Hello, Weekend! So Long, Government!

Enjoy your government shutdown and your Turbotax, ladies and gents! I know I certainly am. That’s right: just hanging out, measuring my “home office.” Looking for some procrastination? Here, we can help, with some things you might have missed this week. See you Monday!

• “The big-step strut is usually done by female soul singers, none better than Tina Turner, who turned the big-step strut into a marketing campaign.”

• “I probably failed to think of a half dozen people who would have been willing and able to write a blurb. If my own mother were Oprah Winfrey, I’d have skipped her and been like, ‘Well, who says she’d necessarily like this book?’”

• “People should not have to go through their entire lives lying about liking bad plays. There has to be a better way.”

• “I enjoyed the perks of someone without an office job — nooners and a very lax dress code — while becoming incredibly dependent on the trappings of someone who did.”

• “My friends went on and on about it. And you know sometimes when your friends go on and on about something it’s like Arcade Fire, which is sort of fine but I don’t want to BUY it or anything. Do they serve seared mutton with capers on this Magical Greyhound bus that is going to put my Chinese friends out of business? And then they said, ‘There are plugs.’”

• “David Wallace was a person who dwelt in darkness either by nature or compulsion, or maybe even by mere habit, or maybe just because he’d been given the wrong medication. Like all depressed persons, Wallace loathed himself in error. He had a real value that others could see, but he could not. And another bad thing: he identified so closely with his mom, it’s as if she got caught in the crosshairs of his self-loathing.”

Photo by Liao Ming Chen.