Quote of the day: Special Fact-Check Edition

(Updated below.)

They are truly floundering now, and it's a marvel to see, like watching armadillos try to swim.

- Charlie Pierce, the Sultan of Similes, the Ace of Analogies, and Master of Mammal Metaphors, marveling at the dreadful performance byTrump surrogates in the run-up to Election Day.

It's a wonderful image – suggestive of plummeting to the bottom of the lake with a minimum of satisfaction and a maximum of splash. And that's certainly the situation Trump surrogates find themselves in these days.

But as it turns out, it's not the situation that actual living armadillos find themselves in. The Google thing took less than a second to point me to a web page called Armadillo Fact File (yes, of course it exists) in response to my three word search query: can armadillos swim? (Click to enlarge. )

One tinkers with brother Pierce's prose at one's peril, but I modestly – humbly – suggest that the position that Trump surrogates like Gingrich are finding themselves in is less like a happy armadillo skillfully crossing a river (although the disturbing image of “gulping air into their intestines” sounds nearer the mark than any of us should find comfortable) and more instead like a luckless, lumbering creature trying desperately but unsuccessfully to avoid a particularly unattractive Nemesis.

Perhaps it's more like watching an armadillo try to outrun a 1958 Buick Roadmaster.

Just a suggestion.


(Updated, later the same day:

Okay, now I'm flattering myself that Pierce is just messing with my head. Here he is, reflecting on the $100 eponymous signature cocktail at the newly opened Trump International Hotel, a few blocks away from -- and as close as Trump'll ever get to -- the White House:

I'm really not ready for someone to tell me that the problem with my Bloody Mary is that there isn't enough winter-wheat in the Yeltsin Juice. But it is of a piece with the candidate himself, who has the over-aesthetic taste of a Bonobo in a $1,000 tux.

Yes, the somber, sad-eyed bonobo does look dreadful in a $1000 tux.

Ì Googled it.)

Quote of the day: The Caudillo's rhinocerous

If you assume, as I do, that simply telling El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago that he is a lying sack of hair who knows less about most major issues than a rhino knows about differential calculus would be frowned upon at the upper echelons of NBC, then there wasn't much for poor Lauer to do.

Charlie Pierce – the Sultan of Similies, the Ace of Analogies, and Master of Mammal Metaphors – on the bad hand that Matt Lauer was dealt last night at the so-called Commander-in-Chief Forum.*

Other examples of his craft here.
______________

*Note that the fact that Lauer was dealt a bad hand doesn't get him off the hook for playing the cards he did get so badly. Even in bridge, with the worst hand imaginable, there's still a right way and a wrong way to bid and play it. (Really? Half of your Clinton questions about emails? Seriously>)

The search for the p3 epithet continues

A few weeks ago, I inventoried some of the best of the best in the international effort to find a new tag for GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump (other than "GOP presidential nominee," which gives me the oogies every time I type it.)

As I explained, I'd coined the phrase "slo-mo exploding citrus" for in-house use here at the blog, but with repetition I find it's just too clunky. "Short-fingered vulgarian" will always be a sentimental favorite, of course, and "Cheetos Jesus" is a damned fine piece of work, too.

And the to-the-point "Litigious Deadbeat" also deserves recognition. Same with "Homegrown Demogogue" – plus, it's sort of amusing to imagine Trump hearing that and thinking, "Hey, people think I'm a demigod!", except that such a misunderstanding is likely beyond the grasp of his peurile working vocabulary. (Even though.)

This morning I had made it no more than half-way through my daily online reading when I realized that I'd seen three different writers already who had each selected the word "unhinged" to describe Trump's performance at his – for want of a better term – press conference yesterday morning.

So maybe "unhinged" should be under consideration as le mot juste. The Unhinged Donald Trump? The Unhinged One?

Of course, the press conference's high-water mark, Trump calling on Putin use the good offices of the FSB in finding and leaking the emails from Hillary's term as Secretary of State, was walked back by Trump as "sarcasm" barely 24 hours later – which is a little odd; usually he would simply have denied that he said it. And that, in turn, has furthered the process of tying Vladimir Putin to Trump's ass like a tin can. (Last week Josh Marshall detailed Trump's financial dependence on Putin and Putin's friends. This week, George Will suggested that's the reason Trump won't release his tax records.)

