TNY weekend reader: tricks and/or treats
(image: carolita johnson)
Jack Handy reports in “My first day in Hell,” that:
The food here turns out to be surprisingly good. The trouble is, just about all of it is poisoned. So a few minutes after you finish eating you’re doubled over in agony. The weird thing is, as soon as you recover you’re ready to dig in all over again.
Good to know, since I plan on doing Hell rather than Heaven. I am a New Yorker, after all. Heaven would bore me, so I’ll leave it to all the good Californians, and wish a bon voyage to the various other aspirants (including the Jehovah’s Witnesses whose departure thereto I magnanimously offered to expediate last weekend when they woke me up at the ungodly hour of 10 a.m.)
In the fiction section we have, “Republica and Grau,” by Daniel Alarcon. On first glance I was afraid it was going to depress me, but it turns out it’s my favorite kind of children’s story for adults: the kind where the kid goes bad, in the good way. I spent the whole time reading it from inside the mind of Maico, wondering how we were going to give the slip to the adults in whose hands our fate rested. The ending left me pretty impressed at our chutzpah, and I was imbued with a sense of mean, fiery optimism that made my subway ride seem more of an adventure again.
The transcript of David Remnick’s interview of Senator Barack Obama at the American Magazine Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, “Testing the waters,” is available online, as is the downloadable audio recording. You’ll be glad to know that our esteemed editor-in-chief bares his prickly side now and then (but only to those who can take it in good stride):
Reminick: Let’s go back to my President Bush question. Obviously, you want to answer it in quite the—
Obama: [to the audience] He’s a troublemaker, you notice? He sounds so much nicer in his columns.
Remnick: Yeah. Sorry to disabuse you of that.
Obama: [to the audience] He turns out to be kind of a prickly guy.
And Michael Schulman used to be afraid to play softball, but lo and behold, he overcame and got good enough at it that I won’t be dressing up as a softball and trick or treating at his door. (He’s a fiercer right field presence than I am, I’ll add.) He brings us the five-borough wide Halloween “haunted house” extravaganza based on a survey of each borough’s most popular (or most dire) fears in “Worst Nightmare.”
Last, but not least, Georgina Bloomberg has followed in her father’s footsteps in the philanthropy department, bringing joy and jodpurs to impoverished equestrians: Gift Horse. Very inspiring. In fact, I have many “one size fits all” flesh-colored thongs which I plan to offer to needy models.
October 28th, 2006 at 9:23 am
Minus the Obama, I read the EXACT same pieces last night over dinner. I was very sorry that they couldn’t make that “fear of heights” plexiglass platform with the tiny furniture.