Infinite Summer

pg 93 "has forgotten that his hamsters were named Ward and June"

Pg 93 "feral hamsters are not pets, They mean business"

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"...the not particularly dreaded but media savvy Fils de Montcalm cell credited with the helicoptered dropping of the 12 meter, human waste filled pie shell onto the rostrum of U.S. President Gentle's second Inaugural." -pg 1061

made me LOL.

p. 149 - "..the video-transmitted image of what was essentially a heavily doctored still-photograph, one of an incredibly fit and attractive and well-turned-out human being, someone who actually resembled you the caller in such limited respects as like race and limb number.."

Made me laugh. It also made me re-consider some of those pictures and look-at-my-great-life-now descriptions on Facebook.

So, so many things. Only outnumbered by things that have made me want to cry.

howling fantods cracks me up every time

I agree, there are so many places where I just burst out laughing and scare the dogs! The herd of feral hamsters was priceless.

L.A. being visited by the Wheelchair Assassins, or, A.F.R... SQUEAK! also a lot that occurs in the Boston AA circles, such as the TSYBYSCD group and Gately's pride in his conspicuous flatulence. It's endless

I think the section about the rise and fall of video telephony and its associated tableaux is the funniest in the book, but the single greatest line for me is p. 525, of the silhouetted meeting between the Headmaster and 7-year-old Tina Echt, in which:
"Their handshake looked, for the split-second [Hal] looked, like C.T. was jacking off and the little girl was going Sieg Heil."

p 152

"...they spend three months collecting and stashing the urine of sub-ten-year-old players, warm pale innocent childish urine that's produced in needly little streams and the only G/M scan it couldn't pass would be like an Ovaltine scan or something..."

I think the videophone chapter is brilliant all by itself; it has always made me giddy, in that DFW is not only making keen observations on human nature but is making predictions based on them.

My all-time favorite is the Helen Steeply article on the the "prosthetic crime victim" (p 142-144)--in part for the story itself, but also for the ambiguous/misplaced modifiers ("ill gotten woman's Aigner purse"), sentences you have to read several times to get ("Her tragic, untimely, and, some might say, cruelly ironic fate, however, has been the subject of the all too frequent silence needless tragedies are buried beneath when the cast the callous misunderstanding of public officials in the negative light of public knowledge."), the seemingly arbitrary insertion of certain key words targeted to supermarket-checkout-line journalism ("fashionable", "active", "alert", "tragically', "callous"--all used multiple times within the short article), and the final sentence citing "the victim's heartless fate".

This evening, I was surprised at how loudly--and inappropriately, it feels like--I was laughing at the descriptions of the Units of the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital complex--in particular, the pranks pulled by Ennet House residents on their (the Units') poor occupants (p 193-198).