A quote via Steerforth:

There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate.

“One never know, do one?” – Fats Waller

(see Bob Purse’s ‘Strange Bedfellows’ post at WFMU’s Beware of the Blog to find out what one never know)

Mark Liberman, over at Language Log, has a totally brilliant post: Towel-snapping semiotics: How the frontal lobe comes out through the mouth. He closes with this essential HL Mencken quote, perennially useful:

… more than anywhere else that I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly–the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages, and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries, and extravagances–is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows. [“On Being an American“, 1922]

I’m currently enjoying Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, and this fits right in.

via Crooked Timber, Cosma’s engaging fable Dives, Lazarus, and Alice. A couple of bits to whet the ummmm appetite:

…Gloomy, snarky, heavy-handed, academic, and obvious to anyone who knows enough about the subject to care…

…The larger point is that while what is technologically efficient depends on facts of nature, what is economically efficient is a function of our social arrangements, of who owns how much of what. Economic efficiency may be a good tool, but it is perverse to serve your own tools, and monstrous to be ruled by them. Let us be thankful for the extent to which we escape perversion and monstrosity.

• Pinkwater's Bushman Lives
  wow.

  …what was there was Michigan Avenue, which had been there in the first place, and which I had seen hundreds and hundreds of times, only I had not seen it like I was seeing it now. The sky was blue, as it often was, only this time it was not only blue, but it was thick. It had a texture. If I could have reached up and taken a piece of sky between my thumb and finger, I could have felt it. The buildings were stone, and brown, and bluish gray, and tall like always, only I felt they were somehow curving, huddling together, and arching out over the street. And the cars! The cars were all these amazing colors, moving along like big beetles, metallic and rounded, and shiny. I could see the air too. It was all amazing. Something had happened to my eyes, or my brain, while I was away inside the painting. By the time I had gotten back inside myself, all my seeing settings had been changed…

  (tags: writing aesthetics)

I’m re-reading John McPhee’s 1987 Atchafalaya article in the New Yorker (as are many other people, just now) and encountered this technological easter egg:

The sun, just above the horizon, was large and ruddy in the mist, rising slowly, like a hot-air baboon.

So you see there IS hope.

that I should make more space and time for reading Dorothy Parker: Doc Searls’ questions about the provenance of a couple of quotes (which she may not have written, but who cares? Still a brilliantly sharp-tongued person, and perhaps it would be interesting to look into how she’s been misquoted).