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