today my husband said something worthy of quotation

I think dog saliva is to mosquito bites what phoenix tears are to basilisk bites.
-James

However this does NOT count as my cake vs pie vote

Jocelyn: This pie is delicious.
James: I KNOW. It's the first rhubarb thing I've ever liked.
Jocelyn: Maybe we should learn to make pie.
James: I don't know, this pie was only $4. Maybe we should just buy a million of them and eat them for breakfast.

We find the Google search predictions sad and hilarious.

James: Oh, man. He acts like... a jerk. He acts like a child. He acts like a girl.
Jocelyn: Men are the worst.

Art and correspondence

I loved this letter from William Steig about his fear of public speaking. The entry on Letters of Note also includes the text of the speech he ended up delivering when he won the Caldecott.

I love this in particular:

Art, including juvenile literature, has the power to make any spot on earth the living center of the universe, and unlike science, which often gives us the illusion of understanding things we really do not understand, it helps us to know life in a way that still keeps before us the mystery of things. It enhances the sense of wonder. And wonder is respect for life. Art also stimulates the adventurousness and the playfulness that keep us moving in a lively way and that lead us to useful discovery.

Is it true that you support the escalation of formality in everyday life?

Absolutely.

So is the trend toward casualness an unfortunate event?

Yes, I would say. It makes me unhappy. To some extent, it's on purpose, so I don't know if I would call it unfortunate in the sense of unlucky. There's a casual agenda, and I think it's winning. The pros of formality are forethought put into word and action, spiffier clothing and fetishization of everyday occurrences.

-Daniel Handler (author of the Lemony Snicket books), in The Sunday Conversation interview

Two recent additions to the lexicon

Here are two things that I have recently begun saying.

I. "Oh, come on, Bible!" On 30 Rock, Liz Lemon is delivering a reading (the standard one from Corinthians) at Floyd's wedding. She has been forced to "stall" by Jack so she starts leafing through the Bible randomly looking for passages to read, and she keeps encountering ones about spilling seed on the ground, and things like that. She gets all annoyed and is like, "Oh, come on, Bible! Help a lady out!" "Oh, come on, Bible!" has become a standard indication of irritation for me, perfect for when nothing seems to be going right.

II. "I can do anything good." Embedded below is my favourite Internet video, maybe of all time. I quote a lot of things from it, including making disjointed but enthusiastic lists of things I like (which vary from one moment to the next but usually include, "I like my husband. I like my dog. I like my garden. I like my Glee DVDs. I like my coffee.") But "I can do anything good" is my favourite. I think this little girl probably means "I can do anything well," ie., I can do a good job of anything; but I prefer the actual meaning, which is that there are good things around, and I can do all of them. I also like going, "yeah. yeah. yeah. yeah" while doing a jumpy little dance. Oh man, I need to watch it again right now.

"Oh, I'm not doing this for the money. I'm just happy knowing that future generations will enjoy unspoiled median strips and pristine highway embankments." -Lisa Simpson

Mom ≠ Google

Backstory: My mother emails me often to ask questions that can easily be answered by going to Google.

Well fine! If you never want to help me ever again with anything then just tell me! Maybe GOOGLE put diapers on you and stayed up all night to make sure you were breathing!

-postcards from yo mamma

but you don't need to tell emma this. she already knows.

I loooooooove you, puppy! because you are soooooo cute!
- a little girl on the sidewalk, as emma and i walked by

he acts like he doesn't care, but he does

on porn, and the uncanny valley:

Tracy: Tell it to me in Star Wars.
Frank: Alright. We like R2-D2. And C-3PO.
Tracy: They're nice.
Frank: And up here (points to pinnacle of graph), we have a real person, like Han Solo.
Tracy: He acts like he doesn't care, but he does.
Frank: But down here (points to base of graph) we have a CGI Storm Trooper... or Tom Hanks in The Polar Express.
Tracy: I'm scared! Get me outta there!
Frank: And that's the problem. You're in The Valley now and it's impossible to get out.

[note: Titan AE was like that for me. I didn't like their hair, or their feet.]

i was kind of surprised he got that

Jocelyn: Hey, what's that Liam Neeson guy's name?
James: Qui-Gon Jinn?
Jocelyn: Yeah!

re-watching dollhouse

Topher: You know what I like? Brown sauce. What's it made of? Science doesn't know!
Adelle: It's made of brown.
Topher: Brown. Mined from the earth by the hardscrabble brown miners of North Brownderton.
Adelle: Oh, my God. I find lentils completely incomprehensible.

And then I laughed at my own hilarity for about ten minutes

James: So the Humanities Computing [the field in which James is doing his MA] students are putting on a conference. And guess what it's called.
Jocelyn: Um. Computing in the Humanities: A Wank Fest?

"With all the attention that copyright law gets, we forget that there was a time when it just didn’t matter that much to the way ordinary people accessed and used culture. I don’t mean that it did not matter to authors and publishers. Of course it did. I mean that it did not matter to most people as they went about their life using, enjoying, building upon, and critiquing culture. ..."

"We are about to make every access to our culture a legally regulated event, rich in its demand for lawyers and licenses, certain to burden even relatively popular work. Or again: we are about to make a catastrophic cultural mistake."
-Lawrence Lessig, For The Love Of Culture [@ The New Republic]

helpful marital support and true love (tm)

Jocelyn: can I order a giant silk tapestry of Karl Marx to hang up in our house?
James: Hmm... how much is it?

A little boy in my library, his voice full of wonderment, to his mom:

"Chapter books are looooooong."

The rules of whackbat

Coach Skip: Basically, there's three grabbers, three taggers, five twig runners, and a player at Whackbat. Center tagger lights a pine cone and chucks it over the basket and the whack-batter tries to hit the cedar stick off the cross rock. Then the twig runners dash back and forth until the pine cone burns out and the umpire calls hotbox. Finally, you count up however many score-downs it adds up to and divide that by nine.
Kristofferson: Got it.
-Fantastic Mr. Fox

Amazing interview with Maurice Sendak, Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers.

But you have all the Disney characters on your mantel behind you.

Sendak: I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness. You went to the movies then, you saw two movies and a short. When Mickey Mouse came on the screen and there was his big head, my sister said she had to hold onto me. I went berserk. I stood on the chair screaming, "My hero! My hero!" He had a lot of guts when he was young. We're both about the same age; we're about a month apart. He was the little brother I always wanted.

Jonze: What was he like when he was young?

Sendak: He had teeth.

Jonze: Literally?

Sendak: He had literally teeth. I have toys in the other room.

Jonze: Was he more dangerous?

Sendak: Yes. He was more dangerous. He did things to Minnie that were not nice. I think what happened, was that he became so popular—this is my own theory—they gave his cruelty and his toughness to Donald Duck. And they made Mickey a fat nothing. He's too important for products. They want him to be placid and nice and adorable. He turned into a schmaltzer. I despised him after a point.

-Where the Wild Things Are

File under: surreal marital conversations

Jocelyn: I think something threw up by our garage.
James: Something? Or someone?
Jocelyn: Something. A cat. It looks like cat food.
James: Maybe it was someone.
Jocelyn: A person who ate some cat food, and then threw up because of the cat food.
James: I think it was you.
Jocelyn: So your theory is that, while you were asleep, I got up, ate a bunch of cat food, and then went and threw up outside by our garage?
James: Well, that makes sense.
Jocelyn: Where would I get cat food?
James: Sherwood Park Mall? You're the criminal mastermind here, not me.

Gertrude just hasn't seen my zucchini

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables. -Gertrude Stein