User:Piewalker

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Contents

1 My Wikipedia Article Contributions

2 Contact

11 On Writing and the Media

12 The Human Condition

My Wikipedia Article Contributions

Contact

[mattskypuck@yahoo.com]

Who am I?

They call me Matt. I'm a medical writer currently living on the East Coast working in the pharmaceutical industry. But I'm certainly not confined to the boiling cauldron of burnt stew that technical writing sometimes becomes. Finding pleasure in exertions of all types of writing, I've tried to flex at least one of my literary nuts in everything from journalism to creative writing.

I'm male and single, due to my Y chromosome and personality, respectively.

Philosophy

I believe in good and evil. I also believe every living, intelligent being knows the difference between the two. I believe in the Universe that is presented to my senses. I believe in humanity who inhabits it. I believe in you.

I believe we do what we can. The strong do what they will and the weak do what they must. I believe in diplomacy and International Relations. I consider myself mildly leaning to liberal international interventionism in the absence of a global central enforcement mechanism. I believe in ice cream. I believe in corduroy evening wear. I believe in quiet moments, bereft of frantic psychosis. I also believe those moments sustain us perfectly through bad news and the holy-crap-the-world-has-gone-to-hell-in-a-handcart moments.

In his television program and subsequent book "Cosmos", Carl Sagan offered the tantalizing hypothetical database entries of an "Encyclopedia Galactica," a master pandect/compendium containing the total accumulation of all the knowledge of the known sentient species of our galaxy. Perhaps in this master database, as Sagan posits, resides the profiles of hundreds of thousands of civilizations waiting to be discovered. The database names of these entries I find revealing. One civilization calls themselves collectively "We who became one"; another "We who survived." Finally, "Humanity." We can learn a great deal from what we call ourselves.

human - c.1250, from M.Fr. humain "of or belonging to man," from L. humanus, probably related to homo (gen. hominis) "man," and to humus "earth," on notion of "earthly beings," as opposed to the gods (cf. Heb. adam "man," from adamah "ground"). Cognate with O.Lith. zmuo (acc. zmuni) "man, male person."

Learning is a joy to me, and Wikipedia works to achieve this end. Journalism does as well. I'm positively energized to live in an epoch of human history where the quest for knowledge (answers and questions) is, as Carl Sagan said, generally prized. Wikipedia champions this notion.

I think mankind's greatest accomplishments (and failures) are both political and personal. We live in a vast global village (Marshall McLuhan) that sometimes feels limiting without proper teaching and explanations of the phenomena of our world. With the careful cultivation of disciplined thought, I believe we can ride on the wings of understanding and knowledge that soars into the realm of the previously unimaginable, perhaps bringing us closer to the seemingly elusive understanding of ourselves. I find meaning in communicating perceptions of the world because I suppose I'm arrogant enough to think I see it clearly. Wikipedia is an outlet for that arrogance, yet has sufficient filters and controls to tailor, channel and peer-review that arrogance into something balanced, fair, intelligent and meaningful...something good enough to share and pass on in the ever altruistic efforts of paying it forward.

And, well, I believe in you.

Hobbies

For fun I build computers. I play ice hockey and chess. I enjoy rollerblading, running, basketball and just playing catch. Thinking is a favorite past time (as ex-girlfriends will tell you). I adore film. I relish the Internet, multiplayer games (current favorites are Halo (PC), Homeworld 2, Star Wars Republic Commando, Star Wars Rebellion, FarCry, and the old Unreal Tournament), and all the continuously updated sources of information, literature and creativity, including news sites such as MSNBC and CNN, National Geographic, The Atlantic Monthly, [CGChannel.com], [CNet.com], [slashdot.org], Project Gutenberg and, of course, Wikipedia.

