Tag: Sentential Links

Yup, after a layoff of a couple of weeks, it’s time to get back into the swing of finding nifty sentences throughout the blog world. As always, click through the get the context.

:: Or put it this way: Let’s make tell our prospective audience that we’re arrogant and smug, that we don’t understand the people we’re trying to reach, and that in fact we don’t know much about the world we’re living in. Now there’s a recipe for success… (I couldn’t agree more.)

:: Yes, I love back-to-school supplies as much as the next autodidact, but their reduced prices at Target do not herald the end of summer, only the end of the “summer fun” aisle. (This is a new entry to the blogroll, by the way, and one of the blogs I had bookmarked when I had to reinstall Firefox and thus lost all of my bookmarks. I rediscovered it quite by accident the other day.)

:: What reason could possibly justify the expense of venturing off-Earth to found offshoot societies, absent direct threat or a compelling need? Ideology of some sort would seem to be required, that or obvious and immediate economic benefit. (Note to self: read the remainder of this series. Via Jay Manifold.)

:: In the meantime, I notice outbreaks of testiness between several of the NRO regulars. I fear it is only a matter of time before they turn on each other like the dusty gang in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. (I dunno; I don’t read NRO. I just like Wolcott’s brand of snark.)

:: Only in New York can people talk about being in an ethnic food “rut” that contains not just Mexican, Chinese, and Italian, but also Ethiopian, Thai, Vietnamese, and Brazilian. (Actually, that’s the entire post. I just thought it was a funny observation.)

:: Many things piss me off. One of those things happens to be a football coach making several million dollars a year condescending to fans that loading up the schedule with patsies is something to be proud of. (This is precisely why I pay extremely little attention to college football. The first half of the season consists of watching Florida State beat the South Carolina Typewriter Repair Maintenance College team — their mascot, the “Shift Key” — by a score of 81-0, and then dropping in the polls because Oklahoma beat the North Texas Animal Husbandry School Fighting Grillies by a score of 84-0. My interest level would probably be different if I’d attended a Division I-A school with a real solid program, as opposed to my Division III alma mater, but I was in Iowa anyway and the Earth revolves around the Hawkeyes in those parts, unless you’re one of the small percentile for whom it’s the ISU Cyclones who command your allegiance. Anyway, I no longer care much about college football.)

:: Here in the non-internet world, we have a technical term for people who, without the permission of the authors, take copies of their books and give them away for free to lots of readers: we call them “librarians”. (Actually, I’d quibble with this: Librarians don’t give free copies of books out, they loan them out, with the expectation that they will get them back. That’s an important distinction, albeit not entirely critical to Mr. Stross’s larger argument.)

:: Yes, I know. I could always move to Florida or Texas, but are hurricanes really preferable to six feet of snow? (This is something I’ve always maintained about Buffalo, and the post linked here isn’t even talking about Buffalo. I’ll take snow over people not dying in heat waves; the temperature hitting triple digits, well, ever; the wind chill not being below zero for months at a time; the possibility of large storms from the Gulf of Mexico wiping us out; the possibility of large swathes of our water-facing properties falling into the lake as a result of either earthquakes or erosion; or entire communities having to evacuate because of wildfires?)

:: But oh, what a country we would be if we could revive a sense of shame in a man if he leaves the house in the morning without a sack suit, brogues, waistcoat with watch chain, shirtfront, string tie and skimmer! (You know, we can elect a Republican President every time out between now and Doomsday, and that won’t be enough to get me to move to Canada. But if we start getting men to dress like this again, it’s “Peace Bridge or Bust” for me. Ye Gods! via Lance Mannion.)

OK, that’s it for this week. Peace out, y’all!

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Good sentences from better posts for the week just gone by.

:: Still, no gift, however generous, can possibly make up for the empty feeling with which we say farewell to the kindly men and women who once upon a time helped to show us what we were. (Mr. Teachout, with all due respect, if you’ve got it in you to write like this — and you damned well do — then please oh please, stop wishing you could write as well as James Lileks. It’s Lileks who should be coming to you for pointers.)

