I <3 Richard Russo, and other Friday bits and pieces
From That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo:
She pointed at the wall, specifically at an indentation in the plaster that looked to be about the same size as a college dean’s forehead.
I won’t even give you the context. It’s good, but sometimes one’s imagination is even better.
In related bits, a friend introduced me to My Parents Were Awesome. While I understand that my parents were once my age (in fact, my mom and I met right about the time she was my age now), I’ve never really seen pictures of them without us kids. And now I really want to know what they were like.
In unrelated news, Jon Stewart’s Glenn Beck impersonation was downright inspiring. It’s not that he’s making fun of Glenn Beck — it’s that he’s taking every rhetorical strategy of Beck’s and illustrating how ludicrous they are: the word association schemes, the crazy diagrams, the appearance of being well-read without the information to back it up, the crying, the screaming, the hand-waving and -wringing — all these are ways Beck tries (and logically fails) not so much to win but to shut down arguments. That’s the beauty of this — not that it’s funny, but that it’s true.