Clever turns of phrase, special splashes of wit, provocative insight — all in a sentence or two.
“Mankind has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars, and so on — while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.”
Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adams was born on March 11, 1952. He died from a heart attack in 2001.
Perhaps the best line of the day ever around here, first posted six years ago.
While getting out of the car, the 3-year-old scooted into the driver’s seat. Told it was time to go, he replied, “Ok. I just wanted to call someone a jackass.”
“If Roethlisberger is at fault, the issues are entirely different. If he’s at fault, he has got to grow up.”
Peter King
“If Ben’s at fault, he’ll have to do a lot more than grow up — three to five in Reidsville, for starters.”
It’s weird enough living in a country where a man can legally own an arsenal of machine guns, but his neighbor growing a pot plant will send a team of DEA agents kicking his door in with a no-knock warrant. But this goes even beyond that. If I go online today to HaveNoLifeAndBetOnSports.com and bet fifty dollars on the Bucks against the Celtics tonight, I’m a criminal. But some gazillionaire firm in New York can legally bet against the United States of America in unlimited amounts in a trade that has nothing to do with anything, but a guess about how many other people will make the same bet.
Jesus, are we a weird country.
Taibbi is referring to credit default swaps now being sold that “insure” U.S. Treasury bonds.
“[I]t wasn’t until I listened to Jeff Bridges’s acceptance speech that I realized how precisely autobiographical The Big Lebowski really was.”
“Even Oprah had to do it; needless to say, she did it with bullet-point briskness and efficacy, but still, it must the first time she has found herself in a lineup.”
Anthony Lane of The New Yorker in a critique of the Oscar show.
“The fact is that after a campaign that appealed so successfully to idealism, Obama hired a bunch of saboteurs of hope and change.
“Rahm [Emanuel] was simply their chief of staff.”
“The Rahm Emanuel that Obama hired is the poster child for the timid, pseudo-pragmatism that is inimical to the idealistic Obama agenda so many excited voters responded to last November. And it’s a pragmatism that is absolutely killing the Democratic Party in the long run, because American voters have an intrinsic distrust of politicians they see as tacking with the polls or shying away from a fight.”
“Every reader of ‘The Cat in the Hat’ will feel that the story revolves around a piece of withheld information: what private demons or desires compelled this mother to leave two young children at home all day, with the front door unlocked, under the supervision of a fish?”
Louis Menand, “Cat People” in The New Yorker (2002). Today is Theodor Geisel’s — aka Dr. Seuss — 106th birthday. Menand has a nice profile of the writer. Seuss was Geisel’s mother’s maiden name.
“A college class was told they had to write a short story in as few words as possible. The story must contain three components: (1) Religion, (2) Sexuality, and (3) Mystery. There was only one A paper in the entire class. In full: ‘Good God! I’m pregnant. I wonder who did it.’”
First posted here five years ago today.
“The internet has surpassed newspapers and radio in popularity as a news platform on a typical day and now ranks just behind TV.”
Pew Internet & American Life Project
- 78% of Americans say they get news from a local TV station
- 73% say they get news from a national network such as CBS or cable TV station such as CNN or Fox News
- 61% say they get some kind of news online
- 54% say they listen to a radio news program at home or in the car
- 50% say they read news in a local newspaper
- 17% say they read news in a national newspaper such as the New York Times or USA Today
“I’d like to tell you that the new month will provide respite from your inner turmoil, but I’m afraid not. This is the month when winter lingers past all sense, when Brutus gathers his courage, when madness descends on sports fans, when you think you’ll die if you have to wear your puffy coat one second longer.”
“Nobody is supposed to beat Canada in hockey, just like nobody is supposed to beat the U.S. in Kardashians.”
“The sentence for attempted murder should be the same as for successful murder. Otherwise we’re just rewarding incompetence.”
Scott Adams
“The city was plunged into darkness, but there was a general sense of calm. Within minutes, the traffic signals began to function again and traffic flowed normally. Several people, upon seeing me — a clueless-looking tourist — puzzling over a map, stopped to offer their assistance. One young man simply stopped, put his hand on my shoulder and smiled as he said, in heavily accented English, ‘Welcome to Chile.’ ”
Time Magazine’s Eben Harrell in Santiago
People thought it was good news a few years back when housing starts – the supply side of the picture – were running about two million annually. But household formations – the demand side – only amounted to about 1.2 million. After a few years of such imbalances, the country unsurprisingly ended up with far too many houses.
There were three ways to cure this overhang: (1) blow up a lot of houses, a tactic similar to the destruction of autos that occurred with the “cash-for-clunkers” program; (2) speed up household formations by, say, encouraging teenagers to cohabitate, a program not likely to suffer from a lack of volunteers or; (3) reduce new housing starts to a number far below the rate of household formations.
Warren Buffet in his annual letter to shareholders as reported at Calculated Risk
| “Oh, Mack has been on skis once in his life. But that hasn’t stopped him from planning how he will act on the medal stand after he wins his downhill gold. (Rock and roll finger horns yes, mouthing the national anthem no.) The kid does not suffer from a lack of confidence.”
Mack’s Mom |
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“Life in Lubbock, Texas taught me two things:
“One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in hell.
“The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.”
John Shelby Spong was bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark for 24 years until his retirement in 2001. Thanks once again to Jeanne for providing this quote and reacquainting me with Bishop Spong. I’ve ordered his book, Jesus for the Non-Religious
“Most emotional of all were probably the television executives who prefer to think of the Olympics as a two-week long soap opera filled with emotional turmoil, heartbreak, and redemption. It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s whether you overcame enough adversity to make your life story worth a three-minute interstitial package.”
“Unfortunately, no one could block out the music of the sibling couple from Great Britain who chose Linkin Park as their backing music and were somehow not disqualified.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – The reputation of the Toyota Motors Corp. received another black eye today as the president of the embattled company missed his scheduled appearance at Congressional hearings after he overshot Washington, D.C. by 150 miles.
Toyota president Akio Toyoda said he was having difficulties with the brakes on his 2010 Toyota Prius, which finally came to rest after crashing into a blacksmith’s shop in Colonial Williamsburg.
. . .
And yet, in its infinite wisdom, the NBC mother network gave us another retrospective on the 1980 Lake Placid miracle in the middle of which Al Michaels–who, at this point, seems firmly to believe that he landed on Omaha Beach or something 30 years ago–said, “It seemed like we went from burning flags to waving them.”
Oh, Jesus H. Christ On A Power Play, just shut up already, please?
Charles Pierce refers to the recently concluded CPAC meeting as the “Nervous Hospital.”
CPAC is the Conservative Political Action Conference.
The Nervous Hospital is where Karl Childers lived when he wasn’t repairing lawnmowers.
“A parent’s only as good as their dumbest kid. If one wins a Nobel Prize but the other gets robbed by a hooker, you failed.”
“Yes, our NHL All-Star team beat another country’s NHL All-Star team in a tough hard-fought non-elimination game that is seriously being compared to the most important international sporting victory in our nation’s history.”