In the Cellar

When did this odd phrase about sexual intercourse enter our language? Surprisingly late, it seems. According to the *Oxford English Dictionary*, it first appeared in print in 1934. Here’s definition 2b of “lay, v1″: “To have sexual intercourse with (a woman); (of a woman) to have sexual intercourse (with a man); (of a woman) to be willing to have (extramarital) sexual intercourse.” Hm — there seem to be some serious gender assumptions at work here. Definition 7d of “lay, n7″ goes even further: “A woman who is readily available for sexual intercourse; an act of sexual intercourse.” The woman-object appears before the act. How charming! (I think the question of whether this sort of sexism is the OED’s fault or not — they are the compilers and definers, and yet they try to let the words tell their own story — is interesting and complex.)

The first appearance of the verb form is in 1934, in John O’Hara’s first novel, *Appointment in Samarra*. The noun form first appeared in 1932 in a work by James Thomas Farrell — perhaps something from the *Studs Lonigan* trilogy, from what I can make out. It’s safe to assume that phrases like “she was a good lay” and “I got laid last night” were in the language for a some time before O’Hara and Farrell conferred immortality to them in print — but how long? Hard to say. 

For a long time, “to bed” was basically the stand-in for “to lay [or get laid].” It gave rise to the delightful phrase “wedded and bedded.” But “to bed” (entry 2b of bed, v) last appeared in print, it seems, in 1740. It’s now considered archaic. (Although I have heard it before, but probably by someone being willfully archaic.) And, since we’re on the subject, yes, “to fuck” has been in the language for quite sometime — since at least the beginning of the 1500s, probably before. 

On a completely unrelated note, the “lay, v1″ entry has 61 definitions, and many of them have multiple subdivisions (and we’re talking like a through h, not a through c). Whoa!

Ah, high school portraits. Mine, as I recall, had me in a grey shirt and shorts, turned about 45 degrees, smiling at the camera. Bland. One of my siblings actually did the “chin on hands, smiling” shot. Egads. I remember I waltzed up to the photographer at my alloted slot and tried to get out of there as quickly as possible. Some people, however, take this far more seriously — or creatively. A buddy sent me a link to a page of outstanding HS portraits. These are my three favorites.

 

 

Scoring a baseball game is a dying art. It demands knowledge of the semi-arcane method of tabulation and keen attention for a long period of time. I could never get into it for two reason: first, I understand the general principles but there are enough freaky occurrences that evade my understanding and cause me to write a puzzled “?” next to that moment, thus delegitimizing the whole endeavor. (Of course, these freaky occurrences cause tried-and-true baseball scorers to geek out gleefully.) Second, I like to drink beer at ballgames and after a few my concentration wavers appreciably. That and I like to watch ballgames in good company, as it provides an excellent forum for occasional conversation, watchful silence, more conversation, and so on. There’s always something to watch, but there’s also always room to talk. Scoring interferes with that pattern. 

I bring up the subject of baseball scoring because I heard a rather incredible story recently. An older gentleman — someone I know professionally, so this is not some barfly spinning yarns to a stranger — told me about an experience he had back in July of 1999. He’s a long-time baseball fan, someone who recalls with distinct pleasure the Brooklyn Dodgers winning the World Series when he was 8 years old. That kind of guy who will take in a ballgame at a park he’s never been to, just because. And he’s an avid baseball scorer — says he finds it intensely relaxing. So he and a good pal of his are in New York City in July and they go to Yankee Stadium to see the Yanks play the Montreal Expos. Both friends love to keep score, and the other guy decided to do it, so my acquaintance said, what the hell, if one of us is doing it I’ll just watch the game. The date was July 18, 1999, the day David Cone threw a perfect game. (He never even reached a 3-ball count and threw only 88 pitches.) As the game progressed, my acquaintance’s friend was offered money for the scorecard. By the end of the game the offers were to the tune of several hundred dollars. He did not, of course, give this precious item away. A perfect game is the rarest event in baseball — or at least the rarest event that isn’t baroque in its unusualness — and, I’d argue, one of the few moments in any sort of sport where the victor can say he or she could not have possibly done any better. Even something like Reggie Jackson’s astonishing batting performance in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series — 1 walk and 3 home runs on 7 pitches, meaning that he took a 4-pitch walk and hit 3 first-pitch homeruns — could have been better: he only hit three home runs. The only examples that come to mind for absolute perfection are goal-tending performances — like 35/35 in saves in big-time hockey game or a soccer goalkeeper who does not allowed a goal and then goes on to stuff all 5 penalty shots in a 0-0 shootout. Or maybe Christian Laettner’s absurd line in that super-famous Duke over Kentucky March Madness win: 10/10 FG, 10/10 FT; and, of course, the last shot is now simply referred to as the shot. Surely there are other examples out there — and I’d love to hear about them in the comments — but, for now, suffice it to say that pitching a perfect game (with under 90 pitches!!) is about as close to perfection that one can get in something as kinetic and haphazard as sports. And my poor interlocutor missed out on the chance to score a perfect game! Of course, this regret must remain a small regret: he got to watch a perfect game. Only 15 perfect games have been thrown since 1900. 

“Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.” — Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”

 

“Trust God and keep your powder dry.” — Oliver Cromwell

 

“One must be drenched with words, literally soaked with them to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.” — Hart Crane, from a letter

 

“This demand for clarity in every particular of a work, whether essential or not, reminds me of the Pre-Raphaelite painter who was doing a twilight scene but rowed across the river in day time to see the shape of leaves on the further bank, which he then drew in with full detail.” — Ezra Pound

 

“Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.” — W. Somerset Maugham

 

Alive! has asked a new question. Or, rather, set a new topic:

“Let’s talk about American shoot em up flicks…Anything with a lot of gunplay. Anyway you fancy it.” So here we go. Same format as always: I’ll response and then kick it over to him. 

I am so accustomed to violence in film — especially American film — that I am genuinely surprised when I see a movie that lacks violence of any sort. Two recent violent movies I’ve seen spring to mind. The first is Zack Synder’s *Watchmen*, the film version of the excellent graphic novel, which is shockingly violent. Hard R rating, to be sure. Bones crushed, faces smashed, gooey entrails hanging from the ceiling — you name it. The graphic novel is violent in its own right, but the film takes some sort of glee in showing us the carnage in perfectly framed, heavily edited glory. Violence that was suggested or received, say, one panel of depiction in the graphic novel now gets about 30 seconds of splattering. In making the transition from print to film, the violence must be upped, must be authenticated. The second movie is *The Departed*, the brilliant Scorcese film that I caught part of on cable the other day. Watching any Scorcese film on TV is strange because the slew of profanity gets comically edited: “fucking” becomes “freaking,” all while Leo’s furrowed brow suggests he’s a little more pissed off than “freaking.” (Oh, and they judicially edit out all the swear words and yet keep the word “faggot” — that’s a nice touch, FX. Wouldn’t want the kids picking up nasty words.) So they edit out all the cuss words and yet violence crawls all over the film. Lots and lots of blood. The shootout when the police bust Costello’s drug deal might be slightly edited, but all sorts of people get gunned down by heavy automatic weaponry. I suppose this is so obvious and normal as to be almost banal, but I want to point it out only for emphasis. FX — or, rather, our bureaucratic censors — are prudish about having “fuck” appear on a telecast but have no beef about showing a segment wherein at least 5 or 6 people get thwacked with multiple bullets, a car catches on fire, a guy puts a revolver under his chin and pulls the trigger, and a guy gets shot in such a way that causes an upward fountain spurt of blood from the mouth. This is the landscape we’re dealing with. 

Violence and film go hand-in-hand. Hell, violence and public entertainment have a long and storied intertwining. Whether it’s state-sponsored executions in the town square or swordfights on the Shakespearean stage, violence is a spectacle and people tend to like that sort of thing. Early film wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as contemporary stagecraft, but it soon caught up and outstripped its rival quite easily. Plots need to have some sort of disruption or jostling — or else it’d be just like real life, which is largely repetitive and mundane — and violence (or the threat of violence) is as good a jostler as any. Trouble needs to brew to bring about a happy ending; and things just get worse and worse in other genres. 

