Friday Links

Spring in Northeast Philly has sprung. I guess I should stop taking pictures from the car, but this was at a traffic light, so no possible hipster injury risk.

  1. The Grand Tour has been a tradition of newly rich countries ever since young British aristocrats took to the Continent in the eighteenth century, picking up languages, antiques, and venereal disease.”
  2. Poor Joey’s food truck is a graphic abomination the likes of which have not been seen since Master P’s last album cover: We have photos of despondent spaghetti on plates; a cartoon of Joey’s grandma; the Brooklyn Bridge; and more fonts than you could shake a Zapf Dingbat at. It looks like the Internet threw up on a children’s book.”
  3. I’m on Pinterest now, so stop your life and look at the pretty pictures.
  4. We settled into coach on an Air China non-stop flight to Frankfurt, and I opened a Chinese packet of “Outbound Group Advice,” which we’d been urged to read carefully. The specificity of the instructions suggested a history of unpleasant surprises: “Don’t travel with knockoffs of European goods, because customs inspectors will seize them and penalize you.” There was an intense focus on staying safe in Europe.”
  5. We recently received, in a tube sent by postal mail, something new in our experience: a 15-foot-long scroll to the editor, below.”
  6. Business casual causes confusion among morons.
  7. I remember the precise moment I began a lifelong love of Kazakh food. I was sitting at a dingy plastic table with some friends at a food cart in Karaganda, a rather industrial town in the center of Kazakhstan, and we were grabbing some lunch after a very long morning trying to teach idiomatic English to some college students.”
  8. Girls and their bedrooms.
  9. Writing a blank check to the State of Israel.
  10. ““We take pride in the country of Persia,” said Mrs. Maddahi, who will host the first Seder on Monday night. “It was an old monarchy, with thousands of years of history.”
  11. “I am hardly alone; almost everyone I know seems to have the KitchenAid mixers and Cuisinarts they got for their wedding still sitting in their boxes, to emerge at Thanksgiving, if ever.”
  12. I’m jealous. I’m jealous of people who succeed at what I do (write literary fiction). I’m jealous of them even if I love them or like them or respect them.”
  13. The market for glasses.
  14. In Australia, you tip counterclockwise.