Quotes from J. Maarten Troost

Bwenawa brought my attention to two wooden planks raised about four feet above the ground. On the ledges were lagoon fish sliced open and lying in the sun, the carcasses just visible through an enveloping blizzard of flies. "You see, " said Bwenawa. "The water dries in the sun, leaving the salt. It's kang-kang [tasty]. We call it salt fish." "Ah," I said. "In my country we call it rotten fish.

It is often said that Americans have no sense of history. Ask a college student who Jimmy Carter was and they will likely reply that he was a general in the Civil War, which occurred in 1492, when Americans dumped tea into the Gulf of Tonkin, sparking the First World War, which ended with the invasion of Grenada and the development of the cotton press.

It was, to reiterate, to stress, to accentuate the point, to leave no doubt, hot.

It is an unfortunate reality for innate idlers that our modern world requires one to hold a job to maintain a sustainable existence. Idling, I find, if immensely underrated, even vilified by some who see inactivity as the gateway for the Evil One.

for what is life, a good life, but the accumulation of small pleasures?

Don't get me wrong. Sacramento is a lovely place, particularly for those with a fondness for methamphetamines. For the meth-addled, Sacramento had conveniently placed a Greyhound bus station just yards from the statehouse where Austria's finest was sworn in as governor of the great state of California.

I had grown accustomed to life being interesting and adventure ridden and, rather childishly, I refused to believe that this must necessarily come to an end and that the rest of my life should be a sort of penance for all the reckless, irresponsible, and immensely fun things I'd done before.

Nevertheless, while I may not have completely understood what Holy Communion was all about, Catholicism did allow me to see the nuances in cannibalism. Eating the flesh of another human being, I understood, might not always be a really, really bad thing to do. If you were a good Catholic, you had some every Sunday.

I had, of course, witnessed hundreds of people in a casino before, mindlessly dropping coins into slot machines. They don't play for money in America. It's true. The big payout is incidental to most gamblers. It's the numbness they're after. Not so in China. No one had that look of glazed stupor often found in American casinos.

i'm off to an island nation where formal wear consists of a leaf tired around a penis.

The I-Kiribati are a remarkably musical people. Everyone sings. There is something arresting about seeing a tough-looking teenage boy suddenly put a flower behind his ear and begin to croon.

Stevenson, though, Was soon enough reduced to the timeless lamentations of the I-Matang on an atoll: "I think I could shed tears over a dish of turnips," he wrote in a letter. And elsewhere: "I had learned to welcome shark's fresh for a variety; and a mountain, an onion, an Irish potato or beefsteak, had long had been long lost to sense and dear to aspiration.

But, as I delved into Chinese for Dummies, I couldn't help but conclude that the Chinese language is the Great Wall of languages, a clever linguistic barrier erected to keep outsiders out. What, frankly, is wrong with Esperanto? Or alphabets? What is so deficient about an alphabet that uses a judicious twenty-six letters? We can make lots of words with those twenty-six letters, big words even.

Christopher Hitchens once said that he drinks "because it makes other people less boring.

When it comes to naming things, vanity and flattery are dull motivations best suited for deciding on a child's middle name. Much more interesting are the descriptive names that suggest a story or happening of interest.

There will be no fucking sunsets in the pages that follow.

the thunder and bombast of what passes for news programming today--Motto: All terror, all the time

the television news paused for a commercial--Coming up next: Are we all going to die Tomorrow?