"Thirteen Hundred Rats"

From the T. C. Boyle story in this week's New Yorker:

When he came back into the room, I thought at first that he’d slipped into some sort of garish jacket or cardigan, but then I saw, with a little jolt of surprise, that he was wearing a snake. Or, that is, a snake was draped over his shoulders, its extremities dangling beyond the length of his arms. “It’s a python,” he said. “Burmese. They get to be twenty-five feet long, though this one’s just a baby.”

I must have said something, but I can’t really recall now what it was. I wasn’t a herpetophobe or anything like that. It was just that a snake wasn’t what we’d had in mind. Snakes didn’t play fetch, didn’t bound into the car panting their joy, didn’t speak when you held a rawhide bone just above shoulder level and twitched it invitingly. As far as I knew, they didn’t do much of anything, except exist. And bite.

“So what do you think?” he said. His voice lacked enthusiasm, as if he were trying to convince himself.

“Nice,” I said.

Oh Doo Da Day

From Mark Halperin's blog via my brother (of course):

Hillary Clinton enthusiastically picked a filly named Eight Belles to win the Kentucky Derby and compared herself to the horse. Eight Belles finished second. The winner was the
favorite, Big Brown. Eight Belles collapsed immediately after crossing the finish line, and was euthanized shortly thereafter.

Missing the Train

The Subway Crush site might be new, but the experience -- and documentation -- of sudden strong feelings among underground commuters isn't.  This passage from Subwayland by Randy Kennedy describes the work of a man named Neil Goldberg, who would wait on subway platforms with a Sony handheld video camera for the sole purpose of filming the facial expressions of MTA passengers who missed their train:

Most interesting and striking in some of the 17 hours of footage Mr. Goldberg has taken so far is the way that commuters briefly let down their subway masks, allow their faces to register real emotion and then, realizing where they are, quickly bring the masks back up again.

"It makes it almost hard for me to watch sometimes," Mr. Goldberg said in his studio, where he will eventually distill the hours of recorded faces into probably five minutes of pure disappointment.  "Somehow, it's almost sad."

Midweek Shouts/Murmurs

This seems pretty Wednesday-appropriate to me.

Big Numbers

From The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol 1 on the number seven:

Seven is the largest prime number between zero and ten. Out of all the numbers, the very largest primes are still unknown. Still, every year, the very largest prime is larger. Euclid proved the number of primes to be infinite, but the infinity of primes may be slightly smaller than the infinity of the rest of the numbers. It is here, exactly at this point, that my ability to comprehend begins to fail.

A Real Shithole?

Something I had not considered about the city's new public toilets: Their rate of 25 cents for 15 minutes comes to $24/day and $720/month. Which is a total steal in this town! Especially for quarters The New York Times values at "more than $100,000" and calls "very spacious" (that's right, "one cannot touch the side walls with arms outstretched")! Still not convinced?

There are two architectural flourishes, both on the roof: a small pyramid of glass, like a little model of the Louvre, and an anachronistic metal stovepipe, reminiscent of a cozy shanty or an old outhouse with a crescent moon carved into the door.

A cozy little Louvre-shanty! This amusing video completely moves in on the idea (happily neglecting the fine print 15 minute time limit for restroom habitation). It's like From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler all growed up and adapted for YouTube!

Odd Couples

This short video from The New Yorker shows cartoonist Steve Brodner riffing on the idea that there's an adversarial partnership -- a cartoonish coupling, even -- in Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's rivalry. "They're not just competitors," says Brodner. "There's a kind of antagonism, there's a kind of tension between these two." Felix and Oscar? Homer and Marge? Ricky and Lucy? Convincing or not, it's a fresh train of thought (with countless possibilities). I for one think I'd like to sketch them as Calvin and Susie. Other ideas?

Losing Farther, Losing Faster

So, like lots of folks, early January finds me on something of a health food/exercise/weight loss kick. New York Sports Club's website has generated a series of slightly Spartan customized meal plans for me (eg, "snack: 20 small peanuts, 1 celery stalk") which I've been duly studying (though In Defense of Food looks like better reading material). In any case, I'm starting to suspect that I'm of Jonathan Lethem's ilk on dietary matters. "My tendency," Lethem says of his daily eating trajectory, "is to go from purity to decadence, like I'm reliving the fall of a great empire." Read his full chronicle of a week's meals -- hands down my favorite Grub Street "New York Diet" of all time -- in its entirety here. Watch out, Caligula!

Savage Love Does Disney Princesses

Sometimes Dan Savage is a bit much, but his response to this question about Disney princess panties is hilariously spot-on.  Read on if you'd like to find out how to subversively "deconstruct a patriarchal heteronormative discourse that reifies female purity" (while more or less naked); don't read on if sex columnists make you squeamish.

Humorless Hindu Huckabee Cartoon

Mike Huckabee says the darndest things. The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg writes:

A few weeks ago at Liberty University (founder: the late J. Falwell), a student asked [Huckabee] what accounted for his rocketing poll numbers. “There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one,” he said. “It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people—and that’s the only way that our campaign could be doing what it’s doing.” To an evangelical ear, that might sound like simple wonderment. But to many other people it sounded like the ravings of someone who thinks God is his precinct captain.

This Ted Rall cartoon (click to enlarge) addressing Huckabee's religiosity comes via the SAJAforum blog. I wouldn't call it atrocious or offensive (as some of SAJAforum's readers have) -- just unfunny. It doesn't really work. Because its humorlessness and inefficacy come from the failed Hindu/Christian Fundamentalism comparison (which doesn't make enough sense to provide the punch line it's going for), to me, the whole thing is just irritating. Is this supposed to be a sophisticated -- or persuasive -- critique of religious fundamentalism in the Republican Party? I'm all for calling attention to Huckabee's cartoonishness (there's definitely something to Hertzberg's observation that "his dimpled face looks interestingly like that of Wallace, of Wallace & Gromit") but to "What if Huckabee Were a Fundamentalist Hindu?" I say, meh.

Mongolian Helmet

This caption comes from a New York Times slideshow (emailed to me by mother) about Tibetan artifacts now on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

One helmet of Mongolian origin is so heavy with text and imagery that one imagines the wearer collapsing under the spiritual weight. Encircling the conical form are inscriptions offering protection from bad planets and stars, destructive demons, weapons, harmful ghosts and a host of other threats.

Leaden indeed.