Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well
  Pellegrino Artusi
   scans found in the Trufflewig Information Archive Mach I

   Blind is the man who cannot see this!  The days of seductive, flattering ideals, the days of the hermits, are coming to an end.  With greater eagerness than it ought to, the world is rushing to the wellsprings of pleasure, and those who know how to temper this dangerous inclination with healthy morals shall take the palm.

   Cooking is a troublesome sprite.  Often it may drive you to despair.  Yet it is also very rewarding, for when you do succeed, or overcome a difficulty in doing so, you feel the satisfaction of a great triumph.


At Random, the memoirs of Bennett Cerf
   Eugene O'Neill was the most beautiful man I ever met, and when I say beautifulm, I mean in the sense that to look at him was soul-satifying.  He looked just the way a great playwright ought to but practically never does--brooding, piercing eyes, a wonderful smile and a superb figure.


Transmission, by Hari Kunzru

   Sunny Srinivasan opened his mouth, unhooding a smile like a dentally powered searchlight.

    "Are you hundred-percent sure you don't need some hot pictures?  Loneliness is a terrible burden."
    "No, Aamir.  They have real girls there, remember?"

    "Can we go now, Ma?" he pleaded.
    "Beta, the plane will not fly off without you."
    "Ma, actually it will."
    "Don't be so silly."

    Every weekday morning Arjun woke up in the midst of his chaos and grinned at the evergreen tree framed in his window.  The tree presumably had a name (was it a fir, or a pine?), though he did not know it.  It looked like one of the trees that you could make appear with a mouse-click and a little noise when playing SimCity.  In fact, if he was honest, most of the Puget Sound area looked like that; perfect, glossily pleasing, somehow /placed/.  Then he put on the cleanest of his T-shirts and took the bus downtown, past the sim marina and the sim park and the mall full of sims shopping at the drugstore and drinking tea at the British Pantry.  Redmond was a town with nice graphics and an intuitive user interface.  His kind of town.

    People did their thing and other people left them to get on with it.  No one took much notice of Shiro's habit of flapping his arms violently every few minutes or Donny's refusal to allow purple objects into his field of vision.

    The MS perimeter enclosed almost three hundred acres of terrain, landscaped around discreet buildings that for some inexplicable Gatesian reason were all named after famous golf courses.

    "Dude, lighten up.  I just pulled it [an Asperger's quiz] off some Web site.  Anyway, what are you so worried about?  Who's to say what's normal and what's not?  You're happy, no?"
    "Yes."
    "Well," she said with an air of finality.  "Then shut the fuck up."

    "Sweetie, I thought we might tryout Thailand this summer."
    "Try it out?  Why?  Do you want to buy it?"

   Since Chris's contact lenses were glued to her eyes the world appeared mercifully hazy, but even with the visuals turned down she knew it was bad.

A description of a man's face.  'its pleasant yet somehow underused features'

    "You did this yesterday, too, this walking in.  Do you--I don't know--have a problem with boundries?  Do you maybe have a condition?  This is a syndrome, right?  Compulsive boundry transgression syndrome."

"...any attempt to compromise or mitigate our ability to function effectively in terms of our critical infrastructure, whether that be in the realm of telecommunications, energy, banking and finance, water facilitation, government operational activity thresholds or the smoothand unhampered running of our essential emergency services must be viewed as taking place within a framework strongly suggestive of deliberate negativization, threat or hostile intent.  We are in the process of investigating and assessing teh current situation, and will move with will move with the utmost alacrity and vigor to institute proportionate, reasonable and devestating countermeasures appropriate to the ultimate outcome of that threat assessment."

   Yves started to make small talk about a production of Aida that he and the director had both attended in Verona.  In deference to Guy he spoke English, constructing elaborate sentences that the director matched, clause for clause, the two of them performing a kind of second-language fencing match.

    "What is your name?"
    He told her his name.  She asked his real name.  He told her his name again, and then told her to fuck off.
    "You speak very good English," she said.  "What is your first language?"
    "/English/, you idiotic tart."
    Banging the table was a bad idea.  She must haved pressed some kind of panic button because two policemen ran into the room, threw him to the floor and sat on his back, cracking his head against the concrete a couple of times to make sure he got the point.



   Guy likes to talk about the earth.  It is, he claims, the source of life.  "Before," he recalls, "I lived under a great deal of geopathic stress."  He subscribes to the theory that London (and to a lesser extent other cities) causes an immense distortion of the earth's natural energy field, a distortion that inflicts physical and psychological suffering on the people forced to live inside it.