Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Best Sentence I've Read on the Internet Tonight...

...is this, plucked out of a post at The Belmont Club:

But in Washington DC nothing has a life apart from the official partisan view. Not even the sun shines. Instead it is assigned a shadow existence, fitted into a narrative, and tortured into a Procrustean bed of arbitrary political specification.

Wow. Follow the link and read the context from whence I uncovered that gem...

And if you are trying to B.S. yourself, stroking your soul patch and saying, "Ah, yes, Procrustean...how droll", I'll save you the embarrassment and just print the following:

In Greek mythology, Procrustes...was a bandit from Attica. He had his stronghold in the hills outside Eleusis. There, he had an iron bed into which he invited every passerby to lie down. If the guest proved too tall, he would amputate the excess length; if the victim was found too short, he was then stretched out on the rack until he fit. Nobody would ever fit in the bed because it was secretly adjustable: Procrustes would stretch or shrink it upon sizing his victims from afar.

Man, why can't I ever produce such an arcane, yet apropos, reference?

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