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It’s never 5 o’clock when you need it to be. Time passes slowly when you want it to pass quickly. Therefore, in theory, if you could somehow stop wanting time to pass quickly…it finally would.

Neil Gaiman writes:

Yesterday I got a juicer. I dropped apples and celery and carrots and such into the top and watched everything that went in at the top turn into juice and pulp. Vegetables you could drink. “This is fun,” I thought.

I woke up from dreams this morning, in which my interest in juicing had led me to experiment with other things you could juice, and in which I had begun to juice books and photographs. I was mildly surprised to find that you could extract the essential essence from any book or picture in the form of a juice, removing the pulp. “Why has no-one else thought of this?” I wondered, as I turned several thick novels I’ve not had time to read into half a cup of pleasant-tasting liquid I could drink in moments. “I’ll probably get a medal for discovering this.”

And I woke up, half-disappointed, half-amused.

Just make sure not to mix Hunter S. Thompson with The Grapes of Wrath.

Over at Lemurama, Jon writes:

Kevin Spacey’s character in American Beauty probably had the best possible ending that he could have had. Where else could he have gone from there? As it stands, the movie ended with him basically happy, right?

To which I let Margaret Atwood respond:

You’ll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it. Don’t be deluded by any other endings, they’re all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality.

The only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die.

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with.

And I’ll let Italo Calvino follow up:

The seventh reader interrupts you: “Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”

Maybe I’m a glutton for punishement. I secretly want people to come here looking for things like “area 51 hooters” (there, I said it again). I look over my referrer logs almost religiously, which is sad, really, since they’re usually very uninteresting and most of my visitors are here by mistake. Occasionally, though, something odd or interesting pops up, and I post most of that at Disturbing Search Requests. Here are some of the stranger search queries that will lead you to my door:

vagina shapes pictures

What’re they, balloon animals? “Mommy! Mommy! I want a vagina shaped like a giraffe!”

www.sexy fish gallery.com

Register now, ladies and gentlemen, while sexyfishgallery.com is still available! Tap into that burgeoning new market for underwater sea creature porn! Ooh, baby…your dorsal fin is so dreamy… Now, I know my weblog is called occasional fish, but that’s just a Neil Gaiman quote, folks, not an invite for people turned on by salmon, perch, or flounder. Oooh…flounder…

world wrestling federation’s funniest jokes

So the Rock walks into a bar… I can’t believe I’m first on Google’s list. Don’t people know you have to put quotation marks around something if you want to find it as a phrase? And why would anyone want to find a phrase like this anyway?

steve guttenburg photos

It’s almost funny. One disturbing search request begets another. What I find most disturbing is that I know my website won’t come up first in a search engine. On Google, I was at the bottom of the third page. So somebody–and I can only hope it’s his agent–is desperately scouring the web for Steve Guttenburg photographs. Of which I, alas, have none.

pregnant political moment

I suppose it’s less disturbing than most (certainly less so than “politically pregnant moment” or “momentous political pregnancy” or “hot naked pics of Strom Thurmond”), but it’s still a strange request. Even more strange is that Google ranked my weblog number one in this search, when all I was doing was quoting The Nation.

website of funny american photographs drunken naked young public

Words fail me. They seem to have failed for this person, too.