Write By Me

Round-up of fine sentences, part 50

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 01:28:00 -0500

And a strange, rotten bit of fish it seemed to this new pack, though they, too, had been young in ‘72. They were in schools, or coming out to first jobs. They, too, had long hair, and tight pants over slender legs … and if sex were money, they all would have been rich.

- Richard Ben Cramer

Let’s stay here for a moment. We’ve got two children who’ve just taken a dagger. They don’t yank out the dagger. Someone might see it. Besides, if they leave it there, maybe nobody can put another one in. And so scar tissue begins to form around it. They don’t realize it, but the dagger soon becomes part of who they are. They end up protecting it, in a way, rather than pulling it out to look at it and learn about it. They end up dedicating their lives to hiding it-strategizing, lying, manipulating others to make sure their eyes go somewhere else: to the strong, smart, confident, golden children they both seem to be. Fabricating who I thought I should be, R.A. would say later, and trying to live up to that.

- Gary Smith in SI

I find Lance Armstrong reprehensible for having passed off fiction as documentary. Two dear friends of mine had their bodies sliced up, pumped with chemicals and radiated, but they still wasted away before my eyes and died, the disease feasting on their bones like soft fruit, flooding their lungs, robbing them of their voices and keen intellects and finally stopping their generous hearts. I am and will always be more moved by the bravery they demonstrated while losing than I would ever be by the amoral celebrity who “beat” cancer.

- Bonnie Ford

Jack got a burst of energy every time he touched the ball. No matter what the defenders did, they just weren’t there. Faith Baptist was double- and triple-teaming him. He was calm. He was apart from himself, and the numbers. But he knew what he wanted. He wanted to score. Everything felt very slow, and he began not to worry about making or missing. He just wanted to shoot, and deal with the numbers later.

- Justin Heckert

A few minutes later, Schrader yelled cut. The crew packed up. Pope went to check on Lohan. He noticed that she and Gavin had been drinking, which was understandable for a young woman shooting a sex scene with three porn stars. Quietly, Pope told Lohan that he could get her a driver to take her home. But she refused, jumped into her Porsche and headed down the dark, narrow road toward the P.C.H. They all hoped they would still have a lead actress in the morning.

- Stephen Rodrick

I sometimes imagine that death might be more tolerable if I passed away in my sleep, although the reality is, no form of dying is acceptable to me with the possible exception of being kicked to death by a pair of scantily clad cocktail waitresses.

- Woody Allen

This is the Murray of legend—punkish, confident, a modern incarnation of a line that stretches from Puck and Pan to Brer Rabbit and Groucho. (Or as Harold Ramis, his longtime, sometimes estranged collaborator and friend, once described it to me, “All the Marx Brothers rolled into one: He’s got the wit of Groucho, the pantomimic brilliance and lasciviousness of Harpo, and the Everyman quality of Chico.”) It’s the Murray whose on-screen persona seems undivorceable from his exploits off. And it’s the Murray frankly idolized by men who were a certain age when he was in his prime, men not overly blessed with good looks, wealth, or athletic prowess, for whom the actor seemed to have sprung forth, as surely as John Wayne, with an alternative blueprint for manhood: self-possessed, on the side of good, exquisitely capable of making one’s way through the world.

- Brett Martin

We break the earth. For energy, for water, for resources. Coal. Oil. Gas. Silver. Gold. Salt. Even chalk. We break the earth for all of these things. We always have.

- Tom Chiarella

Speaking in a gravelly mixture of urban slang and old-fashioned street-crime lingo, he told us that he was born in Memphis but grew up in Chicago, where, at age thirteen, he learned how to pick pockets at what he called “whiz school,” under the tutelage of two local cannons named High Pocket and Finger Wave Dave. “I been playing since I was knee-high to a shit-ball,” he said. “At first, I was a moll buzzer. I used to play in the ghetto. Then I started playing Skokie, then I started playing downtown in the Loop. They got Shot-Jims down there, and if you can play at that level and beat a chump, right there on the corner in front of they face—believe me, you can play.” (Rough translation: “I started out stealing from women’s purses in my neighborhood, and then I started to ply my trade downtown, where I got so good that I was able to steal wallets out of men’s jacket and pant pockets even under the eagle eye of undercover police officers trained in the ways of my profession.”)

- Adam Green

You could call this desire — to really have that awareness, to be as open as possible, all the time, to beauty and cruelty and stupid human fallibility and unexpected grace — the George Saunders Experiment. It’s the trope of all tropes to say that a writer is “the writer for our time.” Still, if we were to define “our time” as a historical moment in which the country we live in is dropping bombs on people about whose lives we have the most abstracted and unnuanced ideas, and who have the most distorted notions of ours; or a time in which some of us are desperate simply for a job that would lead to the ability to purchase a few things that would make our kids happy and result in an uptick in self- and family esteem; or even just a time when a portion of the population occasionally feels scared out of its wits for reasons that are hard to name, or overcome with emotion when we see our children asleep, or happy when we risk revealing ourselves to someone and they respond with kindness — if we define “our time” in these ways, then George Saunders is the writer for our time.

- Joel Lovell

You know those monks who get really good at life and realize that life isn’t as fair and compassionate as they are? There are seemingly two options from there: End up on fire in a public square or get even quieter.

I’m not calling Kobe Bryant a monk. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m just asking you to think about it.

- Ben Collins

In turn, Cramer talked to me about writing. He flooded my office with knowledge on “depth of words,” the “gift of someone telling you his secrets or the secrets of others,” and why it is important to “strip the bull—— away from the people that we worship as heroes.” He loathed the casual use of that word. Hero. Not necessarily to tear them down but “to actually know them like we only thought we knew them in the first place.”

It was rapid-fire journalism school. “Write sentences that are absolute. … Don’t be afraid to ask open-ended questions that will put some of the thinking back on the reader. … Don’t deify this damn guy; humanize the hero!”

- Ryan McGee

Taylor was leg-whipped during a game once in Washington. Happens all the time. Common. He was sore and had a bruise, but the pregame Toradol and the postgame pain medicine and prescribed sleeping pills masked the suffering, so he went to dinner and thought he was fine. Until he couldn’t sleep. And the medication wore off. It was 2 a.m. He noticed that the only time his calf didn’t hurt is when he was walking around his house or standing. So he found a spot that gave him relief on a staircase and fell asleep standing up, leaning against the wall. But as soon as his leg would relax from the sleep, the pain would wake him up again. He called the team trainer and asked if he could take another Vicodin. The trainer said absolutely not. This need to kill the pain is what former No. 1 pick Keith McCants says started a pain-killer addiction that turned to street drugs when the money ran out … and led him to try to hang himself to break the cycle of pain.

- Dan Le Batard

At the end of “Clouds,” the script flashes back to the scene of the fall, where, upon closer inspection, Guy manages to grasp the hand he leapt for and “watches his lifeless body fall to the concrete below.” Another hand “emerges” and pulls Guy up.

The script continues:

VOICE (heavenly)

“Welcome. We’ve been waiting for you.”

Guy emerges into the cloud. Fade to white.

- Greg Bishop

Decades later, the operators say, the images are vivid. The slender fellow in the jacket and tie, bending his knees at the platform’s edge. The reveler stumbling on the tracks at dawn, wobbly in her evening best, unable to stagger away in time. An arm reaching up, hopefully, then disappearing in a flash.

“As cruel as it makes it sound, for the individual it’s over,” said Curtis Tate, a former operator whose train struck and killed a man in 1992. “It’s just beginning for the train operator.”

- Matt Flegenheimer

I didn’t know it then, but Cramer was one of those few writers, one of those few people, who change everything, and influence scores of people — some extraordinary writers and tons of imitators — in their wake. He wrote with all of the verve and inventiveness of Wolfe, but whereas Wolfe was not above keeping a contemptuous distance from his subjects, Cramer inhabited his people, body and soul. No one had ever humanized on the page they way Richard did. No one.

- Mark Warren

Now it was no hobby: Ted fished harder and fished more than any man around. After his divorce from Doris, he’d made his home in Islamorada, bought a little place on the ocean side, with no phone and just room for one man and gear. He’d wake before dawn and spend the day in his boat, then come in, maybe cook a steak, maybe drive off to a Cuban or Italian joint where they served big portions and left him alone. Then, back home, he’d tie a few flies and be in bed by 10:00. He kept it very spare. He didn’t even have a TV. That’s how he met Louise. He wanted to see a Joe Louis fight, so Jimmy took him to Lou’s big house. Her husband was a businessman from Ohio, and they had a TV, they had everything. Lou had her five kids, the best home, best furniture, best car, and best guides. Though she wasn’t a woman of leisure, she was a pretty good angler, too. She could talk fishing with Ted. Yes, they could talk. And soon, Lou would have a little money of her own, an inheritance that she’d use to buy a divorce. She wanted to do for herself, she said. And there was something else, too. “I met Ted Williams,” Louise said. “And he was the most gorgeous thing I ever saw in my life.”

- Richard Ben Cramer

Round-up of fine sentences, part 49

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 16:26:00 -0500

These are culled from John Branch’s excellent piece Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, which is must-read stuff.

At the bar, Rudolph mentioned an idea to a few people: Tunnel Creek on Sunday. Invitations traveled in whispers and text messages, through a knot of friendships and slight acquaintances.

The flames in the fire died to orange embers. The last beers were sipped empty, and people slipped into the night. The campers were blanketed with snow.

It was about 11:45. The storm had passed. A low, pewter sky hid the surrounding peaks. Castillo glanced around at the others, wearing helmets and rainbow hues, a kaleidoscope of color amid the gray surroundings, like sprinkles on vanilla ice cream.

Across the meadow, above Jack, loose snow seemed to chase him down the hill and out of sight.

Not everyone saw it. A couple did. They caught it in their peripheral vision and were unsure what to make of it.

A few hundred yards down the mountain, a ghostly white fog rushed through the forest.

She had no control of her body as she tumbled downhill. She did not know up from down. It was not unlike being cartwheeled in a relentlessly crashing wave. But snow does not recede. It swallows its victims. It does not spit them out.

Jack’s phone chirped. It had survived the avalanche, and Pankey reached into Jack’s pocket and pulled it out. It was a text message from Jack’s girlfriend, Tiffany Abraham. Rumors of a big avalanche in Tunnel Creek had reached the base area of Stevens Pass.

“Where are you?” it read. “You OK?”

“He said Johnny was one of the people buried,” Brenan said. “‘He didn’t make it.’ I didn’t want to believe it. I said, ‘Have you seen him?’ He said no. I said: ‘Then you don’t know. It’s possible he’s not there. You go back and get more information because that is wrong. Go. Go find him. You’re wrong.’ I remember thinking: He’s got two kids. This was for fun. Johnny doesn’t leave his responsibilities. Ever.”

Round-up of fine sentences, part 48

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 03:40:00 -0500

Crennel raised both his hands, pleading with Belcher to put the gun down. “You’re taking the easy way out!” Crennel yelled.

Belcher glanced at an approaching police officer , then knelt behind a minivan, made the sign of the cross on his chest with his left hand and fired a bullet into his head above his right ear. After the gunshot, Crennel slumped, dropped his hands and turned away from Belcher.

- Christine Vendel

So began the moment that must be high in any appreciation of Larry Merchant. We’ll get to the rest of it. How a kid from Brooklyn plays football in Oklahoma … how he helps revolutionize sports writing … how he wishes Vitali Klitschko were a Montana cowboy … how he asks Nelson Mandela the question every honest fight reporter must answer for himself. We’ll get there after this moment with Mayweather, for in this moment we see everything important about the most important television commentator in boxing history.

- Dave Kindred

I’ve treasured the tips that arrive from all quarters: police officers, social workers, nurses, business leaders. I’ve treasured the people who have invited me into their homes and their lives. I’ve treasured the opportunity to point out the ridiculousness of exorbitant corporate salaries and uptight suburbs. I’ve treasured most of all giving voice to those who might not otherwise have it: the dying gas station attendant in Cambridge beloved by his customers who paid to fly his body home; the Mattapan mother who faced foreclosure years after her son was shot and paralyzed. Readers stopped that from happening.

