“Every bit of Arredondo’s skin is coated with antibiotic cream. His left palm has glass in it from when three Marines informed him that Alex was dead and he began smashing the windows of their van. His lower legs, which received the worst of the burns from when he splashed gasoline in the van and ignited it, are stained the color of cranberries. His hair, cut off in the hospital, is only now starting to grow back. His fingernails, ruined when he used his hands to claw holes in Alex’s grave for flowers, are all gone.” — Washington Post writer David Finkel in his 2005 profile of Carlos Arredondo, who was the man in the cowboy hat at the Boston marathon yesterday.
(Source: Washington Post)
“In ancient days men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same but our heroes are men of flesh and blood.” — President Nixon’s contingency speech if the moon landing had failed.
“I don’t know, I ate a lot of Montgomery Donuts. What else? The usual, going to Georgetown and trying to get into bars with fake IDs…” — Julia Louis-Dreyfus, telling Hank Stuever about her school days in Washington in the ’70s.
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“Imagine a rerun of Norman Lear’s ‘All in Family,’ roughly contemporaneous in 1971, slowed down so much that one 30-minute episode took 10 hours to watch, almost to the point of immobility. Put Don Draper in Archie Bunker’s chair. Let the Meatheads and Glorias and Ediths and Jeffersons swirl around him, come and go, a constant and nagging reminder of how his world is no longer his. The gurgling toilet would elongate into an atonal funeral dirge. It’s the same show.” — Hank Stuever on the funereal new season of “Mad Men.”
“He became most known for his thumbs, but this up-or-down brand was oddly out of sync with his ecumenical, nuanced grasp of cinema and life. This man was a mensch. This analyst was a humanist. This was a wit among twits.” — Dan Zak, in tribute to Roger Ebert.
Taste the happy.
“If the cellphone’s legacy is convenience and mobility, maybe the legacy of the land line is punctuality and commitment.” — On the 40th anniversary of the first cell phone call, Dan writes a love letter to the landline.
“Gwyneth is never evil; she’s just slightly tone-deaf, slightly off, like a combination lock that will not open because you are misreading the eight as a nine. There’s something that people find repellent about Gwyneth — something beautifully, preciously repellent, a “Let them eat quinoa” mentality that infuses all of her work.”
Monica spends much too much time reviewing Gwyneth Paltrow’s new cookbook.
Illustration by Court Jones for the Washington Post.