The New Yorker, 2005-12-12

"Long Island Postcard: Hands Up" / Daniel Kurtz-Phelan
__ (The Minuteman) stays quiet and hydrated.

"Your Move" / Tom Mueller

• "Das ist mir Wurscht!" - "That's all sausage to me!"
• Donninger is frequently unable to access it, because the Sheikh and Hydra, playing under the name zor_champ, are on the Internet, taking on all comers.
• Computers had triumphed at chess not by aping human thought,.. but by playing like machines. The analogy with flight is instructive.
• "Twelve bits is good discipline."
  

"Hogs Wild" / Ian Frazier

• There is nothing like the expression in a wild hog's eyes. I studied it for a while and the words I found were: unromantic; undeceived.
• The word "cur" is a higher-sounding synonym for "mutt".
• From her high view the little girl looked at the dogs, at the hog. Her mind took a second to understand what was going on. Then, in a tone of the greatest emergency, with an authority that cut through every noise and rang above the assembly, the little girl cried, "Run, pig! Run!" Some people laughed, the way a crowd usually does when a child makes a remark that everybody hears. Some people said, "Aww . . .," in sympathy. The little girl, seeing that the pig had nowhere to run to, began to cry, and her father lifted her down and comforted her. She cried louder when the pig squealed. A woman standing nearby excitedly took up the girl's cause, saying, "She's right! What are they doing!" and so on, until her neighbors shushed her. For a moment we all hesitated, uneasy and off balance; then we returned to the business at hand.
  

"The Gene Hunters" / Sue Halpern
__ a person's genotype (what genes she carries) as well as a phenotype (what traits she embodies)

"New Frontier" / Anthony Lane
__ This slow and stoic movie, hailed as a gay Western, feels neither gay nor especially Western.
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