MAN, I LOVE DAVID SEDARIS

He has a brilliant essay in The New Yorker that scorches the so-called undecided, those who just can't decide between Barack Obama or John McCain. A frined thinks it's really white people who don't want to admit that they'd never vote for a black man. Lord, I hope that ain't so.

Sedaris has a better line of reasoning. Here's a taste...

I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

Read the rest here.

AMAZING AND DISTURBING

The New Yorker has a condensed video of Nicholas White, who spent 41 hours trapped in an elevator in New York City’s McGraw-Hill building. I can't even imagine the horror of that situation; not knowing whether you were going to live or die in an 7x7 foot space under fluorescent lights with The Girl From Ipanema playing endlessly overhead.

Thank goodness he didn't have to take a shit.

Here's the link: http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/2008/04/21/080421_elevators

There's also a fascinating article. This is why I love the New Yorker.

After a while, White decided to smoke a cigarette. It was conceivable to him that, owing to construction work in the lobby, the building staff had taken his car out of service and would leave it that way not only through the weekend but all through the week. That they could leave him here as long as they had suggested that anything was possible. He imagined them opening the doors, ten days later, and finding him dead on his back, like a cockroach. Within hours, he had smoked all his cigarettes.