"It's an ol' scientific puzzle: which came first, the frying pan or the egg?" -- Walt Kelly

Overheard at the bar:

"Do they sell candy at the liquor store? I feel like some candy."

Worthy Description

"His head resembles a half-inflated rugby ball with intellectual leanings."

 from "The Legend of Pradeep Mathew"

Christmas Javelina

javelina

All lists are flawed; they lean to the side

There are many different reasons for letting a lawn grow in a wild state of nature, not all of them philosophically sound. -- Panorama City

From Panorama City

I am followed by televisions everywhere I go, I am unlucky that way.

New poetic form

http://www.googlepoetics.com/post/35068295041/how-to

My contribution:

When d
When does fall start
When does summer end
When do babies start teething
When do you ovulate

Greatest non-fictional video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQZxF_roWyk&feature=player_embedded


nice narrative, with form to fit

Someone's else's Starbucks cup

"That's coffee, not tea," Obama said. "I thought that was my tea."




...

If Therefore

The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. Matthew 6:22

Good question.

"I lost my garage door opener. What else could go wrong?"

This sentence is non-fiction:

She's being cared for by a non-profit group created by a reclusive multimillionaire named Martine Rothblatt. 


from Lost at Sea -- Jon Ronson

Dreamstuff

Key items from my unpleasant dreams of last night:

1) Someone needed to keep a school yearbook from me, as there was a piece of information in there I shouldn't see.

2) One of the two beers I brought to drink at the social breakfast turned out to be Brown Bag soda, refreshing but not beer.

Big Rock

Big Vehicle on Nearby Street

Woman on date #3

-- I'm a writer. People tell me my scripts are good, but female leads, period piece, blah, blah blah.  I've had poetry published.  I'm a Renaissance woman stuck into this position as an accountant.

Woman on date #2

-- He went on and on and on about his previous wife.  I said, if you want to get me into bed you shouldn't go on and on about your ex-wife.  He said, yeah, you're right.

Woman on date, next bar table: I hate white wine. It makes me throw up. I like rose. Only French rose, though.

Now this was starting to seem like the old days. -- from "Home" by George Saunders

"You have to drive in L.A. So I got a rent-a-car. I turned on XM Sirius radio and heard Bob Dylan telling jokes. I almost crashed the car."

-- Jesse Malin.
"They were good jokes."

Judicial Sentence of the Day

Furthermore, the sarcastic comments made by her supervisor about her foot, though insensitive, do not rise to the level of a constructive discharge under our caselaw.   Sekiya v. Gates, 508 F.3d 1198, 1200 (Ninth Cir. 2007).

Further Bar Talk

"It is soo hard to find someone who can play both Bruce Wayne and Batman."

Bar talk

"I took the first mind-altering substances of my life, I was whacked on ecstasy and acid, and my roommate at the time worked in a video duplication lab, and he put on The Matrix, which hadn't been released yet, and my mind exploded."

Indifferent Moon Unconcerned Man

St. James' Icebox

I walked around the apartment and looked two or three times inside the refrigerator, so cold, so white, so bare. . . .

       from Cassandra at the Funeral.

Tell me Tell me the answer

You may be a lover but you ain't no dancer

You Chose Wrong

Very nice collection from Choose Your Own Adventures:

http://youchosewrong.tumblr.com/

"Who the fuck is Maria?" -- Justin Townes Earle's then current girlfriend.

. . . ever since moving out, my days had been upside down and strange. I could not tell what season it was, or if I was moving through water or air.




-- Sheila Heti

"To go on and on about your soul is to miss the whole point of life. I could say that with more certainty if I knew the whole point of life.". -- Sheila Heti

Word on the street

"You know me, I'm a liquidity kind of girl.  I like to get my hands on my money."

P.G. Wodehouse random quotation generator

http://www.drones.com/pgw.cgi?tw_p=twt

Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter -- Alan Watts appreciates this insight of G.K. Chesterton

LARB on Noir

http://lareviewofbooks.bigcartel.com/product/los-angeles-review-of-books-issue-4-noir-kindle-format

Axford says it all.

http://www.brewcrewball.com/2012/5/12/3015992/heres-the-note-john-axford-left-for-reporters-following-his-rough

John Axford's post-game statement.

