Quotes

Start every day off with a smile and get it over with.
W. C. Fields

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.
Samuel Goldwyn

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.
Groucho Marx

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
H. L. Mencken

Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
P. J. O'Rourke

Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
Laurence J. Peter

You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.
Harry S. Truman

Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.
Mae West

The superfluous, a very necessary thing.
Voltaire


The smartest thing to do is pull it [Building 7, World Trade Center], uh, they made that decision to pull and we then we watched the building collapse.
Larry Silverstein (owner, World Trade Center on September 11, 2001), PBS Special 'America Rebuilds'

We were told the World Trade Center was going to collapse...
Rudolph Giuliani to Peter Jennings, ABC News

Precipitous withdrawal

I was reflecting on President Bush's statements about the disastrous consequences of precipitous withdrawal. I was having these thoughts whilst entertaining a fille sympa, so his comments were particularly relevant and I could not but agree with the President on this issue. Once an incursion is successfully implemented, there is a natural--and compelling--instinct that drives one to the logical conclusion of the act; a primal imperative, one might say. I felt this in a very profound way last night, which led me to ignore the nay-saying voices in my head urging a precipitous withdrawal. I now have a greater understanding of our President. I see how a precipitous withdrawal might well have resulted in a catastrophic effect on future relations with said party. I stayed the course, as the President advocates, and withdrew only after my resources were exhausted and there was no more to be done.

President Bush lost me, however, when he tried to make the point that we effected a precipitous withdrawal in Vietnam. According to my calculations, we haven't suffered a single casualty there in thirty-two years. Possibly, we didn't get out soon enough. Perhaps, one could say, we had no business being there in the first place.

Perfume

Saw the movie Perfume last night. I knew we were in for something extraordinary when the director CG'd the camera right up the nostril of the protagonist in the opening credits as though declaring that this would be a literal interpretation rather than a nuanced, conceptual rendering of the story. Tom Tykwer was going to play it 'on the nose', so to speak.

In this beautifully photographed film, we have the pleasure of playing Twenty Questions with Dustin Hoffman's character as we strive to guess exactly what accent he is delivering with his performance. The closest I could come was a cross between Boris Badenov and Homer Simpson. The joy wasn't in watching a fine actor struggle with a difficult accent, as no effort was discernable. Rather, the pleasure came from watching a highly paid actor deliver n'importe quoi as a commentary, perhaps, on the rest of the film.

I would love to see what Patrice Leconte would have done with this exceptional novel from Patrick Süskind with Vincent Cassel as Mr. Frog.

Cary Grant

I was talking cinema with a stranger in the bar downstairs and the subject of Cary Grant came up. My new found friend bemoaned the fact that no one had ever taken Cary's place in the movie world and, inasmuch as my doctor has forbidden me to watch any more Ben Affleck movies, I was in complete agreement with him. I grew up watching Steve McQueen, Richard Boone, Lee Marvin and James Coburn. How can I possibly find any interest in Matt Damon, Ethan Hawke, Jake Gyllenhaal or Mark Wahlberg?

Between the two of us, we concluded that the charm exuded by Cary Grant is no longer a valued commodity in today's society. Charm is wasted on the prostitutionalized women of this era and what need of seduction when the lady in question is listening to "Back that ass up!", the signature lyrics of our time, on her iPod?

Le charme est mort. Viva le charme !

Condoleezza Rice

It has reached my ears that Condoleezza Rice has announced that the Surge is starting to work. What exactly it is accomplishing was not specified. Nevertheless, I found the news heartening. When the Intelligence community organizes an overthrow, whether overt or covert, they like to control and orchestrate both sides of the conflict so as to ensure the desired result and thus it was with Iraq. The U.S. marshaled the Coalition of the Totally Willing and the Saudis their al-Qaida proxies. The end result was a slam dunk and the pronouncement of "Mission Accomplished" was given in good faith under the circumstances as they were perceived by the controlling forces at the time.

Of course, they forgot to take the Iraqis into consideration; probably because there aren't any. What we thought of as Iraqis were actually inmates in a macrocosm of Gitmo with Saddam as the warden. When we freed the prisoners, it was quite natural that they no longer thought of themselves as a collective, but as warring factions with mutually exclusive imperatives. When they hear us talk of democracy for the Iraqis, there isn't a dry seat in the house. The resulting civil war was inevitable and "all the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty together again." I doubt that we shall obtain a better result than they did.