Whopper Quotes

Luc moved to the center of the floor. "I don't have all day, guys. I have things to do. A nap I want to take this afternoon. There's a new movie out on Netflix I want to watch, and a goddamn coupon for a free Whopper Jr. that's calling my name.

And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn't probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.

Fictions, whoppers and paradiddles.

That's the thing with handmade items. They still have the person's mark on them, and when you hold them, you feel less alone. This is why everyone who eats a Whopper leaves a little more depressed than they were when they came in. Nobody cooked that burger.

One of the problems with all of this is that not all narratives are equal. Imagine, to take a silly example, that someone told you story after story extolling the virtues of eating dog shit. You've been told these stories since you were a child. You believe them. You eat dog shit hotdogs, dog shit ice cream, General Tso's dog shit. Sooner or later, if you are exposed to some other foods, you might figure out that dog shit really doesn't taste good. Or if you cling too tightly to these stories (or if your enculturation is so strong that dog shit actually does taste good to you), the diet might make you sick or kill you. To make this example a little less silly, substitute the word pesticides for dog shit. Or, for that matter, substitute Big Mac, Whopper, or Coca Cola.

I shall be perfectly frank with you,” which is how politicians in both Delhi and Washington preface a real whopper of a lie:

After four hours I passed slowly from the country of 'nine-fingered people and prepare to meet thy God' into the drive-ins and motels and Homes of the Whopper but all I could see was the river.

I don't have all day, guys. I have things to do. A nap I want to take this afternoon. There's a new movie out on Netflix I want to watch, and a goddamn coupon for a free Whopper Jr. that's calling my name.

You really know when people are lying?” He nodded. “Prove it.” “Got a boyfriend?” “No.” “Is there a man you’re interested in?” “No.” “You’re lying.” I stiffened. “I am not.” “Yes, you are. He may not be a boyfriend but there’s someone you’re interested in enough that you’re thinking about having sex with him.” I glared. “I am not. And you can’t possibly know that.” He shrugged. “Sorry, Mac, I hear the truth even when the person isn’t admitting it to themselves.” One dark brow lifted. “I don’t suppose it might be me?” I blushed. He’d just made me think it. Us. Naked. Wow. I was a perfectly healthy woman, and he was a gorgeous man. “No,” I said, embarrassed. He laughed, gold eyes glittering. “Lie. A whopper. Gotta love that. Have I told you I’m a big believer in fulfilling a woman’s fantasies?

Now – by omission – she was trying to get away with what she thought of as a whopper, and she wondered if either she or Ludo would be equal to it. He had seemed ready enough to fall in with her; had had no scruples as she herself had; had thought it all rather a lark. She had tracked him down in Harrods Banking Hall.

You got it, you fatass little creep, Brady thinks, and smiles his widest, most charming smile. Fuck up your cholesterol all you want, I give you until forty, and who knows, maybe you’ll survive the first heart attack. That won’t stop you, though, nope. Not when the world is full of beer and Whoppers and chocolate ice cream.

The four seasons in Australia consist of "fuck it's hot," "Can you believe how fucking hot it is?", "I won't be in today because it is too fucking hot" and "Yes, the dinner plate size spiders come inside to escape from the heat. That is a fucking whopper though.

During the descent, she gave the doily to the man across the aisle, worried about his ailing son, and the needlework was so elegant it made him feel better just to hold it. That’s the thing with handmade items. They still have the person’s mark on them, and when you hold them, you feel less alone. This is why everyone who eats a Whopper leaves a little more depressed than they were when they came in.

Companions were not allowed to lie. I don’t know why. I had tried a few times when I was young to get Benjamin to lie, and he never could. As we got older, I tried experiments, attempting to find a way for him to lie. Lies of omission, white lies, whoppers. Nothing. He couldn’t lie. My father told me that they were programmed that way. He seemed kind of proud about that. And now, I hoped, that would save my life.

It is usually known that newspapers do not say the truth, but it is also known that they cannot tell whoppers.

The baby regarded Mike gravely as she discoursed to it about a poor drowned woofum-wuffums, and did the bad man treat it badly, then. The baby belched eloquently. “He belches in English!” I remarked. “Did it have the windy ripples?” cooed Mike. “Give us a kiss, honey lamb.” The baby immediately flung its little arms around her neck and planted a whopper on her mouth. “Wow!” said Mike when she got her breath. “Shorty, could you take lessons!” “Lessons my eye,” I said jealously. “Mike, that’s no baby, that’s some old guy in his second childhood.

