Kunama's Quotes Page

"Grief dallied with nor law nor limit knows."

I'm reading Shakespeare.

Voluntarily.

Yes, you may now look shocked.


The poem I'm reading is titled The Rape of Lucrece.

Lucrece is very eloquent, but appealing to logic in the face of lust is so very pointless.


Feel free to go away once you get bored. It's a long, pointless post.


I disagree with Shakespeare on this line:
"But she hath lost a dearer thing than life"
Was chastity really so highly upheld those days!? I'm glad I'm alive now and not back then!

Afterwards, Lucrece is a ranting, crying wreck. Understandable, given the circumstances.
But she's an eloquent, ranting, crying wreck - the quoted lines below are spoken by her.

"Why should the worm intrude the maiden bud?
Or hateful cuckoos hatch in sparrows' nests?
Or toads infect fair founts with venom mud?
Or tyrant folly lurk in gentle breasts?
Or kings be breakers of their own behests?
But no perfection is so absolute,
That some impurity doth not pollute."

Sounds like the way this world is.

"What virtue breeds iniquity devours:"

Thus is the darker side of human nature.

"Guilty thou art of murder and of theft,
Guilty of perjury and subornation,
Guilty of treason, forgery, and shift,
Guilty of incest, that abomination;
An accessary by thine inclination
To all sins past, and all that are to come,
From the creation to the general doom."

Don't blame Fate/Opportunity.

"Mis-shapen Time, copesmate of ugly Night,
Swift subtle post, carrier of grisly care,
Eater of youth, false slave to false delight,
Base watch of woes, sin's pack-horse, virtue's snare;
Thou nursest all and murder'st all that are:
O, hear me then, injurious, shifting Time!
Be guilty of my death, since of my crime."

Time has nothing to do with it. But it does do all these other things -

"To show the beldam daughters of her daughter,
To make the child a man, the man a child,
To slay the tiger that doth live by slaughter,
To tame the unicorn and lion wild,
To mock the subtle in themselves beguiled,
To cheer the ploughman with increaseful crops,
And waste huge stones with little water drops."

"In vain I rail at Opportunity,
At Time, at Tarquin, and uncheerful Night;
In vain I cavil with mine infamy,
In vain I spurn at my confirm'd despite:
This helpless smoke of words doth me no right.
The remedy indeed to do me good
Is to let forth my foul-defiled blood."

Ah. So she knows it's pointless. Ok then.

"And let mild women to him lose their mildness,
Wilder to him than tigers in their wildness."

What? Don't look at me like that. You all know I could be like that if I wanted to.

"Let him have time to tear his curled hair,
Let him have time against himself to rave,
Let him have time of Time's help to despair,
Let him have time to live a loathed slave,
Let him have time a beggar's orts to crave,
And time to see one that by alms doth live
Disdain to him disdained scraps to give."

Ooooh. Maybe she's not just a wreck after all.

"In vain,' quoth she, 'I live, and seek in vain
Some happy mean to end a hapless life.
I fear'd by Tarquin's falchion to be slain,
Yet for the self-same purpose seek a knife:
But when I fear'd I was a loyal wife:
So am I now: O no, that cannot be;
Of that true type hath Tarquin rifled me."

Or.. maybe she is. It's a bad situation, but there's more to life than chastity or blaming oneself for something that wasn't one's fault. *rolls eyes*

"My tongue shall utter all; mine eyes, like sluices,
As from a mountain-spring that feeds a dale,
Shall gush pure streams to purge my impure tale."

Smart. Most victims don't tell anyone, and so they are never given justice until many years later.

"Sad souls are slain in merry company;
Grief best is pleased with grief's society:
True sorrow then is feelingly sufficed
When with like semblance it is sympathized."

Not always true, but is usually quite accurate.

"is woe the cure for woe?"

Of course, there's always the other side of the argument.

"My blood shall wash the slander of mine ill;
My life's foul deed, my life's fair end shall free it."

Kill oneself because something that one couldn't help happened? Silly wreck.


Meh. Shakespear goes on for far too long. That poem took 3 hours to read. Now I remember why I didn't like Shakespeare all that much. >_<
Here it is, though I don't know why on earth you'd want to read such tedious ranting.

Kunama in Penultimate Fantasy

Bouncy and vibrant, this offbeat story, set in a world much like our own, draws the viewer into the journey of sceptics, Tillius (Ben Stiller) and Kunama (Alicia Silverstone), who find themselves troubled indeed because a chance meeting has been made possible by Kunama's misguided boss, Slippedinsane (Kenneth Branagh). Nudity is kept to a tasteful zero.

Produced by ianiceboy

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used?

Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads.

Why did the English build them like that?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did "they" use that gauge then?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing!

Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads?

Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels.
Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.

And may the bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a spec and told we have always done it that way and you wonder what horse's ass came up with that, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the hind ends of two war horses.

Now the twist to the story... When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on
its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah.

The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.
The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' asses.

So, a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most
advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a Horse's Ass.

And you thought being a Horse's Ass was not important??

Quoted by Kederaji Tajorn here

Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

Terry Pratchet

Come with me by yourselves and rest awhile,
I know you're weary of the stress and throng,
Wipe from your brow the sweat and dust of toil,
And in My quiet strength again be strong.

Come now aside from all the world holds dear,
For fellowship the world has never known,
Alone with Me, and with My Father here,
With Me and with My Father, not alone.

Come, tell Me all that you have said and done,
Your victories and failures, hopes and fears.
I know how hardened hearts are wooed and won;
My choicest works are always wet with tears.

Come now and rest; the journey is too great,
And you will faint beside the way and sink;
The bread of life is here for you to eat,
And here for you the wine of love to drink.

Then from fellowship with your Lord return,
And work till daylight softens into even:
Those brief hours are not lost in which you learn
More of your Master and His rest in Heaven.

From Streams in the Desert, edited by James Reimann