Big on New York. The highest energy, the brightest of people, the most livable large city there is. 25 million visitors a year and 8 million permanents can't all be wrong. Love it.
Bright people with a position that is reasoned and can be argued. Unlinke President Bush, I'don't believe there is any absolute truth. But you need reasoned thought to have a defensible position. Something he also would not agree with. This why I have so much trouble with the Bushes, pere et fils. As far as the Bushes are concerned, we are 0 for 2.
Long walks on the beach, snuggling by the fireplace and making silly faces in serious situations is not what floats my boat. Keep the sushi; where's the meet - of minds?
My music ranges from the 17th to the 21st century. Not much on Britney Spears or Snoop Dogg or any flavor of Simpson, but big on Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, CSNY, people who actually wrote music. In Jazz, Moe Koffman and The Modern Jazz Quartet were all I needed to get me going.
Most of my movie star faves are gone. Some are totally forgotten. Let me drop some names: Alan Bates, WC Fields, Spencer Tracy, Carole Lombard, Jacques Villeret. When I look at the great screen leading men and women, I mourn for this century. Will Farrell, Rob Schneider, and Adam Sandler will (hopefully) soon be forgotten. Our heroes are morons! Movies get Dumb and Dumberer. Is that America today?
The Weather Channel.
The rest is too horrible to contemplate.
I think this is the finest first page ever written in the history of English noveldom. If you know of one better, I'd be delighted to read it.
CHAPTER I
H aving placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare- time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.
Examples of three separate openings - the first: The Pooka McPhellimey ,
a member of the devil class, sat in his hut in the middle of a firwod meditating on the nature of numerals and segregating in his mind the odd ones from the even. He was seated at his diptych or ancient two-leaved hinged writing-table with inner sides waxed. His rough long-nailed fingers toyed with a snuff-box of perfect rotundity and through a gap in his teeth he whistled a civil cavatina. He was a courtly man and received honour by reason of the generous treatment he gave his wife, one of the Corrigans of Carlow .
The second opening: There was nothing unusual in the appearance of Mr John Furriskey but actually he had one distinction that is rarely encountered - he was born at the age of twenty-five and entered the world with a memory but without a personal experience to account for it. His teeth were well-formed but stained by tobacco, with two molars filled and a cavity threatened in the left canine. His know- ledge of physics was moderate and extended to Boyle's Law and the Parallelogram of Forces.
The third opening : Finn MacCool was a legendary hero of old Ireland . Though not mentally robust, he was a man of superb physique and development. Each of his thighs was as thick as a horse's belly, nar - rowing to a calf as thick as the belly of a foal. Three fifties of foster- lings could engage with a handball against the wideness of his backside, which was large enough to halt the march of men through a mountain-pass.
How could you not turn the page?
- Abe Lincoln was the first last and only great president. Sorry, Bush fans.
- Al Hirschfeld was the person who took his own art to the highest level, and lived the best life of anyone I have read about or seen. Go rent The Line King. It will give you all kinds of hope and cheer.
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