You can begin a story in the middle and create confusion by striking out boldly, backward and forward. You can be modern, put aside all mention of time and distance and, when the whole thing is done, proclaim, or let someone else proclaim, that you have finally, at the last moment, solved the space-time problem. Or you can declare at the very start that it is impossible to write a novel nowadays, but then, behind your own back so to speak, give birth to a whopper, a novel to end all novels. I have also been told that it makes a good impression, an impression of modesty so to speak, if you begin by saying that a novel can't have a hero anymore because there are no more individualists, because individuality is a thing of the past, because man- each men and all men together- is alone in his loneliness and no one is entitled to individual loneliness, and all men lumped together make up a "lonely mass" without names and without heroes. (...) I shall begin far away from me, for no one ought to tell the story of his life who hasn't the patience to say a word or two at least half of his grandparents before plunging into his own existence. And so to you personally, dear reader, who are no doubt leading a muddled life outside this institution, to you my friends and weekly visitors, I introduce Oskar's maternal grandmother

It’s already midmorning, and we’ve got beasts to outrun, holes to avoid, and whopper spiders to squish before we make it back to the Lady Kate.” Camille picked up the map. Oscar took Camille’s arm and helped her up the first boulder. “Well, aren’t we a sorry-lookin’ lot?” Ira bellowed as they limped up the cascade, each one nursing injuries. As they climbed, their huffing and puffing and grunts of pain were both amusing and disheartening.

My entire life has been one big, fat whopper of a lie, and my parents betrayed me in the worst possible way. I don’t care if they believed they were protecting me. You don’t lie to the people you profess to love, no matter how painful the truth is.

How are you going to try to say that this is a beautiful moment between us when I’m eating a Whopper?” Sam laughed. “I think I just love you that much,” he said. “That even standing next to you as you cram Burger King into your mouth is special to me.

CHRONOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS’ REVENUE-ENHANCING SUBSIDIZED TIME™, BY YEAR (1) Year of the Whopper (2) Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad (3) Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar (4) Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken (5) Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster (6) Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic) (7) Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland (8) Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (9) Year of Glad 78

I was thinking that it was regrettable that your tastes have grown canalized so young. There it was, raining soup-and you were caught without a spoon. Even three days of what you were offered-urged on you!-would have been something to treasure when you reach my age. And you, you young idiot, let jealousy chase you away! Believe me, at your age I would have gone Eskimo in a big way, thankful that I had been given a free pass instead of having to attend church and study Martian to qualify. I'm so vicariously vexed that my only consolation is the sour one that I know you will live to regret it. Age does not bring wisdom, Ben, but it does give perspective . . . and the saddest perspective of all is to see far, far behind you, the temptations you've passed up. I have such regrets myself but all of them are as nothing to the whopper of a regret I am happily certain you will suffer.

It is surely obvious by now that the authorities whether political, administrative, corporate, scientific, academic or media mislead us all the time either by themselves being misled or by downright lies. I don't mean little ones, either, but enormous distortions of truth and reality. By far the safest filter system is to believe nothing The System tells us until it proves worthy of acceptance, and with every day that passes this gets less and less likely - with whoppers becoming ever more whopping. Keep asking the question 'Who benefits?' - Who benefits from me believing what they are telling me? Remember that words don't change the world only outcomes do. The outcome will invariably tell you who was behind events that justified or led to the outcome and you can see the process at an earlier stage by asking when an event happens - what will be the outcome if I believe what they are telling me?

