Month: March 2001
Sort of a modern version of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, except I like it better
“He developed a way of finding honest food at just prices in the cafes of blue highway America. Count the calendars. No calendar means the place is the same as an Interstate pit stop, all the way up to five calendars where he says, ‘Keep it under your hat or they’ll franchise it.’ Only once…
Ding-dong! This train will be going express, skipping your stop, of course
“With practice, it is no more difficult than hearing and understanding what two people might be discussing if they were yelling at one another through megaphones while submerged in the deep end of a nine-foot pool. For instance, when you clearly hear: ‘Attensqaeee, the wheepahooy until babbagonga kereeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,’ you instantly know that the 2 isn’t…
Self-satisfied white middle-class males kill, revealing ignored pathology
“Office massacres claimed 12 in Atlanta, three in Alabama, seven in Honolulu, four in Seattle, eight in Tampa, three in Santa Cruz. Enraged middle-agers gunned down four teens and three adults in a Fort Worth church, six more in a Mormon library, and three teens and a Bible teacher in Ohio. Failed romances prompted midlife…
The Taliban do, on the whole, want to eliminate violence and return to peace
“Then a man took a kalashnikov from one of the Taliban, and aiming it awkwardly, pulled the trigger. Six or eight rounds rattled out in a sharp, loud burst and the muzzle of the weapon jerked upwards and to the right. The condemned man, still squatting, shuddered and spun round as the bullets hit him,…
The Hermit Kingdom, live: rictus grins, clinch-fisted salutes and chest-beating
“There are moments of near hilarity, as when Mr. Kim tours a collective farm populated with ostriches. Ostriches in North Korea? And yet there they are. There is literary content: static shots of the day’s newspapers, page by page. And children’s programming appears in the form of a cartoon in which a boy hero is…
If a couple of boxes of this book ‘fall off the truck,’ keep one and read it
“Swag wasn’t the same thing as out-and-out stealing. It was an unwritten rule in Jersey City
We’re not toothless guys running down the streets with big nets
“OK, let’s get this straight. It’s not ‘dogcatcher,’ it’s ‘animal control officer.’ We don’t like dog warden either… We don’t just deal with dogs, and ‘warden’ sounds more like a prison term.”
Do interns and residents learn to transcend fatigue and function effectively?
“Unlike pilots, who have an obvious vested interest in error prevention and usually belong to powerful labor unions that aggressively negotiate on their behalf, residents are a captive population afraid to complain
Pakistani troops are assured of victory because they have the support of Allah
“Atom bomb, atom bomb. Atom bomb. Atom bomb.”