The New Yorker, 2006-04-10

[fiefoe]

"Friendly Sky Dept.: Peanuts, Madam?" / David Owen
    Attempts at exhaustiveness are inherently self-defeating: the longer a list, the more conspicuous its lacunae.

"On the Bay" / Bill Buford

• A single oyster cleans about two gallons of water an hour.
• (I) was then struck by an unexpected affinity between where I found myself and what was in my mouth. It was the briny intensity of what had crossed my palate: the food equivalent of the salty air.
  
• Thus the caution against eating oysters during the "r"-less summer months - "Nobody likes shells full of sex."
  
• Oysters... are protandrous. .. Oysters hibernate when the temperature drops below forty degrees and seem to lose their gender... and then it's anybody's guess what happens when they wake up.
• Osinski used the word terroir: in an oyster, as with wine, you should be able to taste the place it came from; in this still-living creature you will find the water and the food it ate - these living, fragile, handmade creatures, tasting wonderfully of the health of the planet.
  

"The Lesson of Tal Afar" / George Packer
__ The classic doctrine, which was developed by the British in Malaya in the 1940s and 50s, says that counterinsurgency warfare is twenty per cent military and eighty per cent political.
__ Much of the activity at an enduring FOB simply involves self-supply. These vast military oases raise the spectre of American permanence in Iraq, but, to me, they more acutely suggest American irrelevance.

"The Soundtrack of Your Life" / David Owen
     {Alternative tag line: 'the business of music for businesses', maybe?}

• ...the Beatles song "Yesterday"... is the most frequently covered song in the world.
• Naturally, there’s an awesome sound system, which extends into the parking lot but not (for deeply felt symbolic reasons) into the elevator.
• The company that became Muzak was founded by George Owen Squier, ...after helping to establish a predecessor to the Air Force, and running the Army’s Signal Corps during the First World War
• Truly modernized Muzak didn’t arise for more than a decade, when the company... underwent a transformation that employees still refer to gravely as “the rebranding".
• They are ever vigilant for the word "funk", which almost everyone mistakes for something else.
  

Elizabeth Bishop:
    Close, close all night / the lovers keep. / They turn together, /in their sleep,
    close as two pages / in a book / that read each other / in the dark.

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