‘Does surrounding yourself with idiots make you feel superior? How will you break new ground if this is who executes your vision?’
It probably stands to reason that imaginary friends always get the best lines. Last year Christian Slater owned pretty much everybody else on television in Mr Robot, and here, Richie Finestra’s hallucination of dead partner-in-crime Ernst steals the whole series so far. For sure, a character so acerbically hilarious could probably never exist, but it’s palpable just how much fun the writers have had in bringing him to “life”.
QUOTATION OF THE DAY
"He is an unabashed, unapologetic believer that America is the Promised Land."
DOUGLAS D. ANDERSON, a business school dean and friend, on Mitt Romney.
查一下，在書/劇/電影等，採用 Ashes To Ashes為名的，可能不少。下述名著書名的雙關語，漢譯本避開，不知為何取為【煙草的命運】，可能是中國的流行用語。直譯是【從煙灰到骨灰：美國煙戰百年；公共健康與煙商Philip Morris公司的不知恥式勝利】。
Kluger, Richard (1996). Ashes To Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, The Public Health, And The Unabashed Triumph Of Philip Morris. Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 807 pages.ISBN 0-394-57076-6.
Jump up^ "Pulitzer Prize Winners: General Non-Fiction" (web). pulitzer.org. Archived from the original on 9 March 2008. Retrieved 2008-03-12.
Architecture Review
A Ballpark That May Be Louder Than the Fans
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
With the colorful Marlins Park in Miami, baseball breaks from the now-familiar retro style into the 21st century.
When people focus on quality, the rest falls in place. That was the credo of William Edwards Deming, the 20th Century’s guru of organizations. A statistician and expert in product design, Deming found that insistence on quality often incurs higher costs at first, but in the longer run costs are lower and the entire system improves.
A core concept, and my favorite among Deming’s ideas, considers quality in “the matrix of relationships." This principle is key to health care.
- The death of Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court’s longest-serving justice and most acerbic conservative, will have huge political and legal repercussions
acerbic wit of Dr. Deming...
(With a tip of the cap to Stephen M. Young, a Democratic senator from Ohio, from whose acerbic replies to constituent letters that was adapted. Another of his responses went like this: “Some idiot sent me this letter and signed your name to it.”)
acerbic
(ə-sûrb')
adj.
- Sour or bitter tasting; acid. See synonyms at bitter.
- Sharp or biting, as in character or expression: “At times, the playwright allows an acerbic tone to pierce through otherwise arid or flowery prose” (Alvin Klein).
[From Latin acerbus.]acerbically a·cer'bi·cal·ly adv.
in place
1. In the appropriate or usual position or order. For example, With everything in place, she started the slide show. [Mid-1500s] Also see put someone in his or her place.
2. In the same spot, without advancing or retreating, as in While marching in place, the band played six more numbers.
━━ n. 点; 先端, 先; 先のとがったもの［道具］; シカの枝角; （pl.） （犬・馬の）四肢; 【ボクシング】あごの先端; 【バレエ】（pl.） つまさき（立ち）, トウ, ポアント; （時にP-） みさき; 【数】点, 小数点 (4.6＝four point six); 句読点, 終止符; 【音声】母音符号; （寒暖計・羅針盤の）度, 目盛り (the boiling 〜 沸騰点）; 程度; 時, 瞬間; （普通the 〜） 決定的瞬間, 間際; 地点; 【クリケット】三柱門の少し前方の野手［の守備位置］; 項目, 細目; 特徴, 特質; 論点; （普通the 〜） 要点; 事柄; 秘訣 ((on)); （笑話などの）おち; （特殊な）目的, 効果; 暗示; 〔米〕 （学科の）単位; （評価の）点数, 得点; 【印】ポイント ((活字の大きさの単位，約⊆1/72⊇インチ)); 〔英〕 電気のソケット, コンセント; 〔英〕 （pl.） （鉄道の）転轍機; 手編みレース; 【狩】犬が獲物のありかを示す動作.
at all points あらゆる点で, 全く. at the point of …の間際に. at the point of the sword [bayonet] 剣をつきつけて, 武力で. beside the point 見当ちがいで. carry [gain] one's point 主張を貫徹する. come to a point （猟犬が）獲物の在りかを示す. come to the point 要点に触れる. full point 終止符. give points to … / give … points 人にハンディキャップを与える, 人にまさる. have a point （言う事が）もっともである. have one's points （それなりの）いい点がある. in point 適切な. in point of …に関して. in point of fact ＝in FACT. labor the point （分かりきったことなどを）くどくどと述べる［説明する］. make a point 論点を認めさせる; ＝come to a POINT. make a point of …を強調する. make a point of doing 必ず…する; …することを重視［主張］する. make it a point to do ＝make a POINT of doing. make one's point 主張を通す, 立証する. make points with 〔話〕 …の機嫌をとる. not to put too fine a point on it あからさまに言えば. off the point 見当はずれで; 要点からそれた［て］. on the point of doing まさに…しようとして. Point taken. 〔話〕 （誤りを認めて）おっしゃる通りです. prove a [one's] point ＝make one's POINT. score points [a point] off [over] …を（議論などで）やりこめる. stretch [strain] a point 例外扱いする, 大目に見る; 誇張する; こじつける. take …'s point 人の論点を理解する. There is no point in doing …してもまったく意味がない. to the point 適切な［に］, 要点を外さない. when it comes to the point いざとなると. win [lose] on points 【ボクシング】判定勝ち［負け］する.━━ v. とがらせる; 先をつける; 強調する; （指・武器などを）向ける; 面している; 指し示す; 指摘する; （猟犬が獲物のありかを）示す; 傾向がある ((to, toward)); 暗示する; 点を打つ, 句読点をつける ((off)); 継ぎ目にしっくい［セメント］を塗る; 【バレエ】つま先立ちする.
