Ian Frazier has written a very funny satire in the New Yorker on the impact of global warming for hell and its inhabitants. Enjoy!
THE TEMPERATURE OF HELL: A COLLOQUIUM
According to the best scientific data currently available, both the average and the mean temperatures of Hell have risen 3.8 degrees since 1955. Although an increase of this size may seem insignificant, especially to those not spending eternity there, the reality of the situation is quite different when experienced in concrete terms. For example, occupants of Hell who in 1955 were standing night and day in boiling pitch up to their knees report that, owing to the expansion of pitch at higher temperatures, they now must endure the torment all the way up to mid-thigh, or even higher, during Hell’s warmer seasons. Condemned souls who have to lie on their backs chained to a flat rock while a white-hot sheet of iron is lowered to within inches of their faces have stated that the rise in Hell’s ambient temperature now makes the iron seem much closer to their faces than it actually is.
I no longer have the patience to watch Woody Allen movies, but his short pieces in the New Yorker are still fun to read. Here is a wonderful postscript to the Madoff Ponzi scheme that made many jewish people wonder why they would be so credulous.
Woody Allen in New Yorker, March 30, 2009: Two weeks ago, Abe Moscowitz dropped dead of a heart attack and was reincarnated as a lobster. Trapped off the coast of Maine, he was shipped to Manhattan and dumped into a tank at a posh Upper East Side seafood restaurant. In the tank there were several other lobsters, one of whom recognized him. “Abe, is that you?” the creature asked, his antennae perking up.
“Who’s that? Who’s talking to me?” Moscowitz said, still dazed by the mystical slam-bang postmortem that had transmogrified him into a crustacean.
“It’s me, Moe Silverman,” the other lobster said.
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Start the Fire By ROGER COHEN (NY Times)
With apologies to Billy Joel, who’s more of a chronologist, and in tribute to a president, Barack Hussein Obama, representing a new post-cold-war generation of 21st-century Americans.
We Didn’t Start the Fire (2)
Bill Clinton, Tina Fey, capitalist China, O.J.,
Asia rising, Facebook, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ugg boots, Seinfeld
West Bank, Gaza City, Tupac Amaru Shakur
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Catholic Google is supposed to help avoiding sin. I don’t think it works. Try it out with your favorite sinful words!
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A campaign is the time to stab your enemies and a transition is the time to stab your friends.
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Question to Steward Copeland of the Police: Sting was photographed outside the Relax bordello in Hamburg in September. Were you tempted to join him?
SC: He never asked us to go with him! His 17-year-old daughter said it best, though: “Dad, at least you didn’t get busted playing golf.” None of The Police play golf.
The Democratic Party is closer than it’s ever been to a political nightmare—a deadlocked convention. Though the odds of its actually happening are still remote, the idea is so rich with dramatic possibility that we asked Lawrence O’Donnell Jr., former West Wing writer-producer, to play out a scenario in movie-treatment form. The premise is that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton arrive in Denver, neither having sufficient delegates to gain the nomination nor a decisive majority in the popular vote. And so it’s on… Read the Story at New York Magazine.
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