oorkate - Tumblr blog

[oorkate]

The neighborhood kids are doing laps through the backyards - literally hopping fences and doing circles around trees. One of them is too little to make it over and keeps getting stuck and falling into them. It's magical.

I don’t really have any great thoughts. Except maybe I should get a TV if this is what’s passing as entertainment.

[oorkate]

Youth - nothing else worth having in the world … and I had youth, the transitory, the fugitive, now, completely and abundantly. Yet what was I going to do with it? Certainly not squander its gold on the commonplace quest for riches and respectability, and then secretly lament the price that had to be paid for these futile ideals. Let those who wish have their respectability - I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic.

Richard Halliburton, The Royal Road to Romance (quoted in Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel)

This never gets old.

[oorkate]

[oorkate]

Tonight's unexpected treat? Stories from Dad about his friends back in Uni. Including Gene of the ginger afro (Inverness), who "smoked a lot of dope." Impressions of talking to a very-stoned Gene included.

I love my family.

[oorkate]

[oorkate]

Awkward Family Photos with Danny McBride and Maya Rudolph

[oorkate]

To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.

Henry Miller

Via: me.

(via kateoplis)

[oorkate]

[oorkate]

Oh How We Try

[oorkate]

[oorkate]

Ummm this was basically my thought process before moving there

[oorkate]

[oorkate]

This woman is such an inspiration.

what i've learned in the last 24 hours....

Bill Gates is a complete IDIOT.

#TEAMMOYO

you do not attack and slander Dr. Moyo’s name and get away with it.

he must be new here….

[oorkate]

Crew Allocation

A week ago last Saturday was the biggest day of race prep yet: crew allocation. This was it - we would find out who our skippers and crew were. That meant we could really dive into our game plan for the race. The morning started early (really early) as I had to catch the train from London to Portsmouth (why was I in London when I'm Somerset-based? Had to visit the embassy and get more pages put into my very full passport). I did meet a couple of crew members on the train (follow the red jackets and/or the sailing logos), so that both kept me awake and made the journey more enjoyable. From the station it was off to the Guildhall (with a quick pit-stop to drop my bags at the hotel) for photos and breakfast, not to mention catching up with many of the people I met during my various trainings in Singapore and Gosport. Eventually we made our way into the auditorium for the main event. Before allocating crews, we were given updates on various race issues: stopovers (Recife? Sydney!), the state of the boats (they should all be here before the race starts, hopefully, haha). Sir Robin made a short speech designed to inspire us. Then: the skippers! The level of nervous excitement in that room as they started calling names was through the roof. PATIENCE. Have it (I'm not so great at that one). Every so often I saw names I recognized from training and then - all of a sudden there was my name! Team Matt. TEAM MATT! I did a little happy dance in my chair while trying to remain cool and collected, but seriously. TEAM MATT. I wanted a young skipper, and boy did I get one. It was quite difficult to sit through the rest of the names after that. Gave me time to analyze the rest of the boats (Asian names? Definitely Qingdao boat. Irish skipper, Irish names, wonder who's going to be be sponsoring that one. Same goes for an Aussie boat). When that was all finished up we broke up into crews to go discuss strategy. Three of us from Team Matt got pulled aside to be interviewed (how are you feeling about your new skipper, what was it like waiting for your name to be called, etc --- followed my me doing my best to smile and make up some semblance of an answer). Represent.

[oorkate]

[oorkate]

love these kind of lists

Sometimes we must turn to other languages to find le mot juste. Here are a whole bunch of foreign words with no direct English equivalent.

1. Kummerspeck (German) Excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, grief bacon.

2. Shemomedjamo (Georgian) You know when you’re…

[oorkate]

How Are We Supposed to Know What the Government Does?

You should probably be afraid, at least a little, of the federal government. The reason for this doesn’t have anything to do with conspiracy theories about fluoridation or the Obama administration hoarding ammo to keep it out of the hands of True Patriots. It’s simpler than that: you should be worried about the US government because it is huge and well funded and powerful and, most importantly, you don’t know what it’s doing.

The civics class version of government—that there are three branches, each with its own checks and balances and blah blah blah—is hopelessly outdated. For one thing, the legislative branch is paralyzed by partisanship and a set of rules that make it impossible for it to do anything but stop laws from getting enacted. For another, as documented by the Washington Post in 2010, the governmental agencies that are in charge of “national security” have grown like not-all-that-benign tumors, consuming billions of tax dollars, constructing massive top-secret facilities, and employing hundreds of thousands of people whose job descriptions you don’t have the security clearance to know. The national security state is vast and unknowable, practically its own branch of government at this point, with its own secret history. Millions upon millions of documents are classified, many unnecessarily. By some counts, there are more pages of classified documents in the US than there are unclassified—and the government spends $12 billion a year keeping all that information under wraps.  

Continue