What is said on the CTA

On a personal note:

It went like this, two guys were on a city bus. One turned to the other:
Guy 1: You know what the difference is between Chicago and New York?
Guy 2: No, what?
Guy 1: In New York, on the train, people will be reading like The New York Times, The New York Daily News, The Economist, The New Yorker, et cetera. In Chicago, there's none of that. People are always reading self-help books on the train. I mean, I won't even have to see the title, I'll just see some of the text and it'll be like "And if you take your anger, and really question, the root of that anger, your life will not only grow in joy, but also lessen in sorrow." It's ridiculous. That's why Chicagoans aren't as aware of the world as New Yorkers, and why Chicago media is such crap.
Guy 2, who's smiling, pauses: You're one of those crazy people on the buses ranting about something totally irrelevant.
Guy 1: What? No! This is important.
Guy 2 starts laughing and hugs his stomach with mirth.
Not far away, a girl on the phone says to whoever's on the other end "...Hey, so I'm on the bus, yeah, ha ha, funny. There are these two hilarious guys on the bus. They're so funny. One of them started talking about reading on the train in New York and, well I'll have to tell you later. I think they miss New York or something.

That was me and my friend Ben.

Life On Mars

Of interest to the editor:

Because this has been one of the worst weeks in quite a while (reminiscent of the end of my junior year of high school) I cannot forge an original entry. Instead I have this. Bill Keller is the editor of The New York Times. Here he is answering a letter that came his way.

Colorful Leads

Q. The colorful lead is the bane (or at least one of the banes) of my time spent with The Times. So often, I have tried quickly to get the gist of a story (this happens in the Sports section more often than in the news sections) only to find that I must read something like "it was a dark and dreary night" before finding the point, or the score, or even a notion of what the article is about.

Whatever happened to the inviolate rule that a lead was 35 words or fewer, telling us where, why, what or who?

-- Peter C. Boulay, Bronx, N.Y.

A. As the sun blazed above the snow-lacquered peaks of the Hindu Kush, the weary editor flipped down his clip-on sunglasses and booted up his laptop.

It had been a long week, a soul-sapping, disorienting and yet strangely satisfying week.

Past the simple campsite where he awaited his digital connection to the modern world flowed all the human mystery of the East: the women shrouded in burqas of azure, or possibly cerulean, he was not too good on blues; the camel-borne warlords draped with belts of bullets; the shoeless boys in filthy "I Heart New York" T-shirts; and all the rest, all separated by semicolons and swaddled in colorful cliches.

The computer flickered to life. The keys clicked like castanets until up came a complaint from the northern part of a far-off metropolis at the eastern end of a troubled superpower. The editor read. He frowned. Then he squinted down at the keyboard and typed:

"Amen, Mr. Boulay. Amen."

There's something about Keller's jovial approach to a rather confrontational letter that you see so rarely today.

Daniel