Film needs violence; film needs (some) gunplay. The big question, for me, is when did this become so damn rampant? I imagine it occurred at some point in the 70s. Vietnam on TV and the development of better cameras and more intricate editing techniques allowed for crisper, longer, and more involved shootouts. If you want an example of what I’m talking about watch the beginning of George Roy Hill’s *Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid* (1969). Robert Redford, who plays the Sundance Kid, is a quick draw, and he proves this to some onlooker by shooting an object (I think it’s a gun on the ground, but I could be wrong); the whole thing looks laughably low-budget, as if they tied some invisible fishing line to the object that’s shot at and they’d tug it accordingly. Or even *The Godfather* (1972): that famous scene where Michael shoots Sollozzo and the corrupt police captain is certainly violent and a little gory, but just imagine how that sort of scene might be filmed today; it’s over 25 years old now, and it seems like a model of suspense and restraint. 

I’m not sure when gunplay became rampant in film, but I think it’s a worthy question. (And here I mean gunplay different than that, say, of the Westerns — although the relationship between these questions and issues and the genre of the Western is rather interesting; I don’t know much about Westerns, so I can’t pursue that line here.) Another worthy question is when did gunplay become cool? Cool, hip, sleek, aestheticized violence — we see it all the time in film now. Hero ducks behind a corner; close up on an attractive, sweaty face; hero rolls out and pops off 2-3 shots from his massive Magnum Revolver as the camera zooms and pans lovingly. We’ve seen this thing time and again, and it’s always sexy and visually arresting. This notion reached its height, in my mind, in *The Matrix* (1999), when Neo dodges the bullet in slo-mo; people are trying to outdo that WHOA moment of visually arresting violence — and in terms of technique and spectacle, they have — but I think they’re playing for second. That single moment in *The Matrix*, to me, is the height of gunplay violence in American film. I’m not sure what the overall film — as opposed to the single moment — would be, but I’d be negligent to talk about gunplay in American film without mentioning Quentin Tarantino’s *Pulp Fiction* (1994). 

When some people think of aestheticized gunplay and cool violence, Tarantino is the first person that comes to mind. After all, he’s the guy that had Mr. Blonde (the Michael Madsen character), bedecked in a sleek black suit and shimmying to “Stuck in the Middle with You,” cut off some poor cop’s ear in *Reservoir Dogs* (1992). That’s some cool violence for you. *Pulp Fiction* takes this idea to new heights. That scene where Jules quotes Ezekiel 25:17 before killing his targets can probably stand on that podium of that bullet-dodging scene in *The Matrix*. Samuel L Jackson can look cool while eating an ice cream sandwich in a Port-a-Potty. Give him some thundering biblical verses and a close up of his frightening intense eyes — well, that’s so unfair you’re basically breaking the rules. That scene at the very beginning of the film with Pumpkin and HunnyBunny (“Everybody be cool this is a robbery!” “Any of you fuckin’ pricks MOVE, and I’ll execute everyone fuckin’ last one of you!”) ends with HunnyBunny gleaming fierce teeth, gun cocked and ready, and there’s a BOOM, only its the opening chord of “Misirlou,” a slick surf-rock song. The film ends with Jules and Vincent ceremoniously tucking their guns into their borrowed pairs of shorts and walking out of the diner, as another surf-rock song starts up. 

David Foster Wallace’s brilliant essay — well, every single one of his essays is brillant — on “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” brings David Lynch into dialogue with Tarantino et al., citing DL as their forerunner. This is some great stuff, so I’ll quote at length:

“The Band-Aid on the neck of Pulp Fiction‘s Marcellus Wallace — the unexplained, visually incongruous, and featured prominently in three separate set-ups — is textbook Lynch. So are the long, self-consciously mundane dialogues on pork, foot massages, TV pilots, etc. that punctuate Pulp Fiction‘s violence, a violence whose creepy/comic stylization is also resoundingly Lynchian. [. . .] D. Lynch is an exponentially better filmmaker than Q. Tarantino. For, unlike Tarantino, D. Lynch knows that an act of violence in an American film has, through repetition and desensitization, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself. This is why violence in Lynch’s films, grotesque and coldly stylized and symbolically heavy as it may be, is qualitatively different from Hollywood’s or even anti-Hollywood’s hip cartoon-violence. Lynch’s violence always tries to mean something. A better way to put what I just tried to say: Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.” (This essay appears in *A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again*, a collection of DFW’s essays which is one of my all-time favorite books.) 

