Pligget
Little to say for myself


Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Paranoid? Moi?

 
Maybe I'm getting too up-my-own-arse, but yesterday I turned up at work clean-shaven, after three years with the full beard in the photo. So far only two people, out of the thirty or so I've encountered, have shown any indication of noticing. This means that the others:
  1. genuinely haven't noticed (because they never noticed the beard in the first place) and I wildly over-estimate the significance to them of my appearance
  2. have noticed, but it's so trivial that it's unworthy of comment
  3. have noticed and are too embarrassed (for my sake), by the wobbly double chin, to draw attention to it
  4. think I'm someone else
On balance I think I'll ease my paranoia by assuming it's option 4. That way I can ask them what they really thought about that bloke with the beard who used to sit at my desk.

posted by Plig | 13:45 |


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Forget the sentimental notion that foreign policy is a struggle between virtue and vice, with virtue bound to win.
Forget the utopian notion that a brave new world without power politics will follow the unconditional surrender of wicked nations.
Forget the crusading notion that any nation, however virtuous and powerful, can have the mission to make the world in its own image.
Remember that diplomacy without power is feeble, and power without diplomacy is destructive and blind.
Remember that no nation's power is without limits, and hence that its policies must respect the power and interests of others.
Hans Morgenthau

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts
Bertrand Russell

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one
Albert Einstein

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative
Martin Luther King Jr.

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man
Bertrand Russell

I think it would be a good idea
Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun
Pablo Picasso

Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others
Groucho Marx

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it
Mahatma Gandhi

Always make new mistakes
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