(TWO-SENTENCE) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
optimizing the throughput of my
mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like an experimental, artificially
constrained, writing-exercise version of all the other notes I've ever posted
here. But... oh, never mind...
• White House Press Secretary Tony Snow came to Pittsburgh yesterday and, during the course of a pep talk to a room full of local Republicans, described President Bush as a force of nature. As of this writing, it remains unclear whether Mr. Snow was referring to an earthquake, a tornado, a hurricane, a tsunami, or just one of those big cold fronts rips across the country, covers everyone in snow and ice and sleet and shit, and leaves a couple ofthousand dozen people dead in its cruelly indifferent
wake.
• Though I've been building The Wall as a regular feature for nine months now, and though my Site Meter stats often indicate readers who come to TWM by Googling the name of a fallen American soldier, this week I received my first email from the family of one of the brave young men and women I try, however humbly, to honor each week. Sad and simple (thank you for honoring our fallen loved ones.) and straightforward (we appreciate your compassion.), it was, in just two short sentences, one of the most aching and affecting emails I've received.
• We're thinking of you and of your son, Mrs. Henderson. And of all the other mothers and sons and families and friends who have suffered and sacrificed for the black and bitter joke of this damned foolish war.
• I've already suggested here -- twice, in fact -- that the answer to the How Do You Explain Your Vote for This Damned Foolish War? question is so simple and common-sensical that only John Edwards seems to have figured it out. To read a searing dissection of how Senator Hillary "There are Others to Choose From" Clinton can't figure it out and why it could doom her already wrong-headed presidential campaign check out William Saletan's simple, common-sensical analysis at Slate.com.
• It still sort of astonishes me that a woman that smart can be doing something that dumb. After watching John Kerry make the same mistake -- albeit even much more spectacularly -- in 2004, you'd think she would realize that candidates who do not learn from rhetorical history are doomed to re-lose it.
• After last night's shocking headline, I'm at least a little afraid to learn who will be filing the brief on behalf of the corpse. I'm guessing it will either be her lawyer or Zelda Rubinstein.
• Anyone who believes there are too many lawyers in the world should have recorded the first half hour of the Today show this morning. After Matt Lauer finished interviewing all of the lawyers in the She-Who-Can-Not-Be-Named, Invasion-of-the-Body-Snatchers Case, you would have had indisputable proof of your point and, as an added bonus, all the explanation anyone needs about why a hearing that should have taken a couple of hours took a couple of days and felt like it was taking a couple of months.
• Why wasn't anyone -- much less everyone -- wondering whether Britney Spears' career can grow back or whether or it can possibly be saved before she shaved her head? If that's all it takes to get morning shows and entertainment magazines worrying about you, I imagine that Ashlee Simpson and Alanis Morissette will be shaving their heads any minute now.
• An email caught in my spam filter last weekend featured a subject line that asked, Would you like to see Dr. Phil live? And I thought, Yes, I would. I mean, I don't particularly like the guy, but that doesn't mean I want to see him die.
• Last week I noted that there must be some section of the Pennsylvania Driver's Manual, unseen by my eyes but not by everyone else's, that revokes all traffic laws and common rules of the road whenever five or more inches of snow fall in the commonwealth. This week I have discovered an even more alarming development, one that must be a trailing clause on the original statute: whenever any of that snow remains on side streets, and especially when there are cars parked and/or plowed in on either side, those streets become one-way streets, and always in the direction opposite mine.
• Those problems paled in comparison to the ones I faced today, when the dangers of Slipping and Sliding and Talking and Driving and even Drinking and Driving were replaced by the suddenly widespread problem of Eating and Driving. On the ten-mile round trip to Oakland and Downtown and back again, I was almost hit by cars whose drivers were eating a hamburger, a Subway sandwich, a cookie, and a candy bar, and, in a tie for the Dippin' Drivers: Accidents of the Future! Award, both an old man repeatedly dunking a donut in his coffee cup and a woman obsessively scraping her bagel through what looked a container of hummus.
