Tag: Sentential Links

(Read by the LAW AND ORDER voiceover guy)

In the world of the Internet, the most penetrating insights are committed by the members of the elite Special Bloggers’ Unit, who use words to craft posts of interest to many. These are their sentences.

CHUNK-CHUNK

(Yeah, that sounded like a funnier idea before I did it. Oh well….)

:: Andrew Thomas was born on 10/04/05 at 5:00 PM. He is 7 lbs. 1 oz. and 19.5 inches long. Mom and baby are both healthy and recovering well. Stay tuned for a full Labor & Delivery report once Kellie is closer to normal strength. (HUZZAH!!)

:: This morning President Bush named an actual blank slate to fill Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s place on the Supreme Court. “This slate has served me well,” said Bush, “and it will make a heckuva great Supreme Court judge.”

The slate, which has never been a judge before, has a long history with President Bush, dating back to his days when it hung in an office at the Governor’s Mansion in Texas. “That slate did a good job,” said Bush. “It held whatever we wanted to it to. This is an excellent slate.” (Why do I always forget to read Tom Burka? The guy is hilarious.)

:: People experience various forms of art (music, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, gourmet cooking) for one or more of the following purposes:
1) to be seen looking cultural
2) to entertain themselves
3) to exercise their emotions
4) to exercise their cognitive abilities
5) to explore the limits of their perceptions

Any discourse on art should address one or more of these purposes. (I should probably bookmark this one, because it sounds like something I should say more about. Consider this just a pointer to something interesting, for now.)

:: Unfortunately, I also think that so far the science has had almost no effect on public opinion. That’s the root problem, I think—the generally low level of scientific literacy in this country is the most troubling long-term issue we face. (I agree with Dr. Myers, one hundred percent. Technology springs from science, but even as society becomes more and more rooted in technology for its basic infrastructure, it’s also becoming more and more ignorant of what science has taught us, and more basically, what science is. This is a kind of cognitive dissonance underlying our society, and it may well lead to some serious problems down the road.)

:: For the love of God and baby Jesus, leave the button down collar behind. (This is a relatively new blog about fashion that I found quite by accident, and I was amused to see that on the basis of just his third post ever that the contents of my closet would have him recoiling in abject horror. Oh well, we all can’t be fashion minded!)

:: It is monstrous when one cares but little about trees but much about Corinthian columns, and yet this is exceedingly common. (OK, this is probably cheating. But it’s from a blog, so it counts. Also check out the Thoreau blogger’s poetry blog, which has some neat pictures accompanying the verse. Link to the Thoreau Blog via Simian Farmer.)

:: [T]the national anthem of Japan should be changed to the original theme song of Uchuusenkan Yamato. (This is the start of a series of posts over at The Tensor’s, called “This I Believe”. Funny stuff, so far. I look forward to future installments.)

:: Brides do not control the heavens.

:: I think…that almost everyone arrives at a point in his or her life at which he or she realizes, “I am woefully ignorant.” (Actually, in my case, I arrive at that point almost hourly, and in my case, instead of saying “I am woefully ignorant”, the thought takes the form: “My God, I am a complete moron.” That’s me, Socrates with self-esteem issues. Wonderful post, by the way.)

:: One day, when my father was still relatively new on the job as town supervisor, he and I were talking about what he hoped to accomplish and there was a point when he was explaining to me why he was thinking about running for the State Senate when his eyes lit up and a sly smile spread across his face, and I swear, at that moment, although probably just for that moment, my father saw his path clear to the Governorship. (This is actually the first sentence of Part Two of a longer, two-part posting. Read Part One first. I’m coming to see Lance Mannion Jr. as Left Blogistan’s less-verbose answer to Bill Whittle.)

All for this week. Fade to credits.

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A roundup of good stuff from Blogistan. Click for context:

:: I finished “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” last night. And cried like a little baby. (Hmmm…been a while since I found a book that made me cry. Maybe I should look this one up.)

