Pope John Paul II created more saints than all his predecessors of the past several centuries put together, and he had a special affinity with the Virgin Mary. His polytheistic hankerings were dramatically demonstrated in 1981 when he survived an assassination attempt in Rome, and attributed his survival to intervention by Our Lady of Fatima: 'A maternal hand guided the bullet.' One cannot help wondering why she didn't guide it to miss him altogether. Others might think the team of surgeons who operated on him for six hours deserved at least a share of the credit; but perhaps their hands, too, were maternally guided. The relevant point is that it wasn't just Our Lady who, in the Pope's opinion, guided the bullet, but specifically Our Lady of Fatima. Presumbaly Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Medjugorje, Our Lady of Akita, Our Lady of Zeitoun, Our Lady of Garabandal and Our Lady of Knock were busy on other errands at the time.

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (56)

The next morning at the Stanford Court Hotel, where Jim's own court was held each day, I bandaged his feet (devastated by lack of circulation) giving his devoted servant Marion Cunningham a rest from her daily chore. His robe had been left open where it "fell," exposing a belly as vast as Yosemite's El Capitan, which swept down to reveal what he could have been proud to reveal were Jim not the exception to the rule that large fingers are also a measure of the family jewels. Jim did have very big hands. This was a morning ritual, exposure to which I had long since become familiar and with which I'd grown confortable over the years I'd known him. After a little fondle, we talked about my career, about Alice, about Marion, about Gourmet, saying it was fine not to make money. We talked about Delmonico's and the time, a hundred years earlier in New York, when the great restaurants listed the provenance of their ingredients on their menus. And about the great William Niblo in his Old Bank Coffee House in 1814 serving ingredients with their origins called out on the menu: "Bald Eagle shot on the Grouse Plains of Long Island." And The Four Seasons in New York, where Jim had consulted starting in 1959.

Jeremiah Tower, California Dish: What I Saw (and Cooked) at the American Culinary Revolution (100-101).

"When a nicely dressed gentleman would come in for lunch alone," remembered Claude Le Gall, "he told us to go out and check his car to see if the tires were Michelins. That wouldn't be proof, but it could be an indiciation, anyway. Sometimes, when we weren't sure which car he had come in, he would have us going through his coat pockets in the vestiare, to see if the keys might identify the car."

Rudolph Chelminski, The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine (151)

There was only one answer. The moment that followed was akin to the one in desert-island tales, when the poor shipwrecked souls decide they have to resort to cannibalism, or perish. We looked down into the pools of hollandaise sitting in those foot wells, those disgusting, fish-juice-stained foot wells, and without a word, we nodded to each other, solemnly acknowledging what must be done. That we each took a bucket, got down on out knees, and with cupped hands began bailing the hollandaise from the car floor back into the buckets. Glancing up at each other we knew that we had both come to the same unspoken decision - that as long as we didn't actually touch the unspeakable floor of Lake Hollandaise, dislodging its bacteriological horrors, we could live with ourselves.

Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, "Our Big Brake," in Don't Try This at Home, Kimberly Witherspoon and Andrew Friedman, eds. (212-13).

The weekend crowd embraced the Dean & DeLuca lifestyle so readily that it was sometimes more then the store's founders could handle. Their original counterman, the expert cheesemonger Steven Jenkins - who claims he was the first to apply the word "artisanal" to cheese - recalls a busy Saturday in the early years when a few staffers failed to show up, forcing a furious DeLuca to join Jenkins behind the counter. "It was total chaos, and Giorgio was slicing some preservative-free bacon, and he lopped off the tip of his thumb," Jenkins says. "He started cursing and rushed off to the clinic on Spring Street. Once he was gone, I decided to merchandise the piece of thumb, which still had fingernail on it. I put it on a little piece of marble in the display case with some rosemary and thyme and put up a sign that said 'Gaetano Crudo'"-crudo meaning "raw" in Italian, Gaetano being DeLuca's middle name. Fortunately, no one asked to taste the product, though Jenkins says a few people inquired as to "what the hell it was."

