25 Comments
Aug 11Liked by Andrew Smith

It's like my mom always said, "Whatever doesn't kill you simply makes you...stranger."

Wait, no, that was The Joker.

I always get them confused.

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In fairness, the Joker is very matronly.

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Aug 11·edited Aug 11Liked by Andrew Smith

The post reminded me of the below quote from Steve Jobs:

Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently - they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

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Now, give me a billion dollars and some carrot juice!

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Aug 11Liked by Andrew Smith

Nice! Is actually anyone "usual?"

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It's all degrees, right? So, no, not precisely. Some are more usual than others, I guess!

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Aug 13Liked by Andrew Smith

This was a fun post - thank you.

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Aug 12Liked by Andrew Smith

While Lydia's dad was quite normal. NOTHING was normal about Delia Deetz. She was a proto-hipster. But Catherine O'hara will make any character interesting.

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I love Catherine O'Hara so much!

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Aug 12Liked by Andrew Smith

Beautiful sentiment, and illuminating to connect strangeness and evolution.

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It is uniqueness to which we owe our very existence!

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"...the living often ignore the strange and unusual." Unless they are forced to confront it by factors they cannot control. Which is what things like animation, speculative fiction and horror media are excellent at doing- "strange" and "unusual" things are the meat they live on.

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Lucky for us culture loves the strange. Dr Strange, Stranger things, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice coming soon can't wait!

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I am allowing myself to be cautiously optimistic.

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It looks like a best of the OG but I still wanna watch it

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I will watch it as soon as it's free at my house. It'll happen soon enough. I can't imagine anything motivating me to go to a theater in the next couple years.

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lol sounds dire. Seeing in theater hits diff. I saw Charade w/ Cary Grant in one of my first pandemic returns and it was super fun. Oh and we were the only ones in the theater! Yum popcorn

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We rented out a whole theater in 2021 and watched "The Green Knight"! It was great. I definitely feel differently if we're the only ones in there.

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What!? I have never heard of this, will look for it most be worth it to rent a whole theater

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Audrey Hepburn too!

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Aug 11Liked by Andrew Smith

Re: “…Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, and Richard Feynman are all three titans of thought who contributed unimaginably important ideas to our understanding of the world, and all three were very much outsiders.

Einstein and Newton, too, were among the greatest contributors ever to our base of knowledge. Both were very much outsiders, and I’d argue that both were unusual, too.”

Strange and unusual may correlate to important contribution but it is not sufficient. All five of your examples put in immense (one might say ‘unusual’) amounts of work to earn their notariaty. I am aware of some whose behavior qualifies as strange and unusual and that’s about all.

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Sure. You might even argue that strangeness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for greatness.

Actually, I'm not even going that far with my assertion. I'm saying that it can be a good thing, so we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater by assuming strange or unusual folks aren't worthy of our time or attention. It might be possible to be perfectly ordinary, and yet still great (although I can't think of any actual examples of this).

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No two stars are exactly alike. Googled.

The same with people.

"Just like each person has unique fingerprints, each star has a unique spectrum."

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That's true about stars, although they do eventually all end up identical in the end (slowly evaporating black holes).

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