For instance, have you ever been going about your business, enjoying your life, when all of sudden you made a stupid choice or series of small choices that ultimately sabotaged your hard work and momentum, all for no apparent reason? You didn’t intend to sabotage yourself, but by not thinking about your decisions—weighing the risks and potential outcomes—you found yourself facing unintended consequences. Nobody intends to become obese, go through bankruptcy, or get a divorce, but often (if not always) those consequences are the result of a series of small, poor choices. Elephants Don’t Bite Have you ever been bitten by an elephant? How about a mosquito? It’s the little things in life that will bite you. Occasionally, we see big mistakes threaten to destroy a career or reputation in an instant—the famous comedian who rants racial slurs during a stand-up routine, the drunken anti-Semitic antics of a once-celebrated humanitarian, the anti-gay-rights senator caught soliciting gay sex in a restroom, the admired female tennis player who uncharacteristically threatens an official with a tirade of expletives. Clearly, these types of poor choices have major repercussions. But even if you’ve pulled such a whopper in your past, it’s not extraordinary massive steps backward or the tragic single moments that we’re concerned with here. For most of us, it’s the frequent, small, and seemingly inconsequential choices that are of grave concern. I’m talking about the decisions you think don’t make any difference at all. It’s the little things that inevitably and predictably derail your success. Whether they’re bone-headed maneuvers, no-biggie behaviors, or are disguised as positive choices (those are especially insidious), these seemingly insignificant decisions can completely throw you off course because you’re not mindful of them. You get overwhelmed, space out, and are unaware of the little actions that take you way off course. The Compound Effect works, all right. It always works, remember? But in this case it works against you because you’re doing… you’re sleepwalking.

Something was in her mouth. Sami's tongue slid along the edges of something plastic. Flat, low ridges, holes-an adjustable strap. A baseball cap? Another taste. Hair spray. Gross. Someone had stuffed her baseball cap in her mouth, and from the feel of it they had taped it in place. Her arms were tied behind her and she lay face down on the floor-of what? Her car. The carpeting scraped her cheek every time they hit a bump. Panic flooded Sami's senses. She came instantly awake. Inhaling deeply through her nose, she willed herself to calm down. Her working motto flashed through her brain, panic never accomplished anything. Of course she had never been kidnapped and tied up before. In the dim light of passing cars, she glimpsed things-paper gum wrappers, an old straw, one whopper wrapper, a CD cover. That's where Sting went. Been looking for that for days. Man did she need to vacuum this car out. A metallic scent hit her nose. She'd recognize that smell until the day she died. Blood. And by the odor, someone had lost a great deal of it.

The towering lie of the criminal justice system—that we can reliably determine the truth, that we can know “beyond a reasonable doubt” who is guilty and who is not—is built on this whopper of an admission: after a thousand years or so of refining the process, judges and lawyers are no more able to say what is true than a dozen knuckleheads selected at random off the street.

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. (Psalm 63:1–3) These words might not speak on your behalf, but they can—they must. If you think they can’t, that is not shame talking. It is hopelessness, indifference, and a heart that is getting hard. These are completely understandable, but they are also a whopper of a lie. A warning about “a heart that is getting hard” is not the nicest comment to slip into a book’s final chapter. But please understand why I give it. There is a paralytic quality to shame that leaves you powerless, unable to put up the least resistance. It leads you to believe the lie that Christ’s words to you are mere words, which they are not. They are words of power that heal the sick and raise the dead. When people encounter the gospel, limbs suddenly begin to move and death gives way to life. So, when you hear these deep truths and still think you are paralyzed, understand why. You have been motionless for a while and your muscle memory says you can’t move. But your memory is lying. You can move; you can hear, believe, and declare. If you are passive and hopeless, take a more radical approach. Adopt the topsy-turvy, surprising culture of the kingdom of God. In that kingdom we aren’t shy about looking at our hearts and identifying resistance where we once found only powerlessness. The warning about being hard-hearted can be a reason to hope.

The advisors, on the other hand, were like older brothers and sisters. My favorite was Bill Symes, who'd been a founding member of Fellowship in 1967. He was in his early twenties now and studying religion at Webster University. He had shoulders like a two-oxen yoke, a ponytail as thick as a pony's tail, and feet requiring the largest size of Earth Shoes. He was a good musician, a passionate attacker of steel acoustical guitar strings. He liked to walk into Burger King and loudly order two Whoppers with no meat. If he was losing a Spades game, he would take a card out of his hand, tell the other players, "Play this suit!" and then lick the card and stick it to his forehead facing out. In discussions, he liked to lean into other people's space and bark at them. He said, "You better deal with that!" He said, "Sounds to me like you've got a problem that you're not talking about!" He said, "You know what? I don't think you believe one word of what you just said to me!" He said, "Any resistance will be met with an aggressive response!" If you hesitated when he moved to hug you, he backed away and spread his arms wide and goggled at you with raised eyebrows, as if to say, "Hello? Are you going to hug me, or what?" If he wasn't playing guitar he was reading Jung, and if he wasn't reading Jung he was birdwatching, and if he wasn't birdwatching he was practicing tai chi, and if you came up to him during his practice and asked him how he would defend himself if you tried to mug him with a gun, he would demonstrate, in dreamy Eastern motion, how to remove a wallet from a back pocket and hand it over. Listening to the radio in his VW Bug, he might suddenly cry out, "I want to hear... 'La Grange' by ZZ Top!" and slap the dashboard. The radio would then play "La Grange.