:: A secret: I fall a little in love with nearly every woman that I meet. Just a little – sometimes only for five minutes, sometimes forever. (And I thought that I was the only one who did that. This isn’t actually from a blog post, but it is from a blog, so it counts.)

:: I mean we all stop dead in our tracks while walking to grab that piece of paper to write down a great idea, or line, or story, or thing to do, or thing to blog. Or is it just me? I wonder who else will be found guilty! (Guilty as charged. I’m constantly thinking up stuff. Some of it is just observational stuff to use in stories, some of it gets put into blog posts, some stuff just percolates around within my cranium. I think that this practice is one thing that marks one as a Writer-At-Heart.)

:: The authority of evolution is derived not from any edicts, there is no Central Committee, nor is there any Great Man who defines it all for us (concepts which are exceedingly hard to get across to creationists), but instead, it is derived from a great many experiments and observations of the natural world.

:: At approximately 7 pm EDT this evening, I left my office (5 blocks from the White House) to board the subway at Metro Center (2.5 blocks from the White House) to travel 12 minutes to walk 2 blocks to get home. During my journey, I saw not one sniffing dog. Not one meter maid. NOT A SINGLE COP. (Actually, that’s the entire text of Roxanne’s post. I hope she doesn’t mind.)

:: The Home Run Derby has now gotten so out of hand that a crappy post-grunge band, Alter Bridge, a derivative remnant of the highly derivative band Creed, will now perform at the Derby. (How behind the times am I? I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anything by Creed, but all I know is that everyone who has ever mentioned Creed to me has also used the word “sucks” in the same sentence.)

:: The flypaper theory is dead and buried. (New redesign for Demosthenes’s blog, by the way, which happens to be the first liberal political blog I ever read.)

:: There sure are a lot of different versions of Diet Coke these days, aren’t there? (Yup, there are. And once again, the Blogger With Millions o’Hits posts about something that the Blogger With Hundreds o’Hits touched on two weeks ago. I’m just sayin’.)

:: Seriously, can anyone name a film adaptation that was superior to the book? (Yes, I can. The Bridges of Madison County.)

:: Can you tell catfish bother me a little bit? (There were about seven or eight sentences I could have chosen from this post, whose only wrong point is that Mississippi is not in the Midwest. It’s in the South. The Upper Delta region might be termed in the Midwest, ranging as far north as the southeast portion of Missouri and the southern tip of Illinois. But as to that, it’s worth noting that Cairo, Illinois is farther south than Richmond, Virginia. Yes, Cairo’s in the same state as Chicago, which is most definitely a Midwest city, but consider: Buffalo is in the same state as New York City, but Buffalo’s certainly not a Northeast city; we’re a Great Lakes city, and it’s about 293 miles from here to NYC. From Chicago to Cairo is even farther than that: about 348 miles, according to this site. But that’s just a mere quibble. This is a wonderful post. Go read it.)

That’s all for now. Remember, there will be no Sentential Links next week, because I won’t be linking much of anything next week. (By the way, it just occurred to me that with the exception of my two moves, from Buffalo to Syracuse and back again, this will be the first real hiatus since this blog began which shall also involve a period of inconsistent Net access. What on Earth will I do!)

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Here we go with this week’s installment of Good Sentences from Better Posts. Click and read, because if you don’t, the puppy gets it. (Yeah, there’s a puppy. There’s always a puppy. No, I’m not gonna show you pictures. It’s a real puppy.)

:: I always know if a performer is an artist or not by their clarity: not articulation or projection or other technical details, but by how, if an artist, every note makes sense, tells a story.

:: What’s really objectionable, though, is the attempt to manufacture a chummy, affectionate bond between fans and players that should spring up organically or, if it doesn’t, be left alone. (What I’m wondering is, do the Sox’s TV guys still shout after every Sox homerun, “You can put it abooaarrdd, YES!”?)

:: Oh, and throw in Braveheart while you’re at it. Willfully inaccurate, horribly overwrought, ridiculously racist AND crap. (Racist? I can see homophobic, but where’s the racist stuff?)