- Brian McGrory

The shot crumpled Pacquiao (54-5-2) to the canvas, right in front of Bob Arum, his promoter, who held his hands out as if he wanted to catch his prized fighter in his arms. Pacquiao’s wife, Jinkee, held her face in both hands and cried. It took her husband several minutes to rise, and when he did, his face was bruised under both eyes, which were vacant. He looked lost.

- Greg Bishop

Nobody warned Wu, or prosecutors, or the public. The petite, 46-year-old woman learned Chen was still here when he stormed into her unlocked apartment one day in January 2010 and announced, “I bet you didn’t expect to see me.” Terrified, she called the police, and he fled. But for two weeks, Chen was free to stalk her and finally, to catch her as she hurried home with milk and bread one afternoon.

Chen then finished what he had started earlier, bashing Wu on the head with a hammer and slashing her with a knife. As she lay crumpled in a grimy stairwell, he ripped out her heart and a lung and fled with his macabre trophies.

- Maria Sacchetti

As Clarett wraps up, there are audible gasps and a few whispered “holy shit”s in the room. Some of the coaches stare at Clarett with stunned, almost fearful looks on their faces. There is a brief silent pause as Clarett sits down. Then the players and coaches slowly disperse.

- Monte Burke

In death, on her bathroom floor, Dr. Chang’s face looked as if she were napping before her morning-court appearance. She wore a silky floral blouse paired with a black jacket. Her hair was neatly coifed. Her lipstick and rouge looked freshly applied, not at all smudged. There was barely a hint of anything askew, save for the shiny wire coiled around her throat like a necklace.

- The New York Times

He muted his on-court celebrations. He cut the jokes in film sessions. He threw heaps of dirt over the tired notion that he froze in the clutch. “He got rid of the bulls—-,” says one of his former coaches, and he quietly hoped the public would notice. When James strides into an opposing arena, he takes in the crowd, gazes up at the expressions on the faces. “I can tell the difference between 2010 and 2012,” he says. Anger has turned to appreciation, perhaps grudging, but appreciation nonetheless. James has become an entry on a bucket list, a spectacle you have to see at least once, whether you crave the violence of sports or the grace, the force or the finesse. He attracts the casual fan with his ferocious dunks and the junkie with his sublime pocket passes. He is a Hollywood blockbuster with art-house appeal.

- Lee Jenkins

You see the smile. What you don’t see are the seven tattoos, high on his arm and shoulders so they’ll be hidden by a shirt, the ink of his grief. There is a tattoo for the deaf mother who was ordered to relinquish custody when he was a child. There is a tombstone tattoo for the brother who was murdered by a rival gang who shot him five times in the back. There is a praying hands tattoo for, among other things, the brother who is serving time in a Mississippi jail for attempted murder.

“People say things happen for a reason; well, I’m not trying to hear all that,” Lee said. “I don’t care about any reasons, some things just shouldn’t happen.”

- Bill Plaschke

Manziel denied he had been drinking but was taken to jail. The next day, his father picked him up, sold the car and replaced it with a busted pickup truck that would repeatedly break down on the way to school. He refused to pay the fine for his son, and when the judge sentenced Manziel to 10 hours of community service, John Paul said: Make it 20.

- Tim Rohan

This is the moment it becomes clear: Regardless of how Easley or any of the replacements handle this, or seem to handle it, they unknowingly sacrificed themselves and their reputations so that the NFL machine could keep running. As the regular season winds down, they are mostly forgotten. But in towns like this, in school buildings and offices, in communities and churches, men like Easley are left to search for normality even in the places they call home.

- Kent Babb

Grabbing the check for once, I confessed that I’d long felt a measure of guilt about the extra burden I’d confronted him with, the added struggle.

He shook his head: “I almost think I love you more for it — for being what you are rather than what was expected of you.”

- Frank Bruni

In headier days, Ed Kennedy personified the hard-drinking, hard-charging war correspondent of another era. The first time his future wife saw him, he was sidled up to a hotel bar in Paris with none other than Ernest Hemingway, both of them so “dead drunk” they could hardly stand.

- Manuel Roig-Franzia

Round-up of fine sentences, part 46

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 06:36:00 -0500

First, he killed his mother.

- AP

In the library, three faculty members heard the noises and hustled about 15 students toward a storage closet in the library, which was filled with computer servers. “Hold hands. Be quiet,” one teacher told the kids. One child wondered if pots and pans were clanging. Another thought he heard firecrackers. Another worried an animal was coming to the door.

They were children in a place built for children, and the teachers didn’t know how to answer them. They told them to close their eyes and to keep quiet. They helped move an old bookshelf in front of the door to act as a makeshift barricade. They wondered: How do you explain unimaginable horror to the most innocent?

- Eli Saslow

Officers found the children during the initial, rushed search of the building for survivors.

“Finally, they opened that door and there were seven sets of eyes looking at them,” a law enforcement officer familiar with the events said Saturday. “She tried to save her class” he said of Victoria Soto.

- Hartford Courant

The service ended. A police officer stepped out into Main Street, raised a hand, and stopped a Ford Focus station wagon. A black hearse and a long trail of cars pulled out.

Past the old town hall. Past the Cyrenius H. Booth Library. Past the American flag at half-staff, and the soaring white spire of the Newtown Meetinghouse, and New England houses with candles in the windows.

Past the “Pray for Newtown” signs and the makeshift memorials, to the Newtown Village Cemetery, and thoughts of tombstones with a birth year that seems like yesterday: 2006.

- Dan Barry

Charlotte, Daniel, Olivia, Josephine, Ana, Dylan, Madeline, Catherine, Chase, Jesse, James, Grace, Emilie, Jack, Noah, Caroline, Jessica, Benjamin, Avielle, Allison.

God has called them all home.

- President Obama

Round-up of fine sentences, part 47

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 06:36:00 -0500

It was a Christmas a very long time ago that my dad gave my brother and me our first guns. And a stern lecture.

Always assume the gun is loaded. Don’t load it until you’re ready to shoot. Never point it at anything you wouldn’t want to hit. Don’t touch the trigger until you want to fire.

The gun is a killing tool. Respect it.

- George Skelton

Snub-nose .38 revolvers stand for the world-weary persistence of pulp-fiction detectives in the Depression. Single-action Army Colts are the attribute of the cowboy. A Parker double-barreled shotgun is your grandfather picking his way with a knowing elegance through the brush in search of quail. A .22 is the innocence of childhood - that spattering noise of the rifle range at Boy Scout camp, and afterward the smell of Hoppe’s No. 9 cleaning solvent. The wood-sheathed M-1 evinces the common-man determination that won World War II. The Model 29 Smith & Wesson .44 magnum carried by Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry is the resentment and paranoia of the early ’70s. On and on.

There is the mystique of the gun that will destroy America and maybe civilization as we know it. It was Thompson submachine guns in the gangster ’20s, sawed-off shotguns, zip guns when we started talking about ”juvenile delinquency” in the ’50s (oh, innocent era), imported military surplus rifles like the one that shot John Kennedy, and the guns that Patty Hearst posed with in front of a Symbionese Liberation Army flag.

We credit guns with powers that verge on the supernatural.

- Henry Allen

The television vans will leave, and there will be darkness up and down the hills again as a Saturday night becomes Sunday morning. What will we see around us then? What will the country look like? What shadows will make us jump?

- Charles Pierce

We do not know who he is. We do not know where he is. We know only one thing: that he is more prepared than we are. Indeed, he is preparing right now. He is buying his guns. He is accruing his arsenal. The grudges of a lifetime are coalescing into a delusion, and the delusion is articulating itself into something like a plan. In two months, or two weeks, or two days, the plan will be all that he thinks about, and the pressure will become unbearable. He likes to be alone, but his plan needs people, and before too long he will seek out a place where they gather. It might be a school, or a crowded theater. It might be Times Square.

- Tom Junod

In this country, you can legally buy assault weapons. What does that say about us?

- Steve Lopez

Round-up of fine sentences, part 45

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 02:05:51 -0400

Three hundred and fifty policemen eyed the crowd. Prohibition would end in December. Concern about the nation’s whiskey supply — 18 million gallons — loomed. Would there be enough? Three-point-two-percent beer, the only alcohol 26-year-old Senators manager and shortstop Joe Cronin drank, already was legal. Pabst Blue Ribbon insisted its brew “soothes jaded nerves, develops fresh energy and helps build a sound, healthy body.”But Griffith Stadium remained as dry as the afternoon. That was a good thing for home plate umpire Charley Moran.

- Nathan Fenno

He remembers much of the detail like it was yesterday, even though it was more than 32,000 yesterdays ago, on Oct. 4, 1924, when Abramson sat in the aisle at old Griffith Stadium and watched the very first World Series game played in Washington.

- J. Freedom du Lac

Drinking was just a part of newspaper life, he says, competing writers covering for each other. Unable to meet a Herald Examiner 6 a.m. deadline while on the road because of too much drink, he says, Times columnist Jim Murray wrote for him under Disney’s byline.

“The next day I remember admonishing him for not having the right angle,” says Disney.

- T.J. Simers

They ate in silence for a minute, thinking about the decades of drive and ambition that had delivered their family to this office in Manassas. From Italy to the United States in 1911; from Firetto to Firetti during the chaos of processing at Ellis Island; from handcrafted marble steps to American brick masonry; from an apartment on a volcanic island to 10 acres in the rolling horse country of Virginia. The Firetti family narrative was the story of steady advance, of one generation after the next overcoming distance and circumstance to accomplish something greater.

Now it was left to Frank to outdo the past again, and something about that thought made the office feel small and quiet. He stood up from the table and rubbed his forehead. “Back to work,” he said.

- Eli Saslow

He continues: “Let me ask you this: Are you married?”

“No.”

“Sorry, that was a personal question. I don’t need to know about your life. But let’s just say you were married and having trouble. What would you do? Maybe see a marriage counselor, right? And that marriage counselor, in order to help save your marriage, would probably have you look at a list of the reasons you’re together with your husband in the first place.”

“Okay, sure.”

“And…?” He looks at me expectantly for a beat. “That’s exactly why we have a rule book like the Constitution. So we have a list of the reasons we’re together. To remind us.” Dramatic pause. “Do you see what I’m getting at?”

“The United States is getting a divorce?”

Mr. Alex frowns at me and goes back to setting up his table.

- Lauren Bans

The zeroes added up until Werth led off the ninth against Cardinals reliever Lance Lynn. He took the first two pitches, called strikes that made it 0-2. He took one ball, a curve that barely missed low and away. He then fouled off seven of eight pitches, looping them just over the home dugout. On the 13th pitch of the at-bat, Lynn made the mistake Werth had been waiting for.

Lynn grooved a 96-mph fastball over the plate’s heart. Werth lashed it to left. Everyone knew — the place erupted. Teammates thrust their hands in the air at the dugout railing. Werth pointed to the right field corner as he rounded first. He slapped an ankle-high five with third base coach Bo Porter, then threw his red helmet 15 feet in the air, letting it hang there like a balloon.

- Adam Kilgore

The question of how baseball could be so cruel to this city may be answered some day. It existed in horrible form in the nation’s capital for decades, and then it vanished for 33 years. It came back gnarled and wretched for seven more seasons, only to yield to this blissful summer, to the moment Friday past midnight when Drew Storen stood on the mound at chilled Nationals Park and, with two outs in the ninth inning, threw 13 pitches that could have moved the Washington Nationals four wins from the World Series.

The St. Louis Cardinals would not allow it. Baseball, this town’s cold mistress, the sport that dares you to love it, would not let it happen. The Nationals led the Cardinals by six runs after three innings. They led by two runs after eight innings. Washington’s miserable relationship with baseball had been exorcised, until it materialized in a more wrenching, twisted fashion than ever seen before.

