Left Behind, pp. 332-337 When last we saw Buck Williams, he was rushing off to the airport to meet Hattie Durham even though he doesn’t really even remember what she looks like. He remembers that she is “drop dead gorgeous,” but nothing more specific. It’s hard to fault Buck for this fuzzy mental image, since that three-word cliche is nearly all we readers were told about what Hattie looks like. We’ve also been told she is “attractive” and “beautiful,” but... Read more
When I worked in the bookstore, we played this long-running game with book titles. The game, which was shamefully juvenile but endlessly amusing, was simply to add the phrase “in my pants” to the title of any book. (Similar to Demetri Martin’s observation that anything you say sounds sleazy if you just add the word ladies.) Once a year, the chain would conduct an inventory of its stores. The staff from the various locations would gather at each store in... Read more
O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! … Hey, wait, isn’t there a war going on? … O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! … A war that can never end, because ending it would supposedly mean losing or “surrendering” … O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.! O.J.!... Read more
Some of us live in a complex and some of us live in a development. Neither of those words really sounds like home to me. I have enough complexes already, thank you. And “development” always strikes me as a medical euphemism (“I’m afraid there’s been a development in your grandmother’s condition”). Development-living is inexplicably popular. A lot of people don’t seem to mind living in a neighborhood where they’re older than any of the trees or buildings, and where the... Read more
Left Behind, pp. 328-332 Rayford and Chloe arrived in New York just after noon on Wednesday … It’s only eight and a half days after The Event and everything is back to normal. Rayford and Chloe, air traffic and airports, and New York CIty itself. And it’s not a post-traumatic “normal” — people aren’t soldiering on, forcing themselves to rebuild a new normal out of the ashes, unmanageable emotions still roiling just below the surface in a world forever changed,... Read more
Syria has so far accepted (at least) 1.5 million Iraqi refugees. Beginning today, that country is placing limits on the number and type of future refugees it will accept. As CBS News reports: With the massive influx of refugees, Syria is starting to feel the strain. “There’s a huge impact for a country of 20 million people to receive a million and half within a few months. There is a huge burden on our services: medical, school, infrastructure — everything,”... Read more
Left Behind, pp. 326-328 Buck Williams and Steve Plank have been watching the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11 on CNN. They don’t wear sackcloth and they don’t shoot fire out of their mouths, but two guys who tried to kill them tripped, fell over and died, then one of them claimed to be the Messiah before they both settled back into chanting that Jesus was the Messiah. CNN’s Dan Bennett, bored already with the chanting, signs off, promising to record... Read more
If you call your dad he could stop it all … (The idea here, generally, is an alphabetical list of songs from my iTunes collection. Feel free to compare and contrast with your own list from the same alphabetical range and to let me know, in comments, what’s missing. The list below, for example, does not include “Complicated,” by Avril Lavigne. You might point out this omission, suggesting that my utter lack of anything by Ms. Lavigne represents a serious... Read more
Finally getting around to reading some of those articles that have been lying around for months … Like this, for instance, by John Seabrook in The New Yorker on the Antikythera Mechanism, which I got halfway through before I was finally convinced it wasn’t just some elaborate hoax, like the archaeological equivalent of Sidd Finch. Or James Surowiecki’s financial column, “Fuel for Thought,” which puts the current debate over CAFE standards into historical perspective: In the auto industry, there’s one... Read more
Attacking Iran would be Bad So Sarah Baxter of The Sunday Times (“Pentagon ‘three-day blitz’ plan for Iran“), George Packer in The New Yorker (“Test Marketing“) and Lance Mannion (“Oh what the heck, let’s start a third war!“) all say that the Bush administration may be considering a major strike against Iran.* That is a Very Bad Idea. “Bad” can mean a lot of things. It can mean wicked, unjust or morally suspect, as when we refer to villains as... Read more
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