Möbius Strips. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. 'Hugh G. Section,' Pam Heath, 'Bunny Day,' 'Taffy Appel'; 35 mm.; 109 minutes black and white; sound. Pornography-parody, possible parodic homage to Fosse's All That Jazz, in which a theoretical physicist ('Reaction'), who can only achieve mathematical insight during coitus, conceives of Death as a lethally beautiful woman (Heath). INTERLACE TALENT FEATURE CARTRIDGE #357-65-32 (Y.W.)

More than two decades later we know that American Science Fiction was not murdered. It had a whopper of a heart attack; it lay in the intensive care ward for quite a while. (and had like most indigents to somehow find its way to the hospital itself), but time and a little fresh air did wonders for the patient, who toddled out of the hospital in 1965 and has not yet returned…Over a thousand titles labeled “science fiction” have been published every year since 1978.

I would expect such behavior from the children,not from their mother." She tsked at him, not even a little daunted. "Aren't you the least bit curious?" "Certainly,but I can wait until-" "But I can't wait," she cut in passionately. "Come with me, Warren. I'll be careful with it. And if it's nothing more'n a simple gift, albeit a mysterious one, then I'll have the box wrapped up again perfectly, so no one will know we tampered with it." "You're serious about this?" he asked. "You're actually going to sneak downstairs in the middle of the night like an errant schoolgirl-" "No,no,we are, like two perfectly sensible adults making a reasonable effort to solve a mystery that has been around far too long." He chuckled at that point, used to his wife's strange logic, and used to her ignoring any of his attempts at sternness.But then that was the magic of Amy.She was unlike any other woman he'd ever known. He gave in gracefully with a smile. "Very well,fetch our robes and some shoes.I would imagine the fire has been banked in the parlor, so it will be a mite chilly." It wasn't that long before they were standing next to The Present, Warren merely curious, Amy finding it hard to contain her excitement, considering what she expected to find beneath the pretty cloth wrapping.The parlor wasn't chilly at all,since whoever had lef the room last had closed the doors to contain the earlier warmth, and Warren had closed them again before he lit several of the lamps. But the doors opened once more, giving Amy quite a start since she was just reaching for The Present when it happened, and Jeremy said as he entered the room, "Caught in the act,eh? Amy,for shame." Amy,noticeably embarrassed despite the fact that Jeremy wasn't just her cousin, but one of her closest friends, said stiffly, "And what,pray tell, are you doing down here at this hour?" He winked at her and said dryly, "Same thing you are, I would imagine." She chuckled then. "Scamp. Close the door while you're at it." He started to,but stepped out of the way instead as Reggie sauntered in, barefoot and still in the process of tying her bed robe. When everyone else there just stared at her, she huffed indignantly, "I did not come down here to open The Present-well, maybe I did, but I would have chickened out before actually doing so." "What a whopper, Reggie," Derek said as he came in right behind her. "Nice try, though. Mind if I borrow that lame excuse? Better than having none a'tall.

When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer (Mark Singer) that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn't believe me. I replied that that was fine, as long as he believed that I believe it. And I do. Stories aren't souvenir tee-shirts or GameBoys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes it's enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand-page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same.

And yeah, put out as I can be with Mama 'bout a lotta things, I gotta admit she gets all the credit for getting me interested in cooking when I was just knee-high to a grasshopper. Gladys never seemed to give a damn about it when we were kids, which I guess is why she and that family of hers nourish themselves today mainly on KFC and Whoppers and junk like that. But me, I couldn't keep my eyes off Mama when she'd fix a mess of short ribs, or cut out perfect rounds of buttermilk biscuit dough with a juice glass, or spread a thick, real shiny caramel icing over her 1-2-3-4 cakes. And I can remember like it was yesterday (must have been about 4 years old at the time) when she first let me help her bake cookies, especially the same jelly treats I still make today and could eat by the dozen if I didn't now have better control. "Honey, start opening those jars on the counter," she said while she creamed butter and sugar with her Sunbeam electric hand mixer in the same wide, chipped bowl she used to make for biscuit dough. Strawberry, peach, and mint- the flavors never varied for Mama's jelly treats, and just the idea of making these cookies with anything but jelly and jam she'd put up herself the year before would have been inconceivable to Mama.