- Adam Kilgore

Other allegations that emerged during the trial were perhaps less criminal but just as squirrelly. Customer complaints were directed to a supervisor named Michael Johnson, a man who doesn’t exist. Print ads claimed that Enzyte was developed over thirteen years by Dr. Fredrick Thomkins, “a physician with a biology degree from Stanford,” and Dr. Michael Moore, “a leading urologist from Harvard.” Those men don’t exist, either. A top Berkeley employee testified that Warshak once directed him to falsify data to show that Enzyte users’ penises grew an average of 24 percent. And in one e-mail, Warshak encouraged his people to engage in some rather cold-blooded sales tactics. “I don’t care if the card is taken from grandma’s purse so junior can buy some Enzyte,” Warshak wrote when an employee asked whether a customer could charge a credit card bearing someone else’s name. “If the card is good, I want to ship.”

- Amy Wallace

The go-to story? The absolute go-to story about Cook?

He was working as the SID at Pitt when a co-ed called and asked Cook if he could read her the names, numbers and position of the Pitt roster. Cook started with something like “No. 14, quarterback, Williams, Stan … No. 15, safety, Lockett, Ted,” and so on.

Finally, Cook stopped and asked the woman why she needed the names. She replied that she intended to sleep with the entire roster.

Not missing a beat, Cook then said “No. 87, tight end, Cook, Beano.”

- Gary Shelton

Bonus:

The king of the Southern California rum runners was Tony Cornero, an Italian immigrant who had his own fleet of ships that brought the high-end stuff down from Canada. The contraband was unloaded in the moonlight on beaches, then trucked to wealthy clubs with complete impunity, Fratantoni said.

“City politicians and police were running everything in the city limits,” Fratantoni said. “Not only did they have a hand in it, they were making the decisions.”

Liquor raids were largely for show. The guys who got hit were mainly outside L.A., in places like Downey and Newhall, where some made “grape-o” moonshine that “would burn a hole in your throat,” Fratantoni said.

Deputies spied from blimps to spot telltale exhaust pipes sticking out of the fields. A beautiful undercover agent named Maria Valdez infiltrated bootlegging rings for the sheriff’s liquor detail.

- Gale Holland

Round-up of fine sentences, part 44

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 06:00:17 -0400

The lid blew off the top of all seething humanity yesterday afternoon in the bursting of the bottled, pent-up, hog-tied emotion of a great city’s populace that was comparable only to the eruption of a passionate volcano.

A giant carboy of sparking burgundy, personifying the spirit of youth and effervescing in all its joyousness, illustrates the mob psychology of the spectacle that was enacted by 40,000 human calliopes who were packed, jammed and sandwiched into Griffith stadium to watch two psysically (sic) perfect fighting machines battle for the baseball championship of the universe.

- The Washington Post, 88 years ago

Julian kept banging on the door. George, an experienced pilot, banked the plane, making one sharp turn after another, hoping to knock Julian off his feet. But the assault on the door continued, the pilots realizing that if it came open, the force of the sudden depressurization could tear the King Air apart. To prevent that, George released the pressure in the plane. Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling, a pre-departure safety video came to life. Julian kept kicking the door. Finally, it opened.

- Eva Holland

It was easy to look at Grant Desme and think he was crazy, for leaving behind the sport, the riches, the lifestyle, the family, the wife, the kids, the spoils of the bubble in which athletes live, giving that up for the same day, every day, forever. He needed to trust. God hadn’t spoken to him, not one-on-one. He doesn’t call like that. It’s more an emptiness that only something bigger can fulfill, even if that something still has questions.

Baseball wasn’t big enough. St. Michael’s was.

- Jeff Passan

THEY SAY MICKEY MANTLE ran from home to first in 3.1 seconds. They say he hit a home run 660 feet. Neither of these seems possible. In every athletic pursuit, humans in 2012 crush humans from the 1950s. The world record for the 100-meter dash is more than half a second lower now than it was in 1951, having been broken well over a dozen times. The world record for the marathon is 17 minutes faster now. The bench-press record has more than doubled. And yet we’re supposed to believe that 60 years ago, Mickey Mantle ran faster than any player alive today ever has. And that he hit the ball more than 100 feet farther than any player alive today ever has. Of course Mike Trout can’t live up to the legend of Mickey Mantle. Mickey Mantle couldn’t have lived up to the legend of Mickey Mantle.

- Sam Miller

A few years back, I was in a place called Shishmaref, a barrier-island village in arctic Alaska that because of global climate change is slowly being devoured by the sea. The people there looked at the argument we were having over the very existence of the phenomenon that was chewing up their home, and they talked as though all of us in the lower forty-eight were out of our minds. That is very similar to the way that those of us in Massachusetts have looked at the campaign Mitt Romney has waged for president of the United States. To us, his health-care reform is close to an unalloyed triumph — a bipartisan solution to a serious problem, and a solution that has become a part of our daily lives. People talk about “the Connector” now the way they talk about the T, or the Sox. It’s the kind of thing on which serious presidential campaigns are based. Hell, if it were about the effects of the health-care reform he helped shepherd through here, I’d do a commercial for him.

- Charles Pierce

And it’s not just the lone reporter affected – someone whose job forces them to spend entirely too much time engaged with the pulsating beast of the web. It’s everyone. Everyone who wakes up and grabs their phone before wiping sleep from their eyes. Checks email from the toilet. Tweets drunk. Swerves out of their lane to text. Can’t maintain eye contact. Takes pictures, pictures, pictures and videos of everything. Feels naked, alone and desperately bored when device-less.

It’s society. And yes, it’s a first-world problem.

- Sarah Perez

Every night for weeks I lost sleep over it. Listening for noises. Opening the door everyday with trepidation. Trying to maintain a semblance of normality and not let my wife or son see that I was dying on the inside. Mortified that they might be in danger because of my big mouth or ancestry.

- Leo Traynor

Wednesday’s presidential debate promises sharp contrasts. One candidate wants to repeal Obamacare, one candidate invented it. One opposed the auto industry bailout, one takes credit for it. One doubts the scientific consensus about climate change, one believes in it. One wants to “voucherize” Medicare, one wants to save it. One dismisses nearly half of Americans as a bunch of moochers, and one claims to champion the struggling middle class.

It promises to be an epic clash: Mitt Romney vs. Mitt Romney. Oh, and President Obama will be there, too.

- Eugene Robinson

Dickey threw his third pitch and the man who would not quit took another monster chop, his eyes focused on those five flying ounces that nearly knocked him out seven years ago, and the crowd, 29,000 strong, stood and cheered. Whatever happens next in the life of Adam Greenberg, he’ll be able to say that in his second big-league plate appearance, he went down swinging and walked away smiling.

- Ben Montgomery

The grime and pain of losers and also-rans are washed away with each magical success at the ballyard. The metropolis begins to believe in itself again, to greet the new daylight with small glances upward toward the heavens, with laughter and newfound kinship among rowhouse neighbors, who regale each other with last night’s on-field heroics as the children tumble into the street and head for school in a seaflow of orange-and-black ball caps and jerseys. Fathers come home from work, drop briefcases and grab mitts for a catch with sons, then adjourn to the den for a Talmudic reading of the latest box scores. Fresh graffiti is scrawled atop the RIPs and gang tags in the heart of the toughest Westside neighborhoods: ORIOLES MAGIC. FEAR DA BIRD. And come the night of the big game, the mayor leads the rally on the steps of City Hall, flicks a switch and lights the ornate dome orange. A city rises as one.

- David Simon in SI

In an era in which athleticism, defense and brawn have threatened to take over the world’s game, Xavi feels in his core that Barcelona is fighting for the soul of soccer. “I believe in this philosophy of ours,” he says, “but years ago, because we weren’t winning, people had doubts. Italy had won the World Cup; Greece had won the Euro. The Champions League was won by physical teams. And I thought, No, it can’t be. Soccer is talent, you know. For the good of the fans, for the good of the game, talented players should always play the sport. But I’m a soccer romantic, and there are others who only want to win, win, compete, defend. Hell no. Soccer can be very beautiful.”

- Grant Wahl in SI

Bonus:

The transformative power of a kick in the ass is not lost on Hochuli, who was divorced from Bonnie, the mother of his first five children, 20 years ago. “I failed,” he says, growing very quiet. “It was a very dark period, and….” He pauses, gathering himself to go on.

“My son Aaron was eight years old at the time,” he continues. “And for the next four years-I’m sorry, it will be hard to get through this-but for the next four years he didn’t speak to me or even look at me. For four years I kept showing up: ‘Great practice today, Aaron.’ And he’d walk right past me without looking.” The tears are now coming, and his square jaw is going. “I’m sorry,” Hochuli says, “but it tears me up.”

He takes a deep breath and says, “When you fail, you have to kick yourself in the ass and go on. A lot of times we feel sorry for ourselves and let the defeats define us.” Instead, he just kept showing up to see the boy who wouldn’t see him back, until one day Aaron returned his gaze.

- Steve Rushin in SI

Round-up of fine sentences, part 43

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 20:12:58 -0400

Cody met a man with a parrot. This was in San Francisco. The man with the parrot drove an old Infiniti. As he was driving, he turned to Cody, who was silently watching him, taking notes on a digital sketchbook. The man looked at a regular button on the side of his stick shift. He pointed to the button. “This is my Turbo button!” he said, and turned again toward the road. After their ride, Cody went into the man with the parrot’s apartment. They were sitting on a couch amid the clutter, facing each other. The man with the parrot was talking about his fiancée. How she liked to sunbathe in the nude. The parrot took a giant shit on his shoulder and he just kept talking.

- Justin Heckert

Thomas grew up the oldest of five sons of a single mother, Gaylian Dupree, a former track star at Los Angeles High. When De’Anthony played for the Bears, he used to dash to the right sideline, pause for a beat, charge all the way back to the left sideline, race down the field and do a front flip into the end zone, landing on his cleats. At 14 he was asked for his first autograph, and at 15 he received his first recruiting letter, from Oregon. “I thought he was too small,” says Ducks running backs coach Gary Campbell. “Then I turned on the film and realized he probably wouldn’t get hurt because nobody could touch him.”

- Lee Jenkins

Today, under the lacquered blue-enamel sky, in a black-belted black dress, stepping out of the nap-time grasp of an SUV, Morena Baccarin is clearly — honest-to-God, and to every vision of woman ever beheld, without a hint of exaggeration or intended pain to anyone who’s borne the title before or will bear it hence — the most beautiful woman in the world.

Never mind where — west and north of L.A., in a kind of near-desert, in the parking lot of a wine bar, her jet hair coated by the brightness of a midafternoon sun rigged high. The world behind her falls away quickly enough. With every step across the careless splash of asphalt, her unlumpy purse hooked over the sinew of her shoulder, finger dangling her keys, Baccarin smiles, which is of course part of why she’s the most beautiful woman in the world today.

- Tom Chiarella

Finally, Boniadi broke down and told an inquiring friend why she was weeping all the time. According to the knowledgeable source, the friend promptly wrote up a 10-page “Knowledge Report” on her, and for more than two months Boniadi’s punishment was to scrub toilets with a toothbrush on her hands and knees, clean bathroom tiles with acid, and dig ditches in the middle of the night. She was also harangued for hours and made to confess what a horrible human being she was. After that she was sent out to hawk L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics book on street corners, a job she continued to do when she was finally allowed to return to L.A. (A Scientology spokesperson responds: “The Church does not ‘punish’ people, especially in [that] manner.”)

“Tom never broke up with her,” Marc Headley tells me. “He never spoke to her.” The whole time Cruise and Boniadi were together, according to Headley, the film people never stopped cranking out new audition tapes. “O.K., boom, next one. O.K., boom, next one,” he says. “She gets kicked to the curb. And a few months later he’s madly in love with Katie and jumping on couches.”

- Maureen Orth

He stepped to the edge to die. Weathered hands gripped the rusted railing of Lowell’s Ouelette Bridge, beckoned by the rushing river current. Brick warehouses and amber smokestacks bore silent witness to one final act.

Oncoming headlights lit up his face. Below, fly-fishers hooked salmon and trout. Ducks congregated along the sandy banks, beside the rocks and reeds, where his body would wash ashore by dawn.