It's a maxim here at p3 that, if everybody's interests all lay in the same direction anyway, you don't need a conspiracy. (Ockham may have said it first, but I said it better.) That's why I'm not including "The Manchurian Candidate" or its geographic variants in this list. Putin doesn't need to directly control Trump in order to realize the benefits of Trump's candidacy. He just has to recognize them. Similarly, Trump needn't be making a gift of the his policy positions to Putin – for example, his ideas about NATO are essentially unchanged from the days when the Soviet Union was presided over by Mikhail Gorbachev. No, I doubt that Trump is Raymond Shaw to Putin's Dr. Yen Lo. He's more like Chester to Putin's Spike.

But this does suggest another moniker for Trump, and one with a certain piquant historical resonance:

Useful Idiot.

The search continues.

"Nothing going on there" and other constitutional fictions

Comes now former United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York (and this week's winner of the p3 "Wait – He's Still Alive?" Award) Rudy Giuliani, displaying his legendary ability to bring his thumb down on the scales in the delicate balance of civil liberties against the never ending battle for law and order:

"There's no minister, there's no rabbi in this city — nor are there some imams — that object to having police officers in their congregation," he argued. "In fact, they want them there, they want them to learn the message. It's enlightening for them." "So if you've got nothing going on there but a beautiful religious service, why in His name would you not want to have police officers there?" he asked.

(h/t to Charlie Pierce)

 There are those – cynical SOBs, the lot of you! – who might suggest that remarks like this are meant to signal Rudy's availability for the Donald Trump Vice Presidential Beauty Pageant and Scholarship Competition, but I say not so! This is simply the sort of thing Rudy ordinarily says into the bathroom mirror as he flosses every morning. Trump's campaign is just a coincidence. Nevertheless, he has returned to that old law and order warhorse: If you've got nothing to hide . . .

Which is another reason this shifty line of argument would be a bad fit for the campaign of the slo-mo exploding citrus, whose list of decredentialed news organizations is beginning to read like a Who's Who of political journalism.

 I defer to the legal expertise of Mr. Spade from San Francisco:

Spade glanced his way, chuckled, and asked Bryan: "Anything I say will be used against me?"

The District Attorney smiled. "That always holds good." He took his glasses off, looked through them, and set them on his nose again. He looked through them at Spade and asked: "Who killed Thursby?"

Spade said: "I don't know."

Bryan rubbed his black eyeglass-ribbon between thumb and fingers and said knowingly: "Perhaps you don't, but you certainly could make an excellent guess."

"Maybe, but I wouldn't."

The District Attorney raised his eyebrows.

"I wouldn't," Spade repeated. He was serene. "My guess might be excellent, or it might be crummy, but Mrs. Spade didn't raise any children dippy enough to make guesses in front of a district attorney, an assistant district attorney, and a stenographer."

"Why shouldn't you, if you've got nothing to conceal?"

"Everybody," Spade responded mildly, "has something to conceal."

"And you have – ?"

"My guesses, for one thing."

The Catalog held but just Ourselves / And Immortality

Here's a bit of news from last fall that I'm only now getting around to processing:

It’s been a long time since most libraries were filled with card catalogs — drawers upon drawers of paper cards with information about books. But now, the final toll of the old-fashioned reference system’s death knell has rung for good: The library cooperative that printed and provided catalog cards has officially called it quits on the old-fashioned technology.

The news comes via the The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). The cooperative, which created the world’s first shared, online catalog system back in 1971, allowed libraries to order custom-printed cards that could then be put in their own analog cataloging systems. Now, says OCLC, it’s time to lay a “largely symbolic” system that’s well past its prime to rest.

When I was in graduate school at Penn State, there was a professor in our department who, so I was told, would sometimes lead his advisees over to Pattee Library and pull out the appropriate catalog drawer,  pointing to all the cards with his name on it (and the number was, indeed, nothing to sneeze at). That, he told his students, was immortality.

He was also fond of reminding his students of the academic injunction "publish or perish," although he took perverse pleasure in pointing out to them it was possible to do both. Perhaps he was right; the professor himself died over ten years ago but the list of his books on Amazon runs to a couple of pages, although most appear to out of print now.

I remember the pleasant shock I found when I discovered my own doctoral dissertation in the card catalog at my undergraduate alma mater.

