Friday, June 17, 2005

The King of Run-On Sentences



I'm a big fan of San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford. In high school we were taught ad nauseam to never write a run-on sentence. In his honor I compiled a short list of some of my favorite run-on sentences written by Mark. Here they are in no particular order.

On rock stars who sell out their best songs:
"And maybe that sad epitaph was writ even larger a few years back when stodgy old Cadillac bought the rights to Zeppelin's manic mega-anthem "Rock n' Roll" for use in hawking the wildly mediocre CTS sedan to wealthy boho yuppies, all of whom vaguely remember inhaling back in the '70s and who might've once believed Page & Plant to be demigods but who now only fantasize about owning a riding lawn mower and having sex once a month and glimpsing the babysitter's nipples through her Avril Lavigne T-shirt. "

On the band Cold Play:
"Coldplay is the new creamy soothing balm you rub all over your chafed and itchy thighs after a long day working in the hot sun hauling scrub brush to the weed pile in the backyard while the goddamn kids think it's funny to throw mudballs at the windows and the creepy meth-lab neighbors peek at you through their dark stained Levolor blinds as you imagine them storing up jars of pickled squirrel brains for the winter. "

On a study which showed excesive internet usage is more dangerous than marijuana:
"That is to say, didn't millions of us already sense, deeper down, despite all this mad orgasm of technology and despite all this incredible ability to stay in constant touch and despite how you can now travel almost nowhere in the world save for remote parts of the Amazon jungle where you cannot be tracked or e-mailed or faxed or called on the cell or FedExed a package from Amazon.com, don't you just know that we are, in fact, lowering our IQs and slaughtering brain cells like Karl Rove murders joy? "

On Mel Gibson's The Passion:
"Perhaps you, furthermore, are more than slightly disturbed that millions have flocked to this bizarre ultraviolent blood-drenched revisionist flick and that so many actually believe its story to be absolutely true, and that it just surpassed "The Return of the King" in total box office and is the No. 8 most successful film of all time and it was No. 1 again across BushCo's flyover states during Easter weekend and has sold 650,000 books and 125,000 creepy pewter nail necklaces and you find it all just incredibly warped and disheartening and what the hell is the world coming to."

On John Ashcroft's war against porn:
"Because while 9/11 and the process of gleefully decimating your civil liberties via the USA Patriot Act may have delayed him a few years, Ashcroft & Co. is back on the anti-porn warpath, hell-bent on slashing and burning its way through the porn industry like a priest through an all-male boarding school -- oh wait, bad analogy -- like a hot knife through butter -- nope, not that, either -- like a Halliburton exec through Baghdad -- there, that's more like it -- as the U.S. Justice Department sets its sights on punishing the sex industry and eradicating porn and making the world safe for uptight danceless ultra-pious nondrinking white men once and for all."

On modern grocery stores:
"It's like some bizarrely overlit funhouse, a massive chaotic attack on all your senses and an outright assault on your optic nerves, and that's well before you've even made it past the towering display of Bud Light and well before the huge end-cap cases of Ruffles Sour Cream and Strychnine and about a mile away from the chemical-blasted, hormone-injected, meat-like slabs in the butcher's section that seem to look at you as you amble by, and hiss. "

1 comment:

The Garbage Man said...

The King Speaks!

From: Joe G
Sent: June 18, 2005 9:34 AM
To: Mark Morford
Subject: In your honor

The king of run on sentences...

mentaldumping.blogspot.com

From: Mark Morford
Sent: June 20, 2005 10:10 AM
To: Joe G
Subject: Re: In your honor

That's goddamn kind of you