Market Jitters

"It's a very, very nervous market. Trying to predict a one-day movement is a bit like trying to forecast a shoal of fish -- where one goes, everyone will go. But the moves are essentially random on days when there's very little news to go on," said Nick Parsons, chief market strategist at nabCapital. (Reuters).

Beat the Kettle, Slowly

Human speech, Flaubert said, is “like a cracked kettle on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to touch the stars to tears.” (Anne Midgette in The NYT).

Some Live, Some Die. Why?

Brother Juniper [in "The Bridge of San Luis Rey"] considered three possible explanations for the deaths: The victims were in the wrong place at the wrong time (a heretical interpretation he immediately rejected); God was punishing the wicked for their sins; or angels were being called early to heaven. Either humans are "like the flies that boys kill on a summer day" or they're like sparrows "who do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God." (Cynthia Crossen writing in The Wall Street Journal about why some people died and others lived in the Minneapolis bridge collapse).

Gone Fishing

The helicopter moved like a drunk descending a staircase, lurching and rocking while the backwash of its fiberglass blades whipped the tall, pale green grass along Newfoundland’s Main River into a frothy, snapping mass. (Pete Bodo in The NYT, about fishing up north.

And ...

And what would a fish camp be without the obligatory, faded flannel shirt, flung like a discarded snake skin over a shrub to dry?

And ...

Catching a salmon on a small river is a little like fighting a badger in a phone booth: an awful lot happens, very fast, in a small space.

Scenes From a Marriage (Yoiks)

“You ask me for intimacy,” Marie was telling her husband of 22 years, Clem — and, unavoidably, the therapist and four other couples in the room — “the same way you ask if I’d like croutons on my salad.” She spoke slowly, deliberately, each word chipping out of her mouth like an ax striking wood. “I don’t hear the difference.” (Laurie Abraham in The NYT's Sunday magazine).

The End of 'Take My Money, Please!'

It is, in a way, the Henny Youngman Economy. Lenders pleaded: "Take my money ... please!" In recent months, harbingers of the end of the credit bubble have been popping up like shoots of yellow forsythia. (Daniel Gross writing in slate.com).

Swatting Bugs at a Standup Gig

"They [hecklers] are like little bugs hitting the windshield. You have to wipe them off and keep moving. But as soon as you get angry, you are not being clever. The secret is stay cool." (Comedian Rich Hill commenting to Reuters).

Bourne Ultimatum:: Doubling Down on Similes

Jaw clenched, brow knotted, body tight as a secret, Matt Damon hurtles through “The Bourne Ultimatum” like a missile. (Manohla Dargis in The NYT).

Assessing Angelina

[Angelina Jolie] is not short, but she is very small, down to her bones, which are like twigs. And yet her flesh -- her golden, mortified flesh -- is extraordinary: Like the sheets on a barracks bed, there's no slack to it. (Tom Junod in Esquire).

And ...

She shines all over. Her eyes and her lips are, as advertised, extravagant creations, but then, in addition to all that extravagance, they also glisten like wet roads in a car commercial. (Junod).

One Prognosis for The Wall St. Journal

This news is like hearing from an old friend that he has a debilitating, fatal disease. You know that things will continue as they are for awhile, but you also know that the future looks bleak. (johnsmcdaniel posting on Wall Street Journal forum about the Murdoch deal).

Examining the World From a Late-Night Perch

In an industry that has since become an escalating arms race of hipness, [Tom] Snyder was happy to sit on the sidelines like Switzerland, a neutral player perfectly at ease with how ordinary and out of the loop he could be. (Dave Itzkoff in The NYT).

Trying to Keep Pace With Spam Blight

... Most anti-spam techniques so far have been like pesticides that do nothing other than create a more resistant strain of bugs. (Michael Specter in The New Yorker).

And ...

There are now blacklists, gray lists, and white lists, which permit people to choose whom they want to receive mail from, rather than whose mail to delete. Stopping spam this way is a bit like trying to stop the rain by catching every drop before it hits the ground. (Specter).

Hot Enough For You?

We are invited to worship the sun both as lifegiver, for those left behind on Earth, and as a kind of annihilating deity; when one spacewalker drifts beyond the limits of the sunshield and catches a direct blast of solar ray, there is a tiny pffsst, and he boils away to nothingness, like a waterdrop on a stove. (Anthony Lane in The New Yorker on the new film "Sunshine").

2007: A Political Odyssey

Bless Ed Markey, the House telecom subcommittee chairman, but it didn't enter his head unaided to hold up an iPhone at a hearing last week and -- like the ape in the movie "2001" -- ponder why he shouldn't use it with any wireless network he wants rather than just AT&T's. (Holman W. Jenkins Jr. in the WSJ on the Google lobby).

Genre Man: Not a Flattering Picture

His beard is haphazard and unintentional, and he dresses in sweats, or in shorts and a T-shirt, or with his shirt hanging out like the tongue of a Labrador retriever. (David Denby in The New Yorker about film's romantic-comedy characters of late).

And ...

When he’s with them [friends], punched beer cans and bongs of various sizes lie around like spent shells; alone, and walrus-heavy on his couch, he watches football, basketball, or baseball on television, or spends time memorializing his youth—archiving old movies, games, and jokes. (Denby)

And ...

Katharine Hepburn in “Baby” nearly drives Cary Grant crazy with her intrusions into his work, her way of scattering his life about like pieces of lawn furniture. (Denby).

And ...

If Tracy and Hepburn were like a rock and a current mysteriously joined together, these two neurotics [in "Annie Hall"] were like agitated hummingbirds meeting in midair. (Denby)

Lesson of a Stick-Up for Afghanistan

“We’re not able to destroy all the poppy — that’s not the point. What we’re trying to do is lend an element of threat and risk to the farmers’ calculations, so they won’t plant next year,” Wankel said later. “It’s like robbing a bank. If people see there’s more to be had by robbing a bank than by working in one, they’re going to rob it, until they learn there’s a price to pay.” (John Lee Anderson in The New Yorker about opium in Afghanistan).

Friedman on the 'Death Cult'

Muslims have got to understand that a death cult has taken root in the bosom of their religion, feeding off it like a cancerous tumor. (Thomas L. Friedman in The NYT).

Say Cheese, Gordon

When he suddenly remembers to smile -- as he did, quite awkwardly, outside No. 10 -- his face bursts into an unnatural glare, like a fluorescent light flicked on in a dark room, as opposed to the warm, glowing grin of Blair. (James Geary on Salon.com writing about Gordon Brown).

Debating a New Captain for the WSJ Ship

No outside board can tame any owner, a former Sunday Times investigative reporter, Bruce Page, told me. “Newspapers are like ships,” he said. “They are real-time systems. You must make your decisions. It is better to have bad decisions rather than no decisions. You can’t have the captain of the ship appointed by people onshore, and fire him when he comes back to shore.” (Ken Auletta in The New Yorker about the prospective sale of The Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch).

And ...

In most newsrooms, John Carroll said, “there are some leaders, but the majority are followers. The majority lines up like iron filings to a magnet.”

Day at the Beach for Lady Chatterley

Viewers will no doubt like and dislike Pascale Ferran's "Lady Chatterley" in ample numbers, but the picture itself is an impressive construction that seems indifferent to such concerns. Watching it is something like swimming in the ocean: You have an idyllic, sun-struck dip for a while, and then the sun goes behind a cloud and you get stung by jellyfish and heaved up on the beach, shivering, half-dead and slimed with seaweed. It's all the same to the ocean. (Andrew O'Hehir on Salon.com).