Tag: excerpts

Yes, it’s a poem, but it’s a good poem. Besides which, there’s a link to pornographic balloons below it. So humor me:

Sentimental Moment or Why Did
the Baguette Cross the Road?

     Don't fill up on bread
     I say absent-mindedly
     The servings here are huge

     My son, whose hair may be
     receding a bit, says
     Did you really just
     say that to me?

     What he doesn't know
     is that when we're walking
     together, when we get
     to the curb
     I sometimes start to reach
     for his hand

     Robert Hershon

1:12 p.m.

You thought clowns were scary before. Wait until you check out these balloons
9:55 a.m.

Great post from Metafilter:

Four out of Five Americans Know Earth Revolves around the Sun. I certainly wish this was an Onion Headline. Should we all know this? I’m inclined to think so. Elsewhere in the article, 2% of Americans believe that Independence was won from France. Shoot me in the face.

posted by liquidgnome at 11:00 AM PST

1:09 p.m.

I’m reading Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, a short story collection flavored with lots of details about Indian life. I don’t usually like short stories, but Lahiri is an uncommon writer. My favorite passage so far is a child’s description of what “sexy” means:

“It means loving someone you don’t know.”

4:43 p.m.

EMAIL MOMENT!

Subject: Friend tells me to use his car while he’s gone.

Excerpt:

You are perfectly welcome to drive my car around. Just remember to turn the lights off and you should be fine. Oh, and I’d probably prefer it if I could say that I’ve had sex in it more than you have, so try to keep the numbers down.

2:04 p.m.

My dentist supplies headphones for her patients. When you’ve got some quality tunes playing, you hardly notice the smell of burning tooth enamel while she drills. I selected Louis Armstrong.

Two masked dentists leaned over me, backed by a glaring, operating-table light, while I tried not to gag on the spit collecting at the back of my throat. At the peak of my discomfort, Louis sang, “AND I THINK TO MAHSELF, WHUTTA WONDERFUHL WAHHHLD� (cue strings).” I swear, it was like stepping into a Quentin Tarantino movie. I found it so absurd that I had to control the urge to laugh (funeralsbreakupsthethingsIwishI’dknown). But the more depressing things I thought about, the worse the juxtaposition became. When “Life is a Cabaret” came on, I lost it. With my mouth stretched open like a gasping trout, I started to guffaw.

They, mercifully, assumed I was choking. I tried to cover my lunacy with a few well-placed coughs, and hit stop on the CD player while I was sitting up. I shoulda gone with Korn.

10:55 a.m.

Tantara– The blare of a trumpet or horn.


3:13 p.m.

Best responses from a magazine blurb about what women call their knockers:

  • The Pointer Sisters,
  • Laverne and Shirley,
  • and, my personal favorite, MacNeil and Lehrer.

Still can’t believe no one suggested the Olson Twins.

11:34 a.m.

MARKETING WORKS!

I recently bought some lipstick because it was named Jezebel. I mean it’s a good color, but mostly the name cracked me up; also, it came in a container that looked like a bullet cartridge. Somewhere in New York, a marketing team is slapping fives. They changed the name from Crimson Punch to Jezebel, took it out of the tortoise-shell tube and packed it in a form of weaponry, and sales rocketed among urban twentysomethings. I am yet another unwitting victim of their plan to dominate the red-lipstick market. Anyway, it was totally worth it. Tomorrow night a bunch of us are getting together to run off a cliff, and I want to look hot.

8:39 a.m.

I took an Italian art history course in college. The whole class could be described by something the professor said absently one day, “Today we’re going to talk about another… big church.”

My second favorite art-history moment was when my modern art professor spent half an hour talking about a Mondrian painting before realizing that the slide was in upside down.

6:15 p.m.

EMAIL MOMENT!

Subject: A reporter’s post-holiday laments.

Excerpt:

I am sick at work and awaiting an excruciating article
assignment, which will probably be a New Year’s
resolution, man-on-the-street story. I will have
to go to gyms and ask people why they decided to get
slim for the New Year or track down smokers who may
be willing to quit for the New Year. This is akin to
the day after Thanksgiving and Christmas shopping
stories I’ve had to do the last two years.
If we still used pencils or pens, I would commit
Hari-Kari with one as we speak…maybe this keyboard is
sharp enough. Nope.

11:29 a.m.

Going through old magazines, I came across the stupidest headline of 1999: Are Your Nails Ready for Y2K?

“Yeah Bob, I’m out on that Y2K nail compliancy call, and we’ve got a few problems over here. Looks like she’s got on a little Revlon Wine With Everything, but she used an incompatible top coat so it’s chipping. Yeah, and her cuticles are all messed up…”

10:25 a.m.

Found a post on, Small Japanese Notebook that struck me as a concise description of being 16:

“i suddenly don’t like my friends. or a good majority of them.”

5:14 p.m.

I was on the Haight awhile back and overheard a conversation between three men. Two of them had been fighting and one asked the third man his opinion:
“I don’t know Jim, you were servin Tommy with some pretty aggressive tones.”

3:34 p.m.

EMAIL MOMENT!

Subject: Friend from college writes, filling me in on the friends he saw over Christmas break.

Excerpt:

…And I swear my friend Mike
smoked about fourteen acres of hash down in Brazil.
Like I don’t know if he’s got a complete sentence in
him anymore. But 99 percent of my friends are tops. Including
Mike, who may well be able to read without moving
his lips by April.

10:40 a.m.

Jesus Dress Up is an online paper-doll of Jesus on the cross. Ever so tasteful. (Thank you Mr. Justin.)

