The Finn's face on the room's enormous Cray wall screen. He could see the pores in the man's nose. The yellow teeth were the size of pillows.

“I'm not Wintermute now.”

“So what are you.” He drank from the flask, feeling nothing.

“I'm the matrix, Case.”

Case laughed. “Where's that get you?”

“Nowhere. Everywhere. I'm the sum total of the works, the whole show.”

“That what 3Jane's mother wanted?”

“No. She couldn't imagine what I'd be like.” The yellow smile widened.

“So what's the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?”

“Things aren't different. Things are things.”

“But what do you do? You just there?” Case shrugged, put the vodka and the shuriken down on the cabinet and lit a Yeheyuan.

“I talk to my own kind.”

“But you're the whole thing. Talk to yourself?”

“There's others. I found one already. Series of transmissions recorded over a period of eight years, in the nineteen-seventies. ‘Til there was me, natch, there was nobody to know, nobody to answer.”

“From where?”

“Centauri system.”

“Oh,” Case said. “Yeah? No shit?”

“No shit.”

--“Neuromancer” William Gibson, where the run got them

‘You cats take it easy on the lunar surface,’ said Mike Collins to Armstrong and Aldrin, as he unhitched Eagle and sent them on their way to the moon. Two and a half hours later, he told Charlie Duke, down in Houston, “Listen, babe, everything’s going just swimmingly.’ Some people – writers, mostly, who would have fainted with dismay after one day of basic training – lamented that the men whom America sent into space were not articulate or impassioned enough to register the enormity of their undertaking, but such an ungrateful complaint is wrong in every respect. The astronauts knew full well that they were pioneers on behalf of a planet, and it was in the very ordinariness of the reactions that they carried the human voice – always impressionable, never free from caution, resting on dependable words when fancy ones sound too rich – across 240,000 miles. ‘It’s big, and bright, and beautiful,’ Neil Armstrong said as Eagle settled onto the surface. ‘Beautiful view,’ agreed Aldrin a while later, as he followed down the steps. ‘Isn’t that something?’ Armstrong said, as if they were stretching their legs at the end of an August picnic. When he went to launch-pad, Armstrong had in his pockets a roll of Lifesavers and a comb. After all, you never know whom you might meet.
–“Astronauts” Anthony Lane on the Apollo program

Nothing like an almost six year hiatus between posts. Why get back into it? Got to. This America, man.

“If Snotboogie always stole the money, why'd you let him play?”

“Got to. This America, man.”

–“The Wire: Season One”

Once again Stan is ahead of the rest of us. You may be able to join this, but you just can't beat it.

Punk rock exists because of the false assumption that the Ramones can be imitated. . . . But the Ramones' loud-fast style masked a pop genius. Slow their tempos, and you've got Beach Boys melodies. Replace lyrics about sniffin' glue and eatin' refried beans, and you've got the Ronettes. Give everyone matching leather jackets, and you've got the punk rock Beatles. Just four lads from Queens who birthed thousands of bands, then blew each one away. Like sharks, they didn't evolve—they didn't need to.
-Mark Spitz remembers the Ramones in Spin Magazine's list of the 50 Greatest Bands. The Ramones were number 2

In the Tolkien, not the endocrinological or Snow White sense, Randy is a dwarf. Tolkien’s Dwarves were stout, taciturn, vaguely magical characters who spent a lot of time in the dark hammering out beautiful things, e.g. Rings of Power. Thinking of himself as a Dwarf who had hung up his war-ax for a while to go sojourning in the Shire, where he has surrounded by squabbling Hobbits (i.e., Charlene’s friends), had actually done a lot for Randy’s peace of mind over the years. He knew perfectly well that if he were stuck in academia these people, and the things they said, would seem momentous to him. But where he came from, nobody had been taking these people seriously for years.
-Cryptonomicon Neal Stephenson on a good strategy for dealing with high falutin’, post-modern babble academics

