WRONG, i’m female and anime FREAK.

He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one.

Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.

This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.

First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.

This kind of play always gets me excited. It’s easier for me to remember opening lines I like, though, because the ones I don’t like don’t stay with me. But there’s no denying that dislikes shape us too. Writing an opening sentence in a fiction is like walking up to a stranger on the street and saying excuse me…. In real encounters like this, all of human nature waits in that moment of turning to look at the person. We have secret lists of near-future possibilities waiting: panhandler? thief? long-lost friend? detective….? And we start considering the list before we actually even see the person. I like opening sentences that don’t let me feel comfortable about my list or my impulse to apply it. I like opening lines that say — something interesting is already happening. This power only comes when everything down to punctuation and single word choice is significantly managed.

Here’s a favorite opening sentence:

“I liked to sit up front and ride the fast ones all day long, I liked it when they brushed right up against the buildings north of the Loop and I especially liked it when the buildings dropped away into that bombed-out squalor a little farther north in which people (through windows you’d see a person in his dirty naked kitchen spooning soup toward his face, or twelve children on their bellies on the floor, watching television, but instantly they were gone, wiped away by a movie billboard of a woman winking and touching her upper lip deftly with her tongue, and she in turn erased by a — wham, the noise and dark dropped down around your head — tunnel) actually lived.”

(Denis Johnson, “Dirty Wedding”; I love the risks here — the work that can be wrung out of a precisely selected comma splice, for instance, and the way the parenthetic comment ends by slamming into an almost forgotten context.)

And of course simple can also be good: “In the kitchen, he poured himself another drink and looked at the bedroon suite in his front yard.”

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

I still contend the opening sentence from Richard Ford’s Independence Day is worse:

In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems.

Yes! this jet train built for political prisoners to dump in vast wilderness of Siberia.swift and speedy.one time kommissar directed to design bureau…,more and more jet engines to be fitted for smooth travel.genadi enraskoi of kommissar is responsible to see daily progress of the project.he was so keen to travel by this nasty time capsule.but he died in road accident before the project reached at testing stage.another prototype TURBOPROP,train was destroy after its first experimental run.unfortunatly they can`t perfectly aligned the pushing and pulling engines.soviets are planned new type of tracks for this train.but after some serious controlling and safety problems they abandoned this project.

I put a post up before it happened. I didn’t see anyone familiar in the film.