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Fragments From Observations

Stopping for all rodents is the norm somewhere.


 
Fragments From Observations

I was in DC over the weekend for a Marine Corps reunion and discovered there are very few English speaking Americans around the Pennsylvania Avenue monument district. Sirens and flashing lights go off constantly. There are bomb gates and police everywhere, and in front of the White House, I stumbled into a Muslim protest consisting of them screaming about how peaceful they are. In the end, I felt like an intruder in my own country, caught up in some surreal landscape like the last scene in the original Planet of the Apes where Charlton Heston sees the top part of the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the mud. It's a shock to find out that somewhere along the line that what you fought for has been given away.
 
How The Muslim Thing Works
"Muslim attempts to export their law into the West have become altogether direct. America has faced the same treatment as any domestic minority group has in the Muslim world. The gathering mobs had a very simple message, either prosecute blasphemy or face the mob. Obama chose to drag the Mohammed filmmaker to prison rather than face the mob. And so Islamic law was complied with, if not openly, but as a covert gesture that allowed both sides to save face. This has been the usual tactic adopted by Western governments that punish blasphemy as crimes against tolerance and social harmony."
Dan Greenfield
 
Describe Any Political Convention
"I did not, I could not anticipate the full insane spectacle of it at the time. No one could have. But I sensed that it would sound a lot like the heroin addict in the bed, shrieking at her parents, changing emotional pitches in a moment from hysteria to sweetness, turning on the momentary charm with the nurses, innocently assuring the staff that she was not a user. And it did. It was a lunatic addict festival with designs by LSD and math by cocaine addicts fresh from Wall Street and social programs from potheads."
Unknown
Nora Ephron
She was tough on others - her husband's marital transgressions were immortalized by the horndog spouse in "Heartburn," a man "capable of having sex with a Venetian blind" - and relentless about herself. She wrote openly about her difficult childhood, her failed relationships, her doubts about her physical appearance and the hated intrusion of age.
 
"We all look good for our age. Except for our necks," she wrote in the title piece from "I Feel Bad About My Neck," published in 2006. "Oh, the necks. There are chicken necks. There are turkey gobbler necks. There are elephant necks. There are necks with wattles and necks with creases that are on the verge of becoming wattles. ... According to my dermatologist, the neck starts to go at 43 and that's that."
 
 
 

 
 

 


 

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