Category: Best Line of the Day

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

Best line of the day, so far

The familiar pattern of a decade ago begs the question that Bill Gates was asked when he met last month with a group of executives and journalists from The New York Times: Will you do to Google what you did to Netscape?

Mr. Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and chairman, paused, looked down at his folded hands and smiled broadly, as if enjoying a private joke. “Nah,” he replied, “we’ll do something different.”

From Can This Man Reprogram Microsoft?, an article in Sunday’s New York Times about the new internet and Microsoft’s re-invention. Interesting look at where we may all be headed.

The “man” in the title is Ray Ozzie.

Best line of the day, so far

“Yesterday evening, a Southwest Airlines plane tried to land in bad weather at Midway Airport, but failed. It skidded past the runway, through a fence and into traffic on an adjacent road killing a six year old boy. In due time, it is almost certain that the boy’s family will bring a wrongful death suit against the airline.

“The success of that lawsuit will depend to a very great extent on whether a legal doctrine called res ipsa loquitur applies. More or less, what ‘res ipsa loquitur’ means, is that the people who caused the harm won’t be able to argue the ‘shit happens’ defense.”

Wash Park Prophet, who goes on at some length.

Best line of the day, so far

Since Wallace Stegner’s death, there is perhaps no one better qualified to make sweeping statements on Western culture and history than Larry McMurtry. From his familial background (Texas homesteaders) to his own experiences in cowboying, bookselling, writing and research, McMurtry is pedigreed like nobody’s business. This is a book he should have been able to write in his sleep.

Maybe he did.

— Allen M. Jones reviewing Larry McMurtry’s Oh What a Slaughter for New West Network.

Of course, Jones is disappointed because McMurtry can write at the highest level:

His best novels — Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers — are all ambushes of emotion, everyman oomphs of grief and redemption. No flourishes of purple prose, no narrative strutting. Here’s just a handful of people you can care about, and here are some of the bad (and good) things that happen to them. His life’s masterpiece, the Pulitzer Prize winning Lonesome Dove, is a staggering achievement of invisible research and camouflaged, authorial labor. Anyone who can read about the death of Augustus McCrae without threatening tears has a chunk of vulcanized rubber for a heart.

Oh What a Slaughter is a short, nonfiction survey of several western massacres.

Best line of the day, Scrooge division

“[I]f shivering in the dark outside a Best Buy at 3:30 a.m. in frigid November drizzle waiting for a half-price deal on a cheap-ass Chinese-made DVD player isn’t the very definition of self-immolating karmic torture, I don’t know what is.”

Mark Morford in a column titled: “Eat My Holiday Cheer: Screw joy and togetherness. It’s all about retail, just like Jesus would have wanted.”

Best line of the day, so far

“The overthrow of Saddam Hussein was supposed to provide the world with a demonstration of American power. It didn’t work out that way. But the Bush administration has come up with the next best thing: a demonstration of American PowerPoint.”

Paul Krugman in today’s New York Times

Krugman goes on to conclude:

The point isn’t just that the administration is trying, yet again, to deceive the public. It’s the fact that this attempt at deception shows such contempt – contempt for the public, and especially contempt for the news media. And why not? The truth is that the level of misrepresentation in this new document is no worse than that in a typical speech by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney. Yet for much of the past five years, many major news organizations failed to provide the public with effective fact-checking.

So Mr. Bush’s new public relations offensive on Iraq is a test. Are the news media still too cowed, too addicted to articles that contain little more than dueling quotes to tell the public when the administration is saying things that aren’t true? Or has the worm finally turned?

Some words of wisdom from Woody Allen

As noted earlier, Woody Allen is 70 today. NewMexiKen saw Allen doing stand-up once upon a time when we were both a lot younger (about 40 years ago, sigh).

Here’s a few of his insights, some possibly from that very time.

“A fast word about oral contraception. I asked a girl to go to bed with me, she said ‘no’.”

“I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers.”

“I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.”

“Some guy hit my fender, and I told him ‘be fruitful, and multiply.’ But not in those words.”

“I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”

“If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.”

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

Best line of the day, so far

“Actually, from the quote it seems that Brown’s actual angle may be providing not generic emergency response consulting services but rather consulting services to incompetents who’ve been saddled with emergency preparedness responsibility and fear becoming national laughing stocks when they turn mid-size disasters in to full-on catastrophes through gross mismanagement.”

Joshua Micah Marshall