[specimen]

He honks his horn only after he’s parked his car and is walking away.   I can’t recognize her voice from a distance, but I can recognize a TV’s.   Jean-Paul Sartre:   “I do not mean that when I chose between a cream pastry and a chocolate eclair, I am choosing in anguish.”   The announcer’s comment that they were wasting precious seconds was meant as a compliment.   My sense of guilt pushes me towards suicide, but there comes a time when you just have to stop the violence.

[specimen]

He said “to know is to represent accurately what is outside the mind,” but we couldn’t figure out how he realized that.   Hegel was right:   the first time it was on TV, Space Ghost was heroic adventure; the second time, it was farce.   We swept up the dust and dirt, dumped it into a plastic bag, and took it to the landfill.   Still first in everything–now they claim that theirs is the “most insidious and long-lived form of ethnocentrism.”   I had to pick myself up by my shoelaces:   the Nikes cut off the circulation to my feet.   When she said, “I’m very interested and I wish you the best of luck,” I knew she wanted me to leave.

[specimen]

The report concluded most of the people at Pompeii died from second-hand smoke.   Referring to them as “an organic, corpuscular form” did not make the clump of frozen peas any more appetizing.   The eternal infinite—each moment taking on a new shape, no one ever repeating—got old really fast.   “A ‘slum’ in the complex jargon of urban politics.”   Maybe they hadn’t been contacted by aliens, but one look at their textile patterns of row after row of blocky objects shifting down the material indicated the Chancay of ancient Peru had known Space Invaders.

[specimen]

She said she hoped it died a natural death before it froze.   You’re speaking clearly, but the subtitles are white letters against a bleached ground.   Smoke stack?   But I don’t want a car with a gear labeled Death Drive.   “Some archeologists express reservations about introducing notions of consciousness into accounts of past behavior.”   Just when we thought the situation couldn’t get any worse, he got out his guitar.