The Null Device

Writer David Sedaris writes about undecided voters:

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

I wonder if, in the end, the undecideds aren’t the biggest pessimists of all. Here they could order the airline chicken, but, then again, hmm. “Isn’t that adding an extra step?” they ask themselves. “If it’s all going to be chewed up and swallowed, why not cut to the chase, and go with the platter of shit?”

(via MeFi) ¶ david sedaris humour indecision metaphors politics quotations wit 0

This past week's Cat and Girl were rather good; starting off with sandwiches as metaphors, and culminating in a sandwich interpreted as a villanelle:

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Eyesore of the Month. Each month, James Howard Kunstler presents a photograph of a different architectural or urban-planning blight, accompanied by a brief and entertaining rant about the decline and fall of American civilisation (references to obese children, Prozac usage and "Car Park Nation" abound):

When your building has no meaningful relation with the public realm, the solution is to "export" the cartoons played within the house to the exterior. The neighborhood is then "populated" with recognizable, non-threatening figures. Once the installation is complete, the homeowner is released from any further obligation to public life, except to mow and trim the grass. The homeowner is then "free" to pursue a life devoted to television viewing. Such is life in the Home of the Brave.

The shark's head portion of this ensemble is probably its best feature -- putting aside any considerations of kitsch or "camp," ( that is, the love of vulgarity for its own sake.) No, what gets me, really, is the quality of the pink building behind Sharky. In a perfect world its function would be a poodle euthenasia center.

Here we have the old courthouse in Biloxi, Mississippi, (left) and its 1970s replacement (right) -- the sublime and the ridiculous. The old building is garbed in the architectural vestments of authority in decorum. The new courthouse invokes arbitrary bureaucratic despotism. Note to political economists: the building on the left came from a far less affluent society than the one at right.

¶ architecture humour sarcasm ugly usa wit 6

The winners in the nerve.com pickup line contest, with the usual ones like "I may not have gotten your virginity, but can I at least have the box it came in?", as well as a few more interesting examples:

He asked, "If you were offered the chance to have one year of perfect bliss, but you would have to forget everything at the end, would you take it?" I hemmed and hawed, asked technical questions. I finally said yes. He leaned in to whisper in my ear: "Well, you've already had your year of perfect bliss." I pricked with curiosity. "You were wonderful." He swore he made that up. I had gotten so into the mind game, it worked. He got the hookup.

And some of the lines put to the test. Can you guess the results?

¶ dating humour pickup lines sex wit 0

A collection of amusing epitaphs and witty obituaries: (via A&L)

Or "Joe" Carstairs, the woman who owned and ruled an island in the British West Indies, which she dotted with signs such as: "I eat brown rice in preference to white. Therefore, if brown rice is good enough for me and my household, it is good enough or even too good for the people." Viscount Barrington, whose method of timing a boiled egg "was to recite a fixed number of the quatrains of Omar Khayyam."

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