David Kamp, The United States of Arugula (207-08)

The grocery store was another great place to play the dating game. My mother always let me unload the cart, so I pretended all the groceries were going to a party. As the conveyer belt moved my mother's purchases to the cashier, I would match every food item up with his or her partner. Ketchup always went to the party with Mustard, of course. Aspirin went with Vitamins, Orange Juice loved Milk, and Spam had a thing for bologna whose first name was O-S-C-A-R. Produce items tended to stick with their own kind, but Lettuce was a rebel. She was dating Catalina French dressing in spite of the protestations of her sisters, the Roma Tomatoes, who thought Celery was a much better match for her. Lettuce would not be swayed and always attended parties with her French lover.

Todd Pozycki, "The Lives and Deaths of Buffalo Butt," in From Boys to Men, Ted Gideonse and Rob Wiliams, eds. (90)

"I'm a free-market advocate and a staunch libertarian," [Charlie Trotter] says. "I don't feel like I'm part of the New American cuisine movement. I have no tolerance for the left-wing embrace of food politics and things like that. I think you can support farmers' markets and that you don't have to do it with a Berkeley sensibility. Don't get me wrong - I'm not on the other end of the spectrum. But everybody who's against genetically modified foods and big corporate food production, I think they could be a little more open-minded in how they look at these things."

David Kamp, The United States of Arugula (328-39)

We were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in at every opportunity to "conceptualize." Hardly a decision was made without drugs. Pot, quaaludes, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms soaked in honey and used to sweeten tea, Seconal, Tuinal, speed, codeine and, increasingly, heroin, which we'd send a Spanish-speaking busboy over to Alphabet City to get. We worked long hours and took considerable pride in our efforts - the drugs, we thought, having little effect on the end product. This is what the whole life we were in was about, we believed: to work through the drugs, the fatigue, the lack of sleep, the pain, to show no visible effects. We might be tripping out on blotter acid, sleepless for three days and halfway through a bottle of Stoli, but we were professionals, goddamnit! We didn't let it affect our line work. And we were happy, truly happy, like Henry V's lucky few, a band of brothers, ragged, slightly debauched warriors, who anticipated nothing less than total victory - an Agincourt of the mind and stomach.

Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential (123-24)

At half-past eight the work stopped very suddenly. We were not free till nine, but we used to throw ourselves full length on the floor, and lie there resting our legs, too lazy even to go the the ice cupboard for a drink. Sometimes the chef du personnel would come in with bottles of beer, for the hotel stood us an extra beer when we had had a hard day. The food we were given was no more than eatable, but the patron was not mean about drink; he allowed us two litres of wine a day each, knowing that if a plongeur is not given two litres he will steal three. We had the heeltaps of bottles as well, so that we often drank too much - a good thing, for one seemed to work faster when partially drunk.

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (65)

I didn't know what to say. My boss was telling me that, to do my job, I now needed to go home and have sex. It has already been a long, long day of carnalities. The meat truck was arriving in a few hours. It seemed unlikely that I had the stamina for more carnality and making butcher love to my wife for the rest of the night and reporting for work before dawn with no sleep. Maybe I didn't have the constitution for this life after all. But, you know, I did the best I could. I didn't want to let the guild down.

Bill Buford, Heat (249)

Hengist and Horsa, two brothers, possessed great credit among the Saxons, and were much celebrated both for their valour and nobility. They were reputed, as most of the Saxon princes, to be sprung of Woden, who was worshipped as a god among those nations, and they are said to be his great grandsons; a circumstance which added much to their authority. We shall not attempt to trace any higher the origin of those princes and nations. It is evident what fruitless labour it must be to search, in those barbarous and illiterate ages, for the annals of a people, when their first leaders, known in any true history, were believed by them to be the fourth in descent from a fabulous deity, or from a man exalted by ignorance into that character. The dark industry of antiquaries, led by imaginary analogies of names, or by uncertain traditions, would in vain attempt to pierce into that deep obscurity, which covers the remote history of those nations.

David Hume, The History of England: from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to The Revolution in 1688, Volume I (17)

This is what computer manuals looked like in 1961 (click to enlarge):



Paul Siegel, Understanding Digital Computers (205)

"Damnit, Bucky. Last time that goateed butterball was in here, he lectured me - me - for a full fifteen minutes on why I needed to intervene in that vegetable case down in Georgia. Christ in a refrigerator, that woman'd been in a coma for fifteen years. She had a flatter brain scan than a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian mummy. And he wanted me to issue an executive order to plug her back in. Who appointed Gideon fucking Payne the conscience of the nation anyhow? Hell, he killed his own goddamn mother, didn't he?"