Artistic Judgment from the Courts

"We agree with the district court that there is no basis for concluding that photos of the American West are more deserving of protection than photos of nude models."

 -- Ninth Circuit 487 F.3d 701, 723.

Woman to me: "Are you a Weinstein brother? I bet my girlfriend you were a Weinstein brother."

Nice opening sentence

 Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father -- an act which made a great impression on me at the time. -- Ambrose Bierce.

from Hungry Presidents -- see blog roll

Individual TVs

Woman at gym next to me: [claps hands] Yay Gandolf!

Words to live by

"I decided that my desire for a beer trumped any journalistic responsibilities."

                                                                           Mark Haskell Smith

One man to another, the latter with yarmulke, in bathroom:

You're not the Israeli author, are you?

Advice from a kid who wandered into my office

Kid:  Why you have your glasses on?

Me:  I can't read without them, and that's mostly what I do.

Kid:  Don't ever read.

Beckett 3/1/1951

I do not believe in collaboration between the arts. I want a theatre reduced to its own means, speech and acting, without painting, without music, without embellishments.

Rejection Letter

"I can now only weakly say this: if the situation ever arose when Alfred A. Knopf was the only publishing house remaining in the world and I was the sole remaining author, that would mark the end of the world of books."   Norman Maclean

from Letters of Note:  http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/end-of-world-of-books.html

"Speaking of bananas, the doorbell rang again" -- Trail of the Spellmans

Your $2.00 shoes hurt my feet. -- Woody Guthrie

Nice Reading Guide

http://www.themillions.com/2012/04/killer-read.html

"This is the Reading Group Guide for the new psychological thriller, The Reading Group Killer. Based on a true story, The Reading Group Killer tells the story of a gruesome book club-turned-bloodbath when one member, after years of enjoying friendly discussion and light refreshments, transforms into a murderer. . . ."

-- Andrew Blachman

Spoiler Alert?

Favorite Introductory Note of Thanks
(t least from a law review article that I've recently read):

"I have asked the editors not to make my citations conform to The Bluebook, and they have generously consented."

-- Richard A. Posner, in a note before his review of the 19th edition of The Bluebook.

Word on the Street

"I've never in my life been, like, so caught off . . . [long pause] . . . guard."

Roger Angell on the Brittanica's predicable shock

and "The Ship"

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/03/more-britannica.html#entry-more

" . . About a hundred detective stories have begun with the discovery that an American millionaire has been murdered, which is, for some reason, treated as a sort of calamity. "

                                                     G.K. Chesterton

"The mistake, the weakness at any rate, is perhaps to want to know what one is talking about.". -- Samuel Beckett 11/8/48

"I go to bars so that someone, the bartender, will occasionally ask "Are you all right?"'"

Cleanliness is next to ?

Roger Angell on the joys of looking things up in print:


An elementary-school teacher I know recalls a moment with a female sixth-grade student of hers who’d somehow botched the word “sophisticated” in a paper they were going over together and, when pressed, confessed that she didn’t really know what the word meant. “Why not look it up?” the teacher said, handing over a dictionary. The young woman leafed about, then paused, with her finger stabbing something on the page. “Hey!” she cried, her face alight. “Oh, wow, they’ve got ‘Snot.’”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books#ixzz1pKkZ1jLl

Too Great to Quote

Album of the moment:  "Old Ideas"

More What It Was

She wore tight slacks the color of vanilla ice cream . . . .

What It Was

Olga's hair, as black and dead as a stuffed raven, had been newly coiffed . . . .

                          --  Pelecanos.

Walt Kelly's Version

How much wood would a wood chunk chunk would a wood chunk chunk would a wood chunk chunk woodawood wunk chunk wooda woo wa wuh wooza?

Classified line of the day

"Not into anything kinky, just hot sex with a woman who wants two guys."

