Sentential Links #9

Good sentences from better posts for the week just gone by.

:: Still, no gift, however generous, can possibly make up for the empty feeling with which we say farewell to the kindly men and women who once upon a time helped to show us what we were. (Mr. Teachout, with all due respect, if you've got it in you to write like this -- and you damned well do -- then please oh please, stop wishing you could write as well as James Lileks. It's Lileks who should be coming to you for pointers.)

:: A secret: I fall a little in love with nearly every woman that I meet. Just a little - sometimes only for five minutes, sometimes forever. (And I thought that I was the only one who did that. This isn't actually from a blog post, but it is from a blog, so it counts.)

:: I mean we all stop dead in our tracks while walking to grab that piece of paper to write down a great idea, or line, or story, or thing to do, or thing to blog. Or is it just me? I wonder who else will be found guilty! (Guilty as charged. I'm constantly thinking up stuff. Some of it is just observational stuff to use in stories, some of it gets put into blog posts, some stuff just percolates around within my cranium. I think that this practice is one thing that marks one as a Writer-At-Heart.)

:: The authority of evolution is derived not from any edicts, there is no Central Committee, nor is there any Great Man who defines it all for us (concepts which are exceedingly hard to get across to creationists), but instead, it is derived from a great many experiments and observations of the natural world.

:: At approximately 7 pm EDT this evening, I left my office (5 blocks from the White House) to board the subway at Metro Center (2.5 blocks from the White House) to travel 12 minutes to walk 2 blocks to get home. During my journey, I saw not one sniffing dog. Not one meter maid. NOT A SINGLE COP. (Actually, that's the entire text of Roxanne's post. I hope she doesn't mind.)

:: The Home Run Derby has now gotten so out of hand that a crappy post-grunge band, Alter Bridge, a derivative remnant of the highly derivative band Creed, will now perform at the Derby. (How behind the times am I? I'm not sure I've ever heard anything by Creed, but all I know is that everyone who has ever mentioned Creed to me has also used the word "sucks" in the same sentence.)

:: The flypaper theory is dead and buried. (New redesign for Demosthenes's blog, by the way, which happens to be the first liberal political blog I ever read.)

:: There sure are a lot of different versions of Diet Coke these days, aren't there? (Yup, there are. And once again, the Blogger With Millions o'Hits posts about something that the Blogger With Hundreds o'Hits touched on two weeks ago. I'm just sayin'.)

:: Seriously, can anyone name a film adaptation that was superior to the book? (Yes, I can. The Bridges of Madison County.)

:: Can you tell catfish bother me a little bit? (There were about seven or eight sentences I could have chosen from this post, whose only wrong point is that Mississippi is not in the Midwest. It's in the South. The Upper Delta region might be termed in the Midwest, ranging as far north as the southeast portion of Missouri and the southern tip of Illinois. But as to that, it's worth noting that Cairo, Illinois is farther south than Richmond, Virginia. Yes, Cairo's in the same state as Chicago, which is most definitely a Midwest city, but consider: Buffalo is in the same state as New York City, but Buffalo's certainly not a Northeast city; we're a Great Lakes city, and it's about 293 miles from here to NYC. From Chicago to Cairo is even farther than that: about 348 miles, according to this site. But that's just a mere quibble. This is a wonderful post. Go read it.)

That's all for now. Remember, there will be no Sentential Links next week, because I won't be linking much of anything next week. (By the way, it just occurred to me that with the exception of my two moves, from Buffalo to Syracuse and back again, this will be the first real hiatus since this blog began which shall also involve a period of inconsistent Net access. What on Earth will I do!)