August 2011
7 posts
Jack London on boxing and steak
All together, it was the face of a man to be afraid of in a dark alley or lonely place. And yet Tom King was not a criminal, nor had he ever done anything criminal. Outside of brawls, common to his walk in life, he had harmed no one. Nor had he ever been known to pick a quarrel. He was a professional, and all the fighting brutishness of him was reserved for his professional appearances. Outside...
John Lardner on Hell's Kitchen
Hell’s Kitchen, the region west of Eighth Avenue around the Forties, won its name many years ago and continued to deserve it until about the time the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed. Things are different there now. So its residents will tell you, and so you can see for yourself, if, having known the neighborhood a little during Prohibition, you visit it even briefly today. Once it was...
Johnny Cash on "A Boy Named Sue"
Well, I hit him hard right between the eyes And he went down, but to my surprise, He come up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear. But I busted a chair right across his teeth And we crashed through the wall and into the street Kicking and a’ gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer.
- Johnny Cash
David Simon from "Homicide: A Year On The Killing...
So where does that leave Barney Erely? And Orlando Felton? And Maurice Ireland? What was so wrong, so irrelevant, about them that they could end here beneath this wretched patch of country mud, wasted souls, with their city’s gleaming skyscrapers just close enough to mock them? Drunks, addicts, dope peddlers, numbers men, children born to the wrong parents, battered wives, hated husbands,...
Nicholas Schmidle on bin Laden's death
Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden’s life. The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye. On his radio, he reported, “For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.” After a pause, he added, “Geronimo...
David Simon on the Huffington Post
“The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing, is the day that I will be confident that we have actually reached some sort of balance.”
- David Simon putting you-know-who in her place.
http://www.thenation.com/article/david-simon-arianna-huffington-and-future-journalism
