The Lexicographer's Rules

"We would get back from a five-hour bus trip at four in the morning and have to pitch a tent. In the rain. Sometimes it was fun. And sometimes it was a nightmare. At the end of the year, we said, 'At least it can't get any lower than this. This is truly the bottom of the barrel.'"

—ESPN. Jim Caple chronicles his travels with the home-stadium-less minor-league baseball team the Lehigh Valley Black Diamonds. Players such as Steve Reed recount the missing chairs, the days-off at the laundromat and the all-you-can-eat buffets that are the norm in the minors. "As the Black Diamonds dressed before their game with the Newark Bears, stadium workers swept through their clubhouse and removed all the chairs, saying they were needed for a party elsewhere. This left the 25 players with just a dozen small stools... 'You can't count these two,' Black Diamonds reliever Mike Martini said, pointing to two stools missing half their seats. 'These two are only half-stools.'" '

"1. If you drink yoghurt with banana you can be cured of AIDS. 2. If you are HIV positive and you sleep with a virgin you will be cured. 3. If you press ice on your penis after sex it will kill the virus."

—Namibian. Ekse Kuume explores AIDS-related myths among his fellow Namibians. "1. Condoms are bad luck. If you carry them in your pocket you donŐt get a woman. 2. No man will have sex with me if they are wearing a condom. That assumes that I am cheap. 3. People should not be encouraged to use condoms. That only encourages more people to have sex."'

"For anyone who had to be out yesterday, the heat was like a furnace that pressed down on the spirit and seemed to compress the body from all sidesŃcorrugated rays rising from the sidewalk, steam hissing in gouts from manholes, black plumes rolling from the exhausts of buses and trucks, and waiting for you in the street ahead, dark asphalt shimmering like a burning lake. But there was a strange beauty in the oppressive day: Central Park was a profusion of dark greens and swimming purples, a Monet at Giverny; in the late afternoon the city lay suspended in the haze, and at dusk a red oil-refinery sunset spread over New Jersey."

—New York Times. Robert D. McFadden writes an ode to the weather, in a longer story about the complications and difficulties of unusually hot weather.'

"I've noticed a general low level of pissed-offness in London. Expectations have been raised and people have a more international outlook, but they're all working really long hours, everything is expensive, and they still look sweaty and hot and fat in their summerwear. The noise is also more intrusive here. New York is bounded by rivers and you can see trees, and that has a calming effect, especially in summer. There is not the sense of endless concrete and brick that you get in London. Here, you sit in your garden listening to your neighbours cough on either side of the fence and want to get up and machine-gun them."

—This Is London. "One in two Londoners apparently experiences pavement rage on a daily basis, whereby they want to kill the pillocks who won't get out of their way fast enough. We have become connoisseurs of rage: road rage, supermarket rage (and its subset, trolley rage), office rage, techno rage, funeral rage (he's already dead, we rationalise, so get out of my way), Tube rage (ergo Ken bloody Livingstone rage), even nail-technician rage (she blotted your finger wrongŃso kill her)."'

"Years after my mother died, I decided to read her medical records. There I thought I'd find the most precise evocation of her fate: the facts of her death, the hows and whys that stand independent of stories and dreams... Doing so wasn't easy. At first my mother's doctor's office fell back on confidentiality. That such facts were secrets presented a clue: a sign that they were not facts at all, but forbidden knowledge, stories none but a doctor could understand."

—Killing the Buddha. Jeff Sharlet writes about the process of dying, of not dying, and the powerfulness of the dead. "Still, I grew more determined to have the records, which in my mind had metamorphosed into a manuscript. I must have underestimated the power of such details. The records would reveal not only results but also calculations: Dosages of medicines multiplied by careful counts of red blood cells; the tumors that killed her known not only by names but by measurements; the width and depth of her disease a record of its age, a number discerned by peeling back layers of exponential growth to its origin, then tracing it back into the present. One mutant cell gives birth to two daughters, the two are mother to four, the four become forgotten ancestors of billions, a world born within my mother's breast."'