Vita/Profile

I began my writing career as an Intern for a Public Relations firm in Salt Lake City, then penned news, features and sports stories for The Daily Utah Chronicle, http://dailyutahchronicle.com, the independent student newspaper at the University of Utah. I then freelanced for various event magazines before and after graduating from the University of Utah in 2003, and shortly thereafter thought it was high time I write what was really on my mind, writing creative fiction and personal essays at the United Kingdom's own Friends of the Heroes http://www.friendsoftheheroes.co.uk. All the while, I penned my own column I dubbed "Chutes and Ladders" at http://longandshortreports.com from 2001 to 2003, poring my creative and technical energies into company valuations and general industry trend analyses.

Favorite Authors

Alexander, Lloyd
Asimov, Isaac
Cunningham-Reid, Dominic (journalist, documentary film producer, director)
Hesse, Hermann
Kaufman, Herbert
Ignatieff, Michael
Lewis, Clive Staples (CS)
Manison, Pete
Moeller, Susan
Sagan, Carl
Sontag, Susan
Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel (JRR)
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler

Favorite Quotes

On War

“Every minute, hundreds of bombs and shells are exploding,” said Fadril al-Badrani, a resident who lives in the center of Fallujah, said after nightfall Monday. “The north of the city is in flames. I can also see fire and smoke ... Fallujah has become like hell.” -NBC, MSNBC and news services; Updated: 9:33 a.m. ET Nov. 9, 2004

"My nerves are in perfect order," Owen wrote his mother. "I came out again in order to help these boys; directly, by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can." - Wilfred Owen, 1918

After the Scott Peterson Death penalty verdict, the mother of Laci Peterson: "There are no winners in a case like this. We are families who are suffering horrendous losses," Sharon Rocha wrote in a statement posted this week on the family's Web site. "People tell me, 'Now you can have some closure.' There is no closure. We are only turning the page and beginning the next chapter in our book of life," she wrote. "Closure will only occur for me when I complete my book of life, when I die."

"'There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom. The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world,' he said. Bush did admit that 'freedom, by its nature, must be chosen,' and he promised 'America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling.' For the most part, Bush’s address was free of any doubt or skepticism. It was instead a prose hymn to human freedom, as loftily idealistic as any of Woodrow Wilson’s high-flown rhetoric." -Tom Curry quoting George W. Bush at the inauguration address for his second term, MSNBC.com, Updated: 8:20 p.m. ET Jan. 20, 2005

In his inaugural address last month, President Bush did not mention North Korea by name. But he said U.S. efforts have lit "a fire in the minds of men...It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world," he said.

Bush also used Saturday's address to celebrate Easter and remember military members overseas. "Easter is the victory of light over darkness," Bush said. "In this season of renewal, we remember that hope leads us closer to truth, and that in the end, even death itself will be defeated. That is the promise of Easter morning." President Bush addressing the Minnesota school shootings where a boy shot to death five fellow students, a teacher and a security guard. CNN reporting, "Bush praises fallen security guard", Saturday, March 26, 2005 Posted: 11:21 AM EST (1621 GMT)

"Look, Kim Jong Il is a dangerous person. He's a man who starves his people. He's got huge concentration camps. And, as David accurately noted, there is concern about his capacity to deliver a nuclear weapon. We don't know if he can or not, but I think it's best, when you're dealing with a tyrant like Kim Jong Il, to assume he can...One of the reasons why I thought it was important to have a missile defense system is for precisely the reason that you brought up: Perhaps Kim Jong Il has got the capacity to launch a weapon; wouldn't it be nice to be able to shoot it down?" CNN reporting from a transcript of the President's news conference Thursday, April 28, 2005 Posted: 11:04 PM EDT (0304 GMT).

"Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages." -Samuel Johnson, writer, 1758

Clever

"Just as I was getting used to today, along came yesterday." -Author unknown

The world has broken into pieces and you and I are not on the same piece. -Piewalker

"In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice." Richard Bach - Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach

"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die." -Mel Brooks

"The musical blows the dust off your soul." -Mel Brooks, from the PBS six-parter Broadway: The American Musical about the uniquely American art form.

