On a sunny Sunday two weeks ago, a man wearing only a condom leaped out of the bushes along a nature trail in New Jersey and accosted a woman jogging. The jogger turned out to be a police officer and, officials said yesterday, the man turned out to be a vice president of J. P. Morgan Chase.
And there you have it, folks: the best lead paragraph in the history of journalism.
Friday Faggotry
If you’re one of the three people who’ve heard me sing (hey, I thought I was alone in the house), you may find this hard to believe, but my sister has landed a record deal! Don’t believe me? Check her short list of music samples, her interview in MookyChick, or her kickin’ animations. Catch her now before she completes her ascent to the top of the Top-40 food chain….
Apart from putting on their make-up at [subway] stations, young Japanese have adopted such “vices” as swinging umbrellas, eating in public and crossing their legs on the subway. While these are minor sins elsewhere, in Japan they are being taken with the utmost seriousness.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has taken the step of convening a commission of eminent experts known, without a hint of irony, as the Study Group Relating to the Prevention of Behaviour that Causes Discomfort Among Numerous People in Public Places [emphasis totally mine].
For the record, I’m not a Star Wars fan. I mean, yes, when I was a kid, I went to see the first one–knowing absolutely nothing about it–and I had a good time. I was even inclined to plunk down the five or six bucks to see The Empire Strikes Back when it came out a couple of years later. Since then, though, I’ve steered clear of Monsieur Lucas’ saccharine, moralistic oeuvre, and unless I’m hungover on the sofa and the remote stops working just as I’m clicking past Attack of the Clones or whatever, I have no intention of sitting through his work in the future.
That said, my friend Jim did come up with an amusing list of names you’re unlikely to see in a Star Wars film. My favorites:
- Darth Crabby
- Darth Finicky
- Darth Nauseous
- Darth Twinkles
- Darth Jeff
- Darth Tubby (“Um…I ate it….”)
- Darth Jemima
- Darth Dennis
- Darth Studious (“Love to join the boarding party, fellas, but it’s a school night.”)
To which I’d add:
- Darth Betty
- Darth Yolanda
- Darth Shequida
- Darth Boom-Boom
- Darth Julio
- Darth Britney
- Darths Ira & Gladys Finkelstein
- Darth Natty Bumpo
- Darth Cuddles
- Darth Foxy
- Darth Rod
- and of course, Darth Pussy Terwilliger
Sex offenders get Viagra paid for by Medicaid
— CNN
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
There’s a style of writing I loathe. Well, it’s not really a whole style, it’s more like a scene or a theme. Sometimes you see it in novels, but I think it’s more common in film and theatre. It usually takes the form of a hocus-pocus stoner revelation. It’s meant to be a quiet moment, but it screams “clunky emotional climax,” and it almost always has a cheap payoff later on.
I’m not explaining myself very well. Gimme a sec….
Well, I’ve just spent a quarter of an hour looking for a good example of the crap I’m talking about, but of course I can’t find one, so I’m gonna have to make one up. It goes something like this:
SENSITIVE ROMANTIC TYPE: (In a darkened study overlooking Central Park) On the news the other day, I saw where explorers in the Arctic discovered a pocket of bacteria growing under the ice shelf. It’s all new ones–new kinds of organisms no one knew about. A huge colony, too, about the size of Canada…. Miles and miles of these tiny little creatures living under the ice. We don’t know about them, and they don’t know about us. We drink the same water, breathe the same oxygen, get energy from the same sun, but we have no idea the other exists…. Spaniards and Aztecs, all over again.
or
GANGLY SOCIAL OUTCAST: (Sitting, legs splayed across the hood of a rusty Dodge Dart as prom music wafts over from the dimly lit gymnasium) For Mrs. Bergen’s class I did this report on wildlife in Australia…. Did you know that in the Outback, the Australian desert, there are these riverbeds? They’re totally dry. They get rain maybe once every ten years or so. And when they do, when they get rain, they fill up for about a week, and you know what’s weird? They’re full of stuff. Right after it rains, you can find, like, fish and frogs and all. The sand is full of eggs, eggs that can last for years and years, until one day they get water, and poof! Then they live their whole lives in a week: seven days to be born, find a mate, lay more eggs, and die. Ten years later, the whole thing repeats, but with new fish and frogs…. My mom proofread it and thought the whole thing sounded depressing and kinda pointless. But me, I like it. I like the thought of having just a week to do everything you need to do. At least there’s a sense of urgency and importance. I mean, in a life like that, if you’re a frog and you’re lazy and you don’t mate, a decade later, there’s not going to be any frog babies…. It shouldn’t matter if you live a week or 99 years, as long as there’s something there to wake you up.
or
CRIMINAL WITH A HEART OF GOLD: (Beside a campfire, beneath a canopy of stars) You know when them computers track your fingerprints and stuff? When the FBI or the police or whoever scans their files for a match? Well, what they’re looking for is this pattern…. Look at your thumb: you see all them little lines? How some of ’em split in two and some of ’em dead-end? Well, the computer makes a mark every time they do, and that’s what they’re looking for. They ain’t interested in the whole shape, the just wanna see those points, those marks, and the shape they make. They connect all those little dots, and then they have this shape, and that’s your shape and no one else’s. It’s like a little constellation on each of your fingertips and each of your toes. Twenty knots of stars in one body…times the six billion people in the world–that’s 120 billion galaxies right here on Earth.
Sloppy and lazy, that’s what it is. It’s the kind of writing that shouts, “I’m deep, and I read Scientific American.” So totally fired.
I am such a freaking wuss. How big of a wuss, you ask? Last night, Jonno and I dashed Uptown to a wingding celebrating a friend’s new album and his [momentary] return to New Orleans, and after lil’ ol’ two beers, I could barely hold my head up. Midway through the performance, I had to slip out so I could come home and crash. This was not a late-night affair, people–this was for 8:00pm.
In all fairness, though, I have been working like a D-O-G dog on a massive event that happens ce soir. And I’ve been running back and forth to Baton Rouge more than usual. And–omigoddess, this is maybe the gayest thing I’ll say all year week morning–my yoga teacher really kicked my ass a couple of nights ago. But still…two beers? My friends are so totally planning an intervention. At least I hope they are.
Sometimes I’m tempted to think of myself as a one-trick pony, except I’ve turned way more tricks than that.
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