The Providence Journal on Babe Ruth

in 1914, playing for the Providence Grays:

"Babe Ruth seems to have gotten in on the ground floor with the fans as a result of his baffling southpaw pitching and his ability to give the horsehide vigorous punishment with the wagon tongue."

  -- from "Babe" by Robert Creamer

"Ham, ham, oo, oo, oo, oo, oo, oo, ham, ham HAW!"

Nicholson Baker, "House of Holes"

Wolcott Gibbs on Thomas Dewey

"Dewey, whose indifference to money is such that he can remember offhand how much he was making at any given day in his life . . . ."

[Dewey, District Attorney at the time, responded to Gibbs' criticism by having Gibbs' bank account impounded.]


from "Backwards Ran Sentences: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs"

is it me, or the universe?

Philip K. Dick's daughter on the arrogant component of her father's mystical experience:

"Wouldn't you have gone to the doctor? I'd have thought something was wrong with me."

On Irony Highway

Truck stopped, out of gas, on freeway off-ramp, with logo: West Coast Logistics, Inc.

"There are hardly five critics in America, and several of them are asleep." -- Herman Melville

(cited by Sam Allingham at The Millions)

Where are the sexy policemen, nurses & firemen the rest of the year when you really need them?

                            -- Sarah Silverman.

"oh, that's right . . ."

Grant Brisbee on Game 5 of 2011 World Series:

Let's say there's a guy with some known quirks and flaws. For La Russa, it's compulsive bullpenning and small ball. For the analogy, say it's a guy who is scared of spiders. Doesn't like spiders. Can't deal with spiders. Most of the time, no one cares too much. It's caused some embarrassment here and there, but that's about it.


Then one day, our arachnophobe is making a delivery to the Sistine Chapel while it's being restored, and he sees a spider, and he freaks out and jumps back right into the scaffolding, and the workers restoring the Sistine Chapel tumble down screaming, but not before someone, desperately grabbing at the air, knocks a can of paint up and it splatters all over The Last Judgment, and the scaffolding crashes into a heap with people flying everywhere, with the screaming, oh god, the screaming, and stained glass windows are shattering, and there are also banana cream pies flying everywhere because, oh, that's right, the guy who was scared of spiders was delivering banana cream pies at the time.

That was Game 5. It was the perfect storm to magnify Tony La Russa's strategic quirks. With two straight wins, everyone will forget about this. Without those wins, they're the story of the World Series.
 
http://mlb.sbnation.com/2011/10/25/2512429/2011-world-series-tony-la-russa-decisions-genius

Richard Stark: Simple and pure.

"Be right back honey." She twisted the last word like a knife.

Bad dreams.

Bad dream tonight, but a bad dream with some really cute baby chicks thrown in.

Favorite lyric from the band Andrew Jackson Jihad:

"Angels are hating on you."

One good thing about having a Mormon President: we'd have a First Lady, and a Second Lady, and a Third . . . .

"I wish I had more fun in college.  Today's students are more lighthearted, which should stand them in good stead when they are unemployed."

    Walter Mondale on the life of the college student today.

Robert Benchley says . . .

"If Mr. Einstein doesn't like the natual laws of the universe, let him go back to where he came from."

OTSOG

I was thrilled that you put it in footnotes, because every generous footnote now is a blow to reclaim footnotes from the judgment of an ill-informed audience that believes that David Foster Wallace invented them and therefore no one else gets to use them. This in a world where Nicholson Baker plainly invented the footnote!

Jonathan Lethem, to Geoff Dyer in BOMB Magazine #117, temporarily online:  http://bombsite.com/issues/117/articles/5988

But also

His tongue was a more potent weapon than his penis, or so it seemed to be during this period of his life . . . his tongue was always capable of thrusting, curling and whirling its way into her good graces; and as his mouth was upon her he was conscious not only of the luxuriance of her loins but also that he was making a literary connection with Henry Miller.

Gay Talese, describing a college-aged Al Goldstein.

Telephone conversation overheard on line in a museum:
Do you have those little signs that you put on cheeses?

Found Surrealism

"A small, rotund figure with a delicate stomach and said to live on Evian water, Blachette was known as the "king of alfalfa"."

Concise Lyric of the Day

She's got one magic trick. One and that's it.

A big "if"

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A giant South American rodent weighing at least 100 pounds (45 kgs) was spotted at a waste-water treatment facility in California recently before disappearing in the brush, according to a wildlife official.

The animal, which was identified as a capybara, is the world's largest rodent and feeds on vegetation.

