The New Yorker, 2005-04-11

[fiefoe]

The name of Italian minister Stefani Stefano made me think of other double names such as Humbert Humbert and Jerome K. Jerome. Wouldn't you know, somebody was way ahead of me. My only addition after his piece: Baden-Baden.

The illustration accompanying a business analysis of Sony's waning fortunes is a clever play of the three No Evil monkeys with Walkman as props.
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"Global Warning" / Todd Pruzan  (also noted here)
    
__ Mrs. Mortimer's personal life could be boiled down to an index of Victorian misery... a list of misfortunes that include spasmodic cholera, a face crushed by a wagon, erysipelas in the shins, fingers lost while rabbit-hunting, a dressing gown set alight in a fireplace, influenza, water on the brain, an apoplectic fit, asthma, scarlatina, jaundice and pleurisy, blindness and deafness, bronchitis, paralysis, and cerebral weakness.
__ Her nephew: 'She could not believe that it was good for her parrot never to rest its back, and when she took it to bed with her compelled it by slaps to lie on its back. The unhappy bird died, family tradition asserts, from being washed with soap and water and dried before the kitchen fire...'
__ Their talks led to a romantic tension.
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"Peace is a Beautiful Thing" / Sean Wilsey

__ I imagined calling the Nobel committee and saying, "Please give your award to Mom and save my ass."
__ A Latvian saying has it that you are as many times a man as many languages you know.

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