3 Previously Unknown Facts, One Regarding Alec Baldwin

The book I am reading now, The World Without Us, is just mind-boggling. I would recommend its purchase. Do it! Do it now!

One of the interesting facts I have learned from this book is that something exists called the Pacific Garbage Patch, which is roughly the size of Texas. It's a gyre of human refuse and flotsam, spinning in a less-traveled area of the Pacific. Most of it is plastic, which has a half life of about 66 billion years. Don't it make you wonder how much plastic we are ingesting through the food chain, and what it might be doing to us? I estimate that I am .66 percent plastic already, and by the time I reach 5% my face will have frozen a la Nicole Kidman.

And also according to the book there are these crazy Caves in Turkey that are riddled with homes and secret underground caverns and even a hotel! I didn't know about these caves. Apparently they will last quite a while after Manhattan crumbles and topples and is overrun with weeds and flowers. Who knew? Have I been living under a ROCK?

But best of all was this quote I discovered today, courtesy of Alec Baldwin. (This was not in the book, but A World Without Us certainly includes no member of the Baldwin family.) Of his wife's divorce lawyer, he stated: "She's this 300-pound homunculus whose face looks like a cross between a bulldog and a clenched fist." How infinitely perfect and delightful is that quote? He can get as drunk and surly as he likes. Those words are worth 1,000 pictures of the awful creature. I wish I had said it. I'm a-gonna save it up and say it someone someday. I have a certain peevish coworker in mind, who may not have the requisite 300 pounds but of whom could be said "I've seen better legs on a piano." She is often sighted with a surly grimace, lumping around on those great, stodgy legs and dreaming of power-mad schemes to drive us all crazy. Her face? Perhaps an omelet with eyes and teeth, gone awry when it got tipped from the pan. With a wig slapped on it.

Grrrraaak! I challenge Alec Baldwin to an invective-off, during which I will threaten to wallpaper my latrine with my enemy's pelts.