"Small but stubborn"

I think I should adopt "small but stubborn" as my personal motto, to be emblazoned on the home page of the blog, my business cards, and eventually the coat of arms of my Game of Thrones-style noble house. It works, donchathink?

The world is too much with us.

Zimmerman. Snowden. Dhaka. Taksim Square. Tahrir Square. Lac-Megantic. Oklahoma tornadoes. West, Texas. Syria. This is starting to feel like one of those novelistically awful long-hot-summers.... as if it's building up toward a blackout-riot on a global scale, or to the revelation that the neighbor's demon-possessed dog has been orchestrating the whole thing, or to a wrath-of-god thunderstorm in which Batman returns after ten years of retirement. This seems like an appropriate summer for Superman to start snapping people's necks.

In the novel that's set in this summer, Jenny McCarthy, Anthony Weiner Colin McGinn, and Elliot Spitzer will provide the dark comic relief--bad, and in some sense too bad to be funny, but not immediately* fatal, and so implausibly ridiculous that they let you laugh for a few pages in between the long stretches of tension.

*Yes, giving Jenny McCarthy a platform for her views will lead to more deaths. I said "immediately."