point off 点で区切る. point out 指摘する. point up 強調する.
point chart 【コンピュータ】散布図. point-contact transistor 【電子工】点接触トランジスター. point defect 【結晶】点欠陥. point discharge 【物】尖端放電. point duty 〔英〕 （交通警官などの）立番勤務.
Novelist Janice Y.K. Lee ("The Piano Teacher") selects her favorite works of fiction that memorably evoke the British colonial era in Hong Kong, India and other points east.
Little, Brown, 2003
Conflicted, painfully snobbish Sam Obeysekere would rather be "under an imperialistic yoke than put [his] trust in a fellow who went about in sandals." Sam, an Oxford-educated Ceylonese lawyer, lives in colonial duality: a privileged member of the local aristocracy in 1930s Sri Lanka who plays cricket and attended a school "founded in 1862 by an Anglican bishop on the pattern of Eton and Rugby" and yet can be called a "nigger" on the streets outside his club. He makes a name for himself with a local murder case involving a British (read: white) tea-plantation owner. All this against a complicated, almost gothic backdrop of family dysfunction: not one but two smothered babies, glamorous mothers and sisters slowly going mad in evening gowns, the deep jungle always just outside. "The Hamilton Case" is an extraordinary, dizzyingly evocative portrait of Sri Lanka's colonial past, where "the British had entered the country's bloodstream like a malady which proves so resistant that the host organism adapts itself to accommodate it."
Doubleday, Doran, 1944
The people in Emily Hahn's frank and unapologetic memoir, "China to Me," seem like characters in a Noël Coward play, making an entrance, uttering their bon mots, then sweeping off stage. The palmy world of 1940s prewar Shanghai and British-governed Hong Kong is rendered in swish dinner parties and horse races attended by dashing expatriates knocking back champagne. Hahn, an American writer who cared not a whit for public opinion, kept gibbons for pets and had a baby out of wedlock with a married British intelligence officer. ("I don't know why I have always had so little conscience about married men," she writes languidly.) Cut to the war and the horror; she describes it all with appro priate solemnity but never loses the tone of a supremely acerbic society gadabout confiding in you at a cocktail party.
Harcourt Brace, 1960
For a refreshing, refracted perspective on colonial India—that of a U.S. State Department officer in the days "when the weird old body of the British Raj was at last thrashing like some foundering dinosaur towards extinction"— read Robert Towers's "The Necklace of Kali." Consulate Visa Officer John Wickham is part of what is called the "Jungly Wallah" set: "a shifting population of rich Indians, Persians, Armenians, poor but ingenious White Russians . . . and assorted American and Britons," who take their name from the club they all frequent. Wickham is a complicated, principled man, whose dealings with people from all strata of society mirror the uneasiness of a country on the cusp of a bloody independence.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008
Amitay Ghosh uses a vast and vibrant canvas for "Sea of Poppies," the first in a trilogy that is still being written. Set in the years before the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century, when Britain was making a fortune from poppy crops in India, the story opens in the port city of Calcutta and brings together characters that include a low-caste giant who runs away with a widow; a mulatto sailor with "skin the color of old ivory"; and Paulette, a French orphan. These people will meet as they gradually make their way to the Ibis, a triple-masted schooner that is being prepped to take indentured workers to Mauritius, off the African coast. Ghosh revels in the joy of language—"as chuckmuck a rascal as ever you'll see: eyes as bright as muggerbees, smile like a xeraphim"—but he is also a splendid storyteller. In the last pages, the Ibis is being tossed by a mighty storm, the characters growing desperate. I was desperate, too, for the next book.
Little, Brown, 1952
"You can't be both east and west at the same time," says British foreign correspondent Mark Elliott to the beautiful Eurasian doctor Han Suyin. But of course she can, in roiling, postwar colonial Hong Kong, where people "circulate among the bridge and mahjong tables." In Han's semiautobiographical novel "A Many-Splendored Thing," the widowed doctor embarks on a doomed, short-lived affair with the dashing—and married—journalist. The starry-eyed quality of their infatuation leads to occasional sentimentality: "Mark and I had many friends, and one of them was the moon." But the book is an invaluable—and startlingly modern—record of a certain time and place, thanks to Han's razor-sharp eye for the hypocrisies of the colonial order, as when a society matron remarks that "Hong Kong would be a wonderful place if there were not so many Chinese."