Tales of an Old Limo Driver

" . . . Yeah, he's a good actor. And he had a fistfight with Edward G. Robinson in the backlot of the old MGM studio."

"How I long for a reliable companion" -- Eli Sisters

The expert

Overheard out in the world, a woman educating three others:


"We all go out in the world as representatives of ourselves. There is just so much artifice. That's why it is so good to see you guys. You're life. Living. You're lavender. Lavender chocolate. A big piece of lavender chocolate."

Seen at the bar

An older, balding, bespectacled man in a police jacket.  Were it an MI-5 jacket he could be straight from a Le Carre novel -- the middle-aged, middle class part of the security apparatus.   Behind the bar, he picked up each of the very many bottles and swirled it, then held a flashlight to the bottom, shining the light through so the bottle glowed.  Looking for cracks? Worms?  Sediment? Fingerprints?  In any case, a job for the police.

"He was an unattractive creature with his clothes on; in the nude I thought he looked something like a goat." -- Patrick deWitt

LA Times headline of the day:

Woman Who Offered Sex For McNuggets Was Hungry

Favorite recent sentence from a newspaper:

"In theory, nothing is sacred."

-- Anthony Tommasini on the less-operatic " Porgy and Bess"

2011 Reading List

Most recently read first:

Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World -- Richard Rhodes


House of Holes -- Nicholson Baker

Backwards Ran Sentences : The Best of Wolcott Gibbs from The New Yorker -- Wolcott Gibbs

The Master and Margarita -- Mikhail Bulgakov

Wolf Hall -- Hilary Mantel

Train Dreams -- Denis Johnson

Assumption -- Percival Everett

The Face of Trespass -- Ruth Rendell

Pictures at a Revolution -- Mark Harris

The Score -- Richard Stark

The Stars My Destination -- Alfred Bester

A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 -- Alistair Horne

The Sleepwalkers -- Paul Grossman

On The Road -- Jack Kerouac

Thy Neighbor's Wife -- Gay Talese

Varieties of Disturbance -- Lydia Davis

Comedy in a Minor Key -- Hans Keilson

Flip Flop Fly Ball: An Infographic Baseball Adventure -- Craig Robinson

Outsider in Amsterdam -- Janwilliam van de Wetering

My Animal Life -- Maggie Gee

The Moonstone -- Wilkie Collins

Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence -- Bill James

A Meaningful Life -- L.J. Davis

Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage -- Richard Holmes

Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960 -- William Boyd

Embassytown -- China Mieville

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews -- Geoff Dyer

The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government -- David K. Johnson

Just Kids -- Patti Smith

Started Early, Took My Dog -- Kate Atkinson

Memento Mori -- Muriel Spark

Half a Life -- Darin Strauss

Three Men in a Boat -- Jerome K. Jerome

Toward You -- Jim Krusoe

The Arabs: A History -- Eugene Rogan

Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry -- David Orr

Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence -- Geoff Dyer

Bossypants -- Tina Fey

The Buenos Aires Quintet -- Manuel Vazquez Montalban

Funeral for a Dog -- Thomas Pletzinger

Ecstasy -- Mike Leigh

Season's Greetings -- Alan Ayckbourne

Mary Broome -- Allan Monkhouse

Heads You Lose -- Lisa Lutz and David Hayward

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe -- Charles Yu

Lidless -- Frances Ca-Chu Cowhig

A Lesson in Narrative Time -- Jody Bolz

Savages -- Don Winslow

Fen -- Caryl Churchill

Saul Bellow: Letters -- Saul Bellow

The Children's Hour -- Lillian Hellman

Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickenson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton, and Emily Bronte -- Maureen Adams

In a True Light -- John Harvey

She Was My Brother -- Julie Jensen

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low-Culture Manifesto -- Chuck Klosterman

Vampire Boy -- Carlos Trillo & Eduardo Risso

Life -- Keith Richards

Revolution: The Year I Fell In Love and Went to Join the War -- Deb Olin Unferth

The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics -- Walter Mondale and David Hage