Author: NewMexiKen

A fellow will remember a lot of things

In A Viewer’s Companion to ‘Citizen Kane’ Roger Ebert says his favorite speech in Kane is delivered by Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane) when he is talking about the magic of memory with the inquiring reporter:

A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since, that I haven’t thought of that girl.

Book for first-graders inspires satire

From The Arizona Republic’s Political Insider: “With corporate underwriting and a hefty publisher’s discount, 80,000 little tykes will get their own copy of a book called This House Is Made of Mud, the touching (though a tad PC) story of an American Indian boy and the building of his adobe house.”


This House Is Made of Mud

By the way, This House is Made of Mud never states that the child is American Indian or a boy.

Ya gotta believe

“Ninety percent I’ll spend on good times, women and Irish Whiskey. The other ten percent I’ll probably waste.”

Tug McGraw on what he’d do with his 1980 World Series share ($34,693). In 2002 the winner’s share (each player) was $272,147.

Life

“No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one.”

Wallace Stegner in Angle of Repose.

“The problem is it takes most of us most of our lives to understand what we should have known from the beginning.”

Leon Uris in Trinity.

“Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing’s worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.”

Richard Ford in Independence Day.

Tough childhood

“I was so inept (with technical things) they wouldn’t let me play with the garden hose. “Get away from that hose,” my mother would say. “You don’t know nothing about machinery.”

“In the seventh grade we had a Halloween masquerade party at school. The scariest costumes were awarded prizes. The kid who placed first went as me.”

Lewis Grizzard

Ghosts of White House past

Excerpt from newly located Harry Truman diary, January 6, 1947:

Arose at 5:45 A.M.[,] read the papers and at 7:10 walked to the station to meet the family. Took 35 minutes. It was a good walk. Sure is fine to have them back. This great white jail is a hell of a place in which to be alone. While I work from early morning until late at night, it is a ghostly place. The floors pop and crack all night long. Anyone with imagination can see old Jim Buchanan walking up and down worrying about conditions not of his making. Then there’s Van Buren who inherited a terrible mess from his predecessor as did poor old James Madison. Of course Andrew Johnson was the worst mistreated of any of them. But they all walk up and down the halls of this place and moan about what they should have done and didn’t. So-you see. I’ve only named a few. The ones who had Boswells and New England historians are too busy trying to control heaven and hell to come back here. So the tortured souls who were and are misrepresented in history are the ones who come back. It’s a hell of a place.

Joel Achenbach on Starbucks

One Tall Cappuccino Conundrum, to Go

Like any savvy dealer, Starbucks sells caffeine on street corners, and will gladly double or triple the dose. The chain is most successful in places where people are already ramped up and on the verge of nervous breakdowns. The Starbucks people understand that human beings under stress will pay large amounts of money for something that exacerbates their problem.

Husband takes stand for breast-feeding defendant, says she was driving, nursing and talking on phone

She also was charged with driving without a license, failure to comply with the order of a police officer and other driving infractions.

Under cross-examination by the prosecutor, Donkers gave even more details of what she was doing when she was talking to her husband with the trooper trailing her.

Donkers said she was taking notes — on a piece of paper on the steering wheel of her Chrysler Sebring convertible — for an unrelated court case in which she and her husband are involved.

“I had a piece of paper on the steering wheel, and I was writing something down — with my right hand,” Donkers said.

When Scahill asked her where her child was as she was doing that, she replied that the baby was “nursing on the nursing pillow” in her lap.

“So,” Scahill said, “now you’re going down the turnpike, writing on a piece of paper…with your infant in your lap?”

The car she drove had license plates from Michigan, where the child-restraint law has a nursing-baby exception.

Excerpted from Akron Beacon Journal.