I also remember the guilty pleasure of searching online catalogs from universities and the Library of Congress in the pre-Web days, seeking that buzz you got when you saw your name on the screen – even if it was only a CRT monitor (which could in part explain the buzz).  "Ego-surfing," it was called, and perhaps it still is. The practice has moved on beyond the simple digital equivalent of looking for one's picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone to more sophisticated questions of online image and reputation management, and even – oddly enough – privacy. I remember finding out about that one the hard way, when a colleague pointed out to me that one of my publishers, linked to on my first-ever web site, had changed its online address and the old address now redirected to a porn site. Of course, social media has made most users' names so omnipresent in their own online sensorium there's less shock in seeing one's name than in not seeing it.

Didn't Oscar Wilde say something along those lines once?

Speaking of slightly less-guilty pleasures, when I go to university libraries or large book stores like Powell's, I often enter my name into a few of the workstations for their book catalog system -- and just walk away, leaving it there on the screen. I enjoy imagining the moment at the regular meeting where they make decisions about acquisitions when someone will look around the table with a puzzled expression and say, "I can't really put my finger on why, but does anyone else think that we should be stocking more books from someone named Nothstine?"  I like to think of it as subliminal marketing, but much more direct than airbrushed nudes in pictures of ice cubes.

One interesting sidelight of the Smithsonian article is the importance that the traditional – I suppose we'd call it "analog?" – card catalog system placed upon clear penmanship, such that it was for a long time one of the major skills sought when hiring librarians. Now both clear handwriting (even block lettering, to say nothing of cursive) are going the way of the dodo. Out-evolved by a doodad you can also use to play Angry Birds and share photographs of your lunch. Same with alphabetizing, a skill that was drummed into me in grade school and which – I discovered to my surprise when I took an exam to be a census-taker in 2010 – either most people had forgotten or were never taught.

Gun safety versus safety through guns: A literary perspective

The story of Little Red Riding Hood, according to this NPR piece from a few years ago, first made its appearance in a French collection of children's stories in 1697. Since then it's been told and retold, worked and reworked, depending on the point of the storyteller, and invariably blood gets spilled – Red's, or the grandmother's, or the wolf's, often all three.

Until now.

Somewhat unexpectedly, the National Rifle Association made its entry into this literary tradition earlier this year with "Little Red Riding Hood (Has a Gun)," the first of two repurposing of classic stories for children (the other being "Hansel and Gretle (Have a Gun)" written by Amelia Harrison in collaboratioin with the NRA. In these two stories, disaster is averted and violence prevented by the presence of a gun in the hands of someone trained to use it safely (in the grandmother's case, it's a shotgun).

So, a couple of things. Three, really.

First, if the NRA really cared about safe hunting and gun handling they'd have stuck with gun safety training and not become the lobby of gun manufacturers and the front for a hysterical reading of the Second Amendment. I took their safe hunter training when I was a Boy Scout. How safe was it? Twice during the course, we were ordered to put our rifles down while the instructors chased away deer who had begun calmly grazing directly behind the targets.

Second, it's not so much that the NRA is preaching gun safety with these stories, it's that they're perpetuating the perception that guns should be everywhere and we'd be safer (and, some also suggest, more polite) if they were. (Presumably, that's not counting homes with domestic violence, of course, or homes with someone having suicidal thoughs, or most of the state of Florida.)

Third, sorry to the author Hamilton and her partners at the NRA, but this theme was handled – and handled better – almost 80 years ago, by James Thurber as one of his Fables for Our Times:

The Little Girl and the Wolf

One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food. "Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?" asked the wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood. When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother's house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.

(Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.)

I can't resist noting that the NPR commentator linked to above describes Thurber's story as displaying "a more feminist bent," making me suspect either that he has a limited familiarity with Thurber's work (which is characterized by a lot of what I'd call casual misogyny, such as these, especially "man and house;" note also the recurring theme of the woman with a gun), or that he has limited familiarity with feminism (or is willing to pretend same to get a laugh).

Should have seen it coming

(Updated below.)

This story begins a few days ago, the American Dialect Society announced that singular "they" was their choice as Word of the Year for 2015. (Go here for pervious years' ADS WOTY selections.) The internet blew up, and I commented on my Facebook page:

Okay, first, we need to keep in mind that it's the American Dialect Society, and they cleverly do this once a year so people will remember they exist.

