"No fighter pilot is ever going to pick up a girl at a bar by saying he flies a UAV."
How do you persuade a grown man to get circumcised?
If you’re out of caviar, use a slightly bent pickle.
Now you can access every last drop of mayonnaise!
"I added that third, green tube for fun. The higher you turn it up, the more it bounces up and down."
"I saw bodies eaten by fire." "I noticed many dead bodies of women and children, including a totally burned body of a child. He was no more than 5 years old."
"The behavior of Iraqi security forces was uncivil," said the spokesman, Ahmed Al-Shakarji. "People were trying to rescue their relatives and friends ... but the security forces opened fire on them."
Unlike the Banana War, the Vodka War is strictly a civil war.
"Their insides were all coming out," said Noor Islam, 22. "We were very upset."
"No one wants to sit by and see mass killing," Hillary said.
"I have no Plan B," Mr. McCain said.
"What keeps me awake?" he asked recently. "Car keys."
So, when did NASA merge with Burning Man?
It feels almost inappropriate to witness such agony at such close range.
"God has destroyed the crowds of defectors and infidels," said Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella insurgent group that includes Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. "Something didn’t go right," General Odierno said.
"The whole point is the anticipation."
"San Francisco is usually a target-rich environment."
It’s not easy being a global-warming skeptic -- or an Al Gore skeptic -- in San Francisco.
"It’s very much like being a Christian in the first century."
BEHOLD the Annoy-o-tron. The easy-to-hide magnetized device promises to drive a co-worker insane.
"What has happened is unbridled competition meets lack of oversight."
"The Iranians have to worry, too. The idea that they’ll emerge as the regional hegemon is silly."
"I think it’s important that people do feel the raw emotions of people who were sent to war."
Valerie Seiling Jacobs left me crying into my morning coffee.
Senator McCain may be deeply sad. We are all deeply sad.
Why do I need a plastic bag when I buy a pack of gum?
The Bush administration has raised little protest as the world’s fifth most populous democracy has been transformed into its second most populous military dictatorship.
"The problem is this is a morally dubious man."
In "A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy," Woody Allen shows up at Mia Farrow’s window on a flying bicycle and urges her to hop on. "Andrew, we’ll get killed," she protests. "Trust me," he replies, "it’s me, Andrew." She looks skeptical, and he tries again. "Trust me anyhow." In the latest and most serious post-9/11 civil-liberties abuse to emerge from Washington, the Bush administration’s "Trust me anyhow" defense has finally collapsed.
"We need to use force to change this regime, because this regime is anticonstitutional." Asked if he was seeking to foment revolution, he declared, "You are absolutely correct."
Eventually Mr. Kasparov was fined $38 and released.
Under a government decree that took effect April 1, only Russian citizens can sell vegetables.
"The rules have changed," King Abdullah II of Jordan recently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
If much has remained constant over the last three decades, much has also changed. "The life of my company can really be divided into three decades," Mr. Eifman said one recent afternoon through an interpreter, "the Soviet period, the perestroika era and the last 10 years."
... the future of France is at stake ...
Not everyone is quite ready to give up keys.
There are two Turkeys now.
The more we examine this issue, the more ludicrous [the Administration's] claims seem.
Now the big questions facing Indonesia are: Can Islam and democracy co-exist? And what would such a democracy look like?
"He’s not the warm and fuzzy type."
"It would be treated as bad fiction if this had appeared between two covers."
The proliferation of "premium" is understandable, given the decadence of the Western world.
Vicious name-calling has accompanied these events, much of which is chronicled on both men’s Web pages. Mr. Finkelstein has called Mr. Dershowitz a "raving maniac," "hoodlum" and "evil." On normanfinkelstein.com there is a recent Finkelstein article titled "Should Alan Dershowitz Target Himself for Assassination?" On Mr. Dershowitz’s Web site (alandershowitz.com), he has had students compile lists of "The Most Despicable Things Finkelstein Has Said," "The 10 Stupidest Things Finkelstein Has Said," and so on.
Bahrain’s investment in motor sports and that of its neighbors Abu Dhabi and Dubai may look like an exercise in vanity or a competition between rich Gulf nations. But behind the high finance, the glitz, the glamour and the testosterone lies a sober business strategy to develop one of the world’s most dynamic regions.
Even today, many Indonesian Muslims regularly consult shamans -- mystical healers believed to have paranormal powers -- to have fortunes told, or to have spells cast and removed.
Linden Labs makes most of its money leasing "land" to tenants, Mr. Rosedale said, at an average of roughly $20 per month per "acre" or $195 a month for a private "island." The land mass of Second Life is growing about 8 percent a month, a spokeswoman said, and now totals "60,000 acres," the equivalent of about 95 square miles in the physical world.
There is something particularly soulless and depressing about these suburbs.
Many of the most active militants come from well-to-do families. Tunisia, for example, has a big, home-owning, mortgage-holding middle class but hasn’t escaped radicalism. In contrast to the Western-friendly face presented at North Africa’s tourist hotels, Al Qaeda finds many admirers in its capital’s narrow streets.
Sometimes the best counterinsurgency strategy doesn't work. It fails.
One of the worst aspects of this conflict was all this rosy scenario, few dead-enders, last throes, ...
"It’s like a game of cat and mouse. It’s just a really, really smart mouse."
"The fact of modern warfare is that you can't parachute into places."