Christopher Buckley, Boomsday (114)

At the same time, though, I have to confess that the thought crossed my mind, not once, but several times, that he might drown out there and, though I didn’t linger over this notion, I know that it didn’t bother me. I didn’t care about him, and I knew there was nothing that could connect me with his apparent accident. For that next hour or two, I felt elated at having done what I wanted to do and, if I gave thought to it at all, the only thing I was certain of was that, if Malcolm Kennedy drowned, I would be free of him. Not that I ever considered this a seriously possibility. He wouldn’t drown, because nobody drowned in a twelve-foot-deep pit of water, a few miles from the town.

John Burnside, "The Limeroom," in Granta 96: War Zones (41)

I should like to say for the record I am not a “Bonesman” or indeed a member of any of the exclusive “secret societies” – Book and Snake, Scroll and Key, Snake and Eggs, the Leatherstockingmen, the Yale School of Forestry, etc. Due to their open advocacy of cloak-wearing and their great windowless clubhouses known as “tombs” (many of them carved out of a single block of marble), these societies have prompted much fanciful speculation about bizarre masturbation rituals and hidden plans for world domination.

John Hodgman, The Areas of My Expertise (144)

A representative mid-nineteenth-century traditionalist was being asked to judge the work of a "wholly new" order of craftsman. His reply to the first letter (implied by her second letter to him – his letters do not survive) must have told her that the "Alabaster" poem lacked form, that it was imperfectly rhymed and its metric beat spasmodic, a judgment which would have been shared at the time by most of the fraternity of literary appraisers. The unorthodoxy of melodic pattern controlled by key words, wherein the parts express whole, the altering of metric beat to slow or speed the nature of time itself (the theme of the "Alabaster" poem), give it dimensions which he was not equipped to estimate. He was trying to measure a cube by the rules of plane geometry.

Thomas H. Johnson, editor; The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (vi)

You get that same beseiged fraternal feeling in a Republican campaign office. There is none of that M*A*S*H ensemble-cast witticizing one-upsmanship you get in the typical Democratic office full of young liberal arts grads. Nobody wears T-shirts that mean something, and nobody looks like an extra from the Czech set of XXX. As I would later find out, most Republicans hate "cool," particularly the older women ("They all think they're so cool and artistic," griped one woman as she watched Fox coverage of Democratic delegates arriving in Boston). Many of the parent-volunteers I met are especially bitter because they think that cool is what liberals use to lure their children away from their early convictions. Which they might very well be right about, of course.

Matt Taibbi, Spanking the Donkey (226)

Of course, I exaggerate [about the aesthetic trends of the 1970s]. At the time, everything seemed normal. Sure, things were a little...brown, a tad more orange than they'd been before. Yes, we knew our clothes were ridiculous when we wore them, but we all knew this wouldn't last. We'd all be nuked into a big long smear of red jam or dumped into a dystopian Soylent Green world, eating pressed wafers made of grandparents and kelp. Crank up the Foghat and get out the ZigZags, boys; let's live it up while we can. The '70s ended in 1977 with the Sex Pistols and New Wave; when college kids started wearing skinny ties and thrift-store Rat Pack jackets, they shot the '70s dead. The corpse remained standing and chatting for a few more years, but the battle was won. If you think the '70s were dumber than the '80s, either you weren't there or you weren't paying attention.

James Lileks, Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible '70s (10)

My favorite thing to buy is underwear. I think buying underwear is the most personal thing you can do, and if you could watch a person buying underwear you would really get to know them. I mean, I would rather watch somebody buy their underwear than read a book they wrote. I think the strangest people are the ones who send someone else to buy their underwear for them. I also wonder about people who don't buy underwear. I can understand not wearing it, but not buying it?

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (229)

I began staying late at the office. Until ten, eleven at night. I would have given both testicles and possibly an arm to see Uma stick her finger down her throat and then throw up a sandwich. Or maybe? Do something really Hollywood, like dump a bag of coke out on the coffee table and snort it up with a hundred-dollar bill. But none of this happened. The most exciting thing Uma ever did was to pick up the phone, read a script, or have a cigarette.