Many real-world Northwestern endonyms have European origins, such as “Portland,” “Victoria,” “Bellingham,” and “Richland.” To address this phenomenon while also contributing a sense of the fantastic, I chose to utilize a forgotten nineteenth century European artificial language as a source. Volapük is clumsy and awkward, but shares a relationship with English vocabulary (upon which it is based) that I was able to exploit. In my fictional universe, that relationship is swapped, and English (or rather, “Vendelabodish”) words derive from Volapük (“Valütapük”). This turns Volapük into an ancient Latin-like speech, offering texture to a fictional history of the colonizers of my fictional planets. Does one have to understand ancient Rome and medieval Europe and America’s Thirteen Colonies to understand the modern Pacific Northwest? Nah. But exploring the character and motivations of a migrating, imperial culture certainly sets the stage for explaining a modernist backlash against the atrocities that inevitably come with colonization.             The vocabulary of Volapük has also given flavor that is appropriate, I feel, to the quasi-North American setting. While high fantasy worlds seem to be built with pillars of European fairy tales, the universe of Geoduck Street is intentionally built with logs of North American tall tales. Tolkien could wax poetic about the aesthetic beauty of his Elvish words all he wanted, since aesthetic beauty fits the mold of fairies and shimmering palaces, but Geoduck Street needed a “whopper-spinning” approach to artificial language that would make a flapjack-eating Paul Bunyan proud. A prominent case in point: in this fictional universe, the word “yagalöp” forms the etymological root of “jackalope.” “Yag,” in the original nineteenth century iteration of Volapük, means “hunting,” while “löp” means “summit.” Combining them together makes them “the summit of hunting.” How could a jackalope not be a point of pride among hunting trophies?

Preston tore away the greasy Whopper wrapper to reveal a small velvet box. “Yes, I only pretended to be a bum to see through you, Charity. And I have.”—he went down on one knee—”So, Charity Angel, will you marry me?” Alabama Skye, Her Billionaire Bum

It is surely obvious by now that the authorities whether poltical, administrative, corporate, scientific, academic or media mislead us all the time either by themselves being misled or by downright lies. I don't mean little ones, either, but enormous distortions of truth and reality. By far the safest filter system is to believe nothing The System tells us until it proves worthy of acceptance, and with every day that passes this gets less and less likely - with whoppers becoming ever more whopping. Keep asking the question 'Who benefits?' - Who benefits from me believing what they are telling me? Remember that words don't change the world only outcomes do. The outcome will invariably tell you who was behind events that justified or led to the outcome and you can see the process at an earlier stage by asking when an event happens - what will be the outcome if I believe what they are telling me?

Finally I slipped out of bed and checked my email. Nothing of importance, although it did appear that I had been hand-picked to help a wealthy and desperate gentleman from Nigeria transfer his funds to the United States. His plan was genius: He would send me a whopper of a check, and I would send him a much smaller check in return. And get this: I get to keep the difference. Boy, what could go wrong with that idea? I