Bullets whirred by, but many missed, as the Taliban demonstrated remarkably poor marksmanship.
"Probably the most overrated thing in the world and in the world of national security issues is this sit down face-to-face. There's plenty of ways to communicate."
The official MAP news agency reported, meanwhile, that police had arrested the leader of a group responsible for the Tuesday suicide bombings and another last month in a cybercafe in Casablanca.
"Life often presents trade-offs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones."
I’d go to parent meetings at my daughter’s school and people would ask what I was doing. When I told them they would say: "God bless you. We hope you win." I had told them I was fighting spam.
"It was a sort of unfortunate concatenation of events."
A disheveled, bearlike presence, Slavoj Zizek is part mad professor, part bumbling clown ... "I wondered what would happen if Slavoj met Morpheus. That was the starting point." Now, "The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology" is in the works, to be followed perhaps by "The Pervert’s Guide to Opera."
Donna Freedman has tried a lot of ways to make ends meet. "I earned $35 for watching a porn film," she wrote on MSN Money this month.
Once you get a reputation for doing good work, managers may call you personally.
There’s a lot of pharmaceutical money now in sex research. Viagra. Once Viagra earned millions of dollars, the pharmaceutical companies saw how sexual pleasure could be monetized. I think the industry discovered there was a longing for sexual performance throughout the culture.
[It's not hard to imagine the possibilities for mergers and acquisitions.]
Withhold everything!
Students who participated in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex as those who did not. Officials said one lesson they learned from the study was that the abstinence message should be reinforced.
No new antibiotics for gonorrhea are in the pipeline. "We are running out of options."
Jackie is lonely, and clearly suffering. The anonymous people she watches are all the human contact she can stand, apart from the occasional bout of perfunctory sex with a co-worker and an awkward encounter with her former in-laws.
If you don’t ask, no one will give you any ... "No doesn’t always mean no. Sometimes it means not yet."
"Face-to-face asking is not something I would have done normally, but I’m trying to do it," he said.
Prime Minister Tony Blair said that the average American endowment was 14 times the size of that of a comparable British ...
"We opened up too early and too wide."
Katie Couric read a plagiarized commentary ...
"I’ve never seen photography as a truthful medium. It’s about individual perceptions of reality, and that’s what people want to see."
Perhaps the emergence of Android Beauty finally suggests that, rather than facing our respective futures with anticipation, we are, many of us, carrying a secret longing to tarry another day or two (make that a trimester) in the womb.
It’s a film about transience, about the awful fragility of the things we want to think are built to last: friendships, marriages, faiths of all kinds -- including the faith that pop culture can sometimes makes us feel in powerful fantasy figures ...
... the generic neurotic pluck that now defines most bland television blondes ...
"Pictures are for entertainment. Messages should be delivered by Western Union."
The idea of making the dead girl an Aborigine, she said, was "one of those things where you get 20 ideas and 19 are terrible."
If I have offended anyone, I will not apologize. I am recycling crass stereotypes about national traits in the service of a better understanding of how innovation works.
Since 2004, Geico, the car-insurance company, has been running spots that involve cavemen. In the first, a Geico spokesman brightly tells the camera that the company’s Web site is so easy to use, "a caveman could do it." At which point the camera pulls back and we realize that the boom-microphone handler is, in fact, a caveman. He stalks off the set, offended. Since then, Geico cavemen have returned in various commercials -- and a Web site and carefully strategized public appearances -- invariably expressing frustration and disgust at the ignorance and bigotry they face.
"It’s indefensible on any level, and yet it’s hilarious."
It is intoxicating to be able to stumble through uncounted pages of rare texts, philosophical classics (from Plato to Dewey), historical studies, early children’s books, opera libretti, lieder lyrics, classic literature (including three English renditions of Dante’s 'Divine Comedy') and exotic travelogues, all of it in simple text format, for easy viewing, searching and copying.
Q: Do you think I am mistaking you for a fundamentalist?
A: I don’t know. But you are doing me the honor of trying to understand me.
Q: I don’t know if I trust you.
A: Put that into the piece!
You can make a misleading case for war, support a secret internal Pentagon effort to manipulate and hype intelligence that supports the case for war, invade another country without preparing for what comes after the invasion. ... And nothing happens. In fact, you are subsequently awarded with a medal and a plum job. But if you use your influence to get a raise for your girlfriend, well, then, you’re in big, big trouble.
"The evidence is fairly clear that sharp downward deviations from normal rainfall in fragile societies elevate the risk of major conflict."
It used to be that all the parts in a car or a computer were made in a single country; now they are manufactured wherever it is most efficient. The same thing is happening in technology services.
The video clip, to be completed in just two days of rehearsals and one of shooting, would be a big live production number: an uninterrupted, uneditable one-camera take.
My nomination for Headline of the Year appeared early this month above a full-page commentary infused with original reporting by the Pulitzer-winning Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal. Here is the headline in the Journal that Rob Pollock, who grasped the universal civil-libertarian point of her article, put across the top of the page: "First They Came for the Jews."
Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in cultural markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of the millions of individual people who participate in them. The common-sense view, however, makes a big assumption: that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another. But people almost never make decisions independently -- in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the 'best' of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.
Our desire to believe in an orderly universe leads us to interpret the uncertainty we feel about the future as nothing but a consequence of our current state of ignorance, to be dispelled by greater knowledge or better analysis. But even a modest amount of randomness can play havoc with our intuitions.
