A classic NYT sentence
Online Dating Sheds Its Stigma as Losers.com: “It’s amazing how all women say they’re slender when a lot of them are overweight,” said one 79-year-old Manhattan man who lists himself as 69 on his Match.com profile.
{ Monthly Archives }
June 2003
Your geese are cooked
The WSJ has this great section on geese:
What could possibly cause a majestic V-formation of honkers high overhead on a thousand-mile migration to the Arctic tundra to suddenly drop down and land on a golf course in, say, Greenwich, Conn., defy their instincts, and take up the posh suburban life?
The answer is startling to many Americans: These geese didn’t stop migrating. They never migrated. These geese, say wildlife historians, have virtually nothing to do with wild, migrating flocks. “Resident” geese — the ones most likely to be seen in suburban parks, ponds and soccer fields — are descendants of farmed geese and flocks of “live decoys” once used by professional hunters.
The Fish & Wildlife Service calls them “hybrids … originating in captivity and artificially introduced” around the country. In other words, in most places these geese are a non-native species thriving, like feral cats and kudzu, in an artificial habitat: the welfare-wildlife world of sprawl.
Hamas’s long view
Here’s the scariest long-term thing you’re likely to read about Hamas:
“When I interviewed over 100 Hamas activists and all leadership, I was quite astonished because everyone told me that an Islamic state would begin about the years 2022 or 2023,” he said. “I asked them, `What are the conditions?’ They said: `Life after Yasir Arafat. Islamic revolution in Jordan and Egypt. Time and demography are on our side.’ “
Bugs
A quite well-reviewed novel called “The Bug” about “the postmodern Prometheus”:
Ethan’s sections of the novel are preceded, Hollywood-style, by the number of days that UI-1017 has been ”open” — it lives for 372 days in all — and his condition deteriorates as the Jester carries him further into the mystery of its birth, the ”deep down strangeness that made this machine seem to be operating in its own terms, alive.” As Ethan’s obsession with the bug grows and the company begins to crumble around his workstation, Berta is compelled by circumstances (and innate curiosity) to become his protector and shadow….