- Alex Prewitt

Mr. Sulzberger himself — square-shouldered, pipe-smoking, affable, unaffected — knew how lightly he was regarded. “I’ve made my first executive decision,” he told his sister Ruth after his first day on the job. “I’ve decided not to throw up.”

- Clyde Haberman

His muscles throbbed, and the bristles of the bedroom carpet massaged his motionless body. Still in shorts and a T-shirt after his first workout in a week, Utah defensive end Nate Fakahafua collapsed as soon as he entered the room.

Pain surged through him on the June day, alighting at each muscle and continuing until it and his racing mind met somewhere in the middle. Everything ached. Only the carpet hugged him.

- Bill Oram

He was supposed to be “In-Vince-able.” That’s what the headlines said. And the T-shirts. And the ever-chattering football pundits. The steady downward trajectory of one of the most well-known sports figures in state history finally hit the ground where it often does - in a courtroom - with an encyclopedia of accusations of waste, indulgence and exploitation.

- Houston Chronicle

After lunch, Ted and Suzan, now with her husband’s ashes lovingly tucked away inside one of her pants pockets, joined a few thousand of their fellow Alabama fans inside the stadium. With her brother by her side for emotional support, Suzan walked down from the stands and made her way to the stadium’s aforementioned brick partition, right next to yours truly. I then watched Suzan — clearly a bit frightened, but determined — reach into her pocket, pull out the plastic baggie holding John’s remains and empty its contents onto the field.

- Brett Michael Dykes

How to write a novel

First make sure you have enough time. It is crucial that you have enough time to make things up. Myself, I do not have time enough for anything like that.

But I’ll just tell you what’s what. It will not be hard for you to follow me doing it.

Just listen.

Just watch.

I’m composing these instructions on an I.B.M. Selectric. I got it back in 1961. I did not by it. I finessed it or I finagled it or I stole it.

The person who is the unexpressed indirect object of one or the other of these verbs was rich. He said you can borrow this thing, use it for a while. Then he stuck his other thing in my wife’s thing. They still have their things and I have this thing and I’m not giving it up.

- Gordon Lish

Round-up of fine sentences, part 42

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 09:42:58 -0400

Four of the five bullets had found their mark. Three lodged in her flesh without serious harm. But one left a trail of destruction. It pierced her left side and passed through her abdomen, crossing her right chest, coming to rest near her right armpit. Along the way it tore her stomach and large intestine and made innumerable holes in her small intestine. It penetrated her liver, her diaphragm, her lung. It cut her pancreas in half. It severed the splenic artery and vein, opening such a fountain of blood that she eventually lost it all, and more. The tireless doctors at Carolinas Medical Center kept replacing the blood through intravenous lines, and she kept losing it. Six liters. One hundred fifty percent.

- Thomas Lake

The pedophile is often imagined as the dishevelled old man baldly offering candy to preschoolers. But the truth is that most of the time we have no clue what we are dealing with. A fellow-teacher at Mr. Clay’s school, whose son was one of those who complained of being fondled, went directly to Clay after she heard the allegations. “I didn’t do anything to those little boys,” Clay responded. “I’m innocent… . Would you and your husband stand beside me if it goes to court?” Of course, they said. People didn’t believe that Clay was a pedophile because people liked Clay—without realizing that Clay was in the business of being likable.

- Malcolm Gladwell

Conservatives in this country — most assuredly including David Brooks, and almost every Republican, including Ron Paul — love them some big government, and that’s not even to mention how much they love to have big government meddle in people’s sexytime. They love their farm subsidies and their rural electrical cooperatives. They just have been convinced by three decades of conservative charlatans that the big government they love is different from the big government loved by black bucks buying T-bone steaks and welfare queens in their Cadillacs. That has been the central pivot on which modern Republican politics has turned. It’s a little late for the scales to be falling from your eyes now.

- Charlie Pierce

And as Cathal Kelly of the Toronto Star reminded me, in the early 1960s boxer Emile Griffith was rumoured to be gay, and in the second of their three fights for the welterweight title, Cuban Benny (Kid) Paret and his corner called Griffith a maricon. Paret said it again during the weigh-in for the third fight, for the welterweight title. In the documentary Ring of Fire, Griffith says, “I knew maricon meant faggot, and I was nobody’s faggot.” Griffith beat Paret so badly that the Cuban died. He said he didn’t mean to, but he did.

- Bruce Arthur

Forced drinking, a staple of college hazing, comes up in a few reports. There also were reports of students’ getting frostbite from walking barefoot in the snow. One said pledges, blindfolded, driven miles from campus and relieved of their phones, were expected to find their own way home. Another said a fraternity branded pledges on the leg, back or buttocks.

- Peter Applebome

Then CP3 says something I’ve never heard any man, let alone a basketball player, say before: “I’ve been fortunate to be short my entire life.” I look puzzled, and he explains. “There’s only one position I’ve ever had to play, and that’s point guard. So I’ve always had to be that leader. And that was my job: you know, to talk.” CP3 is looking me straight in the eye. “I’m a big-time people person, too. Like, I love people. I hate to be by myself.” He repeats the phrase to himself, quieter each time: “I hate to be by myself. I hate to be by myself. I hate to be by myself.”

- Steve Marsh

The encounter had never really been a prospective drug deal. Green was apparently planning a con: he was going to hand Hoffman a bag full of aspirin in place of the Ecstasy, a relative of his told me, and take off with the money. When investigators spoke to Green’s wife in the days that followed, she acknowledged that her husband had called on the night of the botched operation. She described what had taken place: “They found a wire in her purse, and shot her.”

- Sarah Stillman

Seven billion little, tiny human grass strands are c urrently alive, but at that moment it seems as if there are just the two of them: a girl left for dead and a boy who was trained to kill. If you saw them from the shore, you would not know how they got there. Boats do not tell life stories. You would see them from the waist up, so you probably wouldn’t even realize they are missing their legs. And so you would not feel sympathy for them, and you would not be inspired. You would just see them gliding.

- Michael Rosenberg

Jack Green did not argue with Clint Eastwood when Clint Eastwood replaced him after a total of twenty-eight films. He simply accepted what everybody accepts, what every Clint Eastwood anecdote, performance, and movie is actually about: his authority. He was the first American authority figure to arise out of the era when American authority fell apart, and he figures to be the last. How did he accrue his authority? Well, those who work with him now that he’s old — like Matt Damon — credit his experience. But those who knew him when he was young — like Lennie Niehaus — say he had it even then. Perhaps the simplest answer is that like Jack Green, we gave it to him. And he had the good sense both to take it and to wear it lightly.

- Tom Junod

Ellis favored 15-milligram capsules of Dexamyl, which he called “bombardiers,” taking five to 12 pills before starts, determined to “out-milligram” opponents. The drugs helped Ellis play through frequent injuries, including a broken hand. They made him more alert and less afraid: during his first major league exhibition game, his mother once said, the 20-year-old Ellis was “shaking like a leaf on a tree.” On the mound, Ellis later recalled, he chewed through gum “until it was powder.” His habit became an addiction. He started popping pills on the days he wasn’t pitching, just so he wouldn’t fall asleep in the dugout. Once — and only once — Ellis tried to pitch a big league game without getting high. Warming up in the bullpen, he couldn’t remember how to throw. He ran back to the clubhouse, took some uppers out of his pocket and washed them down with hot coffee, a routine he called “locking and loading.” The coffee scalded the inside of his mouth.

This was good: the hotter the liquid, the more quickly the drugs would dissolve.

- Patrick Hruby

Round-up of fine sentences, part 41

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 13:13:54 -0400

The system for delivering sports news is constantly changing, but there’s still a lot to be said about a tangible product, one that you can pull out to show your kids and, someday, grandkids and say, “This is what happened.” Somewhere in my storage is a Sporting Green with Dwight Clark rising high in the end zone. Somewhere in your storage is probably a newspaper with the image of Buster Posey leaping into Brian Wilson’s arms.

It’s the tie that binds. I’m honored and humbled to contribute some of the thread.

- Ann Killion

Every football player has a handful of collisions that are seared into his memory, hits they are able to conjure up and re-live even years after they took place. There is something primal and exhilarating about delivering a blow that knocks another man off his feet. Done right, it’s as pleasurable and addictive as any drug. If I close my eyes, I can still hear the thunderclap of plastic, metal and bone ringing in my ears. Try to explain this sensation to almost anybody who has never buckled a chinstrap or put on shoulder pads and the reaction typically ranges from disgust to horror. They aren’t wrong to feel that way either. Logically, the satisfaction of a violent collision is indefensible. But those emotions exist, regardless of how oafish it is to confess to them.

- Kevin Van Valkenburg

I now say this to you: be hated. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross. One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

- Adrian Tan

Aaron Perlut, the chairman of the American Mustache Institute, said in an interview that Gilbride’s mustache was a perfect example of the so-called Chevron design, which is “your standard-issue, law enforcement-style mustache.” Perlut admired Gilbride’s consistency, he said, as Gilbride stuck with the same look throughout his career, eschewing styles used by other N.F.L. personalities like “Andy Reid’s walrus or Shad Khan’s Mario Brothers Handlebar.”

- Sam Borden

“I voted,” he says. He is perched on a chair in a sparsely furnished office of the shelter he calls home. “I voted for Obama, and I was real active in those things. And now, with this situation that’s come up, I have a tendency to look at things like: Those (people) that’ll be here are people that haven’t been subjected to the things we have. … It’ll be a gathering, to me, of people that are well-to-do – not for people who have struggled.”

People who have struggled.

Them that ain’t got.

The busted and disgusted.

Poor folk.

- Leonard Pitts

Driving to college is still crazy exciting, even if you’re not a student anymore. There’s still that funny feeling you get in your stomach and in your loins as you get closer and closer to campus. PRETTY BUILDINGS! HOT YOUNG COEDS! FANCY LEARNIN’! You can’t help but psych yourself up for good times. That feeling is probably what keeps many an alum coming back year after year.

- Drew Magary

We might not love our football any more than the rest of the world loves theirs. We might love it less. We have no hooligans, after all. We do have that Alabama nut job who poisoned the majestic century-old oak trees on archrival Auburn’s campus. And we do have that asshole alum who reportedly paid for said nut job to attend the national championship. We also have the mental defectives who spotted the nut job in New Orleans and treated him like a celeb, asking him to pose for pictures. But these, we hope, we pray, are exceptions. What makes our football different, what distinguishes our relationship to it, isn’t passion. It’s the same thing that endangers it — violence.

- J.R. Moehringer

The crowd knew him intimately, from a distance. “C’mon, Andy!” Their accents marked them as hailing from the British version of “around the way.” Not posh. These were not the voices of the preppies I stood next to on the Tube. “C’mon, Andy!” They didn’t know him personally, but something in their tone made it seem as if they’d been acquainted with Andy Murray his whole life. Their voices were in turn familiar, cajoling, teasing, encouraging. At first, the crowd was merely excited. As Murray seemed to feed off their noise, and started to pummel Federer, that excitement transformed into giddy astonishment. Set by set, Murray became their cousin, kid next door, guy sitting in front of them in math class. I felt I was watching a neighborhood chronicle, each “C’mon, Andy!” trailing some unspoken reference to their shared history, an invented history that was being embellished with every stroke:

“C’mon, Andy — don’t muck it up like you did when you tried to ask Trudy to the Valentine’s dance!” Andy fought harder.

“C’mon, Andy — you can do it, like when you and your mates stole the Carpenters’ horse, dressed it up as Old Man Dylan, and parked him at Duffy’s pub.” Andy knocked Federer around for nine straight games.

“C’mon, Andy — don’t go out like your brother Nigel when he got caught with his trousers down in the chicken coop, or your sister Maggie when we found her having a turnip party with the magistrate’s boy, and don’t get me started on your Uncle Ned!” Andy won.

- Colson Whitehead

It’s actually Penn who best explains the power of magical restraint in his autobiography, God, No! Penn was once a student at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in Florida. There, he learned a way to distinguish professional clowns from amateurs: the red makeup around their mouth. A professional clown stops his makeup at his top lip. He won’t paint where his mustache might be, because he knows that too much makeup actually obscures his expression rather than enhances it. Amateur clowns assume that more makeup equals more expression, and they paint from the bottom of their nose to the point of their chin. Professional clowns refer to this phenomenon as the “busted asshole.”