And American English is at least trying to find a remedy to this centuries-old problem. What's the alternative? "He or she" is clunky. We know the problem with generic "he" (or "she"). And "s/he" is unpronounceable. In an age when Webster's offers "figuratively" as a nonstandard synonym for "literally," the whole they/them thing just isn't the hill I'm prepared to die on. If I'm working under a style manual that forbids singular "they," I follow it. Otherwise I default to the Midwestern dialect of my youth, and save my disdain for things like "impactful."

A friend commented that the "they" problem can often be gotten around with a little care in re-writing, which is true, but that end-runs the problem rather than solving it. Basically, this problem is a pseudo-problem anyway, created by generations of prescriptive grammarians trying to force English and American English into the procrustean bed of Latin.

The next day, the story came out that Chris Hughes, the Facebook-co-founding billionaire who purchased The New Republic in 2012, was putting it up for sale. Hughes was not known to have any particular feel for the magazine or its long tradition when he bought it; it was simply a shiny thing he planned to turn it into a showcase for his largely-inapplicable theories about digital media. (Spoiler it went badly.)

Here are the first several lines from his announcement – online, naturally, because that's how it works – that TNR was for sale (emphasis added):

I have some difficult news today: I have decided to put The New Republic up for sale. I bought this company nearly four years ago to ensure its survival and give it the financial runway to experiment with new business models in a time of immense change in media. After investing a great deal of time, energy, and over $20 million, I have come to the conclusion that it is time for new leadership and vision at The New Republic.

Over the past few years we have made good progress in reinvigorating this institution. Our readership has grown younger and more diverse, largely as a result of our digital strategy. Our journalism has been widely recognized as impactful, impassioned, and more relevant to our nation’s challenges than ever.

p3 wishes Mr. Hughes well in his next endeavor, which we sincerely hope won't be education reform.

Update (1/30/16): Looks like the Washington Post isn't going to save Private Ryan anymore, either.

Scenes from a failed novel: Special "Ripped From The Headlines" edition!

Earlier this month I read about the latest developments in a notorious suit based on allegations that University of Miami didn't fulfill its Title IX obligations to investigate charges of sexually inappropriate behavior by one of its faculty luminaries:

When Morrison worked as McGinn's research assistant, the famed professor pressed the student for a photo of her, repeatedly asked if he could come to her apartment and made multiple references to Lolita, the novel in which an older professor becomes obsessed and sexually involved with a 12-year-old girl, according to emails HuffPost reviewed. At the time, McGinn was 62 and Morrison was 26, something he noted in one email. In the emails, McGinn wrote about wanting to kiss her, floated the idea of their having sex over the summer and stated she was "much better off with my support than without it." [. . . ]

Morrison's attorneys say she often avoided his direct questions about his coming to her apartment or wanting to see her, saying she was sick or had spotty Internet or simply was too busy.

One March 2012 text message exchange provided to HuffPost is emblematic of her general response to his comments, the attorneys claim:

McGinn: I love your essence
McGinn: Plus it gives me a slight erection
Morrison: Can I borrow your philosophy of physics book…the one by lange [sic].

There's more at the link, and you're certainly welcome to follow the link and read about it, but I've already thrown up a little in the back of my mouth as it is, so you'll have to make that journey on your own. (Pro tip: If you're texting someone about your erection rather than sending a photo, it's okay to go ahead and tell her you have a "substantial erection." No one will be the wiser, eh?)

But the story sounded familiar. And after some digging around in the cellar, I discovered the following fragment of a manuscript, circa 1992, covered with whisky-glass stains and half-hidden under a pile of hard drives found in a recycling bin ("Think Globally, Act Locally") about two blocks from the Clinton compound in Chappaqua NY: 

She took a seat at a table and looked over her list again. Wormel had let it slip that it was a faculty member who was holding onto her book. The odds were good that only one professor was both theoretically interested in that particular book and relentlessly self-centered enough to keep an overdue library book for over a year: Emile Thoreau.

