"Billions of dollars are spent on advertising in this country. Advertising companies hire the very brightest, wittiest young people to write for them. Not one single sentence of it is worth repeating. Why? Because it wasn't meant. It was all written, not because the writer felt something and then said it (if you feel a thing the more simply you say it the better, the more effectively), but because he tried to impress and inveigle people, convince them something is very fine about which he himself does not really care a button."

Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write
Garner's Usage Tip of the Day
Oxford University Press

"...a device you carry that, when switched on, tells a satellite exactly where you are every few seconds."
Momus
Wired
-
Click Opera
-

"A world of laptops and jet planes" as against "A world of cars and cell phones"

[is that all you do]

is that all you do
is put things together I
asked the prophet Ezekiel what
he coughed do you mean
well I said...

Jon Woodward
Verse Daily 26.09.06

"...or you'll find yourself giving it advice, which it does not need."

The Scale
Steven Kenny

The masterlode of Stanfoolery of the verbally thrips oratory

He'd always had a love of languages and was a fan of James Joyce, Charles Dickens and great speakers like Isaiah Berlin.

Big big world Jamaica Sweden

big big world Viet Nam

that I too will miss you much China

harassed by racially intolerant neighbors and the clandestine infiltration of state and federal law enforcement authorities

last days of the cross-bred lions too weak to eat

Corn Smut Lasagne

soul owner

Comedian uses dead pig as boat

All you need to know about John Updike's review of Le Carre's new novel “The Mission Song”, in the New Yorker:

"In “Absolute Friends” (2003), the sore spot became le Carré’s fury at the American and British intervention in Iraq."

That's a resound from Updike's cite of Lowell's poem “July in Washington” - the stiff spokes of this wheel / touch the sore spots of the earth - which technically would make Iraq the sore spot, not Le Carre's anger at American and British intervention.
But in fact the book[Absolute Friends] isn't about anything so facile.
It's a frighteningly vivid portrayal of a new Other, faster, smarter, far more powerful, treacherous, amoral - almost another race - sharing our time and planet with us, doing what it wills when it will.
The image is pretty scary, and totally convincing, so it's understandable Updike would feel the need to trivialize it. But it's inaccurate to say the book's driven by "fury".
As always with Le Carre's best books it's compassion that's holding everything together, not anger.

Human Photos
Eelavision - photo visions of Eelam

Several paired sequences of signs, scholars said, have prompted speculation that the text may contain couplets of poetry.

-
Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (AU)
BOSF (UK)
The Orangutan Conservancy (US)

boynton

Two photoprints of Joseph Stalin, with his description, and fingerprints taken after his arrest March 1908