Then came Dani’s turn to read a question. “‘Who’s in charge in the bedroom?’” Much to the group’s amusement, none of them got a match, and Sean didn’t think they would either as he held up his notepad. “‘I am, since I carry the big stick.’” Emma read hers with a remarkably straight face. “‘Sean, because he has a magic penis.’” “Wow. Um…so Sean and Emma have a point,” Dani said as the men nearly pissed themselves laughing. No way in hell was he leaving that unpunished, and he winked at Emma when Kevin read the next question. “‘Where’s the kinkiest place you’ve had sex?’” The fact that Joe and Keri had done the dirty deed on the back of his ATV led to a few questions about the logistics of that, but then it was Emma’s turn. “‘In bed, because Sean has no imagination.’” Roger threw an embarrassed wince his way, but his cousins weren’t shy about laughing their asses off. Sean just shrugged and held up his notepad. “In the car in the mall parking lot. Emma’s lying because she doesn’t want anybody to know being watched turns her on.” Her jaw dropped, but she recovered quickly and gave him a sweet smile that didn’t jibe with the “you are so going to get it” look in her eyes. Beth asked the next question. “‘Women, where does your man secretly dream of having sex?’” Keri knew Joe wanted to have sex in the reportedly very haunted Stanley Hotel, from King’s The Shining. Dani claimed Roger wanted to do the deed on a Caribbean beach, but he said that was her fantasy and that his was to have sex in an igloo. No amount of heckling would get him to say why. And when it came to Kevin, even Sean knew he dreamed of getting laid on the pitcher’s mound at Fenway Park. Then, God help him, it was Emma’s turn to show her answer. “‘In a Burger King bathroom.’” The room felt silent until Dani said, “Ew. Really?” “No, not really,” Sean growled. “Really,” Emma said over him. “He knows that’s the only way he can slip me a whopper.” As the room erupted in laughter, Sean knew humor was the only way they’d get through the evening with their secret intact, but he didn’t find that one very funny, himself. It was the final answer that really did him in, though. The question: “If your sex had a motto, what would it be?” Joe and Keri’s was, not surprisingly, Don’t wake the baby Kevin and Beth wrote, Better than chocolate cake, whatever that was supposed to mean. Dani wrote, Gets better with time, like fine wine, and Roger wrote, Like cheese, the older you get, the better it is, which led to a powwow about whether or not to give them a point. They probably would have gotten it if they weren’t tied with Keri and Joe, who took competitive to a cutthroat level. When they all looked at Sean, he groaned and turned his paper around. They’d lost any chance of winning way back, but he was already dreading what the smart-ass he wasn’t really engaged to had written down. “‘She’s the boss.’” The look Emma gave him as she slowly turned the notepad around gave him advance warning she was about to lay down the royal flush in this little game they’d been playing. “Size really doesn’t matter,” she said in what sounded to him like a really loud voice. Before he could say anything—and he had no idea what was going to come out of his mouth, but he had to say something--Cat appeared at the top of the stairs. “I hate to break up the party,” she said, “but it’s getting late, so we’re calling it a night.” Maybe Cat was, but Sean was just getting started.

But my daddy always said that story was a fish tale. That was his way of describing a trumped-up story, like a whopper

The group called the Chowder Society had only a few rules: they wore evening clothes (because thirty years ago, Sears had rather liked the idea), they never drank too much (and now they were too old for that anyhow), they never asked if any of the stories were true (since even the outright whoppers were in some sense true), and though the stories went around the group in rotation, they never pressured anyone who had temporarily dried up.

Bitch got better luck getting Ronald McDonald to try a fucking Whopper.

Witnesses to his whoppers realized that Reagan was not lying but had persuaded himself of the validity of his tales. “He finds it next to impossible to say anything that is not in some crucial way untrue,” wrote the journalist Jack Beatty. “It’s not a credibility gap, for there is no evidence of cynical or even conscious duplicity. The President is so far out of touch that it amounts to a reality gap.” Still, listeners were often dumbfounded. His daughter Patti said, “He has the ability to make statements that are so far outside the parameters of logic that they leave you speechless.” John Sloan, author of The Reagan Effect, has written: “In Reagan’s mind, unpleasant facts could be avoided; contradictions could be denied; anecdotes could overcome facts; movie illusions could substitute for history; unpleasant realities could be blamed on a hostile press.” His fictions mattered little, though, for after a generation of assassination and scoundrelry the media decided—consciously or unconsciously—to feature his presidency as a success story and to brush aside inconvenient particulars. “Ronald Reagan,” observed the political scientist James David Barber, “is the first modern President whose contempt for the facts is treated as a charming idiosyncrasy.” In London, a writer in the Observer commented: “His errors glide past unchallenged. At one point … he alleged that almost half the population gets a free meal from the government each day. No one told him he was crazy. The general message of the American press is that, yes, while it is perfectly true that the emperor has no clothes, nudity is actually very acceptable this year.

The cubs looked into Mama’s eyes, then at each other, and then they began to tell one of the biggest whoppers that has ever been told in Bear Country.  

Hey baby, do you want to hold my Whopper?

Q: How did Burger King get Dairy Queen pregnant? A: He forgot to wrap his Whopper.

I looked across the street at the National Storytelling Center, which was built a few years ago and brings Jonesborough a limited amount of national acclaim. Every October, thousands of people gather for a huge storytelling festival. I smiled as I thought about the irony of having a storytelling center so near the courthouse. There were whoppers being told in both places.

