From a series of emails debating the reimbursability of certain Christmas Day working meals at NYC firm Skadden, Arps: “In the absence of reimbursement for my meal on December 25th, I would appreciate your office having someone available this upcoming Christmas Day so that when I am stuck here, I will have someone to call …
Category Archives: General
Stranger than fiction
Larry Ellison has married a fiction writer, and apparently people are speculating that he has a hand in writing her books. Having worked for Mr. Ellison at Oracle, I can say that a lot of the documentation and marketing that came out of that company was fiction, and perhaps still is. He is very good …
Might as well face it
Cole Porter may have been onto something when he wrote “I Get a Kick Out of You.” “For a start, a relatively small area of the human brain is active in love, compared with that involved in, say, ordinary friendship. “It is fascinating to reflect”, the pair conclude, “that the face that launched a thousand …
Hipper than thou
Hipster Detritus hints at an upcoming screed against indie music credsnobs and suggests Ten Hipster-Baiting Statements to liven up any party or club gathering. I don’t hang out in the clubs enough to make adequate use of this, but I want to be part of spreading the love. (Link via The Minor Fall, The Major …
Harder than it looks
A former British cabinet minister spends a week as a teacher, and the teacher she replaced has to watch on “reality TV.” (I’m currently teaching a theater workshop to third and fourth graders, and the single hardest thing so far is maintaining discipline while also engaging the kids and keeping everything fun and informative. Well, …
I’ll take “Masters of the Underworld” for a thousand, Alex
“The quizmaster is describing various monsterish toys sold at Toys’R’Us and the teams are asked to identify them. The real monsters are having a difficult time. They are good with faces, but bad with names. They seem to “know” all of the monsters but cannot correctly identify them, so perhaps one member of the team …
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Lush life
The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board announced yesterday that sales of wine and spirits at state stores in 2003 increased 7.7 percent over 2002. The increase is assumed to be caused in large part by changes in how Pennsylvania sells alcohol to its residents: new Sunday hours in select stores, outlet stores nears state borders, trials …
It’s “fra-gee-lay” … it must be from Italy!
For those who want to construct their own fancy leg lamps, as seen in A Christmas Story, this is a good starting place. (Link via The Straight Dope.)
Rockwellesque tableaus of multi-generational TV-watching
Jonah Goldberg was so shell-shocked by the incident that he suffered a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder that left him completely unable to generate timely pop-culture references. “Think of the more outrageous art controversies of the recent past,” he stammered, trying to think of something, anything, that fit that bill, while stumbling around the smoking …
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