Ultimate Disc Quotes

Currency is… a shared delusion in the minds of all men, a necessary delusion if civilised society were not to fall… yet so many lives, so many cities and kingdoms and nations, ultimately depend on hoping that no man ever stops to wonder why he values discs of a shiny yellow metal so highly…”   -

Whenever we find functional information—whether embedded in a radio signal, carved in a stone monument, etched on a magnetic disc, or produced by an origin-of-life scientist attempting to engineer a self-replicating molecule—and we trace that information back to its ultimate source, invariably we come to a mind, not merely a material process. For this reason, the discovery of digital information in even the simplest living cells indicates the prior activity of a designing intelligence at work in the origin of the first life.

Nevertheless, an eloquent testimony to Henry III’s occult interests survives in the form of an exquisite inlaid marble ‘Cosmati’ pavement in front of the high altar of Westminster Abbey. Restoration of this pavement was completed in 2010, revealing a pattern laid down in 1268. Modelled ultimately on the marble pavement marking the ‘centre of the world’ on which the Eastern Roman emperors were crowned in Hagia Sophia, at the centre of the Westminster pavement is a disc of Egyptian onyx on the spot where the throne is placed for a coronation. An inscription around this sphere of marble by the monk John Flete (c. 1398–1466) identifies it as a representation of the ‘macrocosm’, the spherical medieval universe and its elements.25 The placement of the coronation chair above a representation of the macrocosm is highly suggestive, and could mean that Henry intended the pavement’s mimicry of the pattern of the universe to channel astrological forces from the stars into the person of the king. The Hermetic principle ‘as above, so below

A week later I joined the ultimate frisbee team. I had never imagined such a sport even existed, but I discovered I had a surprising talent for it. It was played with one of those discs they used to call frisbees that we can’t call frisbees anymore because some manufacturer registered the name.

The shanties of indigent newcomers to the place were scattered on one side of the crossroads, and on the other side, beyond the shops, were two stinking shebeens where drunken men squatted on the dirt floor, drooling over their home-brewed beer, while a haggard woman ladled more of it into tin cans from a plastic barrel. Outside under a tree, a man in rags, either drunk or exhausted, lay in a posture of crucifixion. Nearby were seven stalls made of rough planks. Two sold used clothes, and one sold new clothes. One offered vegetables, another milky tea and stale bread rolls for the schoolchildren. In a butcher’s shack the stallholder hacked with a machete at the black, flyblown leg of a goat. The last and most salubrious stall, labeled Real Hair, sold wigs and foot-long hair extensions. Near the shops was a shade tree under which a dozen women and about ten children sat in a friendly chatting group, some of them pounding ostrich shells into small discs, while others, using homemade tools, drilled holes in the middle, and still others threaded the punctured discs into bracelets and necklaces to sell to tourists.