OK, maybe not so much with the squeaking
...thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender...
Scottish poet Robert Burns, in a 1791 letter to a critic, well worth reading in its entirety. Via Rosanne Cash.
Networks and Cooperation
President Bill Clinton, in an interview in the January 2012 Esquire
"One of the real dilemmas we have in our country and around the world is that what works in politics is organization and conflict. That is, drawing the sharp distinctions. But in real life, what works is networks and cooperation. And we need victories in real life, so we've got to get back to networks and cooperation, not just conflict. But politics has always been about conflict, and in the coverage of politics, information dissemination tends to be organized around conflict as well. It is extremely personal now, and you see in these primaries that the more people agree with each other on the issues, the more desperate they are to make the clear distinctions necessary to win, so the deeper the knife goes in."
Via Kottke.
The cream-filled march of time
If I set aside a Twinkie today, it will likely still be edible in 43 years. Had my father set aside a Twinkie in 1968 when I was born, it would likely still be edible today. Had my grandfather set aside a Twinkie in 1939 when my father was born, when they were still made with BANANA CREAM (yes, real bananas and real cream), said confection would have disintegrated long ago, because apparently nuclear-grade food preservative and BANANA CREAM are mutually exclusive ingredients - if you've got one, you can't have the other. The universe is truly an unjust place.