As comforting as an airport security check.
As honest as a movie studio accountant.
As impressive, in its way, as a wall of laser disks.
A real marksman, provided the target is at the end of his leg.
His brain has a cold solder joint to ground.
One senator short of a scandal.
As spontaneous as political convention applause.
As compassionate as a Purple Heart Band-aid.
As straight as the Appalachian Trail.
His mind was as broad as his stance.
Inevitable as death and sequels.
It would have been twice as funny with the addition of one crutch.
He's solving the world's problems, one Cheeto at a time.
Satisfying as vegetarian bacon.
Last year around this time, some villain or henchperson in the Dick Tracy strip was uttering a singularly inane and opaque simile, which at least had novelty on its side. I composed a brief list of other equally intelligible similes for their future use. As they have not used them, I feel free to pass them along here:
“Bonus! More similes for Dick Tracy villains! -
• Easy as chewing milk!
• Easy as shoveling wood!
• Smooth as a baby’s resume!
• Fungible as pie!
• Platitudinous as February 3rd!
• It was just like driving a train to the dentist!
• It was just like putting a rubber band around a lava lite!
• Like sand through the hourglass; these are the days of our lives!â€
(Reprinted from The Comics Curmudgeon, July 2, 2008)
All the warmth and charm of a phone book on a Kindle.
non ironically, there's "As refreshing as a good drink of water."
I wish we'd spent the extra dough for the positronic robot. We ended up with an Objectronic robot, and after a couple of weeks it was gone, leaving only a note that it had headed for some god-damned gulch out West. The worst part is, we're still paying for it.
They want to be thought of as manly men, and not boring time-servers. So they call Rent-A-Scandal.
...my uncut Vonnegut, I shoulda said. Bother.
My high school offered a class in American Short Stories, and one of the books was almost Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House. If the title story hadn't been amputated from each copy, that is.
So I had to go out and get my Vonnegut on the street, but at least I knew which story to read first.
John Houghton @50 has me thinking that "Many Hands" is a collocation that should be on the front page somewhere, referring either to the good folks who read and comment here, or to the possibly even better folks who quietly lubricate squeaks and remember when the eclipses are.
Sodomy,
Levitatio,
Trannysaurass,
De-con-suc-tion.
Father, why do these words cause a ruction?
Moderation rhymes with fun.
Join the post-bronze slip-steam singularists
Everyone!
(We'll work "Roger Ramjet" and "[fudge]packing" into version 1.2.)
And Now you Know. The Remainder. Of the Narrative.
Good DAY.
(How was-- ...what? Again?)
I know I've gone through this story before, and I'm guessing somebody here pointed me to it. Not much to say, as anything I'd choose to emphasis has already been neatly framed in the post proper. Sarcasm fails me today. Pity (for the victims) and outrage (at the murderer -- and his present-day ilk) are all I've got.
Teresa, I keep trying to find a copy of the DeCoverley papers, without ordering it online. I may have to give in. As a stopgap, I formatted one from PG to go onto my iPod, but it's a subset of selections. If I find myself wanting more, I'll keep trying. There's a copy on the bookshelves of the inn we stayed at when we first scoped out Pittsford, but I don't know if they want to start selling me those books. I think they were picked specifically to be uninteresting to people, but you know how that goes.
[re pointy hats]
A letter-writer in the latest issue of Viz offers the following top tip: "Biro pen tops make authentic Battle of Hastings re-enactment helmets for stick insects."
The last couple of times I got out to Colorado, I was able to go visit a sandstone rock up north of Fort Collins off the Laramie road, up past Ted's Place, or where it used to be before it burned down, and even past the trailer-sized nearly cubic Haystack Rock, which sharpers used to cover with hay and sell to suckers. They're talking about doing something to that road now, and I fear for Haystack Rock's future.
Signature Rock is a big old chunk that sticks up from the flatlands just before the mountains. It's on private property, on a ranch you get to by way of a tidy, well-maintained dirt road. My friend Randy has permission from the land owner to be there, and he parks his car and puts a note on the dash explaining who he is and what he's doing there, and we step out into the stubbly brush that feels like home to my feet and cross a fence or two as we head toward the rock.
