Here’s a couple of items I read this week that I highly recommend:
“Do you know how many snowflakes fall in a single blizzard? And do you know how many blizzards there have been? If the same snowflake hasn’t fallen twice on Buffalo, let alone on the entire planet, in the whole of its meteorological history, I’ll eat one of each of Asia’s three species of wild ass.”
This is from Son of Bold Venture, a blog on writing by Chris Jones, a writer for Esquire magazine. This post lists 20 things you should avoid having in your writing. I break numbers 1, 5, 7 and 17.
“Four losses turn into eight. He avoids Player like the plague. He is betting five thou a pop now. He is not winning. He is walking more and cursing louder and slamming the table. As if to make certain these hexed cards will not be used again, he bends them, tosses them, launches them like Frisbees. The casino is only too happy to pass him more cards for mutilation.”
This was written in 1993 for Philadelphia Magazine by Bruce Buschel, who now primarly writes a restauranteur blog for the New York Times. It was recently posted in full on Deadspin due to the focus of the piece, former big leaguer Lenny Dykstra, who has hit some serious trouble with his finances. There’s something really great about the way it flows between Dykstra’s on-field playing style to his playing style in a Atlantic City casino burning through $40,000 at a baccarat table. Since some of my friends aren’t keen on sailor-style language, you’re warned it has a lot of f-bombs.