Georges Perec's A Void was originally written in French (as La Disparition). It completely avoided using the letter "e". As you know, the letter "e" is the most common letter in the English alphabet. Without it you can't use "the", "he", "she", "love", or about three quarters of the words in English. Since French uses even more e's, I am told that that constraint excluded seven eighths of all French words from being used in the composition. The translation that was subsequently made in to English managed to keep the same constraint.

Perec did all sorts of other interesting constrained writing experiments, many in conjunction with Oulipo (a group that included Italo Calvino), who were also particularly interested in constrained writing. One of their other members, Raymond Queneau created a work called 100,000,000,000,000 Sonnets, which "consisted of ten pages of 14 lines, cut into strips so that one could lift a strip and make up to 10^14 combinations, thus the title. If you attempted to read all the sonnets contained, it would take 190,258,751 years until you finished it."

"You see symbols were made to be doorways. You don’t stop at a symbol and say, here, this is an equal armed cross with a circle around it. You're supposed to go through that symbol and find out what’s behind it... for me, a symbol is just a beginning. To what is behind the symbol. It is not just a pretty decorative pattern. You take it and you chew it... You take it apart. You look at it, and can use any one of a dozen ways... Look at it, wait and see if another symbol comes up, add that to the first one. Wait and see if another one comes up. When you’ve finished all that lot, kind of sit and look at the symbol... you make a friend of your symbol. And you give it a name. ‘Hi Fred! How are you doing?’ And the symbol sits there and says, ‘I’m doing O.K. What would you like to know today?’ ‘Well listen Fred, I’ve been thinking. You know, you’re always drawn in this way, can you give me an aspect of yourself that was before this?' ‘Well, let me think.’ says Fred, ‘I used to be drawn like this...’ --An Interview with Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki

"Suffering is the fastest horse that leads to perfection" --Meister Eckhart

"FEMA, the federal agency charged with disaster preparedness, is engaged in a crash effort to prepare for multiple mass destruction attacks on U.S. cities - including the creation of sprawling temporary cities to handle millions of displaced persons..."

Stickers
(Thanks to Mike)

"It may be that after this life we shall perish utterly, but if that is our fate, let us so live that annihilation will be unjust." -- Etienne de Senancour

The Queen of Spades --Alexander Pushkin
Igitur --Stéphane Mallarmé

An Entheogen Chrestomathy

A Modern Perspective on Classical Technologies for Personality Restructuring: Processes of Ecstatic Initiation in Ancient Eleusis and Pompeii

"On the Beach tells a simple story. Some kind of complicated mix-up happened, and nuclear war has devastated the Northern Hemisphere. Who is to blame? The explanations would be hilarious in their complexity, if not for the implied question: who is not to blame? The people of Australia wait the 7 or 8 months for the radioactivity to drift southwards. Then everyone dies. Their dogs die. Their infants die. Either messy deaths due to radioactive poisoning, or swift deaths due to cyanide pills. Radiation approaches, they die, the end..."

"From the day of its foundation, in 1866, the Societé Linguistique de Paris let it be known that it wouldn't accept papers claiming to explain how human language had originated. The savants felt they had a right to be spared the at best ignorant and at worst lunatic theorizing of those who believed they had an answer to this seductively remote question.

Historical linguistics had become a subject reserved for those who dealt in facts, and the extra-historical matter of language's origins could be left aside, exciting for sure when addressed by a Rousseau or a Herder, futile when addressed by madmen or amateurs led on by the new fashion for thinking in evolutionary terms. The situation wasn't promising therefore for the man whose theorizing was, it's safe to say, the most lunatic of all, so strange indeed as to have been cherished now for more than a century, whether as an example of what André Breton called the "humour of reception", which is when we laugh at something that wasn't intended to be funny, or as a crucial resource in the study of linguistic misapprehension. This was Jean-Pierre Brisset..."

"Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." --Blaise Pascal

"Luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow." --Aristotle (paraphrased)

"Character traits are secret psychoses." --Sandor Ferenczi

"Nor wonder how I lost my Wits;
Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia shits!" --Jonathan Swift

"Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 per cent
Of everything you think and
Of everything you do
Is for yourself -
And there isn't one." --Wei Wu Wei

The nonduality of Life and death: A Buddhist view of repression

"The Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants (one in 24 Americans) than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police."

American dirty nukes: Depleted Uranium Weapons

"It is my opinion that never before have we, as a nation, stood in greater danger of losing our individual liberties as we are today," Serpico said. "We, the people of this great nation, are being punished for the transgressions of our leaders and their consorts."

500,000 to be vaccinated for smallpox

"United Nations weapons inspectors colluded with British secret service agents to spread disinformation about Saddam Hussein's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programmes as part of a campaign to justify military strikes, according to the head of the UN inspection team in Iraq."
More...

"Everything human strikes me with horror" --attributed, by Camus, to a camp survivor

Who's afraid of the International Criminal Court? The US, Russia, China and Israel, of course.