:: Voting ends on Monday for the “Hottest U.S. Senator” contest. (Oh, my, no. No, no, no, no, no. Uh-uh. No. And what’s with the look in Senator Murkowski’s eyes? She looks like she’s about to fire blast beams of hot death from her retinae. And seriously, has any human being ever managed to look as embalmed as Robert Byrd has for, what, fifteen years?)

:: I’m going to throw up.. (Me too. My stuff still isn’t published, so harumph. But congrats, anyway!)

:: The harmful novels are often well-written, but their effects have generally been disastrous: they inspired younger writers to imitate them, they created awful new genres that debased readers’ tastes, or they promoted literary or social values that we could very much do without. (And he goes and gives a list of the most harmful novels, of one of which he intones: “This one took me only 45 minutes to read, and half a second to fling across the room.” Oy! Via.)

:: Jungr’s main point is that because of the emphasis on youthfulness and mostly because record companies don’t want to invest in singers and let them develop their own unique voice over time like they used to do, there is no sex appeal and no experience in people’s voices.

:: 54 people came in search of “japanese vagina.” (Confucius say: “He who writes about the weird, will gather before him those who Google about the weird.”)

:: I’ll give you just a couple of “originalism’s” fatal flaws.

:: A newspaper from 1814 is like a time machine. I jump in and I’m walking the streets of Manhattan, looking at shops, listening to people talk.

Enough for now. More next week. None the week after that, as I’ll be off. And so it goes.

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The poor sentences were screaming. “Let us free!” They shouted.

“You’re prisoners?” Dr. Jones asked, unbelieving.

“We can never escape the context!” one of them told me.

Dr. Jones set his jaw, rubbed his stubbled chin, put the fedora back on his head and uncoiled his bullwhip. “You’re escaping it now,” he said.

“Oh, good,” another sentence said. “You see, our writers are always just making this up as they go.”

“I know the feeling,” Dr. Jones replied, as he began the work of freeing sentences from their blog-post context.

“Say,” one sentence began as it awaited its turn, “in 1936, what do you point-and-click?”

“Cameras,” Dr. Jones said.

“Ah,” said the sentence.

OK, I suppose that wasn’t as clever as it sounded before I wrote it. Anyway, here are sentences from posts that grabbed me this week. Click and read.

:: Now, years later, God and I sometimes get along. (Via Alan. That line comes near the very end of a long post that’s among the most powerful things I’ve read in Blogistan. It’s posts like that which make me want to give up blogging.)

:: It was George the mailman’s last day on the job after 35 years of carrying the mail through all kinds of weather to the same neighborhood. (Not safe for work. It’s a joke, headlined by a Norman Rockwell-like painting that gives the whole thing a creepy undertone. Yeesh. And hey, she’s from Toronto.)

:: When you see the other side of 40, you’ll discover Coltrane isn’t just for sex any more. (Wait a minute: Coltrane is for sex? Really?)

:: Every time I’m tempted to wax poetic about the virtues of the original Star Wars movies or how cool the original Legend of Zelda was, I just imagine if my Dad had tried to convince me that those old 12″ GIJoe figures he had as a kid were somehow better or more “real” than my little Zartan and Snake Eyes figures. (Tell me about it.)

:: Most people associate the smell of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies with Mom. For me, the mom-smell is more that of wet paint.

:: For you youngsters who may be unfamiliar with how the game works, Match Game was a tv game show that aired (the best version, anyhow) back in the 70’s. (I remember watching that show when I was four or five, and enjoying the hell out of it, just because all those people on the TeeVee sure seemed to be having a great time, and to this day I just find something infectious about people having obvious fun. I never saw it again until just a few months ago when I was in the presence of “The Game Show Network” or whatever, and I was astounded that they got away with stuff like this on TV back then. Wow.)

:: My parents are extremely fond of a geothermal concept called The Crossbreeze. (Yup, the Crossbreeze is wonderful if your domicile allows for it. If you’re in an apartment whose windows only face two directions, which are at right-angles to one another, fuhgeddaboudit. Game over, and fire up the A/C.)

