Dangerous curves are marked, at least in Christian lands, by white wooden crosses positioned to make the curves even more dangerous. These crosses are memorials to people who’ve died in traffic accidents, and they give a rough statistical indication of how much trouble you’re likely to have at that spot in the road. Thus, when […]
P.J. O'Rourke Quotes
Automobiles are free of egotism, passion, prejudice and stupid ideas about where to have dinner. They are, literally, selfless. A world designed for automobiles instead of people would have wider streets, larger dining rooms, fewer stairs to climb and no smelly, dangerous subway stations.
We’re told cars are dangerous. It’s safer to drive through South Central Los Angelse than to walk there. We’re told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We’re told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it’s hard to reach the […]
At least we American tourists understand English when it’s spoken loudly and clearly enough. Australians don’t. Once you’ve been on a plane full of drunken Australians doing wallaby imitations up and down the aisles, you’ll never make fun of Americans visiting the Wailing Wall in short shorts again.
We are surrounded by the decomposing remains of things that, just a few years ago, seemed so modern. “Modern”, for example – the word is now mainly used on tags at yard sales to increase the price of ugly lamps. Modern lamps were the product of Modern Design, which was the product of Modern Art, […]
The first American soldiers showed up (at the U. S. embassy in Kuwait City) and everyone had to kiss them and shove babies into their arms and get the soldiers to autograph Kuwaiti flags… And across one intersection downtown a thirty-foot banner had been strung, reading – in answer to the U. S. and European […]
Listening to the Walkman is about the only fun American troops are having in a place where there’s no booze and most of the women either are covered with the front hall rug or they outrank you. By now every American soldier has listened to every cassette and CD in Saudi Arabia at least twice.
I stopped in one of the oasis towns to get gas and some more Coke cans to throw out the window. There was a Bedouin kid about fourteen years old at the little store there. Most Saudis are – whether they take their socks off during ablution or not – fastidiously clean, and they are […]
Personally, I’m coming back to the United States as a big supporter of atomic power. It’s worth the risk just to make sure that this part of the world never has any political, strategic or economic significance again. That done, we can use the Middle East for the purpose to which it is so ideally […]
On Thursday afternoon, February 28th, about six hours after the U.S. declared a cease-fire, the victorious armies began to roll into Kuwait City. The Arab contingents were firing their guns in the air and the Kuwaiti Resistance fighters responded by firing their guns in the air and then the other Kuwaitis picked up all the […]
