Category: Best Line of the Day

Clever turns of phrase, special splashes of wit, provocative insight — all in a sentence or two.

Best book line of the day

“The ultimate Western is not Blood Meridian, it’s Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, and right behind it is Lonesome Dove.

Allen Barra in a review essay, “Cormac McCarthy vs. Larry McMurtry: Best Western Novelist”

The essay is well worth any reader’s time, but the booklist is invaluable too.

The roundup of serious writers who have written Westerns over this span is impressive: E.L. Doctorow’s amusing revisionist take on the pulp Western, Welcome to Hard Times (1960), Thomas Berger’s epic Little Big Man (1964), Charles Portis’s True Grit (1968), which is soon to appear as a Coen Brothers’ film for Christmas release, Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Ron Hansen’s Desperadoes (1979) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983), Pete Dexter’s elegiac twilight-of-the-gods account of Wild Bill Hickok’s last days, Deadwood (1986), Daniel Woodrell’s Woe to Live On (1987), made into Ang Lee’s film Ride With the Devil, Susan Dodd’s heartrending fictional biography of Jesse James’s mother, Mamaw (1988), N. Scott Momaday’s juxtaposing of the legend of a young Kiowa boy with that of Billy the Kid, The Ancient Child (1989), David Thomson’s witty and original Silver Light (1990), which straddles the lines between fiction, film and history by mingling the destinies of real-life Westerners with film characters, Robert Coover’s phantasmagorical Ghost Town (1998), Philip Kimball’s sweet, sad and savage Liar’s Moon (1999), and, this year, Deep Creek by Dana Hand (pen name of Anne Matthews and Will Howarth), a grim and fascinating fictional account of the actual slaughter of Chinese miners in 1870s Idaho.

Best line proving you can be good and still be overrated

“Jeter committed six errors this season, his lowest total in 15 full seasons. But more advanced defensive measures showed his range to be well below average, as it has been nearly every season of his career.”

Jeter’s 5th Gold Glove an Error, Metric Says – NYTimes.com

One measure ranked Jeter 59th, i.e., last, among all Major League shortstops.

Update: Posnanski on Jeter. An excerpt:

The thing that annoys non-Yankees fans about Jeter, I think, has less to do with Jeter himself and more to do with the intense campaign to spin him into the perfect ballplayer. He is great enough as is. He’s been a terrific hitter — one of the three best, I think, to ever play shortstop — a durable player, a smart player, a leader, a good teammate, a credit to the game. He’s going to the Hall of Fame the first day he’s eligible, and I will be one of those people proudly voting for him.

Trouble is, when Jeter wins his fifth Gold Glove — like he did on Tuesday — even when the best statistical evidence suggests he has been a well-below average defender throughout his career, well, that’s the stuff that drives people nuts about Jeter.

Best myth analysis of the day

*Where does the Easter Bunny actually rest in the “Stuff we wants kids to believe until they get older” myth collection? Yes, I know, it’s sad when kids finally have it broken to them that there is no Tooth Fairy and that the money they found under their bed came actually came from a small group of Silicon Valley inventors who figured out the chemical combination of turning teeth and pillow cases into quarters. But what about the Easter Bunny? Does it rank up there with the great myths — with the tooth fairy and Santa Claus and George Washington’s cherry tree and Mikey having his stomach explode with pop rocks? Or is it really kind of a second-rate myth?

Personally, I guess I would rank the myths like this:

No. 1: Santa Claus
No. 2: Tooth Fairy
No. 3: Your parents know better
No. 4: If you make that face, it will freeze that way.
No. 5: I will stop this car on the highway.
No. 6: No, that mascot is real.
No. 7: Easter Bunny

But maybe I’m underestimating the Easter Bunny.

From Joe Posnanski in a blog post, History Lessons With Bud [Selig]. Poz takes the Commissioner to task for stating, in a letter, that he “really believe[s] that Abner Doubleday is the ‘father of baseball’.”

He’s not.

Best line of the day

“Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm…”

Opening line of Gone with the Wind, written by Margaret Mitchell, who was born 110 years ago today.

Miss O’Hara is 16 when the book begins; her waist was 17. (Vivien Leigh was 25 when the movie was filmed during 1939.) I was told, by someone who had once had dinner with Margaret Mitchell, that as first drafted Scarlett’s name was Pansy.

Line of the day

“On the next play, [Kansas] gave the ball to Sims again, and this time he broke through the [Colorado] line, scored from 13 yards out. The Jayhawks were down 45-24. There was 11:05 left. They had their consolation touchdown. I turned off the radio.”

Joe Posnanski

But that was just the first of four Kansas TDs in six minutes. And then they got one more and won, 52-45.

Best Houdini’s birthday line of the day, so far

“Typical memories. But as I recall, the special excitement of Halloween didn’t come from candy or costumes or dark, whispery streets. The overwhelming thrill came from going out of the house at night and wandering freely around the neighborhood with no parents.

“Halloween was a night of incredible freedom.”

R.L. Stine, “Scariest Sight on Halloween? Grown-Ups”