i will massage women over 300 pounds

today on craigslist:

if your a women over 300 pounds and cant leave your house, i will come to you and for free, i will massage you


Such effective sentence construction! Each clause shorter than the last, creating an attractive rhythm (the way the last phrase is clipped is particularly nice) and a sense of heated urgency. Good use of the I as well, insistent, vulnerable. And isn't the use of "and" in "i will come to you and for free" kind of funny? It lets a (necessary) levity and buoyancy into the sentence. You can almost hear the voice raise when it says "and for free"--whee!

Sunday night post

Learned two important lessons playing tennis this weekend: balls you think are unreachable tend not to be unreachable, and hit the ball when it’s near the ground. Another truth was reinforced: the best meal to eat Mexican is breakfast (although not the most complementary with coffee). And this from the preface to Is Sex Necessary? by James Thurber and E.B. White: “As the vegetation of the earth grew more luxuriant Man grew more moody”.

Today, Sunday July 10th, in the morning

It's been many moons since I've sat down to my blog, and even though I think I'm writing to air, I miss my little constitutionals in Lemurs n' Things. I guess it was the shift from the solitude of Alaska to the teeming and relatively eventful life I lead in Chicago that made me lose my footing. But please, don't mistake me for a fickle, call-when-I-want-some-action blogger. I'm in it for the long haul; I just get misdirected occasionally.

The chief CEO of WorldCom is on his way to a small, low-security prison in the South, where he'll spend 25 years without parole. While this warms my heart, there are still others I would rather see in shackles...Elections are approaching in Germany and a woman from the Christian Democratic party named Angela Merkel is gaining ascendance. Like all good Christian politicians, she worships the market and is in favor of things like less stringent job-protection laws and weak labor unions...[as you can probably tell, my roommate brought home the Wall Street Journal]...Last night I fell asleep playing Breakout with Dan and this morning I got a random Friendster message from a really hot blond woman named Cindy in gold lame. We think she might be Eastern European...It feels good to be back in the blogosphere.

NYT editorials

The administration is throwing black-tie dinners as suspected "terrorists" are shipped to detention cells in Egypt and Syria. The Times reported yesterday that up to 26 of the detainee deaths may be criminal homicides. Meanwhile, the Justice Dept. has decided propaganda is legal as long as its based on facts...Opening up drilling in Alaska, besides being only a temporary salve, will actually benefit Japan and China (who holds $200 billion and counting, as Bush pushes more tax-cuts, of our I.O.U.s) more than U.S. citizens--a matter of "simple geography"...Ken Lay is back in the spotlight, reminding us all why it's a bad idea to put faith in our financial institutions, even if does give us more "choices".

Life in Alaska

This guy walked 40 miles back to his village of 400 people after his snowmachine broke down. He had gone out ptarmigan hunting and the long walk left him "sore and tired".

shadow puppets

In case you were wondering about the fledgling shadow puppet industry, here is a website with some pretty amazing specimens and the intellectual biographies of two of the world's premiere practitioners, Amar Sen and Sabyasachi Sen.

phonebashing

Pretty funny!