I should here point out that in thinking about gunplay and violence, I’m certainly not trying to scold or hand-wring. I am not Mrs. Lovejoy screaming out “Won’t somebody please think of the children!” In fact, I enjoy — some of them immensely — every single one of the films I’ve mentioned so far. 

My two big questions so far have been: 1) when did gunplay violence become so rampant? 2) When did gunplay violence become aestheticized and cool? The third and last question I’ll throw in the pot is how often do films portray gun violence realistically? For instance, there’s a scene in Michael Mann’s *Heat* (1995) where cops are chasing robbers across a crowded space in LA and all parties are firing many, many shots from some seriously heavy artillery. This sort of thing makes me scratch my head and roll my eyes. In the movies guns tend to be light as a feather, seem to have infinite clips of ammo, and aren’t particularly accurate. I’m trying to think of films that are incredibly diligent about portraying gunplay violence accurately, and I’m not coming up with much. 

Ball’s in your court, Alive! Have at it.

This month’s theme here at The Dark Comedy Hour is “What You Wish You Were.” I figured I’d chime in. Since life is short and wishes are long, I don’t want to confine myself to one vision. Instead I offer many. 

~I wish I were a bus driver on the Las Vegas Strip. 

~I wish I were the guy who lived out in the lighthouse, alone with my Sir Walter Scott novels and two shaggy dogs. 

~I wish I were the person who gets to change the score on the old-time manual scoreboard at Wrigley Field. During the game, I’d take a window out of the “NITE GAMES” section and watch the action. 

~I wish I were giving scenic hillwalking tours in the Scottish Highlands. 

~I wish I were Chest Rockwell to Dirk Diggler’s Brock Landers. 

~I wish I were working on something involving alternative energy production, something where I could say I was making, inarguably, a difference in the world. 

~I wish I were a ranch-hand out in the Panhandle. 

~I wish I were the owner of a late-night diner on the Jersey Shore. 

~I wish I were a deepsea fisherman and would know how to commune with the ocean at sunrise. 

~I wish I were batting lead-off for the Mets. 

~I wish I were an accomplished playwright. There’s little more exciting than the energy that ripples up during the collaborative effort to put together a theatrical production.

~I wish I were a powerbroker who could get anyone on the phone I wanted to at any time. Then I’d hang up. 

~I wish I were living out in the middle of the woods near a small pond. 

~I wish I were a professional surfer. Those people seem like they enjoy life. 

~I wish I were pals with Jack Nicholson. Or Michel Foucault. Or Christopher Marlowe. Or Anne Carson. 

~I wish I were a dandy back in fin-de-siecle Paris. 

~I wish I were a spectator at the marriage of Edgar Allen Poe and his child-bride. (Thieved from Nabokov.) 

~I wish I were a bullfighter. Just once. 

These are some things I wish I were. Perhaps more will appear later. 

 

 

Justice John Paul Stevens has decided to take a ride on the crazy-go-round, joining the grumbling lunatic fringe that claims that Shakespeare didn’t actually write his plays. Oh dear — not you, JPS! 

My favorite part of the article is Justice Scalia’s comment. It makes some sense on the surface, until you realize that, uh, there’s a large body of evidence to support that Shakespeare — yes, Shakespeare, that son of a glover who prolly didn’t go to university — wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Like, you know, his name on the First Folio. Scalia acts like Shakespeare’s name was drawn out of a hat. 

For my money, the best overview of the authorship controversy is in a chapter in Jonathan Bate’s *The Genius of Shakespeare*. (The title doesn’t mean what you think it does.) I’ve always felt that Stephen Greenblatt’s *Will in the World* was written in part as a big “up yours!” to the crazy anti-Stratfordians because it mixes scholarship and a few cupfuls of speculation to offer a narrative about how someone like Shakespeare could come to write Shakespeare’s plays. 