:: Let me tell you about my history with Tommy. (That is, Tommy of Tommy, the album by The Who. Which I’ve never heard. Is it true that if you play it with a candle burning, you will see your future? And I should have voted for Almost Famous, which I just freaking adore.)

:: Times change, people change, literature and popular culture change. But it’s always struck me as strange that in such a Bible-thumping, God-bothering country as this one, so many of us never learn who Ahab was, the original Ahab, who did more to provoke the LORD God of Israel to anger than all the kings before him, until we first sit down with a copy of Moby Dick or hear the story of Absolam, Amnon, and Tamar until we read Faulkner.

:: The difference being that the US is no longer looking to annex Canada by force (if at all). (Well, shit. Here’s me, thinking that being a launching point for our invasion of Canada will finally be the silver bullet that the Buffalo economy’s been looking for, lo these many years! Just found this blog last week, by the way.)

:: And by the way, we rented The Iron Giant to watch Saturday night. Never seen it before. I’m not giving anything away, but at the end, when the IG is flying and says, “I’m Superman…” I totally had to increase my rate of blinking by at least a factor of ten, lest my wife see an unwonted emotional outpouring. (Oh, screw that! Cry openly! The wimmen-folk love a guy who cries. I think I read that somewhere, anyway. Oh, and congrats on one year blogging.)

:: I think there’s something to this, and I also think that blogging has had the effect of liberating thousands of talented amateur writers whose particular gifts may not necessarily fit neatly into the pigeonholes of professional publication. (I think it’s amazing how nearly every time the thought crosses my mind that maybe I’m just wasting my time here, Terry Teachout posts something like this.)

:: There is, needless to say, quite a bit about the Bomb on the Internet. (No, really? But seriously, Mr. Ross has a collection of fascinating photos he took while touring the Trinity site, where the first atomic bomb was exploded. Fascinating stuff.)

:: You know, there is very little in the world that makes me more objectively terrified than the idea of George Bush and his den of incompetent hacks fiddling with the Posse Comitatus Act. Indeed, if you were to ask me what one thing would get me marching in the streets, this would be it. I’m entirely serious. (Actually, this is the entire post. I hope Mr. Scalzi doesn’t mind.)

:: Plus, I’m teaching myself to play the piano–the fruits of which are certainly worth a blog entry or two–plus I’ve been doing lots of reading, but haven’t had the energy to write much about it. (Well, crud. But hey, along the lines of self-taught pianists, perhaps I could send a book recommendation Will’s way, as opposed to the other way around.)

Enough for this week. Enjoy, and I’ll try to have this feature back on Sundays now, although, to be honest, I may keep it on Mondays, since I’m finding a heavy dose of blog-surfing nice and relaxing after a Monday at The Store.

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Time for our usual dose of context-free, clickable goodness. Cheerio!

:: Dear Catholic Church,

Please consider this my official resignation. I am done with you.

:: This is a danger with people who don’t have money: it’s never enough for them, because they really have no idea of how money works. (Permalinks here rarely work; if not, scroll down to the post dated September 24.)

:: So often I’ve wanted to just sit on the roof alone with my thoughts and an old fashioned telescope, the big unwieldy kind with all kinds of lenses and mechanical gears. Someday when I am eccentric and rich, I’ll have a whole house decorated with the theme of “Alice In Wonderland”. There will be old-fashioned astronomy equipment mounted on the roof. I’ll have an unwieldy old telescope and I’ll gaze at the stars. It will have gears and lenses I can turn and adjust. I’ll make notations of my observations in big dusty books. Eventually, the telescope and I will turn inward upon ourselves so many times, we’ll just disappear. For years the children and old people will talk about the lady up the street who spent her fortune on this big crazy house, and then one day she just disappeared… and the only thing missing was the telescope. (I hope Warren Ellis doesn’t mind me quoting this in its entirety. I read it, found it just a wonderful passage, and was saddened to learn that its author died last week.)

:: Houses interest me. Not so much as aesthetic objects, though I am hardly immune to the pleasures of architecture—to grandeur, stark geometry, homeliness, or charm—but more as, well, containers of human life. In the hands of a good writer, setting serves as a virtual character.

