That was the title of a Yahoo! News article I saw the other day.
I’ve gotta laugh when I read news articles like that.Â
And I’ve been seeing them A LOT lately.
Here are a couple of good quotes from some books I have been reading:
“if you look at the many interviews with workers on assembly lines, for example, that have been done by industrial psychologists, you find that one of the things they complain about over and over again is the fact that their work simply can’t be done well; the fact that the assembly line goes through so fast that they can’t do their work properly. I just happened to look recently at a study of longevity in some journal on gerontology which tried to trace the factors that you could use to predict longevity — you know, cigarette smoking and drinking, genetic factors — everything was looked at. It turned out, in fact, that the highest predictor, the most successful predictor, was job satisfaction.”
The Relevance of Anarcho-syndicalism
Noam Chomsky interviewed by Peter Jay
“You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you’ll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved.”
The Abolition of Work
by Bob Black
Before leaving for Laika, Glen Sylvester (a co-worker here at STARZ Animation) sent this out in his farewell e-mail:
“One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all.
One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.
The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”
Two Wolves
A Cherokee Legend
I’d like to think of it all as some sort of a sign. Or a SIGN.
But when I start to see patterns emerging I always think back to an article in the back of Cerebus #219.
“When the Universe seems to confirm our fictions as opposed to our supposed theories, then this suggests a strange relationship between fiction, mind, perception, and cosmos that is far more gripping than simply solving a whodunit.I once heard an anecdote about a contemporary magician who decided to put this principle to the test by adopting a belief so strange that nobody could possibly mistake it for reality and then seeing what happened. The belief he decided to go with was that Noddy, the little toy-car driving and belied-hat wearing protagonist of Enid Blyton’s
children’s books, was in fact the absolute creator of the Universe and the God of all Gods. Within a couple of weeks he abandoned the experiment in alarm, finding himself upon the brink of conclusively proving that Middy was the Supreme Being. He’d come across magazine articles showing freshly discovered cave-drawings of an obviously sacred figure wearing what appeared to be a tall pointed hat with a little bell on the top. He’d read an interview with Enid Blyton herself in which she described a strange vision that had come to her while under the influence of gas at the dentist; in which she had been whisked across the Universe at the speed of light to meet God himself, although he couldn’t describe the details of their conversation. This, along with a whole mess of other stuff and previously hidden meanings in Bible passages (Cain is banished to the Land of Nod in Genesis, for example), seemed to indicate that Nod was God and Enid Blyton His prophetess.”
Dave Sim/Alan Moore Correspondence – Cerebus #219
Alan MooreÂ
Off on a semi-tangent:Â Mark Mayerson wrote a good article on his blog about the state of animation in Canada titled Woe Canada.