Rural Free Delivery (RFD) Home, upon that word drops the sunshine of beauty and the shadow of tender sorrows, the reflection of ten thousand voices and fond memories. This is a mighty fine old world after all if you make yourself think so. Look happy even if things are going against you— that will make others happy. Pretty soon all will be smiling and then there is no telling what can’t be done. Coca-Cola Girl Mother baked a fortune cake pale yellow icing, lemon drops round rim, hidden within treasures, a ring—you’ll be married, a button—stay a bachelor, a thimble—always a spinster, and a penny—you’re rich. Gee, but I am hungry. Wait a second, dear, until I pull my belt up another notch. There that’s better. So, you see, Hon, I am straighter than a string around a bundle. You ought to see my eye, it’s a peach. I am proud of it, looks like I’ve been kicked by a mule. You know, dear, that they can kick hard enough to knock all the soda out of a biscuit without breaking the crust Hogging Catfish This gives you a fighting chance. Noodle your right hand into their gills, hold on tight while you grunt him out of the water. This can be a real dogfight. Old river cat wants to go down deep, make you bottom feed. Like I said, boys, when you tell a whopper, say it like you believe it. Saturday Ritual My Granddad was a cobbler. We each owned two pairs of shoes, Sunday shoes and everyday shoes. When our Sunday shoes got worn they became our everyday shoes. Main Street Saturday Night We each were given a dime on Saturday opening a universe of possibilities. All the stores stayed open and people flocked into town. Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds set up a popcorn stand on Reinheimer’s corner and soon after lighting a little stove, sounding like small firecrackers, popping began. Dad, laughing shooting the breeze with a group of farmers, drinking Coca Cola, finding out if any sheds needed to be built or barns repaired, discussing the price of next year’s seed, finding out who’s really working, who’s just looking busy. There is no object I wouldn’t give to relive my childhood growing up in Delavan— where everyone knew everyone— and joy came with but a dime. Market Day Jim Pittsford’s grocery smelled of bananas ripening and the coffee he ground by hand, wonderful smoked ham and bacon fresh sliced. He’d reward the child who came to pick up the purchase, with a large dill pickle Biking home, skillfully balancing Jim Pittsford’s bacon, J B’s tomatoes and peaches, while sniffing a tantalizing spice rising from fresh warm rolls, I nibbled my pickle reward.

We’re all telling lies- perhaps that’s what humans do. It’s not the lies we tell others- the truth blatantly obvious, the lies we tell ourselves. It’s these whoppers that let us carry on with the robotic dysfunctional behavior.

It has been said that what we face with this climate crisis is harder than winning World War II, achieving civil rights, defeating bacterial infection and sending a man to the moon . . . combined. So let’s get super duper clear, my dear friends: this is a human despair crisis. Rebecca Solnit: “The scale is not like anything human beings have faced and journalists have reported on, except perhaps the threat of all-out nuclear war.” She then added the whopper caveat that nuclear war was something that “might happen, not something that is happening.” I add this: with nuclear war, we all agreed the threat was real and we talked about it openly. We weren’t fighting the science on it. Sure, we’ve had climate change before. And, yep, the planet survived. But this is not the point. No doubt the planet will survive again. There’s just one small problem that we get distracted from. This time, we probably won’t. Or at least, our lives as we know and love them won’t….Scientists and activists have no vested interest in making this shit up. There is no money to be made and no power to be gained from spreading information about the worth of sustainable energy, or consuming less. I said this to someone who challenged me at a dinner party as to my motives behind engaging in climate activism: “We would much rather be at the beach.” Fair point, they replied.

I remember, I started to begin about compliments.

I thought about what it meant to no longer have parents. There was no longer anyone who always knew my whereabouts. No one to tell when I was leaving town, no one to call when I got home. There was no one to ask for advice (Should I get the travel insurance/anesthesia with my root canal/cheese on my Whopper?). People who don’t have parents—even shitty ones—don’t have anyone to corroborate their earliest memories, call them on their bullshit, care, or even notice, if they are royally screwing up their lives. Before I had someone to blame for my missteps. Now the buck stopped with me.

the big headline of the book, a whopper really, is Hochschild’s claim that the population of the Congo fell by 50 percent or 10 million on Léopold’s watch. The EIC, he claims, caused “depopulation” and “mass murder” of “genocidal proportions” due to its drive for rubber profits. In fact, the most knowledgeable estimates today suggest that the general population of the Congo rose slightly during the EIC era and that any deaths attributable to the limited abuses in the rubber areas were far outweighed by the lives saved and created by the EIC’s direct interventions in other respects. Even if we can agree that any life lost to senseless violence and negligent governance is always and everywhere deserving of condemnation, Léopold’s regime was a monumental achievement in saving and promoting black lives.

