True to an extent, but with staggering exceptions. witness the film,
literary, and music worlds--truckloads of moderately-gifted and
completely untalented persons making truckloads of money. Oh--and
lest we forget--politics.
jm
On 9 Apr 2001, at 20:46, Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen wrote:
>
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> From: gkm@petting-zoo.net (glen mccready)
> Subject: QOTD: Moderately Gifted.
> Resent-From: 0xdeadbeef@petting-zoo.net
> To: 0xdeadbeef@petting-zoo.net
>
>
> Forwarded-by: Nev Dull <nev@sleepycat.com>
>
> "... simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing
> press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately
> gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years
> ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern
> communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but
> world's champions.
>
> The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion
> performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person
> has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of
> speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tapdances on the coffee
> table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Robers. We have a name for him or her.
> We call him or her an 'exhibitionist.'
>
> How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next
> morning, 'Wow! were you ever drunk last night!'"
> -- Kurt Vonnegut, "Bluebeard"
>
John Marlow
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:59:45 MDT