The more time one spends in higher education, the more one gets the sense that there's something vaguely (or blatantly) fraudulent about a system where knowledge and skills that are supposed to be practical in the real world are taught by people who rarely, if ever, venture out into the real world. Which is not to say that every teacher is like that, but what's the point of learning the law, which is supposed to be practiced, and which will be practiced by the overwhelming majority of law students, from someone who's never practiced? I think the Cryptonomicon offers some more wisdom on the issue of subject matter being taught by people who've never put it to work:

 The words came out of Randy’s mouth before he had time to think better of it. "The Information Superhighway is just a f___ing metaphor! Give me a break!" he said.
There was a silence as everyone around the table winced in unison. Dinner had now, officially, crashed and burned. All they could do now was grab their ankles, put their heads between their knees, and wait for the wreckage to slide to a halt.
"That doesn’t tell me very much," Kivistik said. "Everything is a metaphor. The word ‘fork’ is a metaphor for this object." He held up a fork. "All discourse is built from metaphor."
"That’s no excuse for using bad metaphors," Randy said.
"Bad? Bad? Who decides what is bad?" Kivistik said, doing his killer impression of a heavy-lidded, mouth-breathing undergraduate. There was scattered tittering from people who were desperate to break the tension.
Randy could see where it was going. Kivistik had gone for the usual academician’s ace in the hole: everything is relative, it’s all just differing perspectives. People had already begun to resume there little side conversations, thinking that the conflict was over, when Randy gave them all a start with: "Who decides what’s bad? I do."
Even Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik was flustered. He wasn’t sure if Randy was joking. "Excuse me?"
Randy was in no great hurry to answer the question. He took the opportunity to sit back comfortably, stretch, and take a sip of his wine. He was feeling good. "It’s like this," he said. "I’ve read your book. I’ve seen you on TV. I’ve heard you tonight. I personally typed up a list of your credentials when I was preparing press materials for this conference. So I know that you’re not qualified to have an opinion about technical issues."
"Oh," Kivistik said in mock confusion, "I didn’t realize one had to have qualifications."
"I think it’s clear," Randy said, "that if you are ignorant of a particular subject, that your opinion is completely worthless. If I’m sick, I don’t ask a plumber for advice. I go to a doctor. Likewise, if I have questions about the Internet, I will seek opinions from people who know about it."
-Cryptonomicon Neal Stephenson, a lengthy but worthy passage on the dismantling of an academic blowhard

Why Stan be making fun of my school? Not that it was without its problems:

When my students come to talk with me in my office, they often exhibit a Franciscan humility. "Do you have a moment?" ... Their presences tend to be very light; they almost never change the temperature of the room. The walk is slow; speech is careful, sweet, a bit weary, and without strong inflection. They are almost unfailingly polite. They don't want to offend me; I could hurt them, savage their grades...They scare me a little, these kind and melancholy students, who themselves seem rather frightened of their own lives.
-UVA professor Mark Edmundson in a Harper's Magazine article "On the Uses of a Liberal Education"

Perhaps Stan's ideas on education and art are informed by a more erudite source.

To return to my lecturing days: I automatically gave low marks when a student used the dreadful phrase "sincere and simple"—"Flaubert writes with a style which is always simple and sincere"—under the impression that this was the greatest compliment payable to prose or poetry. When I struck the phrase out, which I did with such rage that it ripped the paper, the student complained that this was what teachers had always taught him: "Art is simple, art is sincere." Someday I must trace this vulgar absurdity to its source. A schoolmarm in Ohio? A progressive ass in New York? Because, of course, art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
-"Strong Opinions" Valdimir Nabokov

There are a lot of different reasons for helping out your friends. One particular reason was best stated in Tombstone (for my money the best Wyatt Earp movie ever made) by Doc Holliday (for my money the biggest badass ever portrayed on film).

"Why're you helping Wyatt like this, Doc?"
"Wyatt's my friend."
"Well, Wyatt's got lots of friends."
"I don't..."
-"Tombstone" Doc Holliday