- Chris Jones

Aboard Air Force One, I’d asked him what he would do if granted a day when no one knew who he was and he could do whatever he pleased. How would he spend it? He didn’t even have to think about it:

When I lived in Hawaii, I’d take a drive from Waikiki to where my grandmother lived—up along the coast heading east, and it takes you past Hanauma Bay. When my mother was pregnant with me she’d take a walk along the beach… . You park your car. If the waves are good you sit and watch and ponder it for a while. You grab your car keys in the towel. And you jump in the ocean. And you have to wait until there is a break in the waves… . And you put on a fin—and you only have one fin—and if you catch the right wave you cut left because left is west… . Then you cut down into the tube there. You might see the crest rolling and you might see the sun glittering. You might see a sea turtle in profile, sideways, like a hieroglyph in the water… . And you spend an hour out there. And if you’ve had a good day you’ve caught six or seven good waves and six or seven not so good waves. And you go back to your car. With a soda or a can of juice. And you sit. And you can watch the sun go down …

- Michael Lewis

Round-up of fine sentences, part 40

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 11:25:14 -0400

You look down at the cup, a sludge the color of hot chocolate. Is this the way the world ends?

- John H. Richardson

Among the many crimes against humanity that TLC, this country’s most socially irresponsible channel, has inflicted upon viewers, perhaps Toddlers & Tiaras is the worst. Well, until the breakout star of that show — a precocious/annoying child named Alana but better known as Honey Boo Boo Child, who is pageant-whored-out by her obese mother, June — got her own series. It’s appropriately titled Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

- Tim Goodman

Did he do “it”? Let’s put it this way (and I say this as somebody who covered some of his Tours de France, and knows and likes some of Armstrong): he was the best cyclist of his time, in maybe the dirtiest sport in existence.

- George Vecsey

I will always cherish your warm embrace.

- George Schroeder

Because those white people voted him into office, his primary job as president is to make sure his entire presidency is a demonstration of how far we’ve come as a nation on race, and that means he is not allowed to do anything or say anything that the white people who elected him can perceive to be divisive, because his primary function is to make them feel good about themselves. In theory, at least, all presidents are servants of the people who elected them. In the case of Barack Obama, it has seemed from the start that the idea as applied to him was more than mere metaphor. He is the first president in my lifetime whom the country felt obligated to remind that he know his place.

- Charles Pierce

They found walking and working on the moon less taxing than had been forecast. Armstrong once reported he was “very comfortable.”

And people back on earth found the black-and-white television pictures of the bug-shaped lunar module and the men tramping about it so sharp and clear as to seem unreal, more like a toy and toy-like figures than human beings on the most daring and far-reaching expedtion thus far undertaken.

- John Noble Wilford

By then — May 2008 — most folks had stopped paying attention to the sixteen acres of quicksand at Ground Zero. George Pataki was long gone, Eliot Spitzer had resigned in mid-March, the Great Recession was looming, and all of the lip service paid to remembrance, rebuilding, and resilience in the wake of 9/11 had long since curdled into a cover story for business as usual. But on May 22, another PA executive director took over, picked by Blind David Paterson, Spitzer’s successor — and the new PA guy, Chris Ward, did something odd and wonderful right away: He called bullshit, publicly, in detail, on all the prior Ground Zero budgets and timetables, which everyone knew to be bullshit anyway.

- Scott Raab

Upstairs on the concourse, the air smelled like smoking meat. Nine-fifty would get you a giant jumbo Holmes pecan-smoked sausage that was supposed to be so good it would knock your boots off. The rain had stopped by then, though a stiff breeze was still whipping the flags in right field. The public-address man had an important announcement.

“WE NEED EVERYONE ON YOUR FEET AND CHEERING ALL GAME LONG, AS THE NATION’S EYES ARE GONNA BE ON THE SKEETERS.”

- Thomas Lake

These were burdensome thoughts, and I wanted to get rid of them. I rented an Uzi, fully automatic. I chose the male zombie. I think he was supposed to be a lawyer. He had a briefcase. I aimed for his left eyeball and pulled the trigger. The patter of thirty-two bullets lasted maybe three seconds, and then the eyeball was gone. The release felt like one gorgeous, fantastic sneeze, and the satisfaction reminded me of cold beer.

- Jeanne Marie Laskas

It is all you can ask. But I’m still going to ask for more: Please don’t rip apart my team. And if you do, please put it back together even stronger. In fact, if you can lead the Jets to their first Super Bowl title in my lifetime, I promise you here and now, Tim Tebow, I will fly to whichever megachurch hosts your next Easter sermon, and I will get down on one knee, pump my fist, and accept you into my heart as my lord and personal savior, so help me God, amen.

- Devin Gordon

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair—the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

- Stephen King (from his book, “On Writing”)

BONUS:

You know that your leisure to watch an NFL game on Sunday was argued and bargained and fought for by unions, right? That the wages you spent on that game-day flatscreen were argued and bargained and fought for by unions, right? That your standing as a member of the American middle class was argued and bargained and fought for by 200 years of collective effort and sacrifice and blood on the part of folks just like you, right?

Or maybe you don’t. Maybe we’ve lost the habit of looking out for each other. Of empathy. Fellow feeling. Of picturing ourselves in another guy’s shoes. When did we decide it made sense to give up on each other?

Next kickoff, maybe think of it this way: That referee, that back judge, that stranger down there on the field running as hard as he can to keep up with the millionaires but falling farther behind with every step? Maybe that’s us.

- Jeff MacGregor

Round-up of fine sentences, part 39

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 11:10:39 -0400

I do want it known that I have spent 44 years doing it from the heart. I have never once written to provoke or to attract attention. I have always done what has come naturally, which doesn’t mean it’s always been right. No one is right all the time.

- Bob Ryan

It’s good and admirable that he was a smart and a histrionic-averse writer in one of the most lurid and overstated corners of an especially lurid and overstated sports discourse. But the truly inspiring thing about the man is that he managed to spend 44 years writing about the same few things without curdling completely, or being hollowed out by the inherent triviality and repetition of the job and simply losing interest. It’s that, somehow, he did the same thing for so long without ever quite souring on any of it, without ever ceasing to care or losing sight of the small and great things about it and the real human stakes inherent in it. The thing to emulate about Bob Ryan, it seems to me, is that he was somehow able to work for so long and also to stay interested and stay himself, and that he had the grace and the good sense to get out of the press room while he still loved it there.

- David Roth

Mile after mile, they saw the best of America. They reveled in its diversity. They welcomed the serendipity of the road. Most of all, they marveled at the generosity that seemed to follow them wherever they went: The man in Daleville, Va., who offered a warm shower and the shelter of his back porch. The woman in Glasgow, Ky., who brought them hot chocolate at a campground. The old rancher near Tupelo, Miss., who shook their hands and slipped them $20. The middle-aged diner in Denton, Tex., who spontaneously paid for their dinner at Rooster’s Roadhouse. The man they met at a rural gas station who offered to throw a salsa party in their honor when they made it to Denver.

- Brady Dennis

There are more clues elsewhere in this cemetery: Penn State logos and flags dotting other graves. One man even has the Nittany Lion logo engraved on his tombstone. These people surely thought nothing but good things about Paterno until the day they died. Most of the recently deceased people here would likely say Joe Paterno was one of the best things about their entire lives. They passed away with none of the ambivalence shrouding this campus now. JoePa did right by them. Or so they thought.

- Eric Adelson

Then the bagpipes swelled with air. Their music blared. And off to Fenway the fans went, like 650 fire ants, shoving their red Liverpool scarves to the sky, marching with purpose beneath a cloud of sweat and smoke and song.

- Alex Prewitt

A terrible thing happened after the article came out. A man who had been staying in Pop’s tumbledown old house was charged with killing a young woman and burying her in the yard. Pop was arrested too, because he was drunk and difficult when the police showed up, but he had nothing to do with the killing. Let me repeat that: He had nothing to with the killing. I confirmed this with the District Attorney’s office. The bad guy was a serial rapist, one of many shady characters hanging around that house, and Pop was incapable of keeping him out. This is something that happens when you’re mentally ill. People take advantage.

- Thomas Lake

Ejected from the game, suspended for two more, and docked those game checks—adding to the $47,500 already levied by the NFL—Ndamukong Suh has been flagged for more personal fouls than any other player since 2010. He’s become a symbol for violence in sports, of crossing the line from fair to foul play. All those headlines about concussions. Young guys bashing their heads so hard they turn into middle-aged crazy guys. Suicidal. Terrible shit. With all those headlines, America has been ripe for an icon to push against, a guy who might stand for a reason to no longer tolerate spectacular sadistic hits—and for the moment Suh is it.

- Jeanne Marie Laskas

Reducing athletes to something less than human has been a favored pastime among SEC fans for at least a decade, but it’s safe to assume there are no date-rape jokes about Russell Shepard or Barkevious Mingo. No matter how well she blends, how much she is accepted, how perfectly she navigates the obstacles that arise when a woman enters a man’s game, there will still be someone, somewhere, for whom Isom is nothing more than a thing to be picked apart and appraised — a subject for the enduring online debate, Would you hit it?

- Jordan Conn

She wore a navy blue dress suit with a modest skirt, white button-down blouse, heels and stockings. Considering that she had spent more than half a day as a hostage inside a Brooklyn bank, she was remarkably well put-together and deceivingly composed. She had not cried, but she was terrified.

- Aaron Edwards

“Remember,” he told me. “If what you’re writing isn’t likely to offend or annoy anyone, go back and start again.” It was great advice, whether you’re creating a comedy, making a film like “Red Hook Summer” or writing a newspaper column. Never be afraid to raise a ruckus.

- Patrick Goldstein

The news has become his 29-year-old life. He washes his face with the news. He has breakfast with the news. He drives with the news and works with the news, the stress relentless with the stream of video piling in, horrible images fresh enough to have accrued only 10 or 15 viewers.

- Chuck Culpepper

Three days before he killed his brother, Jason didn’t sleep. He sweated through his clothes. Thoughts jumbled. Killers lurked just out of sight, he told his father. They spoke to him. They were inside of him. He wore sunglasses to hide his fear. They could see his fear through his eyes. He asked for music. Music brought him peace. When music played, the voices stopped. Music stopped the killers. He sat in front of the television and watched the new “Planet of the Apes.” He wanted friends to watch it with him. Study the green-eyed monkey. The green-eyed monkey isn’t afraid. The green-eyed monkey kills the big, black gorilla. The gorilla is dead. Eddy is dead. The green-eyed monkey is free. Jason is free.

- Wright Thompson

Round-up of fine sentences, part 38

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 16:09:51 -0400

You have become the first president to execute without trial an American citizen because you hired David Barron and Martin Lederman — the constitutional lawyers renowned for their blistering attacks on the legal memos that justified the Bush administration’s use of torture — to write the legal memos that justified the execution without trial of an American citizen.

- Tom Junod

Talk about the schedule, Coach. Talk about recruiting. Talk about playing Georgia in the season’s second week. Sometimes, a few of the more creative souls in those rooms begin with “ Can you talk about” a subject. A “talk about” drinking game would be brilliant if not for all the liver failure it would cause. And it would be entertaining if it weren’t so lazy.

- Kent Babb

Yet for someone who trades on her appearance and antics, Marsh spouts the same things about fame as other press seekers who don’t like the attention they’re getting (we’re looking at you, Kardashian). One moment she brags about making the home pages of gossip sites, then she laments how terrible the press is. This scrutiny was not what she dreamed of as a preteen who idolized Pamela Anderson. But really, who dreams about reality?

- Kayleen Schaefer

That randy roommate of Godina’s, Greer, picks up the story: Each day, the shaggy blond was visited by three women, sometimes just hours apart — an accomplished pole vaulter and former flame; a mighty hurdler who “tried to dominate me,” Greer says; and a “very talented” vacationer from Scandinavia. Greer says his Olympian partners were, like him, looking to “complete the Olympics training puzzle.” When his event did come around, Greer nailed Athens’ longest toss in prelims before a knee injury sidelined him. “I was a happy man going into competition,” he says. “If you find somebody you like and who likes you, your world’s complete for a second, and you compete well.”

