Some Pork With Your Peanut Butter?

After ticking off all the things New York City has done to guard against another terror attack, Bloomberg called for a risk-based dispersal of homeland security funds, accusing Congress and the White House of spreading homeland security dollars "around the country like peanut butter." (Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York at Senate hearing).

McCain, a Political Cat That's Off Balance

Mr. McCain is stuck on the bridge of a sinking policy with W. and Dick Cheney, who showed again this week that there is no bottom to his lunacy. The senator supported a war that didn’t need to be fought and is a cheerleader for a surge that won’t work. It has left Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, once the most spontaneous of campaigners, off balance. He’s like a cat without its whiskers. (Maureen Dowd in The NYT).

Expecting Freddy in the Garden State

Because of spending controls, the half penny and fewer uses of one-shots, the structural deficit has been reduced – for the moment. But like Freddy Krueger, it’ll be back. (Gov. John Corzine of New Jersey in Budget Address).

New Orleans, Rushmore & Chicken on a Spit

Their arms were folded. It was like talking to Mt. Rushmore. (Dan Baum in his online New Yorker journal, about the New Orleans aftermath of Katrina).

E-mail and phone trees spread the word Monday morning that the City Council was going to be publicly questioning Warren Riley, the police chief, and Eddie Jordan, the district attorney, later that day. “They’re going to turn like chicken on a spit!” a friend who called to alert me to the show exulted. (Baum).

Mr. President, Welcome to Third Grade

Watching the administration try to get its story straight about Iran’s role in Iraq last week was like watching third graders try to sidestep blame for misbehaving while the substitute teacher was on a bathroom break. (Frank Rich in The NYT. Times Select access required).

A Times Psychology Lesson on Suburban Teens

Sophomoric by definition, this youth is plugged into his id but not his conscience, and the stabilizing fluid of common sense is still slipping and sliding through his system like unset Jell-O. (NYT editorial-page blurb on suburban (or subintelligent) teens who run into fences for kicks).

From the Land of Oz

Those striped socks, curling back like a pair of deflating noisemakers. ... (Article in The NYT on Meinhardt Raabe, 91, the Munchkin coroner who confirmed the death of the Wicked Witch in "The Wizard of Oz." Times Select signup required.)

The Literary Amazement of Amis

[Martin] Amis's observing eye is constantly abulge with amazement at the wickedness and folly of his fellow human beings. He looks upon the world with incredulous surprise, like a man stumbling befuddled out of a dim restaurant into the acid sunlight and traffic roar of a summer afternoon in a strange city. (John Banville writing in The New York Review of Books about Amis and his new "House of Meetings.")

Tortured Similes: Getting Under New Yorker's Skin

The show’s villains usually inflict the more gruesome tortures: their victims are hung on hooks, like carcasses in a butcher shop; poked with smoking-hot scalpels; or abraded with sanding machines. (Jane Mayer in The New Yorker
on “24,” torture and the man behind it all).

His students were particularly impressed by a scene in which Bauer barges into a room where a stubborn suspect is being held, shoots him in one leg, and threatens to shoot the other if he doesn’t talk. In less than ten seconds, the suspect reveals that his associates plan to assassinate the Secretary of Defense. [Retired Law Professor Gary] Solis told me, “I tried to impress on them that this technique would open the wrong doors, but it was like trying to stomp out an anthill.”

“It’s been very heady,” [“24” writer Howard] Gordon said of Washington’s enthusiasm for the show. Roger Director, [“24” executive producer Joel] Surnow’s friend, joked that the conservative writers at “24” have become “like a Hollywood television annex to the White House. It’s like an auxiliary wing.”

Turning Heads & Phrases on the Runway

Anybody who attempts to deny that today’s cadaverous lovelies have become absurdly attenuated — they move gingerly down the runway like starving egrets — must simply not have been around when models looked more human. (The New York Observer on Fashion Week.

And …

The day’s second jolt of creativity arrived like a sledgehammer from hell. It was the celeb sighting to end all celeb sightings. Indeed, the range and breadth of front-row notables turned the Marc Jacobs show into a veritable waxworks: Rod Stewart, Lil’ Kim, Lenny Kravitz, Lee Radziwill. Other than Dr. Phil and Weird Al Yankovic, it’s hard to think of a contemporary icon who was not present. (Observer)

Getting Gussied Up for Some Important Dates

In the master bathroom, a white sheepskin rug had been slung over the edge of the sunken tub, looking rather like an albino sloth making its way to a watering hole. (Rebecca Mead writing in The New Yorker about dressing up homes for sale).