• I didn't know whether to honk my horn, flip 'em off, or get out at the next traffic light and ask if they could use a few more napkins. Without much deliberation, I chose the first two.
• I have already used this space to sing the praises of a number of last year's truly brilliant films -- Children of Men, United 93, The Descent -- but I realized this week, when I ventured out to buy the freshly released DVD, that I have not yet used it to plug my other favorite film of 2006: Christopher Nolan's gut-churning, mind-bending thriller, The Prestige. I highly recommend it not only because it's just about as taut and tense and utterly compelling as those other three films, but also because it's one of those rare films that, Sixth-Sense-like, immediately demands and rewards a second -- and perhaps even a third -- viewing.
• Near the end of Tuesday's Trips/Trio/Trinity/Trilogy meme, I listed three tunes by the Drive-By Truckers as Three Songs I Can't Stop Listening to Right Now, but a more accurate (if less economical) heading for that category would have been Three Songs I Can't Stop Listening to Right Now from the One CD I Can't Stop Listening to Right Now. I've come to it a few months late -- it slipped off my radar for a while, then got caught up in my pre-Christmas, pre-birthday buying moratorium -- but DBT's A Blessing and a Curse is, for my money, the most brilliant and compulsively listenable album of the last year.
• How much have the Penguins grown and improved and evolved after their last few years of last-place finishes? To the almost perfectly preposterous point at which, this past Monday afternoon, they lost for the first time in seventeen games and, instead of thanking the hockey gods for their bounty of blessings and graces, I was actually pretty pissed off.
• It's nice to see that, for the first time in 51 years, the head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers will actually reside within the city limits. No offense to Fox Chapel or Upper St. Clair -- even if they do seem to produce an awful lot of silly letter writers -- but it just doesn't seem right for a team so closely and fiercely identified with its city to be coached by someone who lives in the suburbs.
• Welcome to the neighborhood, Tomlin Family. We're proud and happy to have you...
• White House Press Secretary Tony Snow came to Pittsburgh yesterday and, during the course of a pep talk to a room full of local Republicans, described President Bush as a force of nature. As of this writing, it remains unclear whether Mr. Snow was referring to an earthquake, a tornado, a hurricane, a tsunami, or just one of those big cold fronts rips across the country, covers everyone in snow and ice and sleet and shit, and leaves a couple of
• Though I've been building The Wall as a regular feature for nine months now, and though my Site Meter stats often indicate readers who come to TWM by Googling the name of a fallen American soldier, this week I received my first email from the family of one of the brave young men and women I try, however humbly, to honor each week. Sad and simple (thank you for honoring our fallen loved ones.) and straightforward (we appreciate your compassion.), it was, in just two short sentences, one of the most aching and affecting emails I've received.
• We're thinking of you and of your son, Mrs. Henderson. And of all the other mothers and sons and families and friends who have suffered and sacrificed for the black and bitter joke of this damned foolish war.
• I've already suggested here -- twice, in fact -- that the answer to the How Do You Explain Your Vote for This Damned Foolish War? question is so simple and common-sensical that only John Edwards seems to have figured it out. To read a searing dissection of how Senator Hillary "There are Others to Choose From" Clinton can't figure it out and why it could doom her already wrong-headed presidential campaign check out William Saletan's simple, common-sensical analysis at Slate.com.
• It still sort of astonishes me that a woman that smart can be doing something that dumb. After watching John Kerry make the same mistake -- albeit even much more spectacularly -- in 2004, you'd think she would realize that candidates who do not learn from rhetorical history are doomed to re-lose it.
• After last night's shocking headline, I'm at least a little afraid to learn who will be filing the brief on behalf of the corpse. I'm guessing it will either be her lawyer or Zelda Rubinstein.