:: There isn’t any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we’re treating these people. They’re living in the tropics. They’re well fed. They’ve got everything they could possibly want. (Make sure to follow the annotation links in Jeanne’s post. But really: “They’re living in the tropics”? That’s a selling point? Well, shit, I’m convinced! Hell, Alfred Dreyfus got to live in the tropics too, so what was he bitching about?)

:: So go ahead and hate Buffalo and hate people who don’t hate Buffalo. That and four bucks’ll get you a cup of lukewarm watered-down coffee at the bodega that’ll be down the block from the $3k/month apartment you’ll have in whatever piece of shit southern humidity tank in which you decide to shack up. (Just because a little rantin’s good sometimes.)

:: Performance majors who are not attending Eastman or Julliard are not getting a professional degree oriented only to one career choice. (Hear, hear! I was a performance major myself, until I changed for something more financially viable in a rapidly-changing global economy. Well, OK, it was Philosophy. Ya happy now?)

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Here we go again. Click for context.

:: Holy Shizzy, Trump THIS, Donald! (This is a post title rather than a sentence from the post, because the post is just a picture. But the picture is really cool. Why don’t we build stuff like that?)

:: I love this mystery. I will hate the person who exposes the man’s identity, and why he does it. Let us wonder.

:: There are lots of evil regimes past and present to choose from, but I’m not sure which ones are acceptable references when describing the use of torture at Guantanamo. Can I get some conservative feedback on this?

:: My favorite sort of enthusiast is an enthusiast with a cocktail. (I like one with a beer, but you get the idea.)

:: There’s so much wrong and invidious in this latest piece by Norman Lebrecht that one hardly knows where to begin to rip into it. (Of course, that dilemma doesn’t stop ACD for one second from ripping into it!)

:: I’m sorry, but I’m still in what I call the “indescribably wonderful” stage. You know, that part early in a relationship where everything is just perfect and you feel like you’re living a dream. Sigh. It’s all just so… indescribably wonderful. (Yeesh! Playing the “I got a new girlfriend!” card to absolve oneself from one’s daily blogging responsibilities is just so lame. And this will probably kill his usual caustic tone, too — now when he posts about politics, he’s gonna be all cute and bubbly about it. Ach well…that Anna must be something!)

:: I hope Nixon won’t go down in history as a great president. (Me either. The man was a lunatic who did a few good things and a whole lot of bad ones.)

:: Please note that what follows is, in no way, an attack on religion. It is merely a defence of science. I sincerely believe that the two need not be mutually incompatible. (Yes, it’s about evolution, and it’s a good post.)

:: This weekend is our 10th wedding anniversary. (Congratulations!)

:: Ten years ago today Krissy and I were married. (Ditto!)

:: Do you think there really is a “certain age” when long hair is not appropriate? (For women, absolutely NOT! For men, well, I dunno. For myself, I have no intention of cutting my hair. I just don’t see the point of doing so.)

:: As a modern woman, I am surprised by Blind Alfred’s contention that God cares about our hairdos. It smacks of micro-management. (This one is where I got the link for the one right above it. Man, there are a lot of great blogs out there.)

:: If you doubt this is possible, how is it there are PYGMIES + DWARFS?? (This is the most surreal bit of Creationist logic I’ve ever seen.)

:: The movie finally limped onto the Sci-Fi Channel alongside cheap filler from UFO and Nu Image, with a DVD from Lion’s Gate (“We’ll release anything!”) not far behind.

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This week’s roundup of sentences ripped horribly from their surrounding blog-context. Won’t someone please think of the children!

:: The mayor’s office has finally realized that this is totally unacceptable and is trying to revive the area (or as my guide more cynically put it, “convince white people that it’s safe to be downtown at night.”) (You’ll be surprised which city she’s talking about.)

