__________
But I will, one day soon, so that I can truly absorb the end of the second “Transformers” movie in heretofore unimagined splendor, clarity so spectacular that I can see, almost down to the pixel, which parts of the movie suck.
-Jeff Vrabel, “Your TV isn’t hyper-real?” Gatehouse, Oct. 5
His corollary to that sentence: “(it’s all of them, spoiler alert).”
__________
So crisp, so eerily timeless, so reminiscent of an era when magazines mattered, when a wasp-waisted gal might curl up on the avocado tweed couch with a Tab and a Winston and plan a lamb dinner with little paper crowns for her middle-manager husband’s boss, because back then middle management might lead somewhere. While the inside pages didn’t always have the same visual verve, you’d look at each cover and say, see, this is the reason why magazines might not die—because people want to be transported by their beauty, to be fed dreams along with their blueberry cheesecake bars.
-Faye Penn, “RIP Gourmet,” Brokelyn, Oct. 5
__________
Kay and Ben
And she isn’t her grandmother. Not a presence, not a doyenne, not awesome.
-Michael Wolff, on Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth, Post Modern, Vanity Fair, October 2009.
(I used to be employed by The Washington Post Company. Post-Newsweek Media, baby)
__________
It could be a combination of naivete, true belief and the willful credulity that leads a person to prefer wild and interesting Internet rumors over mundane truths. It could be that she is a rabble-rouser by nature. As a preschooler, she says, she organized a “borscht riot” among classmates after noticing that the teachers were getting more sour cream than the children in their beet soup.
-Liz Mundy on Orly Taitz, public face of the birther movement, “Burden of Proof on Obama’s Origins,” Washington Post, Oct. 6.
__________
It also tapped into the lighter side of the dour-looking Mr. Safire: a Pickwickian quibbler who gleefully pounced on gaffes, inexactitudes, neologisms, misnomers, solecisms and perversely peccant puns, like “the president’s populism” and “the first lady’s momulism,” written during the Carter presidency.
-Robert D. McFadden, “William Safire, Political Columnist and Oracle of Language, Dies at 79,” New York Times, Sept. 27
(uh, the Times totally ran a photo of mine on Inauguration Day. Bottom row, eighth from the right. What.)
Inverted Soapbox 