"If you think a giant guinea pig is cute, then you probably would like it," said Todd Tognazzini, of the California Department of Fish and Game.







http://news.yahoo.com/giant-south-american-rodent-spotted-california-015314303.html

Guy next to me at the bar reading texts from someone called Pookie Pookie.

Crack action on the part of the police

from L.A. Times:

Beverly Hills police blew up an aspiring screenwriter's laptop and script when investigating a suspicious package Thursday morning on Rodeo Drive.
The screenwriter, who was not identified, apparently left his briefcase -- with the computer and script inside -- unattended at a talent agency office.

Beverly Hills Police Lt. Tony Lee said police, not knowing what was inside the briefcase, detonated it as safety precaution.

Lee said the owner was distraught when he learned what happened to briefcase.

The case was found near the intersection of Rodeo Drive and Little Santa Monica Boulevard.
Several streets were closed and nearby businesses were being evacuated, causing traffic jams in the area.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/08/beverly-hills-police-blow-up-screenwriters-laptop-script.html


[Admittedly, there may be more to the story]

Crack thinking on the part of the police

A woman is found dead in the courtyard of a house, naked, hands and feet bound, and she'd been hanging from a second floor balcony, noose around neck. Three days earlier a 6 year-old boy was found dead in the house. Roy Frank of the San Diego sheriff's homicide unit: "The case is certainly suspicious."

from People magazine

They are pretty good looking girls who can play softball

"Hey, come on," said Lowell. He never knew how to react to aggression. He was always kind of stunned by it.

"I hate it when you sit in a chair like that," said his wife.

from A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis.

Don't get me down

Samuel Johnson on Richard Savage:

Those are no proper Judges of his Conduct who have slumber'd away their Time on the Down of Plenty

Free historic sounds

Link to Library of Congress "National Jukebox"  --  http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/

Noir Dialogue

Lee Marvin:                    Hey, that's a nice perfume.


Gloria Grahame:              It's something new. It attracts mosquitos and repels men.



"The Big Heat"

 

Heard at the bar:

"I used to date a girl from South Africa, so I know all about that. I know all about that stuff."

Don't the brakeman look good flagging down the Double E?

The cup of tea on arrival at a country house is a thing which, as a rule, I particularly enjoy. . . . There is something that seems to speak to the deeps in me in the beaming smile of my hostess and the furtive whisper of my host, as he plucks at my elbow and says "Let's get out of here and go and have a whiskey and soda in the gun room."

P.G.Wodehouse, "The Code of the Woosters"

Patti Smith on Andy Warhol:

I hated the soup and felt little for the can.

At the next table in the restaurant:

"I was in my bathing suit pregnant. Who says that to someone who's pregnant?"

I yearn for the good old days, when you could go about and tell people what you thought of them with a hatchet and a bow and arrows.

-- Jerome K. Jerome

More from "Toward You"

" . . . The interesting thing is that most felons actually prefer novels to short stories or even poems . . . the prisoners themselves tell us that the novels' longer narrative arcs give them a sense of continuity, as well as a chance, in a way, for them to escape their present unhappy circumstances, if only temporarily. As for their own writing, which we encourage through weekly workshops, they much prefer poetry. I don't know if it's a certain criminal lack of attention span -- somebody ought to do a study someday -- or just poetry's innate potential for violence and its implied permission to use inflammatory language, but they certainly do churn it out for whatever reason."

Someone, a girl actually, chose to describe me as "a perfect capybara," which -- none of us but her ever having seen one -- left me undisturbed until the following morning when I looked it up in the single volume of the World Book Encyclopedia I owned, unfortunately the letter C. . . . I took a good look in the mirror. The girl had been right. What woman would ever want to date a capybara? But the bright side of that experience was that the research I did that morning began a lifelong interest in animals -- not a bad thing for someone who spends most of his time alone.

from " Toward You" by Jim Krusoe.

Bar talk:

"I bought some moss. Boy, is it expensive there. I bought some moss. $7.00. I don't even need moss."

Bartender to me: "I'm sorry, I'm interrupting you. You are probably 'These damn kids.'"

Things I am sure are true

"There are things in here they'll never teach you in school." -- Woman handing out book to passersby at LA BookFestival

The truth is often not that hard to find -- Patti Smith

Paper on ground:

You told me you USED to think he was cute!

Such is life; and we are but as grass that is cut down, and put into the oven and baked.

-- Jerome K. Jerome

Geoff Dyer Suffering

"Writers suffer more from the flu than other people and I suffer more from the flu than other writers."