The hike involves walking along a shaded creek where cattle have been drinking and little things splash into the water at our approach. Randy tells me that the rock is the tallest thing before the mountains, and could be seen by wagon trains from Nebraska or thereabouts, even before Steamboat Rock (which I walked up when I was about five, with a large group of some sort). The trail crosses the stream a few times, and I once picked up a roughly parallelepiped-shaped sandstone rock that turned out to have a broken geode embedded in the side I didn't see -- the best rock I ever found, and the only geode.
After a pleasant stroll, we are in the shade of the big sandstone, which has been eaten away by winds from Wyoming down by the ground, so that it vaguely resembles a half-formed mushroom cloud. The ground slopes up to it, becoming part by the time they meet. Here the travelers scribed their names into the soft stone back in the 19th century to let us know that they had been there and had rested a little before taking the Overland Trail or the Mormon Trail, or maybe even the Wheelbarrow Trail west on ruts that still cut a scar through the prairie.
We sat and took refreshment and sketched the hills and mountains that filled the western side of our field of view. One set of ruts gets deeper and deeper, opening out into a veritable gully. The others continue on in their directions over pastures where we can see cattle grazing; first the outlying guards, giving us a wary eye, then the rest of the herd, then outlying guards on the other side. We come out the other side instead of retracing, passing through a collection of tepee rings, still visible, and still a place where we can find rocks that seem to have been shaped for a purpose -- the one I find suggests a needle or an awl, with the tip broken off. I seem to recall tiny shards of pottery as well.
We're almost back at the car now. One time we saw a buck deer at the mouth of a box canyon, moving this way and that to keep a doe trapped inside. She'd go to one side, and he'd match her. She'd try the other side, he'd counter the move. I tried to move in for a picture, which disrupted the game, and they both ran off.
One time as we drove in, we found ourselves following a real cattle drive. If I'd had a digital camera then, I'd have pictures of it, so it must have been before the 2005 trip. Men on horses kept the livestock moving between the two fences that paralleled the road until they got to the desired section, opened up a fence, and let us pass. We were in no hurry.
Hoping to make it up there again soon. About a month from now if I'm lucky.
We had this big rock formation up by the Wyoming border that we'd see when we took 85 up to Cheyenne. It was called the Natural Fort, because a group of Indians had stood off another group of Indians in a war they were having. Held out for a while, until the food was gone. The wind had carved out twisty, fluted shapes, and we may possibly have found an arrowhead once. I know I always looked and never found one.
Then they made plans to put I-25 through, along the same route. I'm told that the planners agonized over the natural attraction, worried that tourists going one way wouldn't be able to get out of their cars and see it. Some genius decided the thing to do was to put the road right through the middle of it, and people could get out and clamber over what was left -- maybe half of the original thing, maybe less.
I would have had the two sides of the road get farther away from each other there, and let the entire place be between them. I guess that's why I never amounted to anything.
It figures that one day someone would make a singing road. I did a comic strip about it back in an 80s issue of New Pals. In my version, the sound was wobbling all over the place. "I liked the stereo effect," says one character, just before the road starts reciting Moby-Dick.
What I was going to say before I read Theophylact's comment is that there was a photocopier in the library at Rice, where I used to work, that continually made a tuneless, somewhat rhythmic whistling noise, like a big dope with no sense of pitch working on something. Luckily, it was in one of the farthest corners of the place. I was always amazed that people could sit near there and study.
Ballard's work isn't science fiction, because for that you have to have an editor who doesn't glaze over when science enters the picture. There, that was easy.
Except for certain specialties, I like my books loosely categorized. It's easier to pick things up and put them back, and find things I wasn't looking for. Win-win-win.
Where has all the FuteFic gone?
debcha @93: You forgot "Bam! Pow! ..."
Wesley @124: It's not always this easy to adjudicate, but in the case of Mark Twain, just call it all fiction. He has almost certainly improved the facts, and we're all richer for it.
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