A nasty dilemma, sure, but I’d rather someone be outright evil than a do-gooder, for evil is easier to confront and conquer, and, without a doubt, less damaging to the human race.

A teacher can teach you the mechanics of writing.

Only you can teach yourself to write with heart and a fearless imagination.

The bullshit keeps piling up this week. From Eamon Javors of Politico, the dumbest and vilest thing ever written:

Let’s be honest: Barack Obama is better than you are.

No he’s not.

This pervasive, malignant deceit that politicians are somehow better than us mere mortals must be purged from common consciousness.

As I reread Edward Whittemore’s “Jerusalem Quartet” for the second time in two years, David Gates asks in his Newsweek piece, “Now, Read it Again”, why some books reward revisiting:

The simple answer is that they give me joy. They fill me with the voices of people I know, thousands of them—many times the number in that old Dickens print—the real and the imagined, the living and the dead. Heaven may be like this eventually, but why wait around when it’s right here, right now?

In a world growing progressively worse—a universal rather than a personal declaration; I quite enjoy my life despite their scabships best attempts to ruin it through their foolish and self-aggrandising behaviour—there’s something wonderfully reassuring about revisiting a beloved novel, finding comfort in well-trodden words, even if the words themselves simply reflect back the world in all its budding bleakness.

Methinks Bulwer-Lytton is the perfect outlet for Paul Krugman’s wretched writing when the old grey lady dies.

On that note, congratulations to David McKenzie, winner of this year’s grand prize in the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest:

Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.

I dedicate this week of purposeful non-recycling to Paul Krugman, the old grey lady’s fool-in-residence.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason—treason against the planet.

That’s perhaps the cheesiest, violin-swelling crap I’ve ever read. Were you really trying to make me laugh?

Well guess what, Paulie? Que será será, and there isn’t a bloody thing you or anyone else can do about it.

If you want to throw around the treason charge, the grand do-gooding king of fools, Al Gore, should be incarcerated for the rest of his natural life for treason against humanity. In fact, every politician should be locked up for life, the filthy criminals.

I don’t think you can comprehend how animated living flesh is until you’ve seen the life taken from it right before your eyes.