Augusten Burroughs, Possible Side Effects (152)

During the mid-1990s the recognized churches, particularly the Church of England, moved from the theology of sin and redemption to a less uncompromising doctrine: corporate social responsibility coupled with a sentimental humanism. Rosie has gone further and has virtually abolished the Second Person of the Trinity together with His cross, substituting a golden orb of the sun in glory, like a garish Victorian pub sign. The change was immediately popular. Even to unbelievers like myself, the cross, stigma of the barbarism of officialdom and of man's ineluctable cruelty, has never been a comfortable model.

P.D. James, The Children of Men

Galinda soaked up the architecture of Shiz. Here and there, mostly in protected college yards and side streets, the oldest surviving domestic architecture still leaned, ancient wattle-and-daub and exposed stud framing held up like paralytic grannies by stronger, newer relatives on either side. Then in dizzying succession, unparalled glories: Bloodstone Medieval, Merthic (both Least and the more fantastical Late), Gallantine with its symmetries and restraint, Gallantine Reformed with all those ogees and broken pediments, Bluestone Revival, Imperial Bombast, and Industrial Modern, or as the critics in the liberal press put it, High Hostile Crudstyle, the form propogated by the modernity-minded Wizard of Oz.

Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (75-76)

It had probably been a mistake to have sex with him but he was undeniably attractive in an average sort of corn-fed white boy way and he had caught her at a susceptible time. He was the average perfected, the ordinary made super-ordinary, the boy next door raised to the Platonic ideal of boy-next-doorness, and as a result you saw him on giant bilboards everywhere in that city dedicated to idealization, his flaxen hair and innocent eyes, his face free from history or pain, he wore alligator shirts here and Stensons there and his underpants in a third place and on all of the billboards he was wearing his super-averagely attractive, super-averagely goofy smile, his body glistening like a young god's, le dieu moyen, the average god of average folks, who had not been born or grown up or suffered life in any way at all, but had sprung like Athena fully formed from the aching head of some middle-of-the-road Zeus.

Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown (35)

Sat on the terrace. The Fatima, who steals food at an alarming rate, yesterday gobbled a large slice of hashish cake left purposefully in the cupboard. An hour or so later she fell silent and morose. Today she arrived two hours late and explained rather bleatingly that she had been malade. ‘That will teach you to eat my food you thieving bitch,’ I said with a cordial smile. ‘Oui monsieur,’ she said slinking into the kitchen. Because she came two hours late, she appeared to imagine that she should stay till three instead of one. At 2.30 I said ‘Fatima, you may go.’ I pointed to my watch. She didn’t understand. M. Yellow-jersey turned up as she was leaving. She looked very disdainful. I see her as having a towny accent and looking askance at Yellow-jersey’s countryfied manners.

Joe Orton, The Orton Diaries, edited by John Lahr (220)

The Night Shift was associated with murders. The hustlers who had killed the "Junk Food Professor" had been regulars. A police sketch of a Hispanic man was posted to the cashboxes; he had stabbed another patron to death. The populace of this "theater" was perpetually stoned on anything and everything - alcohol, grass, angel dust, MDA, acid, mescaline, Christmas Tree speed pills, and heroin-cocaine speedballs. Before it was padlocked by the Board of Health, the Night Shift was a cesspool of psychosis.

Bill Landis, Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger (245-46)

I think that the conclusion we must draw from this movie is obvious. All actresses should be lobotomized as soon as they are put under contract. It would save such a lot of anguish for them, for their agents and for their directors and, in spite of the surgeon's exorbitant fees, in the end it would save the studios a lot of money.

Quentin Crisp, How to Go to the Movies (47-48)

"Oh, judgemental and superior." Max says. He takes a bite of Pop-Tart and a swig of cold coffee. "To regard others critically and to feel that one's own situation, decisions, or actions are in some way more noble, or simply more comme il faut, than theirs, is one of the great satisfactions of a reflective life."

Paul Kafka-Gibbons, Dupont Circle (235)

George
...and try to keep your clothes on, too. There aren't many more sickening sights than you with a couple of drinks in you and your skirt up over your head, you know...

Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (17)

Often during this period in my life, to the embarassment of my hearers, I claimed that my whole existance was love. I meant that I was trying never to close my hand against anyone - even the unloveable (in dealing with whom I was having a great deal of practice). I would have placed at anyone's disposal my meager resources of money or advice or concern. Sometimes I fancied that all the elements of a golden age of universal well-wishing were already known and would become instantly effective when, as with the components of DDT, some genius combined them in their right order. I was always delighted with the slightest breakthrough in this field.

Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant (111)

"Let's see," Fiona said, paging through a thick book entitled Mushroom Minutiae, a word which here means "obscure facts." "It was in the table of contents - that's all I've read so far. It was about halfway through." She brought the book over to the table, and ran a finger down the table of contents while the Baudelaires leaned over to see. "Chapter Thirty-Six, The Yeast of Beasts. Chapter Thirty-Seven, Morel Behavior in a Free Society. Chapter Thirty-Eight, Fungible Mold, Moldable Fungi. Chapter Thirty-Nine, Visitable Fungal Ditches. Chapter Forty, The Gorgonian Grotto - there!"

Lemony Snicket, The Grim Grotto (101-102)

Here is a woman who is solely responsible for the brand image of Amtrak, our nation's flagship railroad, and she's wearing a tacky pantsuit from QVC and twelve-dollar shoes. She sat back in her chair like a trucker and complained. "Why the hell don't you talk about the new engines we got? We got all new engines on most of our trains. Why can't you say, 'Come aboard and experience our new engines.' Why can't you talk about that if you don't wanna talk about the price?"

Augusten Burroughs, Magical Thinking (56)

75. Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their empty lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.

Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (102)

Mrs Lavery, Edith’s mother, considered herself a bird of quite different feather to her spouse, fond as she was of him. Her own father had been an Indian army colonel but the salient detail was that his mother had been the great-niece of a banking baronet. Although kindly in many ways, Mrs Lavery was passionately snobbish to a degree verging on insanity and so her frail connection to this, the very lowest hereditary rank filled her with the warming sense of belonging to that inner circle of rank and privilege where her poor husband must ever be a stranger. Mr Lavery did not, for this reason, resent his wife. Not in the least. On the contrary he was proud of her. She was, after all, a tall, good-looking woman who knew how to dress and if anything he was rather entertained by the idea that the phrase 'noblesse oblige' (one of Mrs Lavery’s favourites) could have the slightest application to his household.

Julian Fellowes, Snobs (12-13)

Nina was conducting her comme il faut class. "Be careful who takes you to Ascot," she said, "because unless you have married a rich husband, he is probably a crook. Even if he's your husband, well ... Not many honest men can take four days off their work, dress themselves in a black suit and a silk hat with all the accoutrements, and lose a lot of money on the horses, and take you out afterward or join a party of people like him. For Ascot you will need warm underwear in case it's cold. You can wear a flimsy dress on top. But your man is bound to be a crook, bound to be. It teems with crooks ..."

Muriel Spark, The Finishing School (109-110)

It was Sambuca, though Bradley could barely focus on his face. The world was gray and faint. But he saw that Sambuca was grinning at him, revealing a row of yellow pointed teeth. And then Sambuca held up a knife so Ted could see it, and smiled again, and with two fingers grabbed the flesh of Ted's cheek and sliced it off with the knife.

Michael Crichton, State of Fear (533)

We have the pots, jewelry, and wall decorations of our ancient ancestors, and a few of their stories. We know nothing of the joys and sorrows of their family lives and care little for their political intrigues. Their faiths have disappeared or changed utterly; their science has been superceded. The things that mattered most to them have vanished. What remains is the superficial. It is how we know them. And when we too are dust, our descendants will have Rashid's curvy plastic trash cans.

Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style (191)

The entire repertory company went through a profound shock when David Lochary died in New York from complications of an angel dust overdose. David had never had a drug problerm until he discovered "dust," and for some reason he lost control. To this day I'm in favor of busting dealers who sell this crap. So if you're on the stuff, don't come around me, because I might call the police. David's death stunned Dreamland and made us realize a whole era in our lives had abruptly ended. At his wake we discussed the major influence David had had on our style and attitudes, and I knew that without my favorite leading man I had no choice but to make a film with all women stars.

