For this competition: No drips, no hearts, no skulls, no birds, no over‐sized animals, no internet cliches, no clusters of random things, no pirates, no ninjas, no ironic references to 80s pop‐culture, no 45‐degree angles, and for the love of all that is holy – no more talking food!
Category: Quotations
The world of the World Cup is the one I want to live in. I cannot resist its United Nations–like pageantry and high‐mindedness, the apolitical display of national characteristics, the revelation of deep human flaws and unexpected greatnesses, the fact that entire nations walk off the job or wake up at 3 a.m. to watch men kick a ball.
Wow. I was sure of is. But the are people have convinced me. Put me down for are, and please hold while I go back and correct pretty much everything I’ve ever written.
If you’re an engineer at a company where becoming a manager is considered a promotion, then you only have three choices: become a manager yourself, or leave, or resign yourself to being a second‐class employee. It should be obvious — you can work through the math using three sock puppets — that this is an arrangement that pushes a company inexorably towards mediocrity. The best engineers either leave the company or try their hand at management, often with doubly disastrous consequences: they simultaneously lose the company a great engineer and gain them an awful manager.
The ability to pick shit up quickly and solve problems is far more important than the ability to regurgitate arbitrary facts. If I can hand you anything from a broken mail configuration to a broken coffee machine, and you tell me “I know nothing about this, but I’m on it,” you’re somebody I want working with me.
This poor man has been shot and will die late at night inside the Louvre; his wounds, although mortal, fortunately leave him time enough to conceal a safe deposit key, strip himself, cover his body with symbols written in his own blood, arrange his body in a pose and within a design by Da Vinci, and write out, also in blood, an encrypted message, a scrambled numerical sequence and a footnote to Sophie Neveu, the pretty French policewoman whom he raised after the death of her parents. Most people are content with a dying word or two; Jacques leaves us with a film treatment.
Meanwhile the albino monk, whose name is Silas and who may be the first character in the history of motion pictures to speak Latin into a cellphone, flagellates himself, smashes the floor of a church and kills a nun.
“If it wasn’t for us, you would be speaking German,” they would say. “No, if it wasn’t for you,” I would tell them, “I would probably be speaking Yoruba.”
The fact that the Earth has never been a sandwich is probably why things are so fucked up.
The technical details don’t even matter here. A company that doesn’t believe anyone would ever try to steal an election shouldn’t be in the voting machine business.