- Sam Alipour

Mr. Caldera still sings at Jilly’s when the Yankees play the White Sox, and at Donatello during spring training, and every time the Yankees play the Tampa Bay Rays. Hideki Matsui, a former Yankee now with the Rays, still asks Mr. Caldera if he’ll be singing at the restaurant after the game. Many other ballplayers and coaches have stopped in, including Joe Torre.

- Corey Kilgannon

For the first time since April 15, Arturo Martinez’s gym was alive. His daughter and wife, however, were not.

- Dan Wolken

If so, also, George Zimmerman is a sociopath who shouldn’t be allowed to go out in public carrying anything more lethal than a bag of marshmallows. Even if everything he said is true, which I don’t believe for a minute, how can he not have second thoughts? He killed an unarmed kid. I know hardened cops who killed people who were aiming to kill them, and who had proven to be very good at that job, who never got over what were clearly righteous shoots. It haunts their dreams, sometimes forever. “You know,” one of them told me 30 years ago, “I’ve killed that guy a thousand times.” Not George Zimmerman, though.

- Charles Pierce

As an example of this tenacity, Remnick recalls the efforts of Seymour Hersh, “one of the greatest reporters I’ve ever known.” According to Remnick, Hersh “was working on the Watergate story. The New York Times needed to catch up with the Washington Post … it was killing them. He needed to get Charles Colson, one of the bad guys of Watergate, on the phone. How did he do that? He got to the office at eight a.m. — nobody gets to a newspaper at eight a.m. — and on a rotary phone, he called Chuck Colson’s home number every 15 minutes till seven p.m. Eight a.m. to seven p.m., every 15 minutes on a rotary-dial phone. … He got Chuck Colson, and there was the front page story.

“When I hear a writer say that they ‘put in a call,’” Remnick concludes, “I want to pull my hair out.”

- Chris Mohney

A factory in north Alabama, land of iron and steel, machines humming and clattering, workers toiling in silence. The product: words. Words about football, delivered through the air to a large and ravenous audience. Forty-six days until Crimson Tide football. Gators football. Gamecocks football. Two kinds of Bulldogs and three kinds of Tigers. Nothing more popular in America than football and nowhere football more popular than the South and no kind of Southern football more popular than college football, especially now, with six straight national championships and no end in sight. The Southeastern Conference, the SEC, the football machine. Unbeatable. July ticking away to August and the glory of September. Nearly 1,000 reporters and bloggers and commentators and photographers and radio personalities. Nothing else like this anywhere. Free golden-fried Gulf Coast oysters at lunchtime and free Dr Pepper whenever you want.

- Thomas Lake

A decade ago, McKee wasn’t studying dead football players. Nobody was. That changed when Bennet Omalu, a forensic pathologist and neuropathologist, examined the brains of former Steelers linemen Mike Webster in 2002 and Terry Long in 2005. Both had suffered slow, puzzling descents into erratic behavior and madness, with Long ultimately killing himself by drinking antifreeze and Webster dying of heart failure after an extended period of living in his truck in which he sometimes shot himself with a Taser gun in order to sleep and other times sniffed ammonia to stay awake.

- Patrick Hruby

Bonus:

This hunger strike’s a moral swamp that London has no wish to wade into. He’s not a tunnel coach, he’s a big-lens guy, an African-American who has felt the same hot breath on his neck as these campus workers; who had a child when he was in college, divorced soon after and drove a Boys & Girls Club bus to get by; who as an undercover detective in Richmond had a gun pointed at his head by a thug and heard the trigger click, the weapon malfunctioning; who beat 10,000-to-one odds when his bone marrow matched that of a daughter afflicted by a blood disorder that often leads to leukemia and death; and who has his players plugged into a multitude of volunteering activities. What muddies it all even more is that London is Joseph’s frat brother, a product of community-activist, predominantly African-American Phi Beta Sigma, whose motto is “culture for service and service for humanity,” a group fiercely proud of its members’ leadership in the famous civil rights March on Washington in 1963, the Selma protest march two years later and the Million Man March in 1995. But now London’s receiving $2.1 million a year from the same employer that the hunger strikers are howling at over precisely such vast wage disparities, and he’s passed word to his media-relations man that he has no comment for reporters who’ve begun to inquire about Joseph’s hunger strike.

It’s Joseph’s turn to tell his tale. So how did this kid slip through the cracks of the U.S. sports system—or bloom through one? Oh, it’s clear right away, he’s not been washed here by the mainstream. This is what it takes for a Division I athlete in 2012 to end up starving and chanting for human rights: a childhood lived in homeless shelters, transitional housing, a church basement, a friend’s attic, a tiny camper, fleabag motels, grandparents’ houses, cramped apartments … 30 homes in his 19 years. Got off easy: His older sister, Joy, tallied 50. Moving because the joint was infested or the landlord a creep or the plumbing pitiful or a job in some other town might actually pay just enough for them to survive. Four children and a parent sleeping in one bed at one shelter, piled in with families whose adults had addictions or physical handicaps, piled in with people wondering what was odd about this family, besides the obvious: It’s an interracial family in Virginia. Again and again, someone somehow materializing and offering them a hand, saving them from the streets and starvation.

Psssst. Here’s the secret that Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali discovered, the one that no agent or handler whispers into the modern athlete’s ear: When you play your sport for something much larger than yourself, than your wallet, than your ego or even your team, when you tap into that power, son … look out.

-Gary Smith

Round-up of fine sentences, part 37

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 05:02:00 -0400

It wasn’t until the next morning that I learned it was not an “accident” at all. The driver of the truck, a 35-year-old man from Connecticut named Frederick Weller, had been convicted of drunken driving at least six times in the past, and Sheffield police say he was drinking on February 28, too. So I don’t call what Weller did to Moira an accident. I call it murder.

- Ted Dobson

His pants had bright red strawberries on them. Of course they did. His shirt was a confident pink, as were his Crocs sandals. In the kitchen, his wife, Anita Ruthling Klaussen, prepared the signature dish—strawberries and cream—just like they serve at the All England Club.

Bud Collins was ready for a Breakfast at Wimbledon.

- Jason Gay

They were a sorry lot. Four escapees, three con men, two accused murderers and a bank robber. They were plucked from 5,700 fugitives hiding in the U.S. or abroad. To Hoover’s surprise, nine of the 10 were soon captured. A year later, the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list was officially born.

- Richard Serrano

King Kong Keller set the batting pace. Following a walk to Williams in the first inning, the Yankee muscle man propelled another ill-fated Claude Passeau pitch into National League (visiting) bullpen. It was King Kong’s first All-Star round-tripper and teamed up with Williams’ later wallops to mark the first time that any side had smashed three for the circuit in a single contest. The trio of socks also produced a 12-9 A.L. edge in homers for the Series.

- Gerry Moore

It is Tuesday afternoon, and Dickey, 37, is headed to a therapy session — relationship therapy. Dickey and his knuckleball, they are making great progress these days, their understanding of each other growing deeper and richer. But the work must never stop, lest they drift apart again. Later that afternoon, in the bullpen at Nationals Park, they will take their places and pick up where they left off last time.

- Dave Sheinin

He feels at every moment the simple tug of age, the limitations of a man whose injury will not heal. He’s lost a little control of his own autonomy, his ability to escape. He roams free on an expansive piece of land, and yet Freeman seems roped in — by family, by change, by people beginning to disregard the choices he made years ago — and now he wants everyone to leave the land, the animals, the past, alone.

- Tom Chiarella

Here’s a truer accounting: Miller never went back inside the locker room. He couldn’t take the crush. Instead, he hid inside the trainer’s room, inside that familiar torture chamber, slumped over one of the massage tables, bone spent. Shane Battier finally eased up beside him, careful not to clap his back, and he pointed at the pictures that lined the room, inspirational blowups from Miami’s title in 2006: Take your medicine and one day you might know this. Now they would join those men on the walls; now they would live forever among the ranks of the motivators. Miller nodded and smiled and closed his eyes, but deep down he knew he was different from those men on the walls, just as he was different from James.

- Chris Jones

IT HAS BEEN all about the ass for more than two million years. When primitive man first raised his hands off the ground to become bipedal, it was the buttocks, serving as a counterbalance to the chest, that allowed our ancestors to stand erect, then propel themselves to the top of the food chain. By 330 B.C., after studying the anthropological and physiological impact of the glutes, Aristotle became the first ass man of record when he boldly declared the booty a hallmark of humanity. “Man needs a seat,” he wrote.

- David Fleming

Bonus, on my all-time favorite player:

The only indication that Kemp is the proprietor: Oskar’s signature drink, the Reignman, is a mix of 151-proof rum, melon liqueur, pineapple juice and orange juice that somehow comes out a green-yellow that combines the colors of the former Seattle Sonics’ jerseys.

Kemp’s specialty, though, was dunking. The apocryphal story: Playing in an outdoor pickup game back in Indiana, Kemp once dunked so ferociously that sparks flew off the chain-link net. While he won’t confirm that one, he played as though unencumbered by gravity, both on the fast break and in the half-court set, his easy grace broken up a few times each game by spasms of violent jams. Think those Blake Griffin throwdowns have no precedent? Fire up YouTube, watch some of Kemp’s handiwork and compare for yourself. Start with his posterization during the 1992 playoffs of Warriors center Alton Lister, one of the signature NBA plays of that era.

Kemp’s voice almost catches, though, when he talks about the reception he’s received locally. “Honestly,” he says, “so much had happened, I didn’t know how people would react to me.” What he found out: Seattleites liked Shawn Kemp the superstar. They may be even more fond of Shawn Kemp the civilian.

“It’s like you can get lost here, but you can’t get lost,” he says. “It’s big enough that people respect your privacy but small enough that you get to know a lot of people. Really, it’s been fabulous.” Stroll around Pike Place Market and you’ll notice that even among kids, more sports fans are wearing throwback number 40 Sonics jerseys than those of any current Mariner or Seahawk. Says Geo Quibuyen, half of the popular Seattle hip-hop duo Blue Scholars, speaking for all of the Emerald City, “We love Shawn Kemp. Love this city and we’ll love you back.”

- L. Jon Wertheim

Round-up of fine sentences, part 36 (feat. pieces written about Penn State/Joe Paterno)

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 09:01:00 -0400

I hope Penn State loses civil suits until the walls of the accounting office cave in. I hope that Spanier, Schultz and Curley go to prison for perjury. I hope the NCAA gives Penn State the death penalty it most richly deserves. The worst scandal in college football history deserves the worst penalty the NCAA can give. They gave it to SMU for winning without regard for morals. They should give it to Penn State for the same thing. The only difference is, at Penn State they didn’t pay for it with Corvettes. They paid for it with lives.

- Rick Reilly

This is line one of Paterno’s legacy. This is what has to be recalled.

- Dan Wetzel

There is no benefit of the doubt any longer because, well, because there should no longer be any doubt.

- Jim Litzke

He was the self-appointed arbiter of character and justice in State College. He had decided Sandusky was “a good man” in 1998, and he simply found it too hard to admit he made a fatal misjudgment and gave a child molester the office nearest to his. He was more interested in protecting a cardboard cutout legacy than the flesh and blood of young men.

- Sally Jenkins

The bronze statue of Paterno that stands outside Beaver Stadium should be immediately removed, as it is no longer even fit for the droppings of birds. The Paterno name should also be taken off the school library, as his legacy has permanently checked out.

- Bill Plaschke

Joe lied. It’s that simple. And that heartbreaking.

Joe Paterno, who for so many decades represented all that was good and honorable in college athletics, lied. Through his teeth.

