Reeves Wiedeman

I just don’t understand how stuff like the second paragraph of Robert Kaplan’s story on Pakistan in this month’s Atlantic make it into print:

To travel the Makran coast is to experience the windy, liberating flatness of Yemen and Oman and their soaring, sawtooth ramparts the color of sandpaper, rising sheer off a desert floor pockmarked with thornbushes. Here, along a coast so empty that you can almost hear the echoing camel hooves of Alexander’s army, you lose yourself in geology. An exploding sea bangs against a knife-carved apricot moonscape of high sand dunes, which, in turn, gives way to crumbly badlands. Farther inland, every sandstone and limestone escarpment is the color of bone. Winds and seismic and tectonic disruptions have left their mark in tortuous folds and uplifts, deep gashes, and conical incrustations that hark back far before the age of human folly.

Maybe there’s something genius about this that I don’t get…but seriously, “conical incrustations that hark back far before the age of human folly.” “Old rocks sticking up from the ground” would have worked well for me.

I’m curious if anyone likes this – the rest of the article is better in my book, but still contains one-liners like the above. I just don’t think it’s worthy of a primo spot in one of the best monthly magazines.

So I just read Christopher Buckley’s satire “Thank You For Smoking.” It’s a great, though dated, summer read, if you’re looking for something to swim through in a day at the beach – funny, hyper-sexualized, over the top, and even occasionally insightful.

But it’s not as good as the movie. A couple plot lines were completely added in the movie that make Nick Naylor into more of a reasonable character – namely, his son Joey only gets a few paragraphs worth in the book, whereas he’s a fairly central character in the film.

Maybe it’s because I saw the movie first, and loved it, whereas book fans may have had a different reaction. Maybe it’s because the book is 15 years old (Buckley himself admits that Naylor today would not have been a tobacco lobbyist). But I think the story was just better told in the movie.

Anyone have a similar reaction to TYFS? Any other movies you thought topped the book version?

This is just cool. The number of semi-practical applications of this new 1000fps camera are mind-boggling enough. This is just for fun…try not to smile when the jello starts jigglin’.

Got your attention? Check out this pic of domestic nature at its wildest. And check out the whole gallery of NPPA award winners while you’re at it.

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