with Matteo Ricci, a sixteenth-century Jesuit who travelled to China. He would use the memory palace to perform feats of memory, such as remembering 300 Chinese symbols that he had never seen before in sequence. This, and much else of his fascinating life are documented in Jonathan D. Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.
If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished?
-Rumi
What one refuses in a minute
No eternity will return.
Every true genius is bound to be naive.
The Bon Iver album, For Emma, Forever Ago, is brilliant and beautiful. I highly recommend you obtain it somehow.
A Viking hoard of Arab silver has been discovered in Sweden. It’s so strange to think these two cultures, which are so completely separate in my mind, interacted and traded. (via The History Blog)
This bloke has a great collection of videos of morphing faces in art. Particularly beautiful is the demonstration of the portrayal of women in art through the ages shown above.
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
Here are two blog posts over on HowToLive.org which describe some of the author’s thoughts about how happiness is to be achieved. I’ve been having many of these same thoughts myself. Three fundamental truths, and thirteen meditations on happiness.
Via kottke, reposted here for my own convenience, a chronological list of fears, from childhood to parenthood.
I’m reading Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions. It’s the autobiography of a Lakota holy man, a Heyoka, and it’s a brilliant insight into I world I know nothing about, a fascinating man, and a chilling reminder of how vulnerable groups can be persecuted even in the self-proclaimed “land of the free”.
Today’s Wikipedia article of the day is an excellent biography of Suleiman the Magnificent, the longest ruling Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.
Perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.
-Giordano Bruno, d. 1600, after being sentenced to burn at the stake for claiming there were planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. (Via the How to Live blog.)
The ltlblg Theme
[Update: New features have been added, which are discussed here. The download link on this page is still up-to-date.]
I started this blog a few weeks ago, and its intention was to be a super-lightweight tumblelog, with the odd longer post if I felt like it. There’s a heavy emphasis on the written word and super duper simplicity; I wanted to strip down the blog format to as simple a design as possible. ltlblg is what I came up with. I’m certain many people will think the design is boring, but I love simplicity, and I like to let the written word take centre stage.
I’m not too possessive when it comes to design (or anything for that matter really) so I’ve decided to release the theme under the GPL just in case anyone else fancied it. The PHP and CSS are bare-bones, just the way I like them, but they’re well commented, so it should be easy for even beginners to tweak the look and functions. The ltlblg theme offers the following features:
Asides built in
This blog is somewhere between a tumblelog and a blog, so I felt it necessary to include the possibility for both asides and titled posts (like this one). For a little more on what asides are about, see Matt’s post on them. Asides are built into the ltlblg theme, and to use them you need to change only one value in the template files. This is easy to do, even for beginners.
Quote styling
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
-George Bernard Shaw
I like to sometimes include quotes in my posts, and to help the wise words of history stand out you can use super simple tags to mark out what you want emphasised. See readme in the zip file on how to do this (it’s easy).
Simple code
The code (particularly the CSS) is laid out in a very simple fashion, and commented extensively, so it’s a snip to change colours, fonts or layout.
That’s it!
Ok, so that’s not a very long feature list, but that’s kind of the point. ltlblg is super-lightweight, loads fast, and looks good.
I hope that if anyone chooses to use it, they enjoy it, and if you do, post a comment below. Likewise, if you have any questions, you can post them below too.
Disclaimer: I should point out that I’m on a Mac, and although the theme looks good on Safari and Firefox, I haven’t had time to test it on Internet Explorer yet. I will do so shortly and tweak it if necessary.
She is the princess of pout, the countess of come hither…
-Time Magazine on Brigitte Bardot
The video for Justice’s new single DVNO, apart from accompanying a pretty rocking track, feature some damned awesome retro typography.
Note to self: when possible, buy and read the Mortdecai trilogy. Apparently, it’s hilarious, like P.G. Wodehouse but darker.
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
John Hawkwood is a fascinating character from history. A 14th century English mercenary, he terrorised the Italian countryside and its city states for over 30 years. His extremely interesting and very eventful life is described in Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman by Frances Stonor Saunders, which I read recently.
Force new window links to open in tabs in Safari. Been looking for a way to do this for a while.
Top 10 Historical Hoaxers compiled by The Times, with links to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Note to self: buy The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow in the near future. Written by a 7-year-old girl growing up in Oregon in the early 1900s, the language sounds gorgeous:
Today the folks are gone away from the house we do live in. They are gone a little way away, to the ranch house where the grandpa does live. I sit on our step, and I do print. I like it, this house we do live in, being at the edge of the near woods. So many little people do live in the near woods. I do have conversations with them. I found a near woods first day I did go explores. That was the next day after we were come here.
New designs for British coinage. These are absolutely beautiful, beautiful enough for me to bother posting something that’s already on kottke.
Jungian Novel Writing - Character. Has some good ideas to help when devising characters.
He soon felt that the realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand out of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the mistake men make in picturing to themselves happiness as the realization of their desires.
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
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