Great Showdowns: Dread Pirate Roberts vs Vizzini

-Scott C (more showdowns here)

Great Showdowns: Lady vs Birds

-Scott C (more showdowns here)

Great Showdowns: Frodo vs Gollum

-Scott C (more showdowns here)

Wet Laundry

A pudgy young man with slicked sandy hair appeared before them. Shaking his hand was like removing wet laundry from a washing machine.

-Christopher Fowler, Seventy-Seven Clocks, 67.

Camp Songs

*** This Fall I've committed to lead music for a once-a-week after-school kids' program at church (think VBS spread out over the school-year), and I've been all over the internet looking for new songs. These guys aren't terribly scriptural - okay, they aren't even slightly scriptural - but I am just delighted by their videos, and only wish there was something similar for goofy church music. (Totally a legit genre.) Speaking of which - do YOU have any favorite goofy church / camp songs? Leave a comment!

Word of the Day

Our house is in a hooroar, with the back kitchen all ripped to pieces for a face-lifting job, and we can't even find our way to the refrigerator without a compass. But I guess the dust will settle eventually.

-E. B. White, Letters of E. B. White, 446.

***

I must find some opportunities to work the word hooroar into my conversation. Perhaps when I have failed to read yet another critical work memo, I could casually remark that my email inbox is in a hooroar? Pretty sure I've also come across some hooroarific databases...

Nothing Special

You can map the lay of the land
Darling, you can describe the sad terrain
Let us survey all the borders
Sugar, don't it all still look the same?
And when you find there's nothing special
About that great big ole hole in your heart
Cause everybody's got one
Yeah with precious little time to talk about it

Nothing like the leaves round your front door
The stages and the pages
Yeah, you've been in love before
And the things you feel inside your bones
Those that won't leave you
Those that won't leave you
Those that won't leave you alone

-Bill Mallonee, "Nothing Like a Train"

News Flash!

According to the WSJ, Salman Rushdie will soon publish a sequel to Haroun and the Sea of Stories! (HATSOS being a really excellent adult-kid book, in the splendidly winsome tradition of The Phantom Tollbooth.) Read an excerpt from the new book here.

Fairer than Florence

If men loved Pimlico, as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

-G. K. Chesterton, quoted by Joey Pensak in a recent newsletter

Oh, How I'd Like to Be Queen, Pa

Oh, how I'd like to be queen, Pa,
And ride in my kerridge to Kew,
Wearing a gold crinoline, Pa,
And sucking an orange or two.

Oh, how I'd like to be queen, Pa,
Watching my troops at review,
Sucking a ripe tangerine, Pa,
And sporting a sparkler or two--

With slippers of crimson shagreen, Pa,
And all of my underclose new!

-Joan Aiken, Dido and Pa, 20-21.

Many Sounds But No Noises

It was a beautiful September evening, windless, very peaceful. The park and the old, cream-painted houses facing it basked in the golden light of sunset. There were many sounds but no noises. The cries of playing children and the whir of London's traffic seemed quieter than usual, as if softened by the evening's gentleness. Birds were singing their last song of the day, and farther along the Circle, at the house where a great composer lived, someone was playing the piano.

-Dodie Smith, The Hundred and One Dalmatians, 8.

Dear Diary

When I was young and full of beans, I used to keep a diary, only I called it a "journal" to make it sound more impressive. I wrote in it so steadily and over so many years that it is eight inches thick and contains probably the world's finest collection of callow and insipid remarks.

-E. B. White, Letters of E. B. White, 445.