See? I had it right. Angelina Jolie was the right pick. Who's more bad-ass than Angelina? Nobody. I just don't know if Joe Biden rises to Angelina's level.
In America, bad-ass trumps everything.
Meanwhile, oh lord it's a bad sign when a nonfiction writer uses a quote from All the Pretty Horses as an epigraph to his nonfiction book(brand new, from a major publisher, but I will not name the book) about the Iraq War. A very, very bad sign. And sure enough:
[p. 3] The marines were pressed flat on a rooftop when the dialogue began to unfold. [Does dialogue actually unfold?] It was 2 a.m. The minarets were flashing by the light of airstrikes and rockets were sailing [sailing?] on trails of sparks. First came the voices from the mosques, rising above the thundery [thundery!] guns [Guns?! What kind of guns? Can you be more specific?].
"The Americans are here!" howled [you can't really howl these words in English, but perhaps in Arabic?] a voice from a loudspeaker in a minaret. "The Holy War, the Holy War! Get up and fight for the city of Mosques!" [This sounds like bad movie dialogue unfolding.]
Bullets poured without direction and without end [classic hyperbolic McCarthy horseshit]. No one lifted his head.
[...]
And then, as if from the depths [the depths? of the desert? of the buildings?], came a new sound: violent, menacing and dire. I looked back over my shoulder to where we had come from, into the vacant field at Falluja's northern edge. A group of Marines were standing at the foot of a gigantic loudspeaker, the kind used at rock concerts.
It was AC/DC, the Australian heavy metal band, pouring out its unbridled sounds [violent, menacing, dire, unbridled; now we're in horsey romance novel territory]. I recognized the song immediately: "Hells Bells," the band's celebration of satanic power, had come to us [yes, reader, via the Marines, through a speaker] on the battlefield. Behind the strains of its guitars, a church bell tolled thirteen times. [The church bell has guitars? And why thirteen? And how long did the thirteen tollings take to unfold?]
I give up.
Original source: http://shakespeareandco.wordpress.com/?p=1030
