Month: March 2001
The way your words clunk and wheeze across the screen suggests impairment
“I have noted your verbatim reprinting of the opening lines of the stories you feature. This is something you should do more of. You get into trouble when you light out on your own, forgetting to hyphenate ‘stepping-stone,’ and generally making an ass of yourself. For the sake of my now-queasy stomach, include fewer of…
Pithiness, directness and passion, the science to getting letters published
“The Daily News, the South Philly Review, the Public Record, Philadelphia Gay News. The Inky‘s hard to get into. I got into the Inquirer once in 1997, when a Puerto Rican store owner shot a white kid. I live right there and I knew the store owner; he was a good guy. I tried the…
That’s the problem with this stupid country: ain’t no barns.
“Amanda walks towards the exit, at which point Sleazeball Two reaches out to perform the all too familiar arm caress that just screams ‘I am violating you in such a subtle way that there is really nothing you can do.’ Amanda removes his hands from her arms and continues out the door. Random Sleazeball Two,…
No Russian shoe-maker would ever buy shoes of his own make
“The new experience of normalcy is testing. It can be hard and painful. Suddenly one may disclose that his standard of living is much, much worse than one thought it was. Every day one sees a lot of people who definitely live better than himself or herself. Especially those pompous New Russians with their insulting…
You’d think at this point we’d've mastered the microwave, but guess not
“Don’t try to make popcorn on the cheap by using a plain paper bag to pop it in. It may catch fire. Don’t try to pop kernels that don’t pop the first time around in a conventional bag. They’ll just burn.”
Eggs that hatch online, in the imagination, grow wings and claws in real houses
“People are able to completely transcend what they are in real life and live a different life entirely. This is such a paradoxical time right now. It is the age of information and the age of misinformation. There was a time when people thought that something printed in a newspaper must be true. It’s not…
There were no frills, such as physical culture, manual training and the like
“For certain trivial offenses a child was placed in a darkened room and clothed in a tow apron. One day I was subjected to this punishment for many hours, an incident which naturally I have never yet been able to forget. On the occasion referred to Miss Forbes was obliged to leave the schoolroom for…
You get it at Wal-Mart, you get it at Lord & Taylor: bad customer service
“Do you ever wonder what’s going on while you’re waiting on hold for customer service? Really, you couldn’t even imagine. Chad, Lubbock’s customer-care advocate, is talking to a woman who is Chad’s customer-care advocate. She has called her customer-care advocate, who is busy on another call. So now we have two customer-care advocates on hold…
If you harbour a perversity, then sooner or later porno will identify it
“Some girls are used in nine months or a year. An 18-year-old, sweet young thing, signs with an agency, makes five films in her first week. Five directors, five actors, five times five: she gets phone calls. A hundred movies in four months. She’s not a fresh face any more. Her price slips and she…
London’s knickers-off-Nobu: home of the libidinous crush and celebrity frottage
“You feel like an elegant woman because you can pick at the food like a bird. The chopsticks feel slim and delicate, and the slivers of raw flesh are small and easily digested. It’s not the chunky, clumsy lamb shank and mashed potato lummox of a meal you get at other restaurants.”