Raven emailed me a link to this story in the Onion: Heroic Computer Dies to Save World From Master's Thesis:

"This fearless little machine saved me from unspoken hours of ex­as­per­at­ed head-scratching and eyestrain, as well as years of agonizing self-doubt over my decision to devote my life to teaching," said professor John Rebson, who had already read through three drafts of Samoske­vich's sprawling, 38,000-word dis­ser­ta­tion, titled A Hermeneu­ti­cal Ex­plo­ration Of Ono­matopoeia In The Works Of William Carlos Williams As It May Or May Not Relate To Post-Agrarian Appalachia. "It was an incredible act of bravery. This laptop sacrificed itself in order to put an end to Jill's senseless rambling."

Nothing like …continue.

I sometimes joke that I must be adopted because my parents have no aptitude for computers. I could make a similar joke about writing. Many of my immediate family, despite decent educations, seem to be incapable of writing a simple English sentence, much less a coherent paragraph.

One relative writes emails that are bereft of punc­tu­a­tion: neither a comma nor a full stop (period) is to be found. Capital letters occur, but too randomly for my liking. And everything is linked into one paragraph, no matter how long or disjointed. Yet, I've received adequately punctuated hand­writ­ten letters and postcards from him. I attribute his email sloven­li­ness to a com­bi­na­tion …continue.

Harold Pinter's speech on accepting the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, in­dif­fer­ent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he …continue.