"We're all weird. We just pretend to be normal." -Andrea Bolingbroke

But you dreamt of me? Why? I'm just an online fantasy. An apparition. A vapor. Afternoon mist floating in the setting summer sun. A quiet ghost. But I'm only a hallucination of yours. A walking illusion. The black hole of truth. The antithesis of emotional respite. I am nothing. I'm nothing to you. This is just an exercise in mental calisthenics. These are things you'd say in your perfect reality. -Piewalker

"If tears made you pretty, I'd be beautiful. I'm self destructive. I hide behind a smile. Everyone goes away in the end. No one understands me..." -Author unknown

"Fabulous." -Becky Wallace

On Writing and the Media

"If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter." -George Washington (1732-1799)

"Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half." -Gore Vidal, author & dramatist

"Books are doors that lead out into the street...You learn from them, educate yourself, travel, dream, imagine, live other lives, multiply your own life a thousand times. Where can you get more for your money? They also keep all sorts of bad things at bay: ghosts, loneliness, shit like that. Sometimes I wonder how you people that don't read figure out how to live like yourselves." -Arturo Pérez-Reverte, writer, 2002

"[I]n bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of smoke and peril, colour and serene delight. That is a journey no one can end with the change of a channel. Enduring magic." -Ann-Marie MacDonald, author, The Way the Crow Flies (2003)

"We are losing our ability to manage ideas, to contemplate, to think. We are in a constant race to be the first with the obvious. We are becoming a nation of electronic voyeurs whose capacity for dialogue is a fading memory." -Ted Koppel, anchor, "Nightline," 1986

"A newspaper is a device unable to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization." -George Bernard Shaw, writer (1856-1950)

"As loyal as I am to newspapers, I confess it's not even essential that the ink-on-paper medium survives. What matters is that journalism survive, that the craft of speaking truth to power with factual care not be snuffed out." -Chris Satullo, editorial-page editor, Philadelphia Inquirer, 2004

"The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off." -Gloria Steinem, feminist and activist, 2005

"A writer is someone willing to betray the people he loves in order to impress people he's never met." –Ron Nyswaner

"Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts." –William Strunk, Jr.

"I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail." –James A. Michener

"Someone told me that there are two kinds of writers. There's the ones who write until they can't find a word, and then they sit around for two days until they get the right word. And, there's the kind who will leave a blank and go back and fill it in. I leave a blank. I will sometimes write a page or two and make a note, 'Better stuff than this.'" –John Sayles

"The same afternoon Zucker presented the fall schedule to advertisers at Radio City Music Hall, Grant Tinker was four blocks away at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. He was getting a prestigious Peabody award for his career running NBC and, before that, building MTM Enterprises, the legendary home of such series as "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "The Bob Newhart Show" and "Hill Street Blues." Receiving his medallion during the annual Peabody luncheon, Tinker, famously modest, called himself "a guy of no distinct or specific skills (who) always needed a lot of help." "And I've always had a lot of help," he added. "You know: really heavy lifters." That is his legacy: Recruiting the best creative people, and letting them do what they do best. By Frazier Moore Associated Press, Monday, June 6, 2005 Posted: 2:52 PM EDT (1852 GMT)

"When you're rewriting, you have to respect the writer who broke the page. If it wasn't for that, you wouldn't be doing those rewrites. A blank page, that's the toughest thing in the world." –Bob Brummer

"You really don't fully understand your own script until about two weeks after the movie opens." –David Koepp

"I'm not really that clever, so when I find something that is really apparent to me, I concentrate and fixate on it." –Eduardo Sanchez

“The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.” -John Cheever, writer, 1912-1982

"Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes, Art is knowing which ones to keep." –Scott Adams

"The tantalising vision of an unmade masterpiece." -Nick Dawson, Empire, excerpt from his review of the documentary Lost in La Mancha