:: There’s been an unfortunate tendency among a small segment of the anti-war left to confuse the badness of the American invasion with the idea that the insurgency in Iraq has any morally redeeming qualities. There’s also been an unfortunate tendency among a far broader swathe of the commentariat to confuse the badness of the Sunni insurgency with the idea that the people on the other are necessarily charming and admirable. The reality is far grimmer.

:: So, we’ve seen “The Young Indiana Jones.” Sean Patrick Flannery was an early crush of mine. But what about the slightly older Indy? He got a PhD, right? What about the adventures of Indiana Jones, grad student? (Do read this. It’s really funny.)

:: I have missed the gentle caress of the moon and stars, and the smell of late summer night jasmine on the wind. This month’s moon is so bright it is almost day outside. Moon shadows everywhere. I am in love with life.

:: How sad that American Christianity seems to be shifting towards a straightforward apocalyptic death cult. How worrisome that it’s possibly the most dynamic strain of Christianity in the developed world.

:: I made it through fine. Neither I nor my Dad lost power, and other than cleaning up some broken branches, no damage at my father’s. My house has a single large branch down over my back fence, but the fence is fine so I only need to drag it out to the curb. No damage there either. (Wow. I forgot that Morat lived in Houston. I’m glad things are OK for him, as well as everyone else who came through better than expected.)

:: Not to take anything away from any of the other women I’ve known in my life, but to me, my wife is the single most attractive woman I’ve ever known. She’s inspired feelings in me I haven’t had since I was a teenager and some I’ve never felt before. I never tire of looking at her, and still after 6 years of living together, I can still be aroused by her simply walking across the room in a pair of overalls. (I know what he means, as long-time readers know. I just found this blog a couple of days ago — I love the pun inherent in its title.)

:: I have been lucky that in all the competitions and masterclasses and jollies I have done, the juries have been charming and helpful and encouraging. (You have to like a post with lots of redacted swear-words.)

:: It brought on a brutally tender memory of Judy Garland. My father loved her deeply as a friend, and as her agent near the end of her life. They had marvelous, hilarious times together. (This is why I love blogging: it’s the only aspect of my life in which encountering someone who knew Judy Garland is a real possibility.)

The end, for this week. Tune back in next Sunday for more sentential goodness.

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It’s that time again. Here is the customary roundup of usual sentences.

:: Oh they broke into our house
And they beat my dad with logs,
They raped my little sister,
And killed my dear old dog.

Everybody!

Limey scum, Limey scum!
I kills them all and still they come… (I’ve been Googling that set of lyrics forever, to no avail. Blogistan rules!)

:: She got her chair obsession psychoanalyzed and says it has something to do with communities – with homes, with talking – with how the Tunisian Jews would always sit around and talk to each other.

:: I’ve even had a cartoon face become my mental image of a blogger. Am I the only one with this problem? (Man, I hope she’s not talking about me….)

:: Five pet peeves about eating out with Ayn Rand (OK, that’s the title to a list. Funny blog-like site with nothing but humorous five-item lists. Via Lynn, of course.)

:: This sort of intolerant, brainwash garbage makes Neha angry enough to talk about herself in third person. (Ahhh, Neha’s just discovered the gooey insanity of Chick Tracts! And here’s me, without my popcorn….)

:: I have discovered that catfish doesn’t do so well in the nuker. (Whew. Here’s an all-important culinary tip, folks: if you want to re-heat food such that it actually has texture when you eat it, use your conventional oven and not your nuker. Yes, it will take ten or fifteen minutes versus two for the nuker, but the short investment is time is well worth it when you eat hot food that isn’t rubbery.)

:: I’m not sure why I thought of that, but now you have a story about me in 1989. (OK, here’s a story about me in 1989: after my high school graduation ceremony, I left immediately out the back door, drove home, and went out for a bike ride. Without telling my parents. Who were waiting on the school’s front lawn for the post-grad school front-lawn crap. Oops.)

