‘Palace coup’: Veteran former CIA chief predicts Russian President Vladimir Putin is about to be toppled
A veteran chief of America’s spy agency has predicted Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to be toppled in a ‘Black Swan’ coup any day now.
At Saatchi & Saatchi, we believed ‘Nothing is Impossible’.
Adidas went further and told us ‘Impossible is Nothing’.
Steve Jobs knew ‘we’re here to put a dent in the universe’.
Colin Powell believed ‘Perpetual Optimism is a force multiplier’.
For hundreds of years the belief that people can influence their reality through sheer will has intrigued many.
And now – Delulu.
Jim Rigg sent me this snippet from – of all places – the NY Times (who knew it was still being published – and Jim – at least – is still reading it!!! That’s the Headmaster in him.)
Derived from the word delusional, delulu first gained popularity online as shorthand for unrelenting confidence. It describes the process of making the seemingly impossible possible. And for young people who may otherwise feel as if everything – the cost of living, job insecurity, politics – is stacked against them, it has become a way to have some degree of control in their lives.
I love it – so thank you Jim – and thank you Bianca Bernardo, a 23 year old content creator in Los Angeles who told us “May all your delulu come trululu, because being delulu is the solulu”.
Stay delulu
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As historian Dagobert Runes quipped, “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.”
Wandering through the countryside of northern Thailand has rekindled my intermittent desire to live overseas…or at least to spend time travelling for an extended period. In order to learn more about what I’d be signing up for, I recently read Rolf Potts’ classic Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel (Bookshop), the 2003 book that helped kickstart the digital nomad movement. Here’s everything I highlighted on my Kindle while reading it.
"I Hate to Write, but I Love Having Written"
I was surprised and a little bit gutted to learn that the quote "I hate to write, but I love having written" cannot be attributed to Dorothy Parker. According to the Quote Investigator, there's no evidence Parker ever wrote or said anything like that. The earliest instance of such a phrase was from a letter written by novelist Frank Norris prior to his death in 1902 (when Parker would have been 8 or 9 years old).
I write with great difficulty, but have managed somehow to accomplish 40 short stories (all published in fugitive fashion) and five novels within the last three years, and a lot of special unsigned articles. Believe my forte is the novel. Don't like to write, but like having written. Hate the effort of driving pen from line to line, work only three hours a day, but work every day.
God, I'm getting nauseous just picturing what an insufferably pedantic snot I'm going sound like the next time someone tries that "Parker" quote on me. "Well, actually..."
But! This was a great excuse to dive into the deep well of Parker's wit. Some of my favorite quotes of hers:
- One more drink and I'd have been under the host.
- There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
- Too fucking busy, and vice versa.
- You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.
- If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.
"Too fucking busy, and vice versa." is an instant classic, up there with E.B. White's "I must decline, for secret reasons."
Oh, and one other thing I'd never heard about Parker: when she died, she left her estate to Martin Luther King Jr., even though the two had never met. When King was assassinated, her estate passed to the NAACP.
FBI secretly taped James Biden as it probed attorney who paid $100K to his consulting firm: report New York Post