How am I going to get MY Christmas shopping done with all these procrastinators in the way?!
Me
Category: Best Line of the Day
Clever turns of phrase, special splashes of wit, provocative insight — all in a sentence or two.
Best foodie line of the day
“I stopped eating pork about eight years ago, after a scientist happened to mention that the animal whose teeth most closely resemble our own is the pig. Unable to shake the image of a perky little pig flashing me a brilliant George Clooney smile, I decided it was easier to forgo the Christmas ham.”
Natalie Angier, Plants Want to Live, Too
“But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to ‘committed vegetarians’ and ‘strong ethical vegans,’ we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot.”
Best line of the day
“Thanks for bringing up Tiger. First thought: Elin has nothing on Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes. Remember? When she suspected Andre Rison was up to no good, she took a fairway wood to five of his luxury cars and then burned down his house. This remains the gold standard against which all spurned women must be measured.”
Malcolm Gladwell in email conversation with Bill Simmons
As with their previous exchanges, this whole Gladwill-Simmons correspondence is fascinating.
Best child raising line of the day
“We just read some great advice somewhere that said to treat every kid as if they are the sixth of eighteen children. You’ll get to them sometime, but right now the fifteenth kid is burning down the kitchen, so whoever is fussing right now will have to suck it.”
Best line of the day, so far
“Also in DC, a cop pulled a gun during a snowball fight, clearly a violation of snowball fighting rules: No slushballs, no iceballs, nothing to the face, no guns. Every kid who’s ever been to grade school knows that.”
The line of the decade
“In nearly 200 years of recorded stock-market history, no calendar decade has seen such a dismal performance as the 2000s.”
“Since the end of 1999, stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange have lost an average of 0.5% a year thanks to the twin bear markets this decade.”
Best line of the day, so far
“Her father hadn’t wanted her to be a writer; he thought that in order to make it as a successful Latina, she should aim to be a television news weather girl.”
The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor describing Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street, more than two million copies sold. Cisneros is also the author of Caramelo and is 55 today.
“But her mom encouraged her to read and write, took her to the library, didn’t make her learn how to cook, and didn’t interrupt her studying or reading to make her do chores.”
Yay, Mom.
Best line of the day
“I’m not happy — this is too flawed a bill for joy — but I am relieved ( or will be once I’m sure that Joe Lieberman isn’t going to pull a double-cross). You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need.”
Paul Krugman with an assist from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
Best 'tis the seaon' line of the day
” ‘Tis the season to be jolly…fa la la la, la la la la…’
“Um. Huh? Cuz I’m looking around at all my fellow mankind and I can tell you that ‘jolly’ is *not* what people are feeling this season.
” ‘Fa la la la bite me’ is more the mood out there.”
Best line of the day, so far
“The filibuster, and the need for 60 votes to end debate, aren’t in the Constitution.”
Best late night line of the day
“Well, according to our NBC affiliate in Wilmington, North Carolina, former Democratic presidential candidate John ‘I am not the father’ Edwards has reportedly bought a home for his former mistress. . . .
“Anyway, he bought a house for the woman he was having an affair with. Imagine if Tiger Woods started doing that. You could jump-start the housing market like that, and put millions of people back to work.”
Leno
Sh**iest line of the day
“Christopher Rains, indicted Wednesday in the gunshot death of his baby daughter, is one of many New Mexicans accused of killing nearly three dozen young children this year.”
Nearly. Three. Dozen. This. Year.
Have a nice day.
Best line of the day, so far
“It’s funny that ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ is a negative thing because how great to wake up and there’s already coffee?”
Dan
Best line of the day, so far
“As the health care debate continues, many Democrats are coming to the conclusion that Al Gore just might have made a worse choice for his running mate than John McCain.”
Janice Hough, Palo Alto, Calif.
Best line of the day, so far
“If all 45,000 of the people cited by that famous Harvard study who will die for lack of a decent health-care system dropped dead on his f**king lawn tomorrow morning, Joseph Lieberman would not CARE.
“He would step over their bodies to get to a fundraiser. ”
Best line of the day from someone having her birthday
“You know it might be time to get rid of the baby monitor when what you hear coming from it is Sofie singing Miley Cyrus’s ‘Party in the USA’.”
Veronica
Best I couldn't have said it better line of the day
“Look, I voted for the guy. I supported him. I agree with a lot of what he’s done in office. Except Afghanistan, and bailing out the car guys and the investment banks, and being a pussy on health care and climate change and Gitmo, and being a complete two-faced bastard on gays in the military. But otherwise, he’s great.”
Best summing up our news media line of the day
“At our office we have one of the cable news channels on at all times. And here I am, late in the day, much of the staff gone, hearing Wolf Blitzer on CNN — part of the on-going coverage of the Climate Change debate and the Copenhagen conference. First we hear Al Gore, discussing the evidence for warming. And after that, the latest from Sarah Palin discussing the science on her Facebook page. That’s the debate. Proud moment. ”
Best line of the season, so far
“Mommy, since it’s the second night of Hannukah, can we sing carols while we light the menorah?”
Sofie
Best line about Tiger I've seen today
“If this was a scheme concocted by your handlers, get some new people. One of the reasons you’re in this mess is because your handlers helped you craft an image that wasn’t really you. Swearing on the golf course is you. Throwing clubs is you. A lot of people took issue with those offensive jokes you told GQ’s Charles Pierce in 1997; that was you, too. But if stepping away from golf is a calculated public relations stunt meant to generate some empathy, that means you’ve learned nothing from this entire ordeal.”
Best line of the day, so far
Further proof that college football’s so-called postseason is a joke: Even the coaches treat it like one.
Can you imagine, say, Sean Payton quitting the unbeaten New Orleans Saints on the eve of the NFC Championship Game to take his “dream job” coaching the Dallas Cowboys?
Referring of course to coach Brian Kelly leaving his undefeated Cincinnati team to take a new job.
The FCS semi-final games were not a joke. Villanova beat William and Mary 14-13 and Montana defeated Appalachian State 24-17. Both were exciting well-played games.
Best line of the day
The execution of Ohio murderer Kenneth Biros made use of an untested one-drug technique that is purportedly an improvement over the three-drug “cocktail” used in most lethal injections. What do you think?
Philip McFarland,
Radius Grinder
“To make this a valid experiment, they need a control group of death row inmates they can inject with a placebo.”
Best Krugman blues line of the morning
“The Fed sprang into action when faced with the prospect of wrecked banks; it doesn’t seem equally concerned about the prospect of wrecked lives.”
Best anagram line of the day
“It’s an unfortunate ending to a storied career.”
Barry Bonds agent Jeff Borris
Best line of the day, so far
“President Obama has accepted the Nobel Peace Prize a mere nine days after committing 30,000 troops to the war in Afghanistan. Because there is no Nobel Prize for Irony.”
Newsdroppings has a couple of other good ones today.