Internet Lovelies

Today is a fine day for some internet quotes.

The first is rather long.

Young Download McNulty was scared of the books at first, his Brain Nozzle pumping him full of Video Sprays.... Download picked up the book and kept pressing on its cover, title, and spine, hoping that images would appear. Ruthie told him that books weren't interactive and they couldn't be brain-pumped, that you had to open them up and read the text with your eyes.

She told Download he had to keep his Brain Nozzle on standby. “Read a little,” she said, “and then every once in a while try closing your eyes and entering the mind of the author.”

“What's an author?” Download asked.

“It's someone who's not you who wrote the book.”

“But I'm special,” Download said.

“I know you are,” Ruthie said.

“My dad and teachers say I'm a superhero. I'm the specialest little guy alive. What if this book thing makes me into someone else?”

“You don't have to worry about becoming the author if you read her book,” Ruthie said. “But if you focus on the words, Download, your life may change just a little.”

“Your life may change just a little,” Download mimicked her sarcastically.

There was a huge clatter from the hallway as my fellow aging librarians burst in with their wheelbarrows, quickly grabbing any books they could with their shaking hands while Robbie Pearlmutter of America's Last Bookstore fought them off with his cane. In the corner, Download had already figured out how to open the book and had placed his little index finger on the first word. He traced the word backwards and forwards, finally opening his mouth, like so many children before him.

“The,” he read, holding on to his Brain Nozzle for comfort. And then his mouth formed the rest.

Gary Shteyngart, Link

I'm sure Steve Jobs will be introducing Video Sprays soon. iSpray! (but no porn!)

"A Commercial for Abortion" -- I've always used that phrase as a nickname for The Family Circus.

David Schmader, Link

I started the description of the relationship between girls exactly at moment in which it’s most threatened — when the expert intimacy best friends have cultivated with each other gets transferred to boys. Nothing more tragic than that transfer of intimacy “resources” has to happen between women. Though obviously there are exceptions, it’s safe to say that the pattern is the rule. Friendships between girls don’t crash and burn, they tend to disintegrate. Men are the beneficiaries of all that work.

Hilary Hamann, on writing Anthropology of an American Girl, Link

And

I cooked my wife a one pound hamburger. "It's like Infinite Jest," I said, "You don't have to finish it. Just tell everyone it was great."

@drewtoothpaste, Link

By the way, Infinite Jest was great.

Urkel for President, 2012

I've been slacking on my reading lately. I blame the discovery that I can stream all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer through Netflix on my Wii. It's a miracle I get out of my pajamas at all.

But I have managed to read another Sarah Vowell book. This time it was her collection of essays, The Partly Cloudy Patriot. As usual it was hilarious, yet educational. I always come away from her books knowing some odd snippet of history I didn't know before. But best of all, it's pro-nerd, which I can appreciate.

Here are some snippets:

I'm standing at the cutting board chopping sage and it hits me what it means that she is letting me be in charge of the dressing: I am going to die. Being in charge of the dressing means you are a grown-up for real, and being a grown-up for real means you're getting old and getting old means you are definitely, finally, totally going to die. My mother is a grandmother and my sister is a mother and I have decided the dressing will be yellow this year, therefore, we'll all be dead someday.

Another reason I'm intrigued with the hanged of Salem, especially the women, is that a number of them aroused suspicion in the first place because they were financially independent, or sharp-tongued, or kept to themselves. In other words, they were killed off for living the same sort of life I live right now but with longer skirts and fewer cable channels.

The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories. Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey caffe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process of making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much.

I wish that we privileged knowledge in politicians, that the ones who know things didn't have to hide it behind brown pants, and that the know-no-enoughs were laughed all the way to the Maine border on their first New Hampshire meet and greet. I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in a seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut...What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Secret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer, and one by one decrypt our woes.

And on patriotism following September 11th:

In the first day or two the [American] flags were plastered everywhere, seeing them was heartening because they indicated that we're all in this sorrow together. The flags were purely emotional. Once we went to war, once the president announced that we were going to retaliate against the "evildoers," then the flag again represented what it usually represents, the government. I think that's when the flags started making me nervous. The true American patriot is by definition skeptical of the government...This deep suspicion of Washington is one of the most American emotions an American can have. So by the beginning of October, the ubiquity of the flag came to feel like peer pressure to always stand behind policies one might not necessarily agree with. And, like any normal citizen, I prefer to make up my mind about the issues of the day on a case by case basis at 3:00 A.M. when I wake up from my Nightline-inspired nightmares.