John Waters, Shock Value (160)

Dwell's editor in chief preaches a pluralism that would sound strange to her forebears: "We think of ourselves as Modernists, but we are the nice Modernists. One of the things we like best about Modernism - the nice Modernism - it its flexbility." She tweaks the puritanical doctrines of Adolf Loos - "one crabby Modernist" - whose influential 1908 essay "Ornament and Crime" proclaimed decoration degenerate, the amoral indulgence of children and barbarians. To a contemporary reader, Loos sounds like a racist, pleasure-hating totalitarian. In the twenty-first century, ornament is not a crime. It is an essential form of human self-expression.

Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style (14)

But if you think about it, Santa Claus is directly responsible for heroin addiction. Innocent children are brainwashed into believing the first big lie their parents ever tell them, and when the truth finally hits, they never believe them again. All the stern warnings on the perils of drugs carry the same credibility as flying reindeer or fat men in your chimney. But I love Santa Claus anyway: All legends have feet of clay. Besides, he's a boon to the unemployed. Where else can drunks and fat people get temporary work? And if you're a child molester - eureka! the perfect job: clutching youngsters' fannies and chuckling away, all the while knowing what you'd like to give them.

John Waters, Crackpot (117)

Considering how often people in America inquire about the ethnic backgrounds of people they've just met, and considering that a kiss-me-I'm-Irish name like Hollahan invites the question, D.J. would have conversations like this over and over again all his adult life. He would come to hate us for for giving him such a green-beer-and-shamrocks last name. There were a couple of other family-name possibilities - Keenan, my middle name and also my other grandmother's maiden name; and Bunbaker, Terry's mother's maiden name. But Keenan presented the same "So you must be Irish" problem as Hollahan, and a name like Bunbaker could get a kid beaten up on the playground daily through grade school. With two gay dads and the name "D.J. Bunbaker," he would never get out of junior high alive. We might as well name him Liberace.

Dan Savage, The Kid (205)

All kinds of films could benefit. The producers of Porky's et al., pretend their films aren't made for dirty, filthy twelve-year-old lechers, but why not be honest and sponsor a circle-jerk for Cub Scout troops with the winner receiving a call girl for the night? If you want to be civic minded and publicize your newly installed handicap ramps, show The Crippled Masters, an honest-to-God karate film with two heroes - one has no arms, the other no legs. Everybody beats them up until one jumps on the other's shoulders, and together they become a killing machine.

John Waters, Crackpot (22)

Waters' relationship with Montgomery was disintegrating, and she returned to Baltimore halfway through the summer. He moved in with Sique, who lived in a tree fort owned by Prescott Townsden. The tree house had no roof or running water, and trees grew up out of the living room floor. The fort was partly made from an old submarine suspended in branches of a large oak. There were seperate units, connected by gangplanks and reached by a rope ladder. Waters lived in one "apartment" with Sique and her friend Flo; Mink lived in another with Channing Wilroy, a friend from Baltimore whom Waters had admired when Wilroy was a regular on The Buddy Deane Show, Baltimore's version of American Bandstand.

Robrt L. Pela, Filthy: The Weird World of John Waters (31)

Look. Folks. It's simple. If you have poor taste in decorating, don't go nuts in the entryway. Wait until your guests are inside before you spring something unusual on them. But, you say, doesn't that fabulous statuary look so right over by the door? It's an ancient Belgian God of Fertility or something. You can hang hats on the erection. Or use it for umbrellas! That's not the point. Most people don't want to encounter this sort of thing right away, if ever. Especially one that's been handpainted in such a unique fashion. Put it in the spare bedroom; it'll keep houseguests from lingering.

James Lileks, Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible '70s (20)

This is why God made alcohol. Though plenty of people, the guests at Bentham's, maybe Len - and Sherrie, for all he knows - probably think Swenson has had a drinking problem for quite some time, Swenson disagrees. But now is when a drinking problem would solve a lot of more serious problems. This is the moment for which God created drinking problems. Swenson watches the cases of wine empty, wrapping the world around him in Styrofoam, cushioning voices and objects as if for the shock of a move, a spongy buffer zone between Swenson and his life. Alcohol keeps him numb and paradoxically energized with an oddly pleasurable anger: white noise that drowns out the dangerous whispers of pain and fear and sorrow.

