"The Corps' lassitude and failure to fulfill its duties resulted in a catastrophic loss of human life and property in unprecedented proportions," Duval wrote. "The Corps' negligence resulted in the wasting of millions of dollars in flood protection measures and billions of dollars in congressional outlays to help this region recover from such a catastrophe. Certainly, Congress would never have meant to protect this kind of nonfeasance..."US District Judge Stanwood Duval A perfect time to pull out your new Oxford Atlas (16th edition) and savor … [Read more...]

"Deeds set upon ideal goals, deeds performed not with careless ease and routine but in exertion and submission to their ends are stronger than the surprise and attack of caprice. Serving sacred goals may change mean motives. For such deeds are exacting. Whatever our motive may have been prior to the act, the act itself demands undivided attention. Thus the desire for reward is not the driving force of the poet in his creative moments, and the pursuit of pleasure or profit is not the essence of a religious or moral act. "At the moment in which … [Read more...]

(notes toward the essay nobody's written yet...) As a ginormous crossover pop star, Michael Jackson embodied the era's cosmic mismatch of outsized talent and crashingly banal taste, the black Barbra Streisand. Tipped just a few degrees in the right direction and he could have been a colossus, a black answer to the Beatles, the great R&B steamroller mashing together a huge range of ideas, grooves and attitudes. As it was, MJ took his heavy ID with child star Elizabeth Taylor way too literally, converted to the church of plastic surgery, and … [Read more...]

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"As far as Harry was concerned, Victor Ramdass Singh was just another Nervous Camera director, who worked tirelessly to make the audience realize at every moment that the picture was indeed being directed." This passage appears in Don Carpenter's 1975 novel The True Life Story of Jody McKeegan. No one who reads the eight other novels or the volume of short stories Carpenter published during his twenty-year career could ever call him just another Nervous Writer. You can comb through his work for flourishes and not find any showing off. Mostly, … [Read more...]

"A police officer contacted UFO experts after claiming he saw three aliens examining a freshly made crop circle in Wiltshire...." … [Read more...]

Soundtrack: Donald Fagen's "IGY" … [Read more...]