For me there’s always been a bigger question: why does the authorship question even matter? Who cares? Theatrical productions back then were collaborative in their creation and production, and “the author,” as we understand it, didn’t really exist back then. To wit: over a dozen of ol’ WS’s plays — including masterpieces like *Macbeth*, *Antony and Cleopatra*, *Measure for Measure*, *The Tempest*, and *Twelfth Night* — may never have published had Heminges and Condell not put together the First Folio, published in 1623. Shakespeare died in 1616. No one can know for sure who wrote the plays, but the pro-Shakespeare camp has much more evidence and has to engage in far, far fewer contortions in order to justice their argument. (My favorite is the contention that Marlowe wrote the plays. Marlowe, the guy who was stabbed to death in 1593. Shakespeare wrote plays until at least 1611. Either Marlowe managed to be insanely prolific — while also developing a knack for comedy, which he never had in his work — or he wrote from beyond the grave.) What I find so troubling about this whole thing is that a fucking SUPREME COURT JUSTICE — you know, the people who weigh evidence and make the most important legal decisions for our country — could come to think this. Ugh.

Anyway, here’s the article. Check it out:

Justice Stevens joins to Crazy Clan.

[This post has been updated; there are hyperlinks at the bottom.]

Apologies for the radio silence. I fell into a work hole. Expect upcoming posts in the next week on this month’s theme (what I want to be) and the next installment of my ongoing dialogue with Alive!

But let’s have some sweet clips for now. The blog is tetchy today and has apparently decided to undermine my efforts to add links. So I’m going to give cold links for now — please copy/paste, and I’ll edit in hyperlinks soon.

A buddy of mine showed me this great Nike soccer commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwlpTgbQTE

 

Cristiano Ronaldo scored this ridiculous goal in a big-deal Champions League match on 4/15. This shit ain’t fair: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_qet3hI3Oo

Soccer commercial

Ronaldo is so nasty

 

I promised you some poetry readings — this is a favorite short poem of mine, and this is why I think it’s so nifty — awhile back. I’m going to get started on this shortlist with Wallace Stevens’ “Of Mere Being.” 

 

The palm at the end of the mind,

Beyond the last thought, rises

In the bronze decor,

 

A gold-feathered bird

Sings in the palm, without human meaning,

Without human feeling, a foreign song.

 

You know then that it is not the reason

That makes us happy or unhappy.

The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

 

The palm stands on the edge of space. 

The wind moves slowly in the branches. 

The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down. 

 

Yep, this is a kooky late Wallace Stevens poem. He died in 1955, and this was probably written in the last year or two of his life. It appears as the last poem in the lovely volume of selected poetry called *The Palm at the End of the Mind*, and — given the title of the volume and the location of this poem at the very end — I’ve always enjoyed the silly idea that this was the last poem he ever wrote. 

This is a quintessential Wallace Stevens poem. Many of the identifiable characteristics are there. Totally abstract? Check. Relatively simple language that seems to gesture toward something profound yet perhaps ultimately mysterious or even ungraspable? Check. Use of birds and/or vegetation as a main object in the poem? Check. 

I adore the opening of this poem: “The palm at the end of the mind, / Beyond the last thought, rises / In the bronze decor.” We’re chucked off the end of the pier and into the lake; we can’t really swim. The poem is asking us to think of a place “[b]eyond the last thought”; this could be a cheap parlor trick, but in hands as accomplished as Stevens, it certainly isn’t. The riveting part about this opening, though, is its quiet confidence. Stevens will often just tell you these marvelous things. No “imagine this!” or scenes of grandiose imagery and highfalutin language. Two super-abstract ideas (palm at end of mind AND beyond the last thought) are brought together with a super-active verb: “rises.” Somehow these abstract ideas are taking hold. This scene might seem ridiculous, but that’s our problem; the speaker states it as if he’s stating a fact.

There’s this bird singing a “foreign song,” that seems to escape our categories of comprehension. Singing birds are a favorite of poets — think of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” or the bird in the tree at the end of Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” — and here Stevens takes this image of natural beautiful and harmony and makes it bizarre, different, other. In a masterful early poem, “Sunday Morning,” Stevens ends with scene of the world as alive and bountiful but ultimately divorced from human comprehension and meaning. The famous pigeons swooping downward to darkness on extended wings — the last lines of the poem — reappear here, sort of. In both cases there’s something haunting about these birds: they don’t need us, not at all. The birds of “Sunday Morning” are of this world; the “gold-feathered bird” here is emphatically not. 