Francine Prose, Blue Angel (257-258)

Luckily, Lesbian Couple was angrier with Lesbian Single than they were with me. Lesbian Couple had let it be known on the Lesbian Grapevine that they had approached me about my sperm. Apparently, Lesbian Single knew they had dibs on my balls and had approached me anyway, fully aware that my balls had been spoken for. Add to this psychodrama the fact that Lesbian Single had once attempted to seduce half of Lesbian Couple away from the other half, and soon we were having meetings to process our anger and hurt feelings around those secondary issues, which delayed any further progress on processing our feelings around the primary issue, which was, as I understood it, the production of a human infant sometime before all three lesbians hit menopause.

Dan Savage, The Kid (31)

A few steps from the top, Swenson's able to read the title of her paperback, which is not, as he expected, the work of some trendy child author, but rather, Jane Eyre. She grasps the novel with talons lacquered eggplant purple, curling from fingerless black leather gloves studded with silver grommets. Her tiny hands - or perhaps their proximity to Charlotte Bronte's novel - give the gloves a prim Victorian decorousness. Otherwise her outfit is pure sci-fi unisex shitkicker. A streaked green and orange ponytail, spraying straight up from the top of her head, makes her look like a garish tasseled party favor.

Francine Prose, Blue Angel (33)

While much effort has been expended in the third world countries educating women into a range of options that does not limit their role merely to bearing children, well-off, educated, and indulgent American women are clamoring for babies, babies, BABIES to complete their status. They've had it all, and now they want a baby. And women over thirty-five want them NOW. They're the ones who opt for the aggressive fertility route; they're impatient; they're sick of being laissez-faire about this. Sex seems such a laborious way to go about it. At this point they don't want to endure all that intercourse over and over and maybe get no baby. What a waste of time! And time's awasting. A life with no child would be a life perfecting hedonism, a forty-something infertile woman said, now the proud owner of pricey twins. Even women who have the grace to submit to fate can sound wistful. It's not so much that I wish that I had children now, a travel writer said, but that I wish I had had them. I hate to fail at anything. Women are supposed to wish and want and not fail.

Joy Williams, "The Case Against Babies," from Ill Nature (94-95)

The work of a moment. And now, tonight, while Terence gamely grunts, while Miranda cracks him in her dappled thighs: I'll be up here chuckling about the things I didn't tell him, about her raw-liver kisses and her sweet-sherry tongue, about the ghostly smells that issue from her pouches and vents, about the underworld effluvia she leaves glistening on your sheets.

Martin Amis, Success (17)

The mania for speculation broke loose. Stock soared in three months from 128 to 300, and within a few months more to 500. Amid the resounding cries of jobbers and speculators a multitude of companies, some genuine and some bogus, was hatched. By June 1721 the South Sea stock stood at 1050. Robert Walpole himself had the luck to make a handsome profit on his quiet investments. At every coffeehouse in London men and women were investing their savings in any enterprise that would take their money. There was no limit to the credulity of the public. One promoter floated a company to manufacture an invention known as Puckle's Machine Gun, "which was to discharge round and square cannon-balls and bullets and make a total revolution in the art of war," the round missiles being intended for use against Christians and the square against the Turk. Other promoters invited subscriptions for making salt water fresh, for constructing a wheel of perpetual motion, for importing large jackasses from Spain to improve the breed of English mules, and the boldest of all was the advertisment for "a company for carrying on an undertaking of Great Advantage, but no one to know what it is." This amiable swindler set up shop in Cornhill to receive subscriptions. His office was beseiged by eager investors, and after collecting £2,000 in cash he prudently absconded.

Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: The Age of Revolution (110-111)

This madness goes on and on, but nobody seems to notice. The gambling action runs twenty-four hours a day on the main floor, and the circus never ends. Meanwhile, on all the upstairs balconies, the customers are being hustled by every conceivable kind of bizarre shuck. All kinds of funhouse-type booths. Shoot the pasties off the nipples of a ten-foot bull-dyke and win a cotton-candy goat. Stand in front of this fantastic machine, my friend, and for just 99¢ your likeness will appear, two hundred feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. Ninety-nine cents more for a voice message. “Say whatever you want, fella. They’ll hear you, don’t worry about that. Remember you’ll be two hundred feet tall.”

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories (46-47)