January 2012
1 post
Take what you need →
Baseball player Don Carman had grown so tired of mundane post-game interviews by 1990 that he decided to forego them altogether, and instead attached a handwritten list of stock responses to his locker along with a message to reporters: “You saw the game. Take what you need.”
December 2011
2 posts
“If John Boehner is speaker of the House for the next 20 years, he’ll be...”
– William Saletan, Slate, November 5, 2010 — ticking off what Pelosi’s Congress accomplished: health care, financial reform, economic stimulus, college lending reform, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and much more. More than a year later, Boehner’s failure —...
“Ask Osama bin Laden … if I engage in appeasement.”
– President Obama (via nationaljournal)
Gauntlet thrown.
(via joshsternberg)
October 2011
2 posts
September 2011
4 posts
3 tags
“And today, thanks to Mike’s principled leadership, our military draws its...”
– Barack Obama on Admiral Mike Mullen, who retired as Joint Chiefs chairman today. (via washingtonpoststyle)
Out of Time
For the Gen-Xers who grew up on R.E.M. and now toil as copy editors for news and entertainment web sites, the breakup of R.E.M. provided a chance for some clever headline writing. Let’s see how they did:
Shiny, Happy Rockers Call It Quits (E! Online)
R.E.M., R.I.P. (MSN)
R.E.M. Breaks Up, Everybody Hurts (Metro Boston)
They Stood in the Place Where They Lived (Time)
It’s the End of the...
1 tag
August 2011
2 posts
2 tags
Summer
Voxtrot and homemade margaritas before birthday dinner with boyfriend at Seasonal Pantry DC. Perfect.
WatchRhett Miller, performing “World Inside the World,” a song off his largely forgotten but highly underrated solo debut album, The Instigator. He was living a few blocks from the World Trade Center on 9/11, and he had started writing this song before the attack and finished it after. The Atlantic published some fascinating excerpts from the diary he kept in the days after the attack.
...
July 2011
2 posts
Washington gay, to boyfriend and I as we browsed his yard sale: “There’s a bed over here you can tie each other up to.”
“One of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today...”
– Former President Clinton gets real about the GOP push to make it harder to exercise your Constitutional right to vote. (via motherjones)
June 2011
3 posts
“It’ll be our same relationship. We’re the same people as when we met, except now...”
– John Huls, at the Stonewall Inn last night, in the Times
May 2011
6 posts
These Songs Are True
This morning, the first (and only) girl I ever dated told me she was getting married. This evening, I saw Paul Simon sing about aging, mortality, and leaving your lover.
“I remember playing here with Artie in the ’60s,” he said tonight, on stage at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, kind of as an afterthought. The audience was like him – thinning brown hair, a little thick around the middle,...
“Remember that the purpose of this exercise is to cement in your granddaughter’s...”
– Sam Sifton, turning wonderfully sweet at the end of his column today, and reminding me of the first time my parents took me to New York, as a child, at Christmas, and how I’ve wanted to live there ever since.
“We had a mutual love for singing and just a never-ending sense of togetherness...”
– Richard Adrian Dorr, 83, who has been with his partner for 61 years and would like to be married in New York. A very sweet story and video.
April 2011
7 posts
“At the times in my life when I was feeling the most gregarious and looking for...”
– Andy Warhol, philosopher (via aatombomb)
At Club Charles in Baltimore with an orange-scarfed John Waters. Y’all have any questions you want me to ask him?
“At this late stage in the life of our oceans, and particularly in a restaurant...”
– Sam Sifton (of course)
Watchcrumbler:
The Low Anthem’s cover of “A Shot in the Arm” will likely polarize Wilco fans. It begins as a woozy, weakened version of the original, with Jay Bennett’s Day-Glo Mellotron replaced with a muted bassoon clarinet. What surprised me was Ben Knox Miller’s vocal, which I found nearly as effective as Jeff Tweedy’s on the original. His high, reedy voice evokes the song’s dark and druggy...
March 2011
7 posts
“Well, Mike is dead and I’m alive. What do you expect me to do? Sleep...”
– Elizabeth Taylor, on beginning anew after the death of her husband, Mike Todd, in a plane crash.
By the time you’re 30, you may have to concede that you will never find fortune as a baseball star, find true love on the first try or be younger than Jonathan Franzen when you write an acclaimed novel. But the larger dreams — to find expression, connection, meaning — are like sturdy suitcases. They get battered on the long trip, but they don’t fall apart. Now that Kevin is about to...
1 tag
When the cute guy next to me at Starbucks
asks if my laptop is the new MacBook Pro — when it is clearly a version from two years ago — is he flirting?
“The main guy, Ken, said, ‘Are you ready for the live sex show?’ We were like,...”
– Northwestern student Jason Smith, recounting watching a woman being penetrated by a “fucksaw” in an optional session of his Human Sexuality class. The Daily Northwestern bravely printed the name of the sex toy in question. But the Tribune had the better quotes, including this one from...
February 2011
5 posts
“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think...”
– Kurt Vonnegut, on happiness. Today is a good day.
“A good five inches of snow falls, and the cubicle landscape is suddenly...”
– Hank Stuever, on how offices transform into Eddie Bauer catalogs when snow falls.
January 2011
16 posts
“Shadowed by the landmarks of a government that turned promises of secular...”
– Anthony Shadid, doing some lovely deadline writing from Cairo, in the Times.
How Facebook Makes Us Sad →
This is one of those stories that explains something you already knew, but didn’t know you knew. The thesis can be told in a sentence: Facebook makes us feel sadder and lonelier because it’s a running compendium of all the great fun and wonderful things everyone else is doing, though, in truth, those people aren’t nearly as happy as their updates make them out to be.
This...
WatchThis is a delight, and this girl is amazing.
Damn, the president looks good tonight
“A story will only ever say one big thing. If (for example, and you are feeling...”
– Rule No. 10, among the 25 simple rules for journalists drawn up by a Guardian editor. This one, I think, applies to all kinds of writing.
Robert F. Kennedy's speech the day after Dr.... →
kateoplis:
“This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives. …
Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the...
WatchThe National, playing (a somewhat flat) “Bloodbuzz Ohio” on Austin City Limits, tonight on PBS. Check your local listings!
Number of times that new Spider-Man photo came up...
Not that I’m complaining.