Then comes a patented Stevens stunner: “You know then that it is not the reason / That makes us happy or unhappy.” What the hell does that mean? It seems portentous, yet its meaning remains unclear. What is the most important word in that first quoted line? I can think of a few candidates: You, know, then, it, is, not, the, reason. That’s every word except “that,” folks. Lean heavily on any one of those words and you can change the reading of the line. Try it. To my mind, “it,” “not,” and “reason” are probably the three most important. “It” — what’s it? “Not” — if we don’t know “it,” this causes even more trouble by gesturing to an idea or space that is NOT “it.” “Reason” — talk about a dicey term, since it links up with logic, causal relationships, and a whole system of ways that humans make sense of their world. This line remains obdurate and opaque. And I like it for that. At one point Hamlet tells Horatio “There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.” I think the first two lines of the third stanza kinda-sorta get at that idea. But Hamlet is explicitly talking about how the mind constructs the world, whereas that only may be the case here. There’s definitely a mind-world dance going on in “Of Mere Being,” but in Hamlet’s formulation the boundaries are crisp and clear, and here they are quite blurry. And, if this wasn’t enough, don’t forget that we’ve been addressed directly: “You know then. . .” Suddenly, within this atmosphere of uncertainty come two taut sentences: “The bird sings. Its feathers shine.” For some reason — there’s that word again — I find these lines incredibly moving. The bird remains, singing, shining. Wipe away all that baggage, all those categories, all that understanding, because there the bird is, singing and shining, and its going to do that whether or not you want to accept it. Two quick sentences gesture toward volumes of marvelousness. 

We end with three 8-beat lines, each a complete sentence. So we’re at the end of mind, beyond the last thought, but only at the edge of space? Um, ok. (The use of the verb “stands,” though, is provocative; what does it stand on, and how is it related to the “bronze decor” that appears in line 1?) Line 1 establishes some location but keeps it static. Line 2 adds movement — the wind in the branches. Line 3 offers the sublime payoff: “The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.” Here’s some alliterative ecstasy. Doing lexical work on alliteration — that repeated letter or sound must mean that — is always dubious and slightly crazy, but: the F sounds like a burning fire (try it — it’s open and continuous) and the hard chop of the D sounds closes off the expansive Fs. “Fangled” by the way, only has one entry in the *OED*: the last recorded use is in 1727, and it means “characterized by crochets or fopperies.” Well, I suppose there is something foppish about this bird. Stevens may have known about this obsolete word — it wouldn’t surprise me — but it hardly matters either way. As wacky as this line is, it somehow works. This mysterious and reticent poem all of a sudden bursts forward. The image — the idea — is fantastical but obscure. Now you see it; now you don’t. It’s a helluva cool line. (And you might now see why I secretly want this to be the last poem. That last line is like how Mickey Mantle hit a homerun during his last at-bat. Both are good ways to go out.) 

I’m not a big fan of Thomas Friedman. Sure, his *New York Times* opinion columns can be intriguing from time to time. But every single one of his columns is always about: 1) green technology; 2) China; 3) globalization. He’ll pick one and run with it, throwing in a nod to the other two. Every single column. Sure, he’ll occasionally take on a topical issue, but you’d better believe he’ll coax it back into his safety zone. (I should point out that this approach makes Friedman seem like Tolstoy when compared to Maureen Dowd. I feel ashamed for once enjoying her work. Talk about mailing it in. Sheesh. I think every one of her columns starts out as a Mad Libs. And there are a few other directives: be sassy; jump from topic to topic without bothering to connect them; tell a story that takes up 2/3 of the column and use that to make a point in the last third that doesn’t in any way relate to that story. Or, be Bob Herbert and do basically the exact same thing, only seem like a sort of crazy but ultimately kindly old doddering man who’s decidedly unsassy. But I digress.) Thomas Friedman has been annoying me for some time now. (And reports I’ve heard that he’s a huge egotistical asshole don’t surprise me at all.) And, thanks to Wonkette, I came across this amazing book review of Thomas Friedman’s *The World Is Flat* from 2005. This is a polemical take-down posing as a “book review.” It’s delightfully nasty. 

Thomas Friedman gets his nose stuck in the mess he made.