Memos from the Brooklyn HQ, Tuesday, December 20

Dear Transit Workers Local 100: You suck.
Expanded version: It's always great PR when your striking workers reply to a reporter who asks, "Do you believe in what you're striking for?" with a resounding "No comment."

Dear MTA management: You suck.
Expanded version: Who are your accountants, the former Enron treasury department? The whole "deficit - surplus - deficit" game is getting a little old.

Dear Governor Pataki: 90% of life is showing up.

Snippet: On the English novel

Michael Kinsley, in Slate:

Today Britain doesn't matter much. But who the new vicar will be in some fictional village 200 years ago still matters a lot. It is history's consolation prize. Nineteenth-century English village life will always loom large in the world's imagination, like Greenland in a Mercator projection map.

Train wreck of a sentence

I don't think the AP meant this last phrase literally:

Richard Pryor startled audiences with his foul-mouthed routines, but his universal and frequently personal insights propelled him into one of Hollywood's biggest stars.

Excellent headline

In Slate, re the Narnia controversy: "Whose Lion Is It Anyway?" (That's the front page teaser for this article, actually.)

"Adam Smith rewritten as Letters to Penthouse"

Go ye forth and read Daniel Davies on Freakonomics. The book bothered me, as I kept on feeling as though "the real falsifiable claims here are all embedded in some econometrics models, which you all aren't telling me about." The inimitable D-Squared has much more to say on the topic.