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.