Bokelskere.no

‘David Bowie has talent,’ Truman Capote told Andy Warhol in 1973 – a generous assessment from the man who thought Mick Jagger as ‘sexy as a pissing frog’.

Another GCHQ operation to harvest IP addresses of website visitors was code-named KARMA POLICE, apparently after the Radiohead song of the same name, which includes the lyric, ‘This is what you’ll get when you mess with us.’

Frederick Jelinek, the researcher who led IBM’s language efforts, famously stated that ‘every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recogniser goes up’.

In time, the founder of Microsoft himself became associated with another computer scientist’s rule of thumb: Gates’s law, which claims that, as a result of wasteful and inefficient code and redundant features, the speed of software halves every eighteen months.

Vi tror vi har all tid i verden, men det har vi ikke. Tiden er hensynsløs. Det er havet som øver seg på glemsel. Bølgen er havets meditative øvelse, sier zen-mestrene. Men det har til hensikt å utrydde oss.

[Familiens puddelhund] var en daglig leksjon i å leve én dag om gangen. Forventning og anger stod ikke i hennes leksikon. Lev i øyeblikket, sier vi til oss selv. Men det er bare hundene våre som praktiserer det til fulle.

"I'm Moby, and I'm an alcoholic."

Lizzie Grant, whom I’d tried dating a couple of years ago, was one of our original backup singers, but she left the group to pursue her own career as Lana Del Rey.

I’d never met Pantera, but I loved their records. The first time Kelly had visited me, in 1999, I’d put on The Great Southern Trendkill while I was making dinner. She liked Belle and Sebastian and Fairport Convention, and was baffled that I would put on a Pantera album while adding organic basil to a vegan spaghetti sauce.

Å sitte i skumringstimen, med hverandre, med en kaffekopp, men ingenting annet, det er nærvær. Å sitte i den samme timen, men med hver sin telefon i tillegg, er noe helt, helt annet.

What I could never process was that each time I entered, I was visiting David Bowie as a friend. As a peer. Well, “peer” seemed absurd. Bowie was the greatest musician of the twentieth century, while I was a bald degenerate with an accidental hit record. He was a demigod; I was most likely a fluke.

People are trying so hard to live through their children. And the children keep trying so hard to live up to their parents, or live them down. Everybody's living through or for or against somebody else. It doesn't make too much sense, and it isn't working too well.