The Human Condition

“The three most important things in life are to be kind, to be kind, to be kind.” -Henry James

“Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” -Philo of Alexandria

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” -Aesop

"When once the wife of Philo was asked in an assembly of many women why she alone of all her sex did not wear any golden ornaments, she replied: "The virtue of a husband is a sufficient ornament for his wife." SER. CXXIII. From fragments of Philo's writings extracted from The Parallels of John of Damascus

"One other possible title has occurred to me: Till We Have Faces. My heroine says in one passage, ‘How can the gods meet us face to face till we have faces?’ -CS Lewis, February 29, 1956 [cited at Hooper, Companion (see IX) 252]

"How can they (i.e. the gods) meet us face to face till we have faces? The idea was that a human being must become real before it can expect to receive any message from the superhuman; that is, it must be speaking with its own voice (not one of its borrowed voices), expressing its actual desires (not what it imagines that it desires), being for good or ill itself, not any mask, veil, or persona." -CS Lewis in a letter to Dorothea Conybeare [cited at Constance Babington Smith, Letters to a Sister from Rose Macaulay (1964) 261; also at Hooper, Companion (see IX) 252]

"It is the ferment of ideas, the clash of disagreeing judgments, the privilege of the individual to develop his own thoughts and shape his own character that makes progress possible." -Calvin Coolidge, 30th U.S. president, 1925

"Einstein to his dying day rejected quantum mechanics as ultimate truth, saying in a letter to Max Born in 1924, "The theory yields much but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One's secrets. I, in any case, am convinced that he does not play dice."" -from The Next Einstein? Applicants Welcome by Dennis Overbye, published in the New York Times March 1, 2005
"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." -Mark Twain

"Grief only streaks their hairs with silver, but has never greyed their hopes." -Herbert Kaufman, The Winning Fight

"They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." –Andy Warhol

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world... Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion... No doubt Pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul." -C.S. Lewis p.81 and 83 from The Problem Of Pain

"The murky waters of fear boil up from the mud of selfishness." -Wayne Brickey, Making Sense of Suffering

"They are the architects of greatness. Their vision lies within their souls. They never see the mirages of Fact, but peer beyond the veils and mists of doubt and pierce the walls of unborn Time...They are the Argonauts, the seekers of the priceless fleece---the Truth...In lace of stone their spires stab the Old World's skies and with their golden crosses kiss the sun." -Herbert Kaufman, The Winning Fight (book c.1910) from the essay "The Dreamers"

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him." -Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." -Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)

"You can't be in a place where you're trying to justify the nature of the violence. The anthropological argument is that violence in film ritualizes it -- by putting in on the stage it's out of ordinary life. But in the end, you can't lie to your kids. You have to try to create a framework where witnessing real, unstructured violence illuminated your child's understanding of the human condition." –David Self

"I have this thing I call the 'trickle up' theory, which is, you find some small microcosm that represents the thing you are really interested in on a human level, and you try to hit people in their hearts and their emotions, and then you hope it will trickle up and they'll think about it with their heads." -Naomi Foner

"Trees stand with us and the rest of Earth's lifeforms on the brink of this eternity and the next, our collective gazes shooting forward into the ether of time and our memories of each other reaching back. The arrow of time points both ways. The trees point up." -Me

"Too many people simply give up too easily. You have to keep the desire to forge ahead, and you have to be able to take the bruises of unsuccess. Success is just one long street fight." –Milton Berle

“That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, an indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.” -Edward Abbey, author, 1927-1989

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those who neither enjoy much or suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat." -Theodore Roosevelt

"One time, when I was little, I lost a quarter in my front yard. Then a few months later, after the snow melted, I found that quarter. Some things you never forget." -Author Unknown

"Marriage provides shelter for the child who enters mortality innocent and helpless. Marriage ensures security and happiness for parents as well." —President Boyd K. Packer, Ensign, Nov. 1986, 18

"He who honors the Lord, the Lord honors." -My Dad

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