Clever turns of phrase, special splashes of wit, provocative insight — all in a sentence or two.
“How bad was it? It was Gila Bend in July.”
Greg Hansen in the Tucson Arizona Daily Star on last night’s loss by Arizona at home to the New Mexico Lobos 29-27.
“How bad was it? With 13 minutes remaining, the large video scoreboard displayed its weekly ‘Hit of the Game.’ It was a highlight from the little leaguers who scrimmaged at halftime.”
[In 3¼ seasons Arizona coach Mike Stoops is 9-24 against I-A opponents.]
“At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.”
— P. G. Wodehouse, Uneasy Money
Brewers manager Ned Yost inadvertently ran his team out of a scoring chance last week when he tried to slap a mosquito on his cheek — causing his base runner to try an ill-fated steal of third base.
Diamond historians immediately declared it the most misconstrued signal since the 2005 U.S. Congressional Softball Game, when Idaho Senator Larry Craig stomped on a spider and touched off a suicide squeeze.
“I hate to put it this way, but there have been Lions games less embarrassing than this.”
“But once a season starts in college football, balancing a rocky ship is like catching a watermelon on a tightrope.”
Supporters of Sen. Larry Craig with the American Land Rights Association are calling for a boycott of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul Airport.
How does one boycott an airport? And I wonder if we could get Craig’s New Mexico supporters to boycott Paseo del Norte and I-25.
“How could a U.S. Senator who was arrested for soliciting bathroom sex and then faked his own resignation…?”
FARK.com. Apparently, Sen. Larry Craig intends now not to resign. Ha!
“Poll shows Michigan voters favor Clinton for the Democrats, Romney for the Republicans, and Lloyd Carr for the unemployment line.”
FARK.com. Carr is the University of Michigan football coach.
A moment I’ve been dreading. George (Bush) brought his ne’re-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-callled kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I’ll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they’ll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work.
Ronald Reagan, in his diary for May 17, 1986, as quoted at Only in New Mexico.
Except, of course, it isn’t true.
The line is from Kinsley himself. When told that Reagan had mentioned him (Kinsley) in the diary, Kinsley wrote a column speculating what it might be. The above is one of his fantasies from My Lunch With Reagan.
Update: Jim Baca removed the bogus Reagan diary item from his post.
I’d like to repeat the advice I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
Alex McCandless in a letter to his 81-year-old friend Ron Franz as quoted in Into the Wild
Maybe I’ll go buy an old school bus.
“They foisted this fool on the world when they all went down to Texas and decided that it didn’t matter that he was completely unqualified by experience, temperament or intelligence — he could be president anyway.”
Digby — “They” being the “Big Money Republican circles.”
“August 31 is the day in 1897 when Thomas Edison patented the first movie projector, the Kinetoscope. Who knows whether High School Musical 2 was the future he envisioned.”
“Clearly she’s as sharp as a marble…”
Machinist: Salon referring to, of course, Miss Teen South Carolina — though he does defend her.
All the major Democratic candidates say they are eager to end this war, and they all say they don’t believe there is a military solution in Iraq. Why, then, do they maintain that we must leave an indefinite number of troops behind for an indeterminate amount of time to work hopelessly towards a military solution everyone says doesn’t exist?
It is time to get a straight answer from all the other candidates: how many troops would you leave behind? For how long?
From Bob Somerby’s “The Too Dumb to be Self-Governing File” — “A Texas gubernatorial candidate unveiled his ten-point education plan— and it had only nine points.”
“Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), a critic of salmon preservation efforts in the Pacific Northwest and a defender of a judicial nominee who was unanimously opposed by tribes, pleaded guilty for a “lewd conduct” incident at a Minnesota airport in June.”
Oh, you mean that Senator Larry Craig.
“I’m a bit anxious, too, but I’m keeping those feelings entirely to myself, except for, you know … blogging about it.”
Joel Achenbach (His second daughter is off to high school.)
Just the other day, Justice Stephen Breyer popped onto our local NPR station to talk about the anniversary of the Dred Scott decision, saying he thought it was the most destructive decision in the history of the country.
Guess again, Steve.
(Think about it. What could have been an even more destructive decision? December. 2000.)
“In a city run by people who have spent their lives endlessly reënacting their election as class president….”
Nicholas Lemann in an essay on Karl Rove. He means, of course, the city of Washington.
“If the Republicans will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.”
Adlai Stevenson
Here’s the cover story — Are We Failing Our Geniuses?
Time has, by the way, put its archives online — TIME Magazine Archives, 1923 to the present.
Columbia Journalism Review has a fun take on Time’s famous style — Hyphen Heaven.
The evidence also shows great, gaping weaknesses. Giuliani’s penchant for secrecy, his tendency to value loyalty over merit and his hyperbolic rhetoric are exactly the kinds of instincts that counterterrorism experts say the U.S. can least afford right now.
Giuliani’s limitations are in fact remarkably similar to those of another man who has led the nation into a war without end.
Amanda Ripley, reporting on Giuliani’s terrorism credentials in Time.
“China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission.”
“[T]he smallness of people and the grandeur of their demands.”
Edward Condon Conlon, in Blue Blood
Conlon, a detective, formerly wrote the “Cop Diary” columns for The New Yorker.
“The entire criminal-justice system functions as an editorial process, as a story is refined, supported, and checked from the complainant to the cop, to the sergeant and maybe the lieutenant, and then to the ADA, and then to the judge, and sometimes to the jury.”
“Al Sharpton, a man who proves every day that you can get away with anything in this country if you can shove the word ‘Reverend’ in front of your name.”
From Tim Page in a fascinating memoir in The New Yorker (not online):
“It would be easier for me to improvise an epic poem at a sold-out Yankee Stadium than to approach an attractive stranger across the room and strike up a conversation.”
And:
“([H]ere I concur with Virgil Thomson, who once said that worry was one form of prayer that he found acceptable).