this is what love is for

If she loves you, if she really loves you, you’ll know it. If you can wake up to her staring at you and it’s not even mildly creepy, if you catch her smelling the shoulder of the hooded sweatshirt you lent her for an autumn walk at the beach, and not for B.O., if she makes you a pancake in the shape of a shark, if she calls you drunkenly at four in the morning “to talk,” if she laughs at your jokes when they’re funny and makes fun of you when they’re not, if she keeps her fridge stocked with Guinness tallboys for when you come over, if she tells you how she wishes she were closer to her sister and that her dad makes her sad: She loves you, of course she loves you.

From Does She Love You? by Pasha Malla

(and also the companion piece, Does He Love You? )

Anthony Bourdain with Josh Ozersky at NYC’s Keen’s:

AB: Should there be a wedge of iceburg salad?

JZ: There might or might not be a wedge of an iceburg salad. The key thing is that, as like as with the case as this carrot and celery, it’s something that’s so stark and unappetizing as this that it’s obviously a gesture of hostility toward the vegetable kingdom. The point is that it’s supposed to be bad.

(from No Reservations)

Coppola’s presentation persuaded Bluhdorn to hire him. Immediately, he began re-writing the script with Mario Puzo, and the two Italian-Americans grew to love each other. “Puzo was an absolutely wonderful man,” says Coppola. “To sum him up, when I put a line in the script describing how to make sauce and wrote, ‘First you brown some garlic,’ he scratched that out and wrote, ‘First you fry some garlic. Gangsters don’t brown.’”

The Godfather Wars, vanityfair.com

Academic debate on controversial topics is fine, but those topics need to have a basis in reality. I would not invite a creationist to a debate on campus for the same reason that I would not invite an alchemist, a flat-earther, an astrologer, a psychic, or a Holocaust revisionist. These ideas have no scientific support, and that is why they have all been discarded by credible scholars. Creationism is in the same category.

—Evolutionary biologist Nick Gotelli  turning down an offer to debate someone from the Discovery Institute.

from The Daily Dish

I am now the proud owner of a Snuggie, thanks to the thoughtful consideration of an office mate.