Taking a Page (& Plenty More) From 'Profiles'

Together with Mark Salter, McCain has built a franchise of best-selling books out of his reputation for personal and public integrity. They bear titles such as Faith of My Fathers, Why Courage Matters, and Character Is Destiny, and make John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage look like a mere Hallmark card. (Todd Purdum in Vanity Fair.)

And ...

At the slightest sign of direct sunlight he breaks out the baseball cap that is always kept at the ready, and slathers his face with so much sunblock that he looks like Marcel Marceau until his skin absorbs it. (Purdum). [McCain had a malignant melanoma removed from the left side of his face in 2000.]

Mary & Rhoda Take Your Seats

We admire the purity of Silverman’s scornfulness, but we don’t want to hang out with her the way we did with Mary and Rhoda. Not that she’d let us get that close anyway. “The Sarah Silverman Program” is like a club so exclusive that only the owner can get in — not even God is on the list. (Tad Friend in The New Yorker).

The Years & the Thunderclouds Pile Up

But the question of indefinite detention itself — which might be construed as a core issue — hangs over our discussions like a far-off thundercloud, darkening a little with each passing year and each report of another suicide attempt at Guantánamo. ( Joe Lelyveld in The New York Review of Books).

New Frontier in Polarization: Kids

Once upon a time, asking about someone’s children was like talking about the weather. Then again, once upon a time talking about the weather was also like talking about the weather — not a portal into the political or the apocalyptic. ( Stacy Schiff in The NYT).

Rueful Laughter at a Sitting Bull Memorial

The 12-foot monument rises where Sitting Bull is supposedly buried and where he certainly once felt at home; where the steel-blue clouds of winter press down upon the hills of dormant grass; where nothing moves but a solitary bird in flight, and the whinnies of a distant horse sound almost like an old man’s rueful laughter. (This Land column by Dan Barry in The NYT).

Wolcott on Empty Bottles, Hitler & the Rose Bowl

[Re: Simpson's "If I Did It"] It is a book out of which no one comes off well, its real-life clichéd characters clattering like empty bottles. (James Wolcott in Vanity Fair).


And ...

[Re: Mailer's "The Castle in the Forest," a fictionalized account of Hitler's youth} All I know is that a third of the way through I knew that finishing the novel would be like trying to dig a tunnel with my bare hands, and that reviewing it would require tunneling back and submitting a piece that would betray the heavy slog of obligation. (Wolcott in his Vanity Fair blog).

And ...

The narration of The Castle in the Forest is such a creaky, padded performance embedded with winking ironies that it's like listening to a Germanic Lionel Barrymore. I'm also apathetic-to-unsympathetic (depending on my fickle mood) regarding Mailer's cosmology; I accept evil in the world, but not as the designer product of the Devil presiding over it like the grand marshall of the Rose Bowl parade. (Wolcott blog).

Sizing up the I-Man, Just About Right

[Description of Imus] "You're like Rose Kennedy in a cowboy hat." (Guest on the "Imus in the Morning" radio show).

When the Bells Ring in Glorious Kazakhstan

... The high visibility of Kazakhstan’s many casinos — typically decorated like pinball machines, with blinking neon lights, even when situated in quiet residential neighborhoods — has produced a backlash in this country of only 17 million people.

And ...

[From tableside in a Kapchagai restaurant] “People in general are feeling negative about the Chinese, but they don’t need to worry: the Chinese will come in large groups and stick together in one casino, like a herd.” (Sayassat Dyussembayev, a Kazakh businessman, told a New York Times reporter.)

Just What We Need: A Prussian Admirer

His [Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates's] favorite quotation from history, he told reporters traveling with him this week for meetings with allies and commanders in Europe and the Middle East, is from Frederick the Great, the 18th century Prussian monarch and gifted musician: “Negotiations without arms are like music books without instruments.” Or, put another way, it takes military power to create the leverage necessary to make negotiations fruitful. (Military Memo, New York Times).