"Life is bearable even when it is unbearable: that is what is so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it."

from "Out of Sheer Rage"

Annals of the Law

Appellant contends that three characteristics of the will undermine the conclusion that the document is testamentary. First, he asserts that the title "Last Will Etc. or What?" creates an ambiguity and implies that the decedent was unaware of what he was writing.

Estate of Williams (2007)155 Cal.App.4th 197, 212.

And --

Most people don't want what they want

More Dyer

How can you know anything about literature if all you've done is read books?

Geoff Dyer and Deconstruction

In the end it took a whole box of matches and some risk of personal injury before I succeeded on deconstructing it.

"As if salaciously self-serving isn't the very soul of American noir."

-- Joyce Carol Oates, responding to James Ellroy's self-criticism regarding "My Dark Places."

Justice Breyer, playing the little old man

"I had to have a tweeting thing because I was very interested in the Iranian revolution, remember when they just had this uprising a little over a year ago. … I sat there fascinated because you could look through the tweeting and see what was going on. The only way you could do that was go through the tweet or the tweeter."

from Dahlia Lithwick in Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2290726/

Unpromising Beginning to Humorous Story

"Let me describe some funny situations in which one of my readers acted as an Empirical Reader rather than a Model Reader."

Umberto Eco, Confessions of a Young Novelist

"It's almost two years. What is it, April. April, May, June, July. In three
months it will be two years. If I propose, it'll be another year until. It'll be a year 'til I propose. Then a year after that. So that'll be okay."

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I'll stop.

All future and no past -- Opening Day.

The Baseball Project

"Normally, when someone says trust me, I find it hard to trust him anymore, and this is doubly true for when it is myself who is saying it"

Charles Yu, from

Fashion advice

http://thefeministfashionista.wordpress.com/?ref=spelling

password: roadrunners (or perhaps roadrunner)

ceaselessly forward

Great NES style game:

http://greatgatsbygame.com/

Bar talk:

"John Travolta is gay."

"You don't believe what you read in the National Enquirer, do you?"

"My brother in law knows him, and -- "

"Your brother in law?"

"My wife's brother"

"Wait, no."

"My wife's . . . brother."

"You mean your wife's husband."

"My wife's brother. My wife's husband --"

"No, your wife's husband."

"His wife's husband is him."

"What? -- Never mind."

Mickey Mantle answers a questionnaire:

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/02/mickey-mantles-outstanding-experience.html?m=1

Bartender: What'll it be?

Patron: Appletini.

Bartender: Don't say that. Apple martini. It's an apple martini. Don't say Appletini.

I know some people like that

Adventures in live public radio pitchdrives:

"This is a station that is not afraid to shy away from the emotional."

Low Anthem:

Opening instrumentation. Hammond organ, clarinet, saw, standing bass.

Song of the Day:

Change of Time -- Josh Ritter

Overheard outside my door, MLK weekend:

Now I'm glad you you didn't invite me because I probably would have hit the nigga.

More from "Million Dollar Legs"

Minister:   I've brought you an ultimatum.


President of Klopstokia (WC Fields):   I don't want any.  I'm full.  I've just had goat stuffed with eels.

I hate to make fun of anyone's passions. The struggles from which they proceed are always real even when their manifestations are ridiculous.

Saul Bellow -- Letter to Melvn Tumin 1942

Million Dollar Legs

President of Klopstokia (WC Fields): Take this message to my Privy Counselor.

Major Domo: Right away. Where is he?

President: Now where would a Privy Counselor be?

Life in the Senate

"The procedural exchanges grew so dense that at one point we were voting on the following: a motion to table a motion to reconsider a vote to table an appeal of a ruling that a point of order was not in order against a motion to table another point of order against a motion to bring to a vote the motion to call up the resolution."

from "The Good Fight" by Walter F. Mondale, with David Hage.

Favorite Book

The candidates for chairman of the Republican National Committee are a literate bunch. And when asked to name their favorite book, their answers were revealing, to say the least.


Maria Cino's favorite is the classic To Kill a Mockingbird. Reince Priebus named The Reagan Diaries as his first choice. And current RNC Chairman Michael Steele's favorite is War and Peace.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," Steele recited -- which is actually a line from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.

But the real highlight of the exchange came when Ann Wagner responded to the question, saying, "Probably my kitchen table." What was she referring to exactly? Her favorite bar, apparently, which she thought she was being asked. Her favorite book, though, is George W. Bush's new memoir, Decision Points.

from Talking Points Memo: http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/01/ann-wagner-names-favorite-bar-not-book-at-rnc-chair-debate.php