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slate's 10th anniversary: June 1996 - June 2006.

Goldberg and Orlean

slate's 10th anniversary
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from: Susan Orlean

An Upper West Side Hot-Pants-Wearing Democrat

Posted Wednesday, Jan. 27, 1999, at 12:09 PM ET

Slate turns 10 this week, and we're publishing The Best of Slate: A 10th Anniversary Anthology. In celebration of the book and the anniversary, we're publishing (or, rather, re-publishing) a selection of pieces from the anthology, including this article. This article was originally published Jan. 25, 1999. You can see a list of all the republished pieces, as well as everything else we are publishing in honor of the anniversary, here.

Dear ol' dirty bastard,

Shouldn't that be "dirty ol' bastard"? I think "dirty" should modify "ol' bastard" rather than ol' modifying "dirty bastard". Or is that art?

I began my day with no fiber, no coffee, nothing but a delicious plateful of extra-strength Excedrin. My ol' dirty head hurts. This might be because I dreamt that I talked my brother and his wife into going to Venezuela on vacation and they absolutely hated it, and I got into a fight with my mother (in my dream) and then we all went swimming to try to make the best of a bad situation and discovered that in Venezuela there is a species of aquatic dog that lives in the rivers and ponds and bites you if you swim nearby. Anyway, it was a lousy vacation and a pretty lousy dream, for that matter. Don't you hate it when people bore you with a retelling of their dreams, which are always fantastically uninteresting, even if you knew what the hell they were talking about? I lived with a roommate a few million years ago who used to do that and finally I had to .... kill her.

You and I are on some kind of crazy mind meld, buster. I woke up listening to my neighbor's radio playing NPR again and heard a report about a terrible earthquake in Armenia and thought, "Unbelievable! Another terrible earthquake! Maybe the world is about to blow up!" Okay, the obvious question here is, why am I always listening to my neighbor's radio? Because a) this saves me some long green on my electric bill and b) my bedroom and my neighbor's bedroom share a common wall and she plays her radio at top volume which puts me in a weird position, namely, if she were playing offspring (your favorite band, apparently) at top volume I could bring myself to complain, but since it's only Bob Edwards and Morning Edition I feel estopped from complaining, being after all an Upper West Side hot-pants-wearing registered Democrat and modest contributor (financially speaking) to National Public Radio. Except I feel entitled to scream when that stupid cloyingly folksy large animal veterinarian does his stupid cloyingly folksy large animal commentaries. Frankly, I'd prefer out-takes from the first offspring mini-disc.

The other mind meld: I also remarked to myself (this was before I got behind those tabs of extra-strength Excedrin) that it was uncanny that the three witnesses being requested in the peachy impeachment goings-on were Two Jews and a Person of Color (did you ever see that movie? The original was better than the remake, by the way). Not to mention that eerie emphasis on "looking them in the eyes" which is what large animal veterinarians do, I think, to cattle they suspect of having mad cow disease. I would respect Henry Hyde more if he had called for the senators to walk a mile in their moccasins.

Are you into football? Have you come up with $20,000 yet for your Stupidbowl ticket? I covered the Superbowl a few years ago, and the "reporter" next to me in the "press" section did not have a pen, a pencil, a piece of paper, or the general all-over body vibe of a "press" person. Plus he got up every ten minutes or so and made phone calls. Plus when I asked him which paper he worked for he couldn't remember, but he offered me awesome odds on the Kentucky derby. Please discuss.

Time for my next dose.

Dirty, ol', but still in love with you,

S

slate's 10th anniversary
entries
1234567891011121314151617181920
from: Susan Orlean

An Upper West Side Hot-Pants-Wearing Democrat

Posted Wednesday, Jan. 27, 1999, at 12:09 PM ET
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Jeffrey Goldberg is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and Slate. Susan Orlean is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Orchid Thief, which was published this month.
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