1:25 p.m.

EMAIL MOMENT!

Characters: Me and a friend-of-a-friend, who I’d never met outside of email.

Subject: I had just figured out that our common friend was trying to set us up.

Excerpt:

Me: Amy is, of course, trying to set us up. I didn’t
realize that until now, but it’s become apparent. To make this more comfortable all
around, let’s mutually agree that it would never work
between us. We’re just different people. Besides, with
my hideous deformity and your overbearing mother, we’d
only be punishing ourselves.

Him: Wow, a pre-meeting rejection! How progressive and efficient of you. You’re
really going to be kicking yourself when you find out I’m the sole heir to
the substantial Huggies fortune. Not that you’re a shallow gold-digger, of
course, I just find that everyone can always use more diapers.

Me: I try to be cutting edge when it comes to rejection.
Can’t get behind the technology, or suddenly your
apartment is filled with belching morons, grabbing at
their crotches and eating all your Klondike Bars.

10:49 a.m.

Nearly all of Jeff Druzba’s posts are interesting. Then again, he hasn’t been at this too long:

“Morning radio DJ’s are the processed cheese of people. Every Monday it’s the same, “Oh ya hate
to get outta bed this mornin’ but ya grab yer cup-a-joe and start the week off right.” Then, every
Wednesday they’re out there with “It’s hump day” and “Here’s hoping the week is almost over.” And,
every Friday, you’ve got your “TGIF baby, let’s part-ay!”

When I was at a younger awkward age, I used to hear them say “hump day” on the radio and I thought
it was some kind of adult joke I didn’t get. I knew that humping was what the big dog up the street did
to your leg if you dared enter his tethered neck radius and it seemed odd to me that they would talk
about something like that on the radio. The usage of “hump” meaning “middle” is not so obvious.”

9:27 a.m.

I’ve become so accustomed to sardonic blog titles that I cheerfully clicked on Not So Manic Now expecting some witty little coed and a few snippets of his favorite Eminem lyrics. After reading a few posts, including one mention of a suicide attempt, I realized it was a “support blog” of sorts for people with bipolar disorders. Right. Not. So. Manic. Now. Have I mentioned I’m a bad person?

3:17 p.m.

The best headlines from this month’s Martha Stewart Living:

  • The Proper Way to Load Your Dishwasher
  • Folding Fitted Sheets and Bath Towels (complete with photo diagrams)
  • Smoothing a Table Cloth
  • Pistachio Valentine
  • Gourd Bird House
  • Drying Decanters

That said, I’m off to carve some “natural sake cups” out of cucumbers.

2:30 p.m.

EMAIL MOMENT!

Character: Friend who’s spending the holidays with family in Virginia.

Subject: What’d you get for Christmas?

Excerpt:

My parents bought me a leather jacket last night, and, despite the obvious
conservation of animals issue, I look pretty hot in it. I will probably be
wearing said jacket on my return flight as my mother thinks the airline people
know which bags have the expensive coats in them.

12:54 p.m.

A friend and I were driving through the city when I spotted a spray-painted wall. GAP IS KILLING REDWOODS!

Me: Gap is killing redwoods? I suspect Gap is doing worse things to humanity than that.

Him: Yeah. Like popularizing the color orange.

4:31 p.m.

Thomas Lynch is a poet and an undertaker. I’m reading his prose autobiography The Undertaking and he wrote something I liked:

“The meaning of life is connected, inextricably, to the meaning of death; mourning is a romance in reverse, and if you love, you grieve and there are no exceptions-only those who do it well and those who don’t.”

2:42 p.m.

“Alex, I’ll take Needs a New Hobby, for $500.” Someone collected all the phone numbers from movies and TV shows and put them at the 555-xxxx site.
One redeeming point, as The Ultimate Insult noted, they do have The Simpsons’ phone number.

1:25 p.m.

Catscan is a site that posts scans of cats. The instructions on how to scan your cat are almost as good as the JPEGs.

11:42 a.m.

I’ve never asked my roommate about his living room bookshelf. It’s pretty small, so there aren’t too many books on it, but what’s there is pretty interesting. (As my friend Sam would say, “Interesting defined as something I wouldn’t necessarily want to put in my mouth.”)

  • Sex for One: The joy of self loving
  • Hitler’s Willing Executioners
  • A History of Torture
  • Plasirs D’Amour: An erotic guide to the senses
  • The Holy Bible (sandwiched between)
  • The Satanic Bible (and)
  • True Crime Vol. 2: Serial Killers and Mass Murderers
  • Fractals Everywhere

5:10 p.m.

I really like this guy. Not only did we go to the same college (yeah, Aggies), but he’s also named Ernie. Anyone who’s gone through life with a Muppet name deserves some support. He posted a great white-girl description a few days ago, racist pig:

“Okay, I try not to play into the stereotypes, swear to god. But after listening to them on the radio, I look up Dream on the internet, expecting them to look like Destiny’s Child, and I come across the four whitest girls on the face of this earth. Not even like typical white girls – they’re like, Sarah Michelle Gellar, let’s go to the mall, swing by Hot Topic and eat a Hot-Dog-on-a-Stick white girls.”

4:04 p.m.

My sister is a full-time parent. Spending all day with little kids has its effects, and one of them is an inability to recognize sexual double meanings anymore. My nephew opened a Christmas gift that contained a soccer ball, a basketball, and a football. My sister promptly exclaimed, “Look at that! You’ve got some big balls, Trevor! You’ve sure got some balls!” When I burst out laughing, she just blinked at me. “What?”

2:19 p.m.