:: If Wyle E. Coyote had enough money to buy all that ACME crap, why didn’t he just buy dinner? (Hmmmm. Personally, I’ve always wondered why Wile E. stuck with a company whose level of customer satisfaction would make Wal-Mart look like Pa’s Corner Grocery down on the corner, but this is a good question, too.)

:: Why is it that police don’t seem to follow the rules of the road… well at least speed limits. (Years ago I watched one of those Current Affair programs or some such thing that did a feature on just this topic. They followed speeding cops to locations like their dentists, their laundromats, and the like. When they confronted one cop with a video, the cop tried to claim that a license is required to have a radar gun for checking drivers’ speeds. Nice try, Officer Krupke.)

:: A German inventor says he’s found a way to make cheap diesel fuel out of dead cats. (Gee, why not really get some bang for our buck, and use dead humans?)

:: It appears that Angela Merkel has been elected Chancellor of Germany. Which means, among other things, that once again Germany will be run by an enthusiastic and knowledgeable Wagner-lover. (Alex then provides an extract from a lengthy interview on Wagner — and nothing but Wagner — that Merkel recently gave. I wonder when the last time was that we elected a President here in the US who even came close to knowing this much about classical music? Not, of course, that I would advance this as a reason for electing Condi Rice in 2008.)

:: I can’t really add anything to it, except to say that all of those issues get amplified with decreasing size of the institution, and liberal arts colleges do tend to be smaller and more personal. (Isn’t that the truth. I went to college at a small school in a small town in Iowa, and I was constantly seeing my profs at the grocery store, at the local watering holes, even in the malls in the bigger town twenty miles south.)

:: The first time I took my son to the office to introduce him to everybody, a few weeks after he was born, H said, “Isn’t it just amazing when they’re this age? It’s like they got one toe here on earth and the other 9 still up in heaven. Say hello to God for me, OK?” (Wow, is that a beautiful thought.)

It was a good week for Blogistan. Let’s keep it up, folks! It’s a jungle out there.

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Here’s the round-up from this week. Not as many as usual, between the monitor problems (now resolved) and the head cold that took my sinuses and mucous membranes out for a spin the last three days.

:: Some would like to see the ‘Silver Surfer’ but it’s tough to visualize that without having a cackle about the rationality of taking a guy on a flying surfboard seriously. (Say, how about a “Galactus” movie? Maybe they could get John Byrne to actually finish “The Last Galactus Story”.)

:: For instance, I had nightmares for two nights after seeing ‘Scream’. That kind of admission alone might cause some of you to spew green pea soup in digust. (Not soup in disgust, but I did spew Pepsi in laughter. Scream has got to be the least scary horror movie I’ve ever seen. After an effective opening ten minutes, it’s just stupid “teen slasher” shit that was staggeringly unrealistic. Silence of the Lambs was scary. Scream was crap that couldn’t decide whether it was an actual horror movie or a parody of a horror movie. And yeah, that’s two appearances for the Indestructible Mister Jones on Sentential Links. But since he tends to write five or six posts at a time and then allows his blog to go fallow for weeks or months at a time, so be it.)

:: I’m one of those guys who say, “isn’t it about time they stopped playing America The Beautiful at baseball games now?” But, when I glanced at my watch this morning, and realized what the date was, I had a sudden pause. (Actually, it’s “God Bless America”, not “America the Beautiful”, which if I had my way would be our national anthem. Still, yeah, I think it’s time to stop singing that thing.)

:: Communism wasn’t fun or funny, folks. It was a dirty, rotten system run by dirty, rotten people that didn’t do shit for the masses. I’m unamused by commu-nostalgia or any other trendy, nouveau communophilia.

:: How wonderful it feels to be in Vienna once again! This imperial city won my heart long ago and I love her with all of my being. (I can’t find any kind of permalinks here, so scroll all the way down to the post dated August 30th. Then scroll upward, reading the account of traveling in the land of Mozart. Wonderful stuff. I’d very dearly love to go to Vienna, and listen to the Vienna Philharmonic perform Brahms in the Musikverein….)

