Phlegm rattled and churned sandily in Deuces Noonan’s throat as he casually worked it up into his gob, then salvoed it into the street with the same rattlesnake accuracy with which he was wont to fling his gleaming Bowie knife on its deadly and more than occasional errands.

“Mechanical pencils rule,” my fifteen-year-old grandniece, Genevieve, declared when I invited her to be her generation’s voice on school supplies.

Almost immediately, John Milnor observed that a theorem due to Ernst Witt implied the existence of a pair of 16-dimensional tori that have the same eigenvalues but different shapes.

Lovecraft has at least one very learned disquisition on doughnuts–see p. 3 of SELECTED LETTERS, Vol. 4.  There he compares the doughnuts at his local A & P with those to be obtained at some grocery in Clearwater, Fla., called the Piggly-Wiggly (!!!).  I also remember a discussion about cookies, whereby he expresses his preference for something called Zu-Zus (made by the National Biscuit Co. = Nabisco) over Yum-Yums.

People who watched a surreal video by director David Lynch and took the sugar pill judged a group of rioters following a hockey game most harshly, while those who watched the video and took Tylenol were more lenient.

“The meaning is deliberately left ambiguous,” Gass wrote about the emblem. “But the reader is invited to wonder ‘what the fuck?’”

In public [Joseph] Schumpeter liked “to play the part of an aristocrat,” McCraw writes, “even though his origins were middle-class and his eminence self-made.” At his first academic job in 1909 he fought a literal duel with swords against, of all people, the librarian, because he wouldn’t make books available to his students. The librarian got an honorable scar out of it, and the two became the best of friends.

Schumpeter “liked to disrupt faculty meetings by turning up late, still clad in jodhpurs and helmet from his daily horseback ride.” He would say in later years that his ambition was to become the world’s greatest economist, the world’s greatest lover, and the world’s greatest horseman. “Things are not going so well,” he would add, smiling, “with the horses.”

(Deirdre McCloskey)

The objective was to lure people into licking the raspberry sauce off my thumb and listen to their reactions.

Billy Mac, New Orleans product and Seattle resident, has brought popular music to the game of golf in a way no one has ever done before.

from the terrible cyberpunk book

Zarkov makes practical use out of the sublime DMT state to redesign the personality he uses in real life. He enjoys his DMT experience, then downloads it in order to devise new business strategies or even new sexual techniques – but he does not take any of it too seriously.