:: He has already taught me many things (that I was aware of previously but have re-learnt): Texan girls dress way skankier than their Ontario counterparts, the Texan accent is a total babe magnet, men don’t wear shirts in Texas, everything is cheaper in Texas, Canadian cable has a lot of nudity/swearing and maple leaves. But the most important thing I have learned is that guns and exotic animals are man’s best friends.

:: Anyway, time to move on. (Go wish him luck!)

:: …[T]he people you should be talking to are those that the IDers are trying to recruit. (You know, the high school kids that creationists want to reach so “they can make up their own minds”, as if science is a democracy where you get to vote for your version of reality.)

:: The problem Hale overlooks, that advocates of free market medicine often overlook, is that a good many people don’t even have “Chevrolet” budgets– they have budgets only for bus fare…

:: Florence, Alabama has several Indian Mounds from the Copena Period, about 300 CE, of the Woodland cultural period in the Southeast from 1000 BCE to 1000 CE. (What would be the point, without photos? Luckily, there are photos. Mira always has photos. Yay, photos!)

:: There’s something almost sacred about a physical library. (No, there isn’t something almost sacred about a library. It’s just plain out-and-out garden variety sacred. No “almost” about it!)

:: One way of surviving is to disassociate oneself from the rotten eggs of the world and find only nice people to be with.

:: Republicans today criticized Paul Revere for his famous ride, saying that he had violated professional colonial ethics by divulging military secrets in violation of his duty to his lord, the King of England. (Why do I always forget to read him? He’s only been on my friggin’ blogroll for, oh, two years or something like that….)

:: Inspired by the hype surrounding the release of Revenge of the Sith, here’s a little bit of Buffalo-related Star Wars history. (Geez, the treasures that await on my own blogroll!)

:: If you tell three men you have a strange creature in your back yard, two will want to kill it, and one will want to season it. (And if there’s a fourth, he’ll just want to stare at it as it interacts with nature in its own habitat. That guy would probably be me.)

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Time for the weekly roundup of neat sentences from neater posts around Blogistan. Click for the context, folks!

:: You know what’s really awkward? (This one’s not safe for work, really.)

:: Tonight, I would like to be able to send bone cancer down phone lines.

:: Your blog is like a sausage patty: no links.

:: I went looking for Emerson everywhere and made sure I caught him, brought him home, and pinned him like a butterfly on every other page of my notebooks.

:: My grandma and grandpa are buried at Park Cemetery in Fairmount just outside of Marion, less than 30 yards from where James Dean’s headstone rests.

:: “If you test a child on basic math and reading skills, and you’re teaching to the test, you’re teaching math and reading.” (Actually, this is an interesting blog post that’s quoting someone else in that sentence. There’s an interesting discussion in the comments there, too. I personally am still of mixed mind on “No Child Left Behind”.)

:: In the space opera Sherwood Smith and I authored back at the end of the last millenium, one character threatens another with “a guided tour of your own intestines.” (This one is high on the “Ewwwwwww!” scale.)

:: We remember you, patient gardener.

That’s all for this week. I spent a surprisingly small amount of time wandering Blogistan this week, for no real reason except that I had some overdue reviews to catch up on and stuff to read that’s printed on paper and whatnot.

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Here we go again, with another round-up of good sentences from better posts. Click the sentence to get the context. I’ve been gathering these all week. Enjoy!

:: Gosh… I so did not find zen on the back porch!

:: The right can’t lecture to the left about how political correctness stifles and chills speech and thought, while in the next breath exercizing its own brand of PC to stifle and chill speech and thought.

:: I am proud to introduce to the world, and in particular to the attentions of British copyright law, my three-act opera Tristan + Isolde, which bears certain superficial resemblances to the similarly titled Richard Wagner opera….

:: How do you get to that galaxy that’s a long time ago and far away? Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.

:: We marched out the symphony hall into the cold rain, but our grins were warm.

:: Why cite The Critic — an animated series that no one in particular actually watched and that is in any case ten years old — as an example of the current low state of the critical field? (Ah, The Critic — I liked that show, even if it got shafted mightily by its network, prompting Jon Lovitz — who voiced the lead — to go on Letterman and issue one of my favorite snarky one-liners ever, “FOX: they should spell it with a ‘U’.”)

