Sentential Links #7

The poor sentences were screaming. "Let us free!" They shouted.

"You're prisoners?" Dr. Jones asked, unbelieving.

"We can never escape the context!" one of them told me.

Dr. Jones set his jaw, rubbed his stubbled chin, put the fedora back on his head and uncoiled his bullwhip. "You're escaping it now," he said.

"Oh, good," another sentence said. "You see, our writers are always just making this up as they go."

"I know the feeling," Dr. Jones replied, as he began the work of freeing sentences from their blog-post context.

"Say," one sentence began as it awaited its turn, "in 1936, what do you point-and-click?"

"Cameras," Dr. Jones said.

"Ah," said the sentence.

OK, I suppose that wasn't as clever as it sounded before I wrote it. Anyway, here are sentences from posts that grabbed me this week. Click and read.

:: Now, years later, God and I sometimes get along. (Via Alan. That line comes near the very end of a long post that's among the most powerful things I've read in Blogistan. It's posts like that which make me want to give up blogging.)

:: It was George the mailman's last day on the job after 35 years of carrying the mail through all kinds of weather to the same neighborhood. (Not safe for work. It's a joke, headlined by a Norman Rockwell-like painting that gives the whole thing a creepy undertone. Yeesh. And hey, she's from Toronto.)

:: When you see the other side of 40, you'll discover Coltrane isn't just for sex any more. (Wait a minute: Coltrane is for sex? Really?)

:: Every time I'm tempted to wax poetic about the virtues of the original Star Wars movies or how cool the original Legend of Zelda was, I just imagine if my Dad had tried to convince me that those old 12" GIJoe figures he had as a kid were somehow better or more "real" than my little Zartan and Snake Eyes figures. (Tell me about it.)

:: Most people associate the smell of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies with Mom. For me, the mom-smell is more that of wet paint.

:: For you youngsters who may be unfamiliar with how the game works, Match Game was a tv game show that aired (the best version, anyhow) back in the 70's. (I remember watching that show when I was four or five, and enjoying the hell out of it, just because all those people on the TeeVee sure seemed to be having a great time, and to this day I just find something infectious about people having obvious fun. I never saw it again until just a few months ago when I was in the presence of "The Game Show Network" or whatever, and I was astounded that they got away with stuff like this on TV back then. Wow.)

:: My parents are extremely fond of a geothermal concept called The Crossbreeze. (Yup, the Crossbreeze is wonderful if your domicile allows for it. If you're in an apartment whose windows only face two directions, which are at right-angles to one another, fuhgeddaboudit. Game over, and fire up the A/C.)

:: There isn't any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we're treating these people. They're living in the tropics. They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want. (Make sure to follow the annotation links in Jeanne's post. But really: "They're living in the tropics"? That's a selling point? Well, shit, I'm convinced! Hell, Alfred Dreyfus got to live in the tropics too, so what was he bitching about?)

:: So go ahead and hate Buffalo and hate people who don’t hate Buffalo. That and four bucks’ll get you a cup of lukewarm watered-down coffee at the bodega that’ll be down the block from the $3k/month apartment you’ll have in whatever piece of shit southern humidity tank in which you decide to shack up. (Just because a little rantin's good sometimes.)

:: Performance majors who are not attending Eastman or Julliard are not getting a professional degree oriented only to one career choice. (Hear, hear! I was a performance major myself, until I changed for something more financially viable in a rapidly-changing global economy. Well, OK, it was Philosophy. Ya happy now?)