Maggie felt her spirits slip slightly lower. Emile Thoreau, self-conscious bad boy of the art history faculty; Emile Thoreau, whose French accent came and went according to the number of sophomore coeds present in the class; Emile Thoreau, tenured champion of the masses, ass-grabber extraordinaire. Maggie groaned to herself. Kathleen had once called Thoreau a "Volvo Marxist": He believed that, after The Revolution, his second car would still be a Volvo and he would still get to nail his grad students. Still, if he had the Jaeger and Prinz book, maybe she could borrow it from him.

She fished some change out of her copy machine bag and walked over to the pay phone. His number was listed, and she dialed it. Thoreau's answering machine took the call. She hesitated, then hung up without leaving a message. If he did have the book, leaving him a message would only give him time to move the book into the bedroom and dim the lights. Maggie shuddered.

Well, it's not the first time a book idea has tanked because it was ahead of its time, I suppose. (For other excerpts from this tragically doomed work, go here.)

A four-year-old took it from him in the toilet, but I made him give it back

So this happened in South Carolina:

A 4-year-old boy walked into a bathroom stall and found a loaded handgun after a church service in Holly Ridge on Sunday, Holly Ridge Police Chief John Maiorano said.

The man, Claude Lee Haynes III, 70, received a ticket for child endangerment.

And somehow it reminded me of this, which happened in San Francisco:

They went to Gutman's door and Spade knocked.

Gutman opened the door. A glad smile lighted his fat face. He held out a hand and said: "Ah, come in, sir! Thank you for coming. Come in."

Spade shook the hand and entered. The boy went in behind him. The fat man shut the door. Spade took the boy's pistols from his pockets and held them out to Gutman. "Here. You shouldn't let him run around with these. He'll get himself hurt."

The fat man laughed merrily and took the pistols. "Well, well," he said, "what's this?" He looked from Spade to the boy.

Spade said: "A crippled newsie took them away from him, but I made him give them back."

Bulwer-Lytton, you deserved better

While looking for something else, I stumbled upon the fact that the winner of the unfortunately-named Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest awards for 2015 have been announced.

You can read about it if you want to.

I've already expressed my opinion on this mean (in every sense) tradition:

For years, the winners of the "official" Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have usually written a long, long, self-consciously tedious sentence, with a sudden reversal in the last five words as if the writer simply popped a blood vessel at the wrong moment. They telegraph the joke like a bad prizefighter.

According to Wikipedia:

Writer's Digest described this sentence as "the literary posterchild for bad story starters."[3] On the other hand, the American Book Review ranked it as #22 on its "Best first lines from novels list."[4]

In 2008, the great-great-great-grandson of Bulwer-Lytton, Henry Lytton-Cobbold, participated in a debate in the town of Lytton, British Columbia with Scott Rice, the founder of the International Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Rice accused Bulwer-Lytton of penning "27 novels whose perfervid turgidity I intend to expose, denude, and generally make visible." Lytton-Cobbold defended his ancestor, noting that he had coined many other phrases widely used today such as "the pen is mightier than the sword", "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar", and said it was "rather unfair that Professor Rice decided to name the competition after him for entirely the wrong reasons."[5]

I get it. It's a joke. It's a joke that, like Snoopy's foray into fiction some eleven years or so before Rice started the BLFC in 1982, wears thin pretty quickly once you get tired of drinking in how deliciously low-brow it all is. Think about it: An animated beagle now best-known for having his image on greeting cards and an insurance company blimp got to the punchline a decade earlier. So it's a joke -- just a fairly lame joke.

Still, as someone else once said, people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

The p3 Manual of Style: Updated

Effective immediately:

1. Anyone who uses "politically correct" as a term of opprobrium is deeply, deeply intellectually unserious and will be ignored. Here's a thought experiment that makes the point. (This has been routine for several years, but now we're making it official.)

2. The three most common uses of the word "vast" are now officially disallowed.

3. The official overused ironic quote from "Casablanca" will no longer be "I'm shocked – shocked!" It will be replaced by "I was misinformed."

Out:

In:

Thank you for your attention.

Not the Dalai Lama, or someone like him*

(Updated below.)

A graphic has been making the rounds again on Facebook, one that appears to go back at least four years in one version or another. It pictures His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, with his trademark expression of infinite patience mixed with secret amusement, and the text begins as follows:

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered

It continues:

"Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived."

A nice sentiment, I suppose, boosted along by the oppositional phrasing and the ascending structure moving from work and the present, to the future, and finally to death. But I always felt that final clause about dying "having never really lived" seemed to have a false ring about it. Not something that the fellow who mostly talks about compassion and kindness would say.