- Gene Wojciechowski

Joe Paterno, as if it wasn’t already obvious, buried the Penn State horrors because he was deeply confident that nobody would believe him capable of lying

- Charlie Pierce

This isn’t the NFL, where Roger Goodell has unilateral authority to investigate and discipline teams, coaches and players. The media try to fill that role, but are often hampered by stonewalling or manipulative administrators (see the way Spanier, Gary Schultz and Curley carefully chose their words in those e-mails to avoid FOIA detection, a few years before PSU remarkably got itself shielded from public records laws altogether). Generally speaking, if a powerful football coach wants to keep something hush-hush — and is smart enough not to use his university-issued cell phone or e-mail account to address a matter — he’ll often succeed. Paterno himself openly pined the old days when the cops brought troublemaking players straight to him, thus avoiding the fuss. The Freeh Report makes me wonder how much that culture actually changed.

- Stewart Mandel

That’s what we are left with now that former FBI director Louis Freeh’s damning independent report on Penn State has been released: It is everything the lawyers and flacks and message-board apologists assured us it wasn’t. It is a football scandal, it is a Penn State scandal, and it is a fundamental violation of the very Grand Experiment — of the balance between academics and athletics, of the notion that football can elevate a university rather than weigh it down, of the idea that men like Craig Meyers benefit from men like Joe Paterno — that the school had espoused since the 1960s. It is a betrayal of every academic advancement Penn State has made since Paterno became its head coach; it is a betrayal of all of us who came of age within Paterno’s sphere of influence; and it is a betrayal, most of all, of those abused children who grew up as my neighbors, and who were ignored and then abandoned by their elders in apparent deference to the abuser himself.

- Michael Weinreb

Paterno did much for Penn State, its student-athletes and its reputation. But the Freeh Group’s crushing report ensures that he will now be remembered more for what he didn’t do about Sandusky.

- Don Van Natta Jr.

This should be a lesson of the distorting power of institutions, of good intentions, of cults and gods and graven images. It should be the lesson of the Catholic Church, and of Graham James, and of the darkest corners of Maple Leaf Gardens. It should be a lesson of how powerful sports have become, and will continue to become, and the dangers of the veneration that comes with it.

- Bruce Arthur

Round-up of fine sentences, part 35

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 14:47:17 -0400

Lonesome George could relate to that. Though he was probably the last surviving example of the giant Galápagos tortoise Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii, he too refused to perform. Scientists, tourists, journalists, conservationists and the government of Ecuador all waited for two decades for him to mate successfully or, indeed, get it on at all. He wasn’t playing. In 1993 two females of a slightly different subspecies were put into his corral. He ignored them. When at last he decided to do his duty, in 2008 and occasionally later, the eggs failed to hatch. Clearly, he was a slow burner. Possibly he was gay. He refused to be turned on even when a female Swiss zoology graduate, smeared with tortoise hormones, gave him manual stimulation for four months.

- The Economist

He counts as his primary baseball heroes Pete Rose, Ty Cobb and Mickey Mantle - and it is perhaps best to forget for the moment that this hard-nosed triumvirate is also, respectively, a convicted tax-evader and gambling addict who remains banned from baseball; a notoriously ornery cuss widely considered to be the dirtiest player in baseball history; and an alcoholic and serial philanderer who died of liver disease at the age of 63.

- Dave Sheinin

Shelagh’s life offers another lens. She didn’t change the world forcibly, but she changed many people in it. She lightened them. She inspired them, though she likely didn’t realize it. She touched them in simple ways most of us don’t because we are too caught-up and lazy.

- The Toronto Star

By the dawn of the 20th century, it was clear that Boston was no longer able to pose meaningful competition with New York, which had turned its wary eyes to rapidly growing Chicago. And that’s when Boston found a new outlet for its old rivalry: the baseball diamond.

- Neil Swidey

My fondest early memories of Houston come not from Houston but from nights at the lake, sitting by the campfire with my father, eating fish caught hours before and listening to Colt .45s baseball on the radio. When the stars were glistening and Loel Passe was rhapsodizing with “Now you’re chunkin’ in there, pardner,” and “Hot ziggedy dog and old sassafras tea,” all was right with the universe.

- Randy Harvey

It’s odd, but Hell can be a lonely place, even with so many people around. They all seem caught up in their own little worlds, running to and fro, wailing and tearing at their hair. You try to make conversation, but you can tell they’re not listening.

- Jack Handey

As a boy, he sneaked away from an abusive high school coach to gulp water from a polluted river. He saw some of his teammates, desperate with thirst, drink from a puddle, and he heard of others who would do so from a toilet.

- David Waldstein

In the town center, two popular pubs, the Village Inn and the Dunblane Hotel, heaved with people 45 minutes before the 2 p.m. start. Crowds spilled onto Stirling Road, which was not a problem because few cars were out driving anyway. Those who could not spend their afternoon planted in front of a television still tracked the score. Outside the youth center, a coffee van blared the radio broadcast of the match. At Simply M&S, the supermarket next door, cashiers asked customers for updates.

- Ben Shepigel

The S.O.E. later evacuated him to England by submarine, but in May 1944 he parachuted back into France. Dressed as a workman, he smuggled explosives into a huge German munitions plant near Bordeaux, hiding them in hollowed-out loaves of bread. He set off the explosives on May 20 and fled on a bicycle, but was caught by the Germans once more.

- Richard Goldstein

This sucks. The internet has gotten lazy,caught in the aughts, as it were. A decade of growth and exciting ideas inspired by democratization of content has metastasized in websites that put out self-conscious, largely contrived, meta content—what writers think they are supposed to produce. This plateau is extended and populated by a wave of writers who, frankly, don’t have much to offer: not original voices, not fresh ideas, not diversity of experience.

That is where reporting comes in. More websites with resources should be investing in reporting. Give me fewer content aggregators masquerading as “writers”; fewer people who spend most of their lives in front of the television, computer, or smart phone and write like they only know other people doing the same. Instead, find talent—be it a good blogger or an actual investigative journalist (“investigative” meaning everything from Watergate to a person who knows what just happened at the community garden)—and tell that person to go cover something. I’d much rather read that than another essay purporting to offer insight but informed by nothing more than being at home with the resources to lead that lifestyle. Lived experience yields the best writing, and the internet—at least, as I know it—continues to bury that truth under turgid, arm’s-length writing.

- Someone very smart

Round-up of fine sentences, part 34

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 09:11:27 -0400

What happened next marked the Villisca killings as truly peculiar and still sends shivers down the spine a century after the fact. The ax man went back upstairs and systematically reduced the heads of all six Moores to bloody pulp, striking Joe alone an estimated 30 times and leaving the faces of all six members of the family unrecognizable. He then drew up the bedclothes to cover Joe and Sarah’s shattered heads, placed a gauze undershirt over Herman’s face and a dress over Katherine’s, covered Boyd and Paul as well, and finally administered the same terrible postmortem punishment to the girls downstairs before touring the house and ritually hanging cloths over every mirror and piece of glass in it. At some point the killer also took a two-pound slab of uncooked bacon from the icebox, wrapped it in a towel, and left it on the floor of the downstairs bedroom close to a short piece of key chain that did not, apparently, belong to the Moores. He seems to have stayed inside the house for quite some time, filling a bowl with water and–some later reports said–washing his bloody hands in it. Some time before 5 a.m., he abandoned the lamp at the top of the stairs and left as silently as he had come, locking the doors behind him. Taking the house keys, the murderer vanished as the Sunday sun rose red in the sky.

- Mike Dash

Later, I was told that five years ago the prospective client forced a kid to strip naked and threw him out into the snow. In another incident, he beat a handcuffed escort black and blue, and I don’t remember what his third strike was, but it was loathsome. That client was dangerous—we usually sent him R, our 27-year-old S/M Top. R wore military clothes and was very combative. Nobody gave R any shit.

- Michael Merriam

It turns out Bill Fong was having a stroke. With the stress, the tension of the night, his already high blood pressure had surpassed dangerous levels. Not long after, he had another stroke. When the doctor saw the scar tissue and heard about the night of dizziness, he explained to Fong that he had suffered what could very easily have been a fatal stroke. That night at the bowling alley, had things gone differently, he could have died.

- Michael Mooney

In case you missed it, The Daily Caller, the small dead tree on which Tucker Carlson has hung the remains of his career, probably to frighten off evil spirits and common decency, had a week that will live in the annals of American jackassery. Everybody knows about Caller correspondent Neil Munro’s deft performance in the role of Obnoxious Subway Crazoid in the Rose Garden on Friday. However, all the noise surrounding that may well have caused you to miss what was perhaps the worst piece of writing about American sports since the last time Phil Mushnick saw a kid with his drawers drooping low.

- Charles Pierce

Ms. Aquash’s decomposing body was discovered in a field in 1976. A coroner ruled her death had been caused by exposure to the cold. But after Ms. Aquash’s family demanded a second autopsy, she was found to have been shot behind the left ear. It was not until 28 years later, in 2004, that the first of two men was convicted in her death.

- Timothy Williams

Yano was reading at age 2, writing by 3 and composing music by his 5th birthday. He graduated from Loyola University in three years — summa cum laude, no less. When he entered U. of C.’s prestigious Pritzker School of Medicine at 12, it was into one of the school’s most rigorous programs, where students get both their doctorate and medical degrees.

- Bonnie Miller Rubin

But he doesn’t get the respect he thinks he deserves. And he’s convinced that a big part of that is because so many people think the product that he sells is icky. After spending a few hours with Shubin, in which he constantly interjects with asides about how his neighbors don’t wave to him anymore when he comes home, about how he’s had to do everything in-house because other businesses don’t want to deal with the sex industry, about how his bank treats him like crap even though they’ve got a zillion of his dollars, about how the East Austin women’s shelter SafePlace refuses the contributions he offers from the company’s accounts, it’s hard not to think that maybe this drive to revolutionize the way Americans view sex and male sexuality is just so people will be able to look at this thing that he’s built and give him some fucking credit.

- Dan Solomon

I wrote to keep myself busy and sane. I wanted to create worlds that were rosier than mine. I tried to channel overwhelming emotions. I’m surprised at how far all of it has taken me. Before writing this I’d told some people my story. I’m sure these people kept me alive, kept me safe. Seriously, these are the folks I wanna thank from the floor of my heart. Everyone of you knows who you are. Great humans, probably angels.

- Frank Ocean

To the Publisher:

Editors do run the risk of appearing arrogant if they choose to disagree with anybody who calls them arrogant.

You sound like one of those publishers who aims to please his pals in the community and give them what they want.

No one will call you arrogant that way. No one will call you newspaperman, either.

- Ben Bradlee

The next time students heard anything about Stan Kops, it was at the end of the next school year, and the news was far more shocking: he had committed suicide. The rumors ran quickly through the Horace Mann student body. Some said that he shot himself in a car, with a Bible nearby. Others said he shot himself on a baseball field as some sort of coded message to Clark. The school still said nothing.

- Amos Kamil

In the end nothing matters but the work. You can’t control how it’s taken, and the act of telling a story always involves a gap. Sometimes confusion is the risk of ambiguity–I say that to students all the time. It’s true at the fireside and it’s true in the parlor, and it’s true in made-up towns and New York. Two humans face one another, words come out of one, words go into the other mind through the ears and eyes of the listener. It’s a story. It’s simple. The gap is the thing. Make sure you build the bridge.

- Patrick Somerville

Round-up of fine sentences, part 33

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 13:12:52 -0400

They walked Sandusky out the back door of the courthouse and to a waiting sheriff’s vehicle, just 50 yards downhill from where they used to hang criminals in the courtyard of the old county jail.

- Dan Wetzel

A smart fourteen year old can call a police spokesman, get rote facts and report what occurred in the 1400 block of East Baltimore Street. But what is actually happening within the institutions themselves? And what that will mean to a city? That shit, my friends, is what makes journalism a career for grown-ups.

- David Simon

There’s the palm tree and crescent moon of his home state on his right forearm, standing next to the grim reaper. His left arm bares a fleur-de-lis — for New Orleans, not Louisville — where he proposed to Dominique. There’s a thick, black peace sign. Thrown into the mix are nicknames “Cottonmouth” and “Bojangles” and picture of Foghorn Leghorn holding a shotgun.

