Lance’s new site gives his take on San Francisco’s real summer:

“Thing is, in December? It’s totally lovely here. In December it’s 70 degrees, the skies are blue, the dogs are running around like chickens, the chickens are running around like chickens and all is right with the world of dogs and chickens. Me, I moved here in December, 1999 from Boston and in Boston in December the chickens are frozen solid and they hurt when people throw them at you…”

A 54-year-old woman who works four jobs, recently won $76 million in the lottery. She didn’t tell her bosses at first, because she’d just requested more hours and felt obligated to work them for awhile.

A gardener found $1,700 under a bush while he was working and actually turned it in to the police. It belonged to a woman who had been saving a dollar a day for a trip to Universal Studios with her son, and had also been holding on to her father’s savings from his Social Security so he could afford a car.

A Bellevue couple chopped up twenty-six trees on a public trail in an attempt to improve the view from their “hillside home.” They were caught in the act, and now they’ll be paying the city $150,000, publicly apologizing, and doing some community service time.

( All via Romenesko’s Obscure Store and Reading Room.)

From Vendela Vida’s interview with Susan Straigt in The Believer:

BELIEVER: You told me earlier that that your middle daughter, Delphine, told you about a boy in her class who touched a girl, uh, where she didn’t want to be touched. How’d you respond?

SUSAN STRAIGHT: I asked her what she was going to do if that happened to her, and she asked, with this trace of malicious glee, Can I hit him? I said, No, cause then you’ll get in trouble for fighting. And I showed her how to throw that mean elbow that catches them in the jaw and the ear. I gave her the line to say after: Oh, you startled me, and I’m sorry you’re bleeding now.

Hey, Amit. This is what you wrote that I thought was funny:

I think that if you post a story on your blog, you should no longer be allowed to tell it at parties where people who read your site might be present.

This week’s New Yorker is a good’un. “Truth in Architecture” by Larissa MacFarquhar contains a description of Moshe Safdie–who is apparently a world-famous architect–that reminds me of how I’d like to be more mindful:

“He wears beautiful, finely woven shirts that he designs himself and has sewn up by a shirtmaker. He takes great pleasure in eating: he is the sort of person who always squeezes his orange juice by hand, or drives far out of his way to procure strongly flavored olive oil. To him, appreciation of such sensual delights–wine, clothing, food–is not an indulgence of whim, but rather an enobling of ordinary need…”

And from the same article, a spot-on similie:

“The fog was thick and white, and the car drove blindly through it. Tree branches flashed in and out of view like scratches on blank film.”

A while ago, Paul Ford did a piece on Sex in the City forThe Morning News. It was funny. Observe:

“I prefer to imagine the show as a black-box play from the 1970s with Beckettian overtones, three women on an empty stage, looking at the audience, speaking in monotones:

1: I doubt I am fecund.

2: I have eaten so little.

3: Where are the men?

1: There are no men.

2: I will pay a woman $40 to caress and decorate my toes with varnish. I will wear shoes that cost more than the weekly wages of a restaurant worker, with tips.

3: What kind of tips?

2: Not on the shoes, for the restaurant workers.

1: I am hungry. I will not marry.

2: Talk about the shoes.

3: The shoes!

Unison: Shoes.”

Amit says: “I’m self conscious every time I use an exclamation mark. “

Kaiser Permanente has a kid-outreach program called, wait for it, “Nightmare on Puberty Street.” As you can see, Kaiser has it’s corporate finger on the pulse of America’s youth culture. Nightmare on Elm Street was first released in 1984, five years before most of these kids were born. Note the actor’s stylish peach T-shirt, striped baseball cap, and overalls. I can only hope they rap.

Few things are more entertaining than a bright writer with a grudge and a fresh pen. In the June 2002 issue of GQ, Bob Drury writes of former George magazine editor Richard Blow’s memoir:

“What is certain is that Blow types faster than he can write.”