And there's a reason for that. He didn't say it.

Plug the first sentence or so into the Google device and you'll quickly find it's a slight tweaking of something by James J. Lachard, the penname of a writer born in Essex, England in 1923, who eventually became CEO of World Vision International, an evangelical Christian humanitarian and advocacy organization.

Facebook and the like are, of course, an endless source of wrongly attributed quotes. Just ask Abraham Lincoln. And the name (or penname) of WVI's former CEO probably wouldn't be as recognizable to most social media users as the name of the world's most famous religious/political refugee. So perhaps whoever first mis-matched the quote to the leader of Tibetan Buddhism thought the expression just needed a little extra push. A little rebranding.

But if you help recirculate it online, incorrect attribution and all, it's on you now.

Still, this bit of literary vandalism did create one memorable moment a few years ago at, of all places, Forbes.com. A contributor who describes his beat as "the intersection of entertainment and technology" (he's a video game reviewer) saw that meme somewhere and attacked it with the intellectual brio of a college sophomore who just aced his first philosophy elective. It's titled – seriously, now – "The Dalai Lama is Wrong" and it begins like this:

This quotation from the Dalai Lama has been making the rounds.

It’s one of those irksome sentiments that sounds really wise and profound and makes all of us sort of cringe in self-examination. Or worse, causes us to look outward at “humanity” and think to ourselves, “Yes, all these people are living for tomorrow. They should slow down and live for the here and now. They should spend less time being greedy workaholics and hang out with their families more.”

And then it continues in much the same vein for another eleven paragraphs (twelve paragraphs, if you count the extended block quote from the pilot episode of "The Wonder Years"), heaping withering scorn on the Dalai Lama for disrespecting the workaday life the rest of us lead while he led "a life of celebrity."

Readers eventually pointed out the attribution error in the comments section, although the post itself appears to stand as originally published in 2011, despite the large, Lama-shaped hole blown clean through the middle of it.

Oddly, though, the author cast references to the object of his derision in the past tense, suggesting that he might have been unaware that the man who didn't actually say the things he found so offensive hadn't actually died, either – in fact, he turned 80 on the 6th of July this year.

Update: And while we're at it, here are a list of things I meant to include that George Carlin never said, either.

*Acknowledgment is made of the works of The Firesign Theatre.

That moment when -- you know

My local coffee shop has had the music set on SiriusXM's "Coffee House" channel -- all emo-acoustic covers of pop standards, all day, all night -- for over a week.

I had a two-hour writing session there yesterday, and by the end of it, I was here:

Thought for the day: FIFA and HHGG

If Sepp Blatter, dreadful human being and corrupt president of FIFA, had not existed, would it have been necessary for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams to have invented him?

He certainly has a name that fits in the list of minor HHGG characters, most of whom were daft as loons and many of whom were cynical, grasping, and avaricious on at least a planetary scale. Consider:

• Gag Halfrunt
• Max Quardlepleen
• Oolon Colluphid
• Blart Versenwald
• and – of course – Zaphod Beelblebrox.

Really, even in a competition like that, can "Sepp Blatter" – which sounds like a bad transcription of "septic bladder" – be far out of the lead?

“As Gregor Samsa awoke in the recovery room from uneasy dreams . . . "*

So this is happening:

All big ideas start somewhere. With that in mind, undergraduate engineers at the University of Pennsylvania are starting with cockroaches.

They’re experimenting with different ways to control the insect’s legs after they’ve been amputated. Think voice commands and brain waves.

It’s the type of technology shaping the next generation of human prostheses, and the assignment gives students the chance to channel their inner Dr. Frankenstein.

*It's the opening of my forthcoming existentialist/dystopian/sci-fi novel, tenatively titled The Transformer.  Contact my agent to negotiate film rights.

The unforgiving minute: Flubber

Here's a pro tip:

If you have to tell your readers that a particular word choice is (or isn't) intended as a pun, it's probably not much of a pun (or is simply careless writing) and should be left alone to do its job as best it can without prodding (or written out).

The writer who inserts "(pun/no pun intended)" is the rough equivalent of the late night host who deliberately flubs a joke so he can use all his carefully rehearsed ad libs.