- Alex Orlando

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

- Tim Kreider

So what happens next? Oh, some oralness, some conjugal tusslings, some other things, dear reader, that after a week mooching around on pornography sets I no longer find astonishing enough to set down in print. The soul is weary. The pen is weary. I am a little abashed, a little ashamed, for having described so much in the preceding paragraphs, to have made myself your Vic Lagina, your Robby D., your personal pornographer.

At this point, in answer to the query I posed at the start of our voyage, I can sincerely say that I would rather drink a mugful of live ticks than switch places with James Deen.

- Wells Tower

But Thompson never made that calculation. He never stooped to trying to sell us on stupidities about “electability” and “realism,” or the pitfalls of “purity.” Instead, he stared right into the flaming-hot sun of shameless lies and cynical horseshit that is our politics, and he described exactly what he saw—probably at serious cost to his own mental health, but the benefit to us was Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.

- Matt Taibbi

One of the leaders of the pack, Baltimore Evening Sun columnist Jack Germond, has not changed much since Crouse described him as “a little cannonball of a man…with a pugnacious, hands-on-hip manner of talking.” One friend of his, the columnist Robert Novak, boasts that Germond “still believes that no day is a good day without enormous ingestions of alcohol and cholesterol eaten at breakneck speed.” Sitting in a Washington restaurant, sipping a Bloody Mary, Germond, 60, reminisces about nights of drinking until 2 A.M. with Bobby Kennedy in a Holiday Inn in Indianapolis, where the waitress was “a frustrated country singer with a voice that would break your heart”; tweaking Jimmy Carter with song parodies about lust; and leading expeditions in Alaska to see exotic dancer Cha Cha O’Brien.

- Alessandra Stanley and Maureen Dowd

At the arena his uniform was laid out on the floor at his locker. A handful of his favorite bromides were laminated on small cards next to his chair. A quote from Bruce Lee was typed on a sheet of paper and taped to the inside of his locker: “Let nature take its course, and your tools will strike at the right moment.” James pumped up the stereo and bopped his head to Young Jeezy. The cameras stared at him, and he stared back, lost in the lenses. They would never look at him the same. “It’s the way this world works,” Spoelstra says. “You can’t win unless you win.”

- Lee Jenkins

He was an athlete. He was a poor kid from rural Kansas—Depression, Dust Bowl, his parents moving the family to the basement to rent out the upstairs for money. He was a good kid, honors, played football, a basketball hero, gorgeous young man the girls adored, delivering the morning paper, working the soda fountain at Dawson’s Drugstore. A local banker lent him $300 to go to college to become a doctor, and so he started, got a girl, but then America called just as manhood did, so he went into the army. Within twenty months, he was in a foxhole, ducking, spitting out dirt. “Move out!” came the command, and he snapped to, got on his feet, waved the platoon obediently out of the trench and forward into the wall of smoke in the middle of nowhere, Italy, in the Apennine mountains. Nazis were pouring artillery rounds from the pillbox bunkers on the hill above, the U.S. bombers blasting that hill to bits, napalm bombs, the mountains soon in flames. Guys tripping into wires, traps, land mines, explosions, then machine-gun fire, guys down everywhere, just lying there dead, everywhere, and then his buddy Sims, his radio guy, bam, Sims was down, Sims! So he crawled in the dirt, having no idea Sims was already dead, slithered in the dirt to Sims and grabbed his shirt and pulled, pulled, and then bam! He felt it in his back, fire in his back, and he lay in the dirt gurgling words, his body seizing up to his eyeballs, only his eyeballs could move, but maybe his mouth, he could feel the dirt in his mouth, yes, his mouth. Another soldier weeping, pissing his pants, a skinny kid shouting, “God help me!” crawling under the artillery, dragging guys, dead guys, barely alive guys, dragging Lieutenant Dole, who was way too big, way too heavy, so the skinny kid rolled Lieutenant Dole like a sack of sand, over, over, blood pouring out, down into a ravine. In and out of consciousness for six more hours on the bloody battlefield, Bob Dole’s mind went home, to Russell, Kansas, running up Maple Street. I always run. I’m running track in school. Hey, Dad, I think we have a good chance of going to state in football this year. I see Spitzy, our little white dog. Spitzy, what are you doing out in this kind of weather?

- Jeanne Marie Laskas

Round-up of fine sentences, part 32 (feat. Colin Nissan)

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 17:32:03 -0400

Goodbye, gas-station soda that’s too big for my cup holder

Did I ever stand a chance of consuming this much liquid? Of course not. But that’s not the point, the point is that you’re only 19 cents more than the medium. You were a hell of a copilot all these years, dispensing a bottomless dose of uppers into my bloodstream, like a carbonated IV drip. Unfortunately, you’re no longer the only thing in my car that’s round and wide and sweaty.

- From Eating Well

Before long, I will be your Fred and you will be my Ginger. I will be your John and you will be my Yoko. I will be your George and you will be my Weezie. It’s time for you to see the beautiful sights of our country through the eyes of a tandemist: Things will look different and, dare I say it, twice as beautiful. Things like mountains, oceans, fields, urban environments, deserts, ponds, lakes, forests, and suburban environments.

- From McSweeney’s

For our Lord and for the parishioners of this church where he prayed, Ryan’s little acts will not go unremembered. Especially his conscious decision to put deadly insects on his effing face! I mean, come on, who’s with me here? Bees sting! They have stingers that pierce your skin! Anyone curious why Ryan’s casket is closed? I’ll tell you why—because he swelled up like the Scooby-Doo float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. That crazy bitch had more poison pumped into him than an amateur Sri Lankan snake charmer, for Christ’s sake!

Oh my God, I am so sorry—please stop crying, Casey, stop crying. I was kidding about your daddy swelling up. Kidding, sweetheart. I’m very sorry …

- From McSweeney’s

If our relationship progresses and we find ourselves engaged in coital activities, there is a chance that my panther will climb up on the bed and watch us. I guess it ignites a certain primal instinct in her. No reason to panic. Girlfriends who have been successful in the past just relaxed and let my panther do her thing. She’s just a curious old gal.

- From Yankee Pot Roast

Be careful not to get too carried away with the landscaping. After all, you don’t want to attract unwanted attention from the neighbors. If you’re new to the area, someone will inevitably bring over cookies, so you’ll just have to deal with that person as best you can. Just be sure to fight the urge to show off your new feng-shui space. Remember, it’s still a meth lab and you’re still wearing a gas mask, and that’s a can of worms you don’t want to open over a plate of pecan sandies.

- From McSweeney’s

By educating me at home, my parents were able to give me individualized attention without the usual distractions that kids in regular school experience, like dating and friendship. Not to mention that traditional school can be dangerous. I’ve heard about kids catching the flu and chicken pox, even Judaism.

- From The Morning News

For dessert, you asked for your mother’s homemade peach cobbler. It is highly unorthodox for someone other than the prison kitchen staff to prepare a final meal. Also, you killed her about eight years ago,remember? So you’ll have to settle for Hostess.

- From College Humor

Imagine you’re opening your trunk, reaching deep inside, and removing a 7-iron from your golf bag. Envision yourself now at the guy’s car. Raise your arms above your head—this is a great rib-cage stretch, so hold it at the top to really feel it—then come down on his windshield in a sharp motion. Repeat until his windshield is completely shattered and he is crying.

- From McSweeney’s

A week later, I went into Rockstar Games in Soho for the recording and screamed two hours of lines as Marshall Leigh Johnson. I threatened, chased, arrested, and killed people. I even died. I didn’t just die, I died with an accent. I was in the freaking zone. After signing my paperwork, I left, sweating, voiceless, and thrilled to bid farewell to my voice-over innocence. A new day had dawned for me and my badass larynx.

- From The Paris Review

Fact: you are throwing me more signals than a third base coach who’s trying to have sex with me. Fact: I am reading you loud and clear and I’m heading straight for home, unencumbered by garments. Don’t let playful euphemisms like that lull you into thinking I’m keeping my clothes on, because that’s not an option at this point. Mentally, I’m already very naked. It’s just a baby step from here.

- From McSweeney’s

See, I’m like the three-headed dog guarding the gates of Hades, except instead of Hades, it’s Diapers.com, and instead of a dog, I’m a dyslexic computer program with a messed up vocabulary and every goddamned funhouse font in the book. Stretched, squeezed, windswept. I’ve got gel filters that’ll render any word virtually unrecognizable and camouflage backgrounds that’ll make you want to ralph all over your laptop. So put on your glasses and get comfortable. Let’s get this typographical acid trip started, shall we?

- From McSweeney’s

There are two things more difficult than writing. The first is editing, the second is expert level Sudoku where there’s literally two goddamned squares filled in. While editing is a grueling process, if you really work hard at it, in the end you may find that your piece has fewer words than it did before. Which, is great. Perhaps George Bernard Shaw said it best when upon sending a letter to a close friend, he wrote, “I’m sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to make it shorter.” No quote better illustrates the point that writers are very busy.

- From McSweeney’s

Round-up of fine sentences, part 31 (feat. Watergate)

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 21:56:26 -0400

Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. yesterday in what authorities described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee here.

- Alfred E. Lewis

A $25,000 cashier’s check, apparently earmarked for President Nixon’s re-election campaign, was deposited in April in a bank account of one of the five men arrested in the break-in at Democratic National Headquarters here June l7.

- Woodward and Bernstein

John N. Mitchell, while serving as U.S.Attorney General, personally controlled a secret Republican fund that was used to gather information about the Democrats, according to sources involved in the Watergate investigation.

Last night, Mitchell was reached by telephone in New York and read the beginning of The Post’s story. He said: “All that crap, you’re putting it in the paper? It’s all been denied. Jesus. Katie Graham (Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post) is gonna get caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published. Good Christ. That’s the most sickening thing I’ve ever heard.”

- Woodward and Bernstein

FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

- Woodward and Bernstein

Richard Milhous Nixon announced last night that he will resign as the 37th President of the United States at noon today.

- Carroll Kilpatrick

—

The Watergate that we wrote about in The Washington Post from 1972 to 1974 is not Watergate as we know it today. It was only a glimpse into something far worse. By the time he was forced to resign, Nixon had turned his White House, to a remarkable extent, into a criminal enterprise.

On the day he left, Aug. 9, 1974, Nixon gave an emotional farewell speech in the East Room to his staff, his friends and his Cabinet. His family stood with him. Near the end of his remarks, he waved his arm, as if to highlight the most important thing he had to say.

“Always remember,” he said, “others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

His hatred had brought about his downfall. Nixon apparently grasped this insight, but it was too late. He had already destroyed himself.

- Woodward and Bernstein

—

Woodward and Bernstein’s techniques were hardly original. But, propagated by “All the President’s Men,” they became central to the ethos of investigative reporting: Become an expert on your subject. Knock on doors to talk to sources in person. Protect the confidentiality of sources when necessary. Never rely on a single source. Find documents. Follow the money. Pile one hard-won detail on top of another until a pattern becomes discernible. Just a few years ago, Dana Priest of The Post used similar methods to reveal the CIA’s secret overseas prisons in which terrorism suspects were aggressively interrogated.

- Len Downie

As it happens, life didn’t turn out so well for Frank Wills. He couldn’t get another job after he lost the job at the Watergate. (One university in D.C. told him it was afraid to hire him for fear it might lose its federal money. So much for the “lessons” of Watergate.) When his mother down in South Carolina suffered a stroke, Wills moved in to take care of her, and they survived on the $450-a-month she got from Social Security. When she died, Wills lost the house and was briefly homeless. He got busted for shoplifting a $12 pair of shoes in 1983. He died, penniless, on September 27, 2000. Richard Nixon, needless to say, got rich.

But, if you happen to be passing by the Mount Transfiguration Baptist Church Cemetery in Aiken County down in South Carolina, you might stop by the grave of Frank Wills and say a little prayer for his soul. This weekend is his 40-year anniversary. It belongs to him, and to the three cops — public employees, as they are reckoned in the politics of the moment — who answered his call. Forty years ago this Sunday, they all did their jobs very well. In the 40 years since, as citizens of a self-governing republic, we’ve all done ours very badly.

- Charles Pierce