:: I shouldn’t hate her because she is in a bad situation that is not of her making. I should feel sympathy. Yet, I can’t stand her. (What follows is a list of funny things this blogger hates about her officemate. I found this blog purely by accident, in searching for something else. It appears to be about one single woman’s life in Washington, DC. I like finding blogs like this; they’re a nice detour from my usual political and cultural blog reading.)

:: My prediction is that when George W. Bush leaves office, like Reagan, he will generally be beloved by the American public. (Hey, it’s OK. I predicted that the Bills would win the Super Bowl each time they got there, that LA Confidential would beat out Titanic for Best Picture, and that Al Gore would win in 2000. One outta three wasn’t bad!)

:: Something about William Hurt makes me want to walk towards the nearest living thing and kill it. (Actually, this isn’t PSotD writing, but someone else replying to a question PSotD posed. I think. Anyway, this made me laugh out loud.)

More next week. In theory.

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Most of Blogistan has, as you might expect, focused on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath this week. I’ve already done a lot of linking about that kind of thing, so I won’t do a whole lot more here. As always, click for context.

:: I was wondering whether or not to continue with the “good news” postings. I think this story has just inspired me to continue. (I’m not sure where Michelle gets her energy, but her response has been one of the more inspiring individual responses to Katrina. If you’re looking for a specific way to help the survivors, give her a look. She’s got some great stuff going.)

:: Anyone saying that now is not the time to play politics, now is not the time to look for people to blame is either consciously or unconciously helping to shield politicians from responsibility for their failures. You can’t criticize a political leader without it being a political act. Tell me that no political leaders here deserve criticism.

:: “I spent my capital and grasped success,
Look on my works, my Country, and—” but there
The brittle stone was rudely hacked away,
And just one word in rusty brown was scrawled: Despair.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The ruins of a million dreams stretch far away.

:: Fall is when I go all Martha Stewart. Although I tend to leave illegal trading out of the mix, a weird insanity befalls me. Even though I never, ever cook anything more complicated than Hamburger Helper or grilled chicken breast during the rest of the year, I start seriously pondering recipes for ridiculous things like homemade marshmallows and foods involving flambe.

:: If the supply of oil can be increased we might be able to dodge the bullet, but if, as some sources suggest the big Saudi fields have passed their peak, we might end up looking back and seeing Katrina as the incident that finally toppled the global economy into a peak oil crisis — the true end of the 20th century that began when, in Lord Curzon’s words, the western allies of the first world war “sailed to victory on a wave of oil”.

:: Number one son tells me that if you slam someone against a truck while they have a mouth full of gas that what gas they do not sallow will be blown out their nose. (Note to self: use some kind of siphoning device when stealing gas from neighbors.) (Further note to self: do not blog about stealing gas from neighbors.)

:: Oil? We’ll be drilling the entire states of Alaska, California, Texas, and Oklahoma for one year. After which we’ll clean them up better than before. (Eco-nuts protesting this will be given honory Swedish citizenship and deported by kayak.) But if we need extra oil and we ask, you’d better think twice before you say no. We’ll always have enough in the strategic petroleum reserve for B-52’s and our carrier groups. If we have to send them out, they will be, we promise you, in a very bad mood. Very bad. (This is absolutely hilarious if it’s satire. If it’s meant straight, well, then, someone should probably pen a sister letter to this one apologizing to the world for the onset of our national dementia. Link via James Wolcott. Oh, and by the way, Right-Blogistan: note that Mr. Van Der Leun makes no attempt to block Mr. Wolcott’s link traffic. I’m just sayin’.)

That’s all for this week. There was actually a lot of compelling writing in the blogs I frequent often, and in the ones I frequent less often, but I just don’t feel like wallowing full-time in post-Katrina funk today.

(And yes, I’ve given quite a bit of cash already, in case anyone’s wondering. As much as I feel I can comfortably afford. Which isn’t much, really, but there’s another payday awaiting me at the end of this week, too.)

