CursesFoiledfrom Michael Christian Gaudet, since 2007.

“When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.”

— Flannery O’Connor

“A beautiful aircraft is the expression of the genius of a great engineer who is also a great artist. It is impossible for that man to carry out the whole of the design himself; he works through a design office staffed by a hundred draughtsmen or more. A hundred minds, each with their own less competent ideas, are striving to modify the chief engineer’s original conception. If the design is to appear in the end as a great artistic unity, the chief engineer must be a man of immensely powerful will, capable of imposing his idea and his way of doing things on each of his hundred draughtsmen, so that each one of them is too terrified to insert any of his own ideas. If the chief designer has not got this personality and strength of will, his original conception will be distorted in the design office and appear as just another not-so-good airplane. He will then not be ranked as a good chief designer.

All really first-class chief designers, for this reason, are both artists, engineers, and men of a powerful and an intolerant temper, quick to resist the least modification of their plans, and energetic in fighting the least infringement upon what they regard as their own sphere of action. If they were not so, they could not produce good aeroplanes.”

— From “No Highway,” 1948, by Nevil Shute.

“How can you make a fool perceive that he is a fool? Such a personage can no more see his own folly than he can see his own ears.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

“If you are one who hates, abhors, and loathes the turnip, this savory casserole should so fill you with rapture that you will cherish this lowley vegetable forevermore.”

— Julia Child, “Navets a la champenoise” (sic) recipe, 1963

Ira Glass, host of This American Life, was interviewed in this week’s Time Out NYC magazine. Ira cites two prime examples of how New Yorkers can be ridiculously egocentric:

You moved This American Life to New York from Chicago two years ago. Which city has better pizza?

No good can come to me from answering this question. There’s just no way to get out of it without making someone mad. The people in Chicago feel like, “Yes, you’ve had some baseball teams that have won the World Series on a more regular basis—we can’t deny that. But in this area, we’re No. 1.” New Yorkers feel like they invented pizza. Like, actually, it didn’t come from Italy; it came from some Original Ray’s shop whose actual original location will never be known.

At the live event, you’re letting the audience ask unscreened questions. Aren’t you worried that some of them will be duds?

Yes. Maybe this is a bad thing to say, but New Yorkers are the worst audience for asking questions at live events. Unlike other cities, for some reason people here will just give little speeches about their take on something.

“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”

— H. G. Wells