Aha Baha
by Linus, October 20th, 20041. Bow Wow. Woof Woof. In these jumpy aggressive times, so much information is classified, secretized, bowdlerized, villified, sanitized, qualified, glossed over and hidden from public view. But you can’t keep the Great Truths hidden forever.
Finally, the world can be told: who did let the dogs out, anyway? (Via Caren Lissner.)
2. Dare Not Speak the Name. I’m not good at waiting rooms in the best of times. Yesterday it was raining, and so it was not the best of times, Q.E.D.
I dandle about ’til the sonogram room frees up, and a September New Yorker issue comes to hand (by law and custom, all medical professionals these parts must have an old issue of the New Yorker on the premises). As one will in a waiting room, I page through, reading the cartoons and all the short bits.
Thus Running Mates, an extraordinary flight of fancy by Paul Rudnick, in which politics nearly makes strange bedfellows. It’s a tidy read — it ran a single page in the magazine — and I laughed out loud, the old-fashioned way. Partisan? Yes, but that doesn’t matter. It’s a love story, through and through.
3. Pop Quiz. As I respond to the changing season and the wet and chill with my customary brio, by getting an early cold, I’ve had some slow-moving home time to spend with a few DVD’s. The last two across the the transom: Best Laid Plans (1999, Mike Barker), which isn’t nearly as bad as the critics would have you believe (you have to love a movie filmed without the color blue — they had to build just about everything from scratch to pull this off), and Running on Empty (1988, Sidney Lumet).
I didn’t watch these movies back-to-back because the degree-of-separation link between them is so close, but as it turns out, it is. Connect the dots if you can, without resorting to databases. Anyone? Bueller?
3.1 P.S. Dear Internet: No, I do not want a fake Italian Rolex. Please stop asking.