UPDATE: OK, I’m adding one, because I think that the question posed here is a serious one that we ought to be considering a bit:

Everyone suggests that part of the problem is that FEMA’s focus was redirected toward terrorism after 9/11. In and of itself, this is neither surprising nor wrong. But the requirements to respond to a major terrorist attack on a U.S. city are largely identical to the requirements for responding to a hurricane like Katrina: food, medicine, maintenance of order, evacuation, and temporary shelter. So what are FEMA’s plans for responding to, say, a large scale chemical weapon attack on Chicago? They’d have less warning than they did with Katrina and the requirements for aid would be largely similar. What would they do?

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Bumper crop of good stuff this week. Click for Context!

:: The Bard is loved for many reasons, none of which I would ever seek to contradict, and yet I’m most drawn to his ability to find grace and beauty in imperfections, in flaws. (Gotta read this blog more; wonderful post.)

:: This argument of universal sin, then, is an argument almost built entirely for cynical use. It has very little to do with morality as such. Instead, it has everything to do with power, with legitimating one’s own power and right to debate and trying to strip that way from others.

:: The family was held up at airport security when something in
Madge’s hatbox started vibrating. (The picture that this sentence captions is the joke. Click through and scroll down to the post dated August 26th — I couldn’t find a direct permalink.)

:: What the Presbyterian Church (USA) Has in Common With al-Qaida (That’s a headline to an article by James Lileks that made my jaw literally thud to the floor. My God, that man is insane.)

:: My father was forty-one when he died. His death was utterly unexpected. He was there one day. The next, he was not. He was survived by a wife and three daughters. (Read the post preceding this one, too. This is really a good blog, the kind of blog that, in a just world, would have a million hits a day while InstaPundit struggled to get a hundred.)

:: Revere of Effect Measure agreed to be both subject and part of my learning curve to present e-mail blog interviews – bloggerviews. (This seems like a neat idea — a direct exchange between bloggers, taking place on a blog. Whoa!)

:: Teaching 5-year-olds, I have discovered, is hard. (NOOOOO! Seriously, I think folks who voluntarily teach Kindergarten should either be awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom, or tossed into the asylum with the guy who thinks he’s Batman.)

:: The problem with ID is that, unlike real revolutionary science, it doesn’t lead to any normal science. There are no ID-based research programs. Nothing has never been accomplished by applying the ID paradigm to a question in biology. All ID’s scholarly (and “scholarly”) proponents do is try to offer half-assed refutations of Darwin. You can quote Kuhn all you like, but you’re not doing revolutionary science unless your purported revolution leads to some normal science. Intelligent design does not.

:: What is fucking her up is the desperation, and the fact that she worked herself to death for over a month, and she still didn’t really save anyone. Now that she’s gone, it’s like she was never there. Even the ones she helped keep alive, she didn’t save. You try dealing with that reality. (Swearing in the original)

:: It’s getting down to the wire, and Mark and I are pretty excited as we face this big, huge, gaping unknown. (Sometimes you don’t know just how much that unknown is gaping.)

:: A couple of things I’ve learned, that I offer up, free of charge, to anyone parenting a teenager, or about to parent a teenager: (There follows, after this point, a list of things that really could also apply to a six-year-old. Trust me. I know.)

:: Just today, I was notified that I’ve gotten a sweet job clerking for a presitigious Camden County judge. (Congratulations to Drew!)

:: Is a virgin still a virgin if its hyphen is not intact? (As of this writing, this sentence is from the lead entry on this permalink-less blog headquartered at RogerEbert.com, but written by Jim Emerson, the editor of RogerEbert.com. It’s a confusing and counterintuitive set-up, as are most attempts by major news organizations to harness the power of blogs while still maintaining their distance from down-and-dirty Blogistan, but it’s still an interesting blog. And you wouldn’t know it was even there if you didn’t scroll all the way to the bottom of the RogerEbert.com front page. Come on, guys.)

:: For me, the working definition of a chickenhawk is–a chickenhawk is a cheerleader. A cheerleader for war. And not necessarily just the war in Iraq, or regional war in the Mideast, but war in general. A chickenhawk glorifies war as an enterprise, enjoying the heroics inside his or her head, mocking those less enthusiastic military aggression as pacifists, appeasers (Michael Ledeen’s pet word), even traitors.

