Word: stuffs
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...markets and the concentrations of great wealth. As elections cost more and more, Congressmen and Senators become supplicants. The third corruption induced by money during the boom periods is philosophic - wealth bends ideology and culture to flatter lucre and to proclaim its entrepreneurial nobility. Markets are saluted as better stuff than parliaments, political contributions are hailed as the 21st century incarnation of free speech and democracy shudders...
...Revelation was the relevant text for understanding what was happening, he got a huge--and frightened--response: "People were asking themselves whether they were ready to die. Very sane, well-educated people have gone back to the storm-cellar thing to make sure they have water and freeze-dried stuff in their basements." Some had trouble reconciling their warm image of a merciful God with the chilling warnings they were reading. "They're asking people to believe that we have a God who simply can't wait to zap the Christian flight crew out of jets so they crash?" asks...
...funny stuff, but The Day I Turned Uncool grates a bit after 150 pages. Sedaris' work has a melancholy undertone that keeps it from cloying, and he has the gift of being funny even when he has something serious to say. Zevin is hilarious when he is humiliating himself, like the time he accidentally invites a pornographer to address his journalism class, but much less so in his philosophical moments, when he urges us to accept the inevitability of growing up. In fact, perhaps he shouldn't grow up at all. He's at his funniest when he's acting...
...soiled kid's bag, a creaky elevator, leaks from the ceiling: not the sort of phenomena likely to scare movie audiences out of their seats. But the great horror films have always laced the stuff of ordinary life with a dose of terror, for the deepest fears derive not from the wildly grotesque, but from the slightly twisted familiar. Terror is a thing of the mind, not the eyes, and the line between mundane normality and unbridled horror can be as thin as that between dusk and night...
...Party... And I'll Cry If I Want To: The prospect of sitting through the annual convention of the United Malays National Organization, or UMNO, could make anyone weepy. But Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad is supposed to be made of sterner stuff, and anyway, he's UMNO's president. Nonetheless, at the convention's closing ceremony last Saturday, the normally steely Mahathir burst into tears, announced he was quitting all his posts and was escorted offstage. The 76-year-old had spent the convention bemoaning the laziness of the country's Malay population, which he's tried to bootstrap into...