<= 2001.01.23

2001.01.25 =>

one was magenta the other was blue

If I don't watch it, this is just going to turn into a repository for Chris Offutt quotes. Yesterday, attacking onomatopoeia in literature:

There's no point in using the word "quack." What is that? Nothing else quacks but a duck, and they don't quack, they make duck sounds.

Here's a small collection of Japanese onomatopoeia, which is much more comprehensive than English (e.g., sounds for "walking" and "a screwed up situation"). This list does, however, omit crucial sounds such as sticks breaking (poki), the squeezing of women's breasts (momi-momi), and the female figure in general (bon-kyu-bon).

On to week two of a diet without beef or any other mammal flesh because, hey, no sense in doing things by half measures. It seems to be going well. I do feel queasy and dizzy a lot of the time, but I think that was happening anyway. I desperately need to find more creative things to do with chicken. At one-thirty this morning a group of young men wandered into my parking lot and started screaming in unison:

Runaway train, never coming BACK!
Wrong way on a one-way TRACK!
Seems like I should be GETTING SOMEWHERE!
Somehow I'm neither HERE nor THERE!
[repeat]

Excerpt from Edward Hooper's The River, theorizing that AIDS may have begun with 1950s polio vaccinations in the Belgian Congo. It's kind of long and the prose is a little overcooked (there are also quite nasty descriptions of people dying), but it's a provoking idea.

Why do you give a tanker a cute name like "Jessica" when you know it'll just go and do something like this? Someone needs to keep these things in mind.

Today's spark of brilliance from the time.com message board:

I am frustrated that members of the Democratic party is hanging on to killing babies, before they are born. I can see why most Democrats voted Republican.

 

<= 2001.01.23

2001.01.25 =>

up (2001.01)