Tune in next week for more good stuff. (Well, and tune in before next week for good stuff. Uh…yeah.)

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Here we go again: click for context.

:: If your side starts to hurt on, say, Monday and you lose your appetite and all you want to do is sleep and you’re dizzy…don’t wait until Friday to mention it to your immediate family. (TBogg’s been on fire — I nearly went with “So if you’ve got a script where a cartoon family of rich eccentric hockey players take on Hollywood only to be horribly tortured and crucified…you may already be a winner!”, but the personal usually beats out the snark when all other things are equal.)

:: That’s what this war has given us: a situation where the best option is pretty bad.

:: “Amanda is in denial,” Jim Kulick said. “She said her father promised her he would come back from the war, and she still believes that.”

Amanda Kulick doesn’t understand what happened to her father.

Neither do we. (OK, folks, if you couldn’t tell, I’m slowly getting more and more angry about Iraq. Link via Drew Vogel, in the post linked in the preceding Sentential Link.)

:: “Women’s social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy. We hope they’re there, I think they will be there, but I think we need to keep this perspective.” (God Almighty, what in the hell are we doing?!)

:: In other news, I tore some skin off my upper lip eating a popsicle last night. Go ahead, laugh. I would, if it didn’t freaking hurt so much. (Well, she said we could laugh!)

:: Strange that someone who was only a virtual presence can be such a force in our lives and that his sudden absence can come as such a blow. Maybe we do have souls after all. (A fine tribute to a blogger whose blog I only learned of when the blogger passed away.)

:: Many people would be thoroughly creeped out by it but I have grown quite fond of The Face. (You won’t believe what she’s talking about. It seems to me that the perfect name is Wolfgang, but that’s just me.)

:: Today, while walking and listening to my husband’s recording of “Russian Easter Overture” I came home insisting to share an entry on Ilkka’s blog. I think a wife deserves that much, don’t you? (Ach, these wimminfolk…next they’ll want blogs of their own! Kidding aside, it’s a nice tribute.)

:: This ends the family of motifs associated with the inspiring power of woman. Although few, they are extremely powerful. (I think that Mr. Himebaugh may be misreading the quote — Mr. Cooke is referring to the motifs as being “few”, not the women. But then, you can’t always tell with Mr. Himebaugh, who’s one of the most “tongue-in-cheek” bloggers out there.)

:: (Y)you can only hear your town called “the armpit of Iowa” so many times without getting rude right back. (Geez, what’s wrong with Waterloo? I always thought it a perfectly nice town. I mean, it’s no Buffalo, but then again, sometimes I wonder if Buffalo is even a Buffalo, so….)

All for now, folks. Check back next week. (After, you know, checking in every day between now and then, because I blog more than just on Sundays. I’m just sayin’.)

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I didn’t have as much time for trawling the waters off the coast of Blogistan for the sentences that are the spawn of posts, but I did find a few standouts. Click for the context:

:: Whatever happens with the Space Program — hell, whatever your thoughts on manned spaceflight or government sponsorship — don’t deny them this: There are thousands of people who believe in what they do, and who have been giving heart and soul to make this work. (Amen, brother.)

:: I’d like to thank The Velveteen Rabbit for convincing me that EVERY-DAMN-THING has a soul. What is it with bunnies and fiction? I’m not even going to mention the crap that happened in my dorky little mind when I read Watership Down. Damn bunnies. (You see, I keep meaning to read Watership Down, but then I read something like this, and I think along the lines of Foghorn Leghorn: “Actually, I’d better not look. I just might be in there.”)

:: The House Majority Leader likes opera. (Well, so did Hitler!)

