This is a dashingly witty description of this blog
Writing a novel, I said once, is like trying to make the Mountains of Edom out of Lego blocks. Or to build the whole of Paris, buildings, squares, and boulevards, down to the last street bench, out of matchsticks.
Alabama State Senator Hank Erwin gives his theory on why Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast have always been known for gambling, sin and wickedness. It is the kind of behavior that ultimately brings the judgment of God. [...] [T]he signature of New Orleans is the French Quarter, Bourbon Street. It is known for sin. And you have a Bible that says God will judge sin, you can put two and two together and say, it may not be the judgment of God, but it sure looks like the footprint.
Well, I understand that, and I think the lord sent them a message that we need to turn around or we may have another hurricane come.
If I understand correctly and then extrapolate, a theory that states that noxious man-made emissions pollute the atmosphere and lead to global warming, one of the consequences of which is a higher frequency of category 4 and 5 storms in the Gulf of Mexico is far-fetched. A convoluted plot by a smiting, faceless almighty in which tens of thousands of innocents suffer to demonstrate a point to a few middle-aged gamblers from Iowa and some university-aged Mardi Gras revellers, however, is a perfectly sound theory. One of the great things about God is that you can make him say what you want him to say. The proof?The New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary was flooded by Katrina. But Erwin said the Baptists knew they were ministering in a sinful place that could be targeted.
Someboday in Toronto is very strange. A quick check of my stats showed that a Torontonian came to this site with the search, "Who is Bonhomme? What kind of creature is he?" Assuming I'm the Bonhomme in question, I'm not sure how to answer. I've never been very good with open-ended questions. You tell me what kind of creature I am.
President Bush is being briefed by Rumsfeld who tells him 3 Brazilian soldiers have been killed. Bush pauses for a minute and asks nervously:
Our hearts were in the right place but our culinary abilities were, as far as I could tell, down the street in the pub. Yesterday my good friend Sexy Realtor and I decided to make jerk chicken tacos. Our success was limited, and our tummies left half empty.
The pain in my right eyeball was instantaneous. It felt is if it were self-combusting while boring its way back into my brain at the same time. I hadn't known such agony since I sat all the way through "Alexander" because the extremely sexually attractive man I was dating at the time insisted on seeing it. My brain emptied itself of all thoughts save survival.
And so once the smoke had cleared and my eyeball had oozed itself back into its socket, we were left with splitnery, blackened, tomato-sogged tacos that left us gasping for air due the hot jerk chicken and begging for water due to the tangy romano cheese. One more brilliant idea foiled by the indignity of reality. Martha would have just laughed and talked about, while still in prison, all the delicious and attractive nibbles she had made with just flour, water, prison rations and a little bit the creative spirit.
I am old enough for technology to pass me by. I laughed at my parents as they struggled with DVDs, cell phones, and Windows, but now I am old enough to feel left out by the march of innovation.
New Yorkers always think they know the real thing when it comes to Chinese food. Forty years ago it was egg rolls, chop suey and drinks with paper umbrellas. Then it was General Tso's chicken and sesame noodles.
But over the past decade, as large communities of people from India, Peru, Korea, Trinidad and Guyana have formed here, New York has had to expand its ideas about what Chinese food can be.
Dishes like chili-spiked, deep-fried chicken lollipops [(recipe)], which are a Chinese-Indian specialty, and lo mein topped with chunks of peppery jerk chicken, served at De Bamboo Express, a Chinese-West Indian restaurant in Brooklyn, are what Chinese food is now to thousands of New Yorkers.
By raising the fines that would be levied against offending broadcasters some fifteenfold, to a fee of about $500,000 per crudity broadcast, and by threatening to revoke the licenses of repeat polluters, the Senate seeks to return to the public square the gentler tenor of yesteryear, when seldom were heard any scurrilous words, and famous guys were not foul mouthed all day.
Yet researchers who study the evolution of language and the psychology of swearing say that they have no idea what mystic model of linguistic gentility the critics might have in mind. Cursing, they say, is a human universal. Every language, dialect or patois ever studied, living or dead, spoken by millions or by a small tribe, turns out to have its share of forbidden speech, some variant on comedian George Carlin's famous list of the seven dirty words that are not supposed to be uttered on radio or television.
Once upon a time, a bridegroom jokingly recited his marriage vows over a skeletal finger protruding from the earth. After placing his ring on the bone, his mirth turned to horror when a grasping hand burst forth, followed by a corpse in a tattered shroud, her dead eyes staring as she proclaimed, "My husband."- via -=JeW*SCHooL=-
This chilling Jewish folk tale hails from a cycle of stories about the great 16th-century mystic, Rabbi Isaac Luria of Safed, in what is now northern Israel, said Howard Schwartz, a top Jewish folklorist and professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. It also apparently inspired Tim Burton's charmingly ghoulish animated film, "Corpse Bride".
