Weekend games for geeks & nerds: Compose your own dowsing-by-numbers column
Let’s play a game…
Today, I’ll give you four quotes: Three directly lifted from as many different newspapers, and the last one by one of our more sensible celebs.
None of these quotes are related. If you want to play, you could try and think of something funny and/or interesting to say about any one of them – or you could try and link two, three or all of them together into a juicy mess.
Tomorrow, I will try and do the same.
I promise that I will play fare. In other words, I haven’t rigged the game: I truly have no idea, as of yet, what to do with any of these quotes. They just caught my fancy – and whenever I read something that interests me, I copy-paste it into my (seriously overcrowded) ‘COLUMNS.odt’ file.
Anyway, here goes. The first one comes from a Times article; the second is the first paragraph of today’s column by Charlie Brooker in the Guardian; the third is something I found on a ‘hostednews’ site; the fourth is a rather splendid comment made by Brad Pitt:
1) “Hide Saito winces slightly and returns to his glowing console. With the help of The Times, a strange and terrible milestone has been reached: perhaps uniquely in the world, Mr Saito has now heard My Way sung badly a total of 25,000 times. His tears, as always, are wept on the inside. Watching customers indulging the delusion that they can sing like Frank Sinatra, Shirley Bassey or Liam Gallagher, says the owner of Smash Hits, is the price to be paid for running Tokyo’s most famous karaoke bar.”
2) “Skin is rubbish. What is skin anyway? Just a stretchy bag for keeping yourself in. A badly designed bag at that: it gets torn too easily and breaks out in pimples at inopportune moments. The one good thing about skin is that it’s available in different colours – and even that’s a disadvantage, because a) you can’t choose the colour yourself yet b) people judge you by it anyway, as though skin is directly attached to your soul by tiny cables and functions as a handy visual indicator of your overall human worth.”
3) “ BERLIN — Germany’s newly elected coalition got set for government on Saturday after adopting a common programme in a late-night meeting aimed at guiding the country out of its worst recession since World War II. Chancellor Angela Merkel won a second term in elections on September 27, managing also to ditch her previous coalition partners, the centre-left Social Democrats, in favour of the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP).”
4) “You shouldn’t speak until you know what you’re talking about. That’s why I get uncomfortable with interviews. Reporters ask me what I feel China should do about Tibet. Who cares what I think China should do? I’m a fucking actor! They hand me a script. I act. I’m here for entertainment. Basically, when you whittle everything away, I’m a grown man who puts on makeup.”
See you tomorrow!
(Sorry about that…)
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