:: August makes me hate the world, and everything in it. (I think that ACD lives somewhere on the northeastern seaboard, if memory serves correctly, in which case he’s almost certainly correct: August is a Godawful horror of a month, if you live in those locales. Here in Buffalo, it’s July that I detest with a passion. August is when things start, ever so slowly, to turn for the better: the humidity starts to slowly drop, as do the temperatures. By the end of the month, we should be down into the high 70s pretty consistently here. Today, actually, we’re enjoying the kind of day that hasn’t been seen here since early June, I suspect: it’s cool and rainy. August in Buffalo is, for me, the best of the summer months. June is pleasant, but I tend to feel a dread for the July that is to come, and July just basically blows. August, though, is bearable — and there are times in August when I can feel the refreshing wonderment that is Autumn, lurking somewhere just beyond my range of vision.)

:: This man is too dangerous to let anywhere near the presidency. He’s simply Dick Cheney with a better backstory.

:: Personally, I think it’s normal for young children to find that kind of magical event unsurprising. Consider your kitchen. In that one little room, a child will find:

* A box that makes juice cold, even when the house is warm.
* A box that makes tater tots hot, even when the house is cool.
* A box that turns little, yellow, hard things into big, white, fluffy, yummy things. (And, of course, the tall box that makes ordinary water into a foul-smelling black potion that each morning converts mean, surly parents into relaxed, loving parents.)

That’s it for this week. Good stuff abounds, as always, although I’m finding that since I’ve started this lark of concentrating on mere sentences, I’m wanting to expand each sentence into the basis of an entire post of mine. Keeping it brief is getting harder. So, does anyone like this series? I enjoy putting it together each Sunday.

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Here we go again. Click the sentences for context.

:: (T)he justification for the Global Vaguely-Defined Endeavor Generally In Opposition To Some Nebulous Foreign Evil (GVDEGIOTSNFE) has finally become entirely pre-verbal. Perhaps it is better this way; I don’t know. But it does sort of make one long for the days of Steven den Beste and Victor Davis Hanson and all those other dudes with their austere tripartite names and their military histories and their impressive connection to the classical tradition of Thucydides, Pericles, and Triceratops. (The comments thread, in which lots of people pile on top of Michael Totten, who nevertheless remains fairly calm and civil, is also worth perusing. I’m no fan of Totten’s, but he conducts himself well here. Warning: this post concludes with some disturbing imagery.)

:: Warren Ellis owns my ass. (Oh, go look.)

:: Instead of continually recycling these silly and bemadding cliches and catchphrases let us indeed reclaim vocabulary. Let us revive rare and beautiful words. Let our language be a garden from which we lovingly pick the most exquisite flowers, not a landfill which we casually sift through to find last week’s disposables! (Really. I, especially, have no desire whatsoever to peruse last week’s disposables. ‘Twould make me shudder, it would!)

:: Last night, I was flipping through the channels when I saw this dead-eyed, purse-lipped, mackerel-faced man droning away in a pulpit. (I like that bit of insulting descriptive, and shall file it away for future theft attributed use.)

:: Instead of being required to answer why pacifists would withhold the scalpel of righteous violence, I want to know why the question is always framed at the point where the patient is dying of advanced cancer. (Via Dave Trowbridge.)

:: For the sake of the art, we need to protect the dreck…

:: Man oh man, you’re gonna like this book; boy howdy. (This is one entry in the Lyttle Lytton contest, whose object goes the Bulworth Lytton contest one better: you’re supposed to write a short, bad sentence. But I gotta be honest here: more than a few of these, instead of making me sagely note their awfulness as sentences, actually made me cry out, “Hey, no fair! I wanna read the novel that comes after these sentences!” Alas.)

:: Wearing clothes that fit should be pretty basic, but just from walking around and looking at people I know that this is something a lot of people have a hard time with. (Interesting stuff here about dressing and fashion and the like, even if I sharply diverge on the subject of pleats on my pants — I tend to think that I look fat not because of the pleats on my pants, but because of the large gut I’m toting around. But anyway, there it is….)

:: I am forwarding my marriage certificate and three children, one of which is a mistake as you can see. (I don’t remember how I ended up on this blog, but this post was funny.

All for this week. Enjoy!

UPDATE: OK, I just had to add this one: So I have discovered that the best way to see Loreena McKennitt perform is from 10 feet away. And Sarah, I hate you. Harumph!

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