In an interview with the New York Times, Michael Brown, former director of FEMA, demonstrates the various qualities that made him such a capable leader before, during, and after the cataclysm of Hurricane Katrina (note the ring of awesomely powerful credibility surrounding his words):"I am having a horrible time," Mr. Brown said he told Mr. Chertoff and a White House official - either Mr. Card or his deputy, Joe Hagin - in a status report that evening. "I can't get a unified command established."
"Would you please call the mayor and tell him to ask people to evacuate?" Mr. Brown said he asked Mr. Bush in a phone call.
Mr. Brown passed the list on to the state emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, but when he returned that evening he was surprised to find that nothing had been done. "I am just screaming at my F.C.O., 'Where are the helicopters?'"he recalled. "'Where is the National Guard? Where is all the stuff that the mayor wanted?'"
In fact, he said, he learned about the evacuees there from the first media reports more than 24 hours earlier, but the reports conflicted with information from local authorities and he had no staff on the site until Thursday.
"Until you have been there," he said, "you don't realize it is the middle of a hurricane."
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22) Aggressive line-cutting at lunch today inspires you to be more assertive. There are many things to do this week, and you will be able to swiftly plough through them all if you abandon all pretence of being nice, courteous and giving two fucks about the feelings of others. For the next few days, permit yourself to become that pushy jerk off who elbows through the crowd on the subway platform in order to nab the first available seat. For once, dirty looks become the sign of a job well done.
VIRGO (August 23 - September 22) You're a proud individual, and there are just some things that you've never been able to bring yourself to say, but "Give me some more goddamned fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy right fucking now" isn't one of them.
Curious George is every 2-year-old sticking his finger into the light socket, pouring milk onto the floor to watch it pool, creating chaos everywhere. One reason the mischievous monkey is such a popular children's book character is that he makes 4- to 6-year-olds feel superior: fond memories, but we've given all that up now.
[...]
But in truth, "Curious George" almost didn't make it onto the page. A new book, The Journey That Saved Curious George: The True Wartime Escape of Margret and H. A. Rey (Houghton Mifflin), tells of how George's creators, both German-born Jews, fled from Paris by bicycle in June 1940, carrying the manuscript of what would become "Curious George" as Nazis prepared to invade.
[Brown] is the former head of the Arabian Horse Association but his official biography says he was also in charge of emergency services in the city of Edmond, Oklahoma, in the late 1970s. However, a spokesman for the city told Time Magazine that his role was really that of an intern - nobody reported to him.
"I had the typical aspiration to be signed to a big label, just like anybody else," he admits. "But after I didn't hear back from a few places, and when the feedback I did get made no sense to me, I started to think about what I really wanted".
There are very few sounds with the awesome power to cut through the battery of drums and gravely guitars of grunge circa 1992. The eardrum-puncturing shrieks of little girls at play, however, reduces even Nirvana to quiet, Sunday afternoon jazz.
When I moved into this neighbourhood it was fairly safe. Now I am treated to witnessing at least one arrest a week, sometimes involving multiple police cars. Last month there were four murders on my block. This may be nothing by American standards, but I don't live in America.
And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this – this is working very well for them.- via And Now, José?
When I was 5, my family moved to a country where only my father could speak the language. It must have been scary, but all I remember of it was coming to the realisation that there are many ways to pronounce the letter "r" and all its counterparts in other alphabets. Because I was young and my brain was still elastic, I picked up the language much quicker than my mother. When she went shopping, she would take me as the translator. I don't remember this and I wonder if I thought it was strange that I was able to do something my mother wanted. She must have felt very isolated and lonely.
When I was 15, I was an alterna-fag in the making. I was addicted to Kate Bush, the Cocteau Twins, Joni Mitchell, and, incongruously, Heart. Nirvana was only half a decade away. I would hide in my room and talk for hours on the phone with my friends, almost all girls, and write e e cumming-inspired poetry that, when I read it now, either makes me laugh hysterically or flush with embarrassment. At school I got good grades and was popular, and although I hated high school, I loved high school.
When I was 25, I had been living in Montreal for five years. I was the manager in charge of training and HR policy development at a small software company that would go belly-up one year later and throw me into the professional confusion I still find myself in today, ten years later. I hated working there and I couldn't imagine what the rest of my life would be like if I stayed.
Today I turn 35. I think back to when I was a child who thought that, in the year 2000 when I was to turn 30, I would be so incredibly old and I couldn’t imagine what that would be like. I am five years older than that now and I'm still waiting to know what it feels like to be so old. 
"A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005."
"Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana."
