On the Home Front: With Support Like This ...

“I am always a little amazed at the response that people get when they hear from Barack,” [Barack Obama's wife, Michelle,] told the crowd at the Beverly Hilton, as her husband stood by looking like a puppy being scolded, reported Hud Morgan of Men’s Vogue. “A great man, a wonderful man. But still a man. ... (Maureen Dowd in The NYT).

Walking Down the Aisle

For many guests a wedding is less a joy than an ordeal, something to get through, like PBS pledge drives or Lyme disease. (Alessandra Stanley in The NYT).

Manny Being Manny the Prophet

In 1999, after [Manny Ramirez] established himself as a superstar with the Cleveland Indians, written messages began appearing on the backs of his cleats, like admonitions from a prophet: “There will be hell to pay”; “Justice will be served”; “Can’t we all get along?”; “Live and let die.” (Ben McGrath in The New Yorker).

The local obsession with the Red Sox is such that David Wells, the former Yankee and Red Sox pitcher, and a night owl, likes to call Boston Picturetown, rather than Beantown, because of all the fans with cell-phone cameras in restaurants and bars, ready for deployment like civilian paparazzi. (McGrath).

Dr. Dahl to Surgery, Stat

... [Roald] Dahl is of that select society of Saki (the pen name of H.H. Munro), Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, and Iris Murdoch, satiric moralists who wield the English language like a surgical instrument to flay, dissect, and expose human folly. (Joyce Carol Oates in The New York Review of Books on Dahl's "Collected Stories").

Dahl's females are particularly grotesque specimens, like Mrs. Ponsonby of "Nunc Dimittis" who is "so incredibly short and squat and stiff, [she looked as if] she had no legs at all above the knees," has a "salmon mouth" and fingers "like a bunch of small white snakes wriggling in her lap." (Oates ... and Dahl).

And from Dahl ...

I was able to take most of it in—the metallic silver-blue hair with every strand glued into place, the brown pig-eyes, the long sharp nose sniffing for trouble, the curled lips, the prognathous jaw, the powder, the mascara, the scarlet lipstick and, most shattering of all, the massive shored-up bosom that projected like a balcony in front of her.

More from Dahl ...

When she marched—Miss Trunchbull never walked, she always marched like a storm-trooper with long strides and arms aswinging—when she marched along a corridor you could actually hear her snorting as she went, and if a group of children happened to be in her path, she ploughed through them like a tank, with small people bouncing off her to left and right.

Earth Day, Rush Style

Rush Limbaugh, he's got the life. His days flick through the slot like postcards from paradise. (James Wolcott on Rush Limbaugh in Vanity Fair).

He appears to think that if there were true global warming the earth would crisp evenly like a baked apple. (Wolcott).

Valiant efforts have been made to correct the mistakes, half-truths, exaggerations, and confusions that Limbaugh coughs up like furballs during his preachings. (Wolcott).

Try to Keep Down the Popcorn

In any case, this dawn-of-the-dead fantasia is gleefully disgusting: flesh melts, bodies explode like packages of liquid squeezed too hard, testicles roll around on the ground like spilled Brussels sprouts. (David Denby's "Grindhouse" review in The New Yorker).

And ...

When Cherry loses a leg to the ghouls, her old lover (Freddy Rodriguez, who’s a pocket-size dynamo) outfits her with a machine gun for a stump; she raises it like a dog taking a pee and blows away anyone within fifty yards. (Denby).

Shocked ... Just Shocked

Like the piano player in the brothel, Imus's notables seem shocked that anyone would associate them with what goes on upstairs. (John Leo in The Wall Street Journal).

And ...

Jeff Greenfield once said that appearing on Imus is like being an important novelist excerpted in Playboy. You wish to be judged by your brilliant writing, not your proximity to the centerfold mammaries. (Leo).

A Find at the Dump

His briefcase sat beside the table like something yanked out of a landfill. (Don DeLillo in The New Yorker).