• Anyone who believes there are too many lawyers in the world should have recorded the first half hour of the Today show this morning. After Matt Lauer finished interviewing all of the lawyers in the She-Who-Can-Not-Be-Named, Invasion-of-the-Body-Snatchers Case, you would have had indisputable proof of your point and, as an added bonus, all the explanation anyone needs about why a hearing that should have taken a couple of hours took a couple of days and felt like it was taking a couple of months.
• Why wasn't anyone -- much less everyone -- wondering whether Britney Spears' career can grow back or whether or it can possibly be saved before she shaved her head? If that's all it takes to get morning shows and entertainment magazines worrying about you, I imagine that Ashlee Simpson and Alanis Morissette will be shaving their heads any minute now.
• An email caught in my spam filter last weekend featured a subject line that asked, Would you like to see Dr. Phil live? And I thought, Yes, I would. I mean, I don't particularly like the guy, but that doesn't mean I want to see him die.
• Last week I noted that there must be some section of the Pennsylvania Driver's Manual, unseen by my eyes but not by everyone else's, that revokes all traffic laws and common rules of the road whenever five or more inches of snow fall in the commonwealth. This week I have discovered an even more alarming development, one that must be a trailing clause on the original statute: whenever any of that snow remains on side streets, and especially when there are cars parked and/or plowed in on either side, those streets become one-way streets, and always in the direction opposite mine.
• Those problems paled in comparison to the ones I faced today, when the dangers of Slipping and Sliding and Talking and Driving and even Drinking and Driving were replaced by the suddenly widespread problem of Eating and Driving. On the ten-mile round trip to Oakland and Downtown and back again, I was almost hit by cars whose drivers were eating a hamburger, a Subway sandwich, a cookie, and a candy bar, and, in a tie for the Dippin' Drivers: Accidents of the Future! Award, both an old man repeatedly dunking a donut in his coffee cup and a woman obsessively scraping her bagel through what looked a container of hummus.
• I didn't know whether to honk my horn, flip 'em off, or get out at the next traffic light and ask if they could use a few more napkins. Without much deliberation, I chose the first two.
• I have already used this space to sing the praises of a number of last year's truly brilliant films -- Children of Men, United 93, The Descent -- but I realized this week, when I ventured out to buy the freshly released DVD, that I have not yet used it to plug my other favorite film of 2006: Christopher Nolan's gut-churning, mind-bending thriller, The Prestige. I highly recommend it not only because it's just about as taut and tense and utterly compelling as those other three films, but also because it's one of those rare films that, Sixth-Sense-like, immediately demands and rewards a second -- and perhaps even a third -- viewing.
• Near the end of Tuesday's Trips/Trio/Trinity/Trilogy meme, I listed three tunes by the Drive-By Truckers as Three Songs I Can't Stop Listening to Right Now, but a more accurate (if less economical) heading for that category would have been Three Songs I Can't Stop Listening to Right Now from the One CD I Can't Stop Listening to Right Now. I've come to it a few months late -- it slipped off my radar for a while, then got caught up in my pre-Christmas, pre-birthday buying moratorium -- but DBT's A Blessing and a Curse is, for my money, the most brilliant and compulsively listenable album of the last year.
• How much have the Penguins grown and improved and evolved after their last few years of last-place finishes? To the almost perfectly preposterous point at which, this past Monday afternoon, they lost for the first time in seventeen games and, instead of thanking the hockey gods for their bounty of blessings and graces, I was actually pretty pissed off.
• It's nice to see that, for the first time in 51 years, the head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers will actually reside within the city limits. No offense to Fox Chapel or Upper St. Clair -- even if they do seem to produce an awful lot of silly letter writers -- but it just doesn't seem right for a team so closely and fiercely identified with its city to be coached by someone who lives in the suburbs.
• Welcome to the neighborhood, Tomlin Family. We're proud and happy to have you...
Posted: Fri - February 23, 2007 at 04:09 PM
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Published On: Jul 28, 2008 01:39 PM
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Published On: Jul 28, 2008 01:39 PM