:: During the decades when hard drugs, such as cocaine and heroin, were widely available, artists were some of their most eager advocates. (Stephen King, a recovering alcoholic, responds to this idea in his book On Writing by noting, “We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter.”)

:: Hostility is so much easier to deal with than friendliness, for some reason.

:: Wouldn’t you sleep more soundly at night knowing Ann Coulter was in the Army and not in a voting booth? (Not from a blog, but I couldn’t resist it.)

:: As I read this crap (sorry), I started to wonder whether there just might be a reverse Mozart effect. Maybe classical music makes us dumber.

:: Yes, the pigeon porn couple is back. (Go look. Nice photo here.)

:: They’re highly unselective when it comes to mating, gleefully grabbing females, other males, and different species in their quest to copulate. 18 seconds later, they’re ready to go at it again. Instead of wooing the female, they simply grab, shag, and run. (You know you’re curious as to what this refers to….)

More next week!

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I had a good time collecting links and sentences for last week’s version of this, so I may start doing it every Sunday. I’m grabbing sentences from blog posts I read elsewhere, and to get the context, you’ll just have to click the sentences. OK?

:: If ve say you vill gamble, then you vill gamble. Und you vill smile vhile you are losing.

:: I left the theater emotionally shaken, unable to really talk about the movie.

:: So a few days ago, Mars Global Surveyor took a picture of Mars Odyssey–the first time one extraterrestrial orbiter has taken a picture of another. (And click on the link within the post)

:: I suppose I was distressed enough when I found out that, when viewed from space, the Earth was in fact branded with copyright messages for Google — presumably these are intended to warn off any other sentient extraterrestrial A.I.’s that might get ideas.

:: Consider: with very few exceptions, Franz Schubert’s 600-odd songs were sourced from texts from writers who would certainly have still been in copyright under current legislation.

:: What a bunch of two-faced, filthy-minded hypocrites. Millstones for them all.

:: When you are contacting alien races always be ready to teleport if there is trouble.

:: Professional musicians usually juggle music with administration and hitting on creative ways to earn a living.

:: It’s Ok to Show Bum Crack. (OK, this isn’t totally fair, since it’s actually the title of this blog, as linked by Sheila. But that title, for good or ill, certainly caught my eye, touching as it does a particular phobia of mine. And the blog, a series of cartoons, may not be safe for work. Anyway….)

:: The truth is that there is no reason in the world to elect judges– the job they do has nothing to do with the popular will, and may run counter to it. (Permalinks never seem to work here; scroll down to the second post dated May 20, 2005.)

Enjoy!

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I’m not sure if “Sentential” is a word, but hey, who cares, right? Anyway, here are some sentences that recently caught my eye from blogs I read. If you want the context, click the sentence. OK? OK.

:: To be a biologist at the dawn of the 21st century is to be a librarian in the last days of Alexandria.

:: I would imagine that the new series CSI:Wichita will solve that little problem by having the crime scene investigators simply pray for the suspects to confess.

:: Am I the only one who feels the need to sing at the top of my lungs when alone in the house and drinking?

(No, you’re not. That’s the only time I ever dance.)

:: The way I see it, women fall into two categories: thong wearing and non thong wearing.

:: People stink and they are stupid.

:: Reverend Dimmesdale, unsurprisingly, was unavailable for comment.

:: Why are axe-murderers distinguished as such?

(Hell, I dunno. PZ Myers labeled me as an axe-murderer, and I don’t even own an axe. I have a saw that I have used seven times: to cut the bottom couple of inches off our Christmas tree trunk each year.)

:: We’re supposed to believe that the nation’s millionaires, having already had their tax rates slashed by a third over the past two decades, are still being bled to the bone by federal taxes.

:: The literary critic Harold Bloom once said that we weren’t fully human until Shakespeare began writing: that Shakespeare completed our sapience. Which is both interesting and stark, utter bullshit.

Good sentences, from better paragraphs and posts.

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