—Ms. Lee's novel, "The Piano Teacher," was recently published in paperback.
apologetic
[形]1 〈人・態度などが〉（…に対して）謝罪する, わびの, 弁明する, 弁解じみた((for ...))；自己弁護の an apologetic letterわび状 She was not ...
apologetically
[副]わびるように, すまなそうに.
1. The Hamilton Case
By Michelle de KretserLittle, Brown, 2003
Conflicted, painfully snobbish Sam Obeysekere would rather be "under an imperialistic yoke than put [his] trust in a fellow who went about in sandals." Sam, an Oxford-educated Ceylonese lawyer, lives in colonial duality: a privileged member of the local aristocracy in 1930s Sri Lanka who plays cricket and attended a school "founded in 1862 by an Anglican bishop on the pattern of Eton and Rugby" and yet can be called a "nigger" on the streets outside his club. He makes a name for himself with a local murder case involving a British (read: white) tea-plantation owner. All this against a complicated, almost gothic backdrop of family dysfunction: not one but two smothered babies, glamorous mothers and sisters slowly going mad in evening gowns, the deep jungle always just outside. "The Hamilton Case" is an extraordinary, dizzyingly evocative portrait of Sri Lanka's colonial past, where "the British had entered the country's bloodstream like a malady which proves so resistant that the host organism adapts itself to accommodate it."
2. China to Me
By Emily HahnDoubleday, Doran, 1944
The people in Emily Hahn's frank and unapologetic memoir, "China to Me," seem like characters in a Noël Coward play, making an entrance, uttering their bon mots, then sweeping off stage. The palmy world of 1940s prewar Shanghai and British-governed Hong Kong is rendered in swish dinner parties and horse races attended by dashing expatriates knocking back champagne. Hahn, an American writer who cared not a whit for public opinion, kept gibbons for pets and had a baby out of wedlock with a married British intelligence officer. ("I don't know why I have always had so little conscience about married men," she writes languidly.) Cut to the war and the horror; she describes it all with appro priate solemnity but never loses the tone of a supremely acerbic society gadabout confiding in you at a cocktail party.
3. The Necklace of Kali
By Robert TowersHarcourt Brace, 1960
For a refreshing, refracted perspective on colonial India—that of a U.S. State Department officer in the days "when the weird old body of the British Raj was at last thrashing like some foundering dinosaur towards extinction"— read Robert Towers's "The Necklace of Kali." Consulate Visa Officer John Wickham is part of what is called the "Jungly Wallah" set: "a shifting population of rich Indians, Persians, Armenians, poor but ingenious White Russians . . . and assorted American and Britons," who take their name from the club they all frequent. Wickham is a complicated, principled man, whose dealings with people from all strata of society mirror the uneasiness of a country on the cusp of a bloody independence.
4. Sea of Poppies
By Amitay GhoshFarrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008
Amitay Ghosh uses a vast and vibrant canvas for "Sea of Poppies," the first in a trilogy that is still being written. Set in the years before the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century, when Britain was making a fortune from poppy crops in India, the story opens in the port city of Calcutta and brings together characters that include a low-caste giant who runs away with a widow; a mulatto sailor with "skin the color of old ivory"; and Paulette, a French orphan. These people will meet as they gradually make their way to the Ibis, a triple-masted schooner that is being prepped to take indentured workers to Mauritius, off the African coast. Ghosh revels in the joy of language—"as chuckmuck a rascal as ever you'll see: eyes as bright as muggerbees, smile like a xeraphim"—but he is also a splendid storyteller. In the last pages, the Ibis is being tossed by a mighty storm, the characters growing desperate. I was desperate, too, for the next book.
5. A Many-Splendored Thing
By Han Suyin 韓素英 (洋人)Little, Brown, 1952
"You can't be both east and west at the same time," says British foreign correspondent Mark Elliott to the beautiful Eurasian doctor Han Suyin. But of course she can, in roiling, postwar colonial Hong Kong, where people "circulate among the bridge and mahjong tables." In Han's semiautobiographical novel "A Many-Splendored Thing," the widowed doctor embarks on a doomed, short-lived affair with the dashing—and married—journalist. The starry-eyed quality of their infatuation leads to occasional sentimentality: "Mark and I had many friends, and one of them was the moon." But the book is an invaluable—and startlingly modern—record of a certain time and place, thanks to Han's razor-sharp eye for the hypocrisies of the colonial order, as when a society matron remarks that "Hong Kong would be a wonderful place if there were not so many Chinese."
—Ms. Lee's novel, "The Piano Teacher," was recently published in paperback.
ballpark
アクセント・音節báll・pàrk
【名詞】【可算名詞】
《主に米国で用いられる》 (野)球場.
unabashed
ʌnəˈbaʃt/
adjective
- not embarrassed, disconcerted, or ashamed."he was unabashed by the furore his words provoked"
unapologetic
出典:『Wiktionary』 (2011/06/16 19:26 UTC 版)
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