Kid, Get Me Rewrite

Caroline’s sense that her story is being written as she lives it becomes an analogue of the old problem of predestination versus free will, and the click-clack of the typewriter becomes the pulse of fate, like the ticking of a clock or the pounding of Poe’s tell-tale heart. (The New Yorker).

Under the Plane Tree

The Athenians valued Themistocles, but they never really loved him. He was pushed from power mere months after his epic victory. [Cleanup after the Leonidas Spartan 300 mess.] As Plutarch later reported, the Athenians “treated him like a plane-tree; when it was stormy, they ran under his branches for shelter, but as soon as it was fine, they plucked his leaves and lopped his branches.” (David Brooks in The NYT).

And ...

President Bush wants to keep everything that happens in his White House secret, but when it comes to his own emotions, he’s as transparent as a teenager on MySpace. (Frank Rich in The NYT).

The British Invasion, Take 2

The British have colonized Manhattan, acquiring minute rent-stabilized apartments in the West Village that they pass on to each other like hereditary titles. (A.A. Gill writing in Vanity Fair about his fellow "Brits Behaving Badly).

And ...

Most Americans think they look like gay Marines with deformed ears.

And ...

Those with the voices like broken crockery, the book-at-bedtime accent, have a lot to answer for.

And ...

We hunker together, forming bitchy old boys' and girls' clubs where we complain about and giggle over Americans like nannies talking about difficult, stupid children.

And ...

Inside, four young Englishmen from the Midlands are reminiscing over lists of Edwardian boiled sweets, like a spoof of "High Fidelity".

A Touch of the Gout

[Walter Benn] Michaels argues that nothing much has changed by substituting the idea of particular cultures for the discredited idea of race. For pragmatic as well as analytical reasons, he wants the left to forget about this kind of diversity, whether we call it racial or cultural ("diversity, like gout, is a rich people's problem"), and focus instead on poverty. (The New York Review of Books reviewing Michaels' "The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality").

Middle School: An Acquired Taste

“Middle school is like Scotch,” [JoAnn Rintel Abreu, an English and social studies teacher,] reflected in the teachers’ lounge one afternoon. “At first you try to get it down. Then you get used to it. Then it’s all you order.” (The NYT).

Six Packs on Parade: Sparta's 300 Go to War

And what guys! Decked out like gladiators in a gay fashion layout, the soldiers from the Greek city-state of Sparta look gym-ready for battle in crotch-squeezing ensembles that expose as much flesh as an R rating will allow. (RollingStone review).

Fighting Words on Fishing's Front Line

"My dad was a duck hunter," said (Thom) Watson (a sponsor of a Maine bill to limit the use of live fishing bait). "He used to say ice fishing was like a hunter sitting by a fireplace looking up the chimney waiting for a bird to fly over." (Article in The WSJ on the ice-fishing vs flyfishing wars).

The V-Word, a Salad Fork & a Carving Knife

Still, it’s important that parents and their children recognize that “vagina,” like “scrotum,” the subject of last month’s bad word kerfuffle (see the children’s book “The Higher Power of Lucky”) is not really a bad word, just a word that, like a salad fork or carving knife, needs to be used correctly, not brandished recklessly. (Article in The NYT on "Vagina Monologues" controversy at John Jay High School in Cross River, NY).

Historical Forecast: Uncertainty & Gloom

Western man in the middle of the 20th century is tense, uncertain, adrift. We look upon our epoch as a time of troubles, an age of anxiety. The grounds of our civilization, of our certitude, are breaking up under our feet, and familiar ideas and institutions vanish as we reach for them, like shadows in the falling dusk. (Arthur M Schlesinger Jr. in an appreciation in today's NYT).

Blogland Comity It Ain't

He's like the kid who gets to the ball field early, warms-up and takes batting practice, only to sit the bench because in the end, he sucks. (A blog commentator's view of another blog commentator on The Nation blog).

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).