The pun may be the lowest form of wit -- opinions vary -- but it is nevertheless a form of wit and should therefore be allowed to go about its work, however humble, without being upstaged by its own creator.

Minute's up.

"Kurt is up in Heaven now."

Kurt Vonnegut died eight years ago today. p3 is proud to honor his final request.

I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in Heaven now." That's my favorite joke.

Kurt Vonnegut,

A Man Without a Country

Great opening sentences: Hard-boiled edition

A friend recently got me started reading the novels of Roger Zelazny, who's been in the business since the Sixties. He started me out with the full collection of Amber novels, and he followed it up with A Night In The Lonesome October. I liked the Amber chronicles, although my favorite was the first of the ten (!) books, partly because of its noir – even Marlowe-esque – action and tone (which were quickly lost once it became a still-enjoyable, but no longer the same, dimension-shifting story of sword and magic). Lonesome October, on the other hand, will probably become my annual Halloween read. It's that good.

Zelazny also wrote the dreadful Damnation Alley early in his career (it was made into the barely-recognizable yet somehow even more dreadful movie of the same name starring Jan Michael Vincent and George Peppard).

But I tell you all that to tell you this: I'm currently reading Zelazny's The Dead Man's Brother, an ultrapulp mystery thriller written in 1971 but for whatever reason not published until 2009 (the fact that Zelazny died in 1995 could be a factor: Harper Lee, pick up the white courtesy phone; Harper Lee, the white courtesy phone, please).

And it begins with this sentence:

I decided to let him lie there, since he was not likely to bother anyone, and I went to the kitchen to make coffee.

As long-time readers know, I curate a small collection of classic first sentences, and this just made the list. So I figure that, however guilty, this will be a pleasure.

In fact, I think I'll put it in a display next to this little treasure.

Who's responsible for the Germanwings crash? You'll be surprised.

James Fallows of The Atlantic quotes "Adam Shaw, who has had a varied and interesting career as a writer and flyer and now leads an aerobatics team in Europe," on the causes of the Germanwings suicide/mass murder/crash last week. It includes this line:

And when people start looking for whom to blame, the answer is simple: Joe-six-pack who wanted a $99 flight from New York to L.A, or Pierre Baguette who wanted a 65-euro Paris-Casablanca … and the cynical bean counters who make this possible

"Joe Six-Pack's" fault? It is to laugh. Unless Joe's carrying on a six-pack of medium-priced Burgundy.

What about the expense-account business-class travelers (with six- or seven-figure frequent flyer mile totals) the airlines depend on for their bread and butter?

Or several generations of corporate union-busting directed against the people on the front lines of airline safety?

Or the next-quarter's-profits-obsessed, bonus-driven CEOs (who wouldn't dream of flying  commercial anyway)?

Yes, although the lowest-bidder fixation is a safety (and service) problem in the airline industry (just as it is throughout America's transportation infrastructure, public education, the food industry, etc.; but let's press ahead), to blame the problem on the customers who fly a couple of times a year and understandably don't want to pay a month's rent to do so is silly.

In fairness, Shaw's reply, which apparently came to Fallows as comment on an earlier post by the latter rather than as a publication in its own right, seems primarily focused on the pressures faced by commercial pilots to get flight hours and certification. So perhaps the culprit here is the copy editor for The Atlantic's web page, who skimmed over the bulk of Shaw's message to seize upon the thoughtless and proportionless -- but very click-baity -- "Joe Six-Pack" line, elevating it to the tag line for the entire Fallows post.

No! (Fifty days until the days start getting longer again)

No sun--no moon!
No morn--no noon!
No dawn--no dusk--no proper time of day--
No sky--no earthly view--
No distance looking blue--
No road--no street--no "t'other side this way"--
No end to any Row--
No indications where the Crescents go--
No top to any steeple--
No recognitions of familiar people--
No courtesies for showing 'em--
No knowing 'em!
No traveling at all--no locomotion--
No inkling of the way--no notion--
"No go" by land or ocean--
No mail--no post--
No news from any foreign coast--
No Park, no Ring, no afternoon gentility--
No company--no nobility--
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member--
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds--
November!

- Thomas Hood (1844) (sometimes quoted by
Rumpole, the Old Bailey Hack, even though it
doesn't appear in his Quiller-Couch edition
of the Oxford Book of English Verse)