Milky Way, AirHeads, Mars bars, Twix, Kit Kat, Chunky, mr. Goodbar, York Peppermint Patties, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Mike and Ike, Atomic FireBall, JuJu Fish, Sour Neon Worms, Goobers, Laffy Taffy, Nerds, Sugar Daddy, Baby Ruth, Snickers, Kisses, M & M’s (plain and peanut), gummi bears, Dots, Junior Mints, Milk Duds, Good & Plenty, Whoppers, Twizzlers, Dum Dum, Skittles, Butterfinger, Starburst, Crunch, Jolly Rancher, Sweet Pops, Tootsie Roll….

always hated fast-food restaurants. Now a Whopper with fries feels like a religious experience. I scarf it down.

actually began experiencing adverse intimations about Haddam during my last years here, close to ten years ago (I always thought I loved it). And not that a realtor’s view would ever be the standard one, since realtors both live life in a town yet also huckster that place’s very spirit essence for whopper profits.

We humans coevolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us. Writing, invented thousands of years ago, is a grand whopper of a tool, and I have no doubt that it changed us dramatically. Five hundred years ago, Gutenberg’s invention led to a significant step-change in the cost of books. Physical books ushered in a new way of collaborating and learning. Lately, networked tools such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too. They’ve shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans. I value my BlackBerry—I’m convinced it makes me more productive—but I don’t want to read a three-hundred-page document on it.

High positions have low levels, these days without titles of the day.

We make mistakes, sometimes whoppers. We correct them or we capitalize on them.

blow the sixty bucks on a movie on Shattuck, on a bucket of fake-buttered popcorn and a shoe-box-size carton of Whoppers or Junior Mints. Cradling the bucket or carton he’d slip into the darkness, washed over by the phantasms of some sex comedy played by American actors a quarter-century younger than himself, who were meant to be taken for adults. This would make it permissible to die. Desirable, even.

Monsieur Cannibal is a great Angel Feast!

FOR MA AND JADE, WHO LOVED A GOOD WHOPPER

Both women, looking different ways, kept shrugging their shoulders and asking themselves how the deuce the other could tell such whoppers!

The Whopper has been regarded, as pepper, salt, sugar with lemon juice.

whopper-stopper

The writing profession that I have always known is changing, old media is ossified, and what I know of new media is that it is casual, opinionated, improvisational, largely unedited, full of whoppers, often plagiarized, and poorly paid.

by all rights, the word burger is a mistake. The word had no ancestor in Old English or even Middle English. The word burgher traces that far back, indeed, but it refers to a certain kind of middle-class citizen, and clearly has nothing to do with Whoppers and Quarter Pounders. The burger so familiar to us was an accident. It started with the fact that what we know as hamburger was initially called Hamburg steak, and a patty of it between bread called a hamburger sandwich, as opposed to the thing then known as frankfurter sandwiches, now called hot dogs.* The relevant word was Hamburg, as in the German city. To someone in the nineteenth century familiar with these then-new terms, hearing what they were eating called a “burger” would have sounded as odd as hearing somebody call a burrito a “rito” now.

The Dutch pigs are excellent in their meatball process.

He had robbed her of a lot more than four years of her life. He had taken her self-esteem, caused her to question her judgment, stolen her self-respect and left her confidence in tatters. A smart woman would be leery of making another mistake after the whopper she’d made with Peter. A smart woman would go slow with Nick, would take her time, would make sure she was doing the right thing. As the clank of metal against metal reminded her she had a very angry man to deal with, she decided she clearly wasn’t as smart as she’d always thought.

Dr. Offit counsels his fellow PIs that lying is part of their job. He justifies any whopper that maximizes vaccine uptake.

I don’t fuck with her. She tried to get me to talk to you about bringing her back.” “Bitch got better luck getting Ronald McDonald to try a fucking Whopper.