The New Yorker, 2005-04-18, part 2

[fiefoe]

"Out In the Sort" / John McPhee

• Lobsters are to Christmas dinners in France what turkeys are in America.
• If a lobster succumbs, the ammonia will detonate as a shaped olfactory charge.
  
• Lobster blood is clear. {And so do octopuses.}
• Your living lobster, checked in, goes off on a wild uphill and downhill looping circuitous ride and in eight or ten minutes comes out at the right plane. It has travelled at least two miles inside the hub.
  
• Over all, this labyrinth, which outthinks the people who employ it, is something like the interior of the computers that run it. Like printed circuitry, seven great loops, each a thousand feet around, are superposed at right angles above other loops.
• Somewhere around each primary loop is one of 364 positions where a given parcel will suddenly depart for another loop where there are 364 additional positions at one of which the package will continue its quest to school up with like-minded packages.
• The weight of the envelope and speed of the loop and distance of the bag and friction on the wood all having been calculated as if by a Norden bombsight...
  
• To UPS, Toshiba has also outsourced its buyer remorse.
• UPS brown was borrowed long ago from the brown of Pullman railroad cars, and, with Pullman long gone, UPS has trademarked the color.
  

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David Denby:  Having passed from the grandeur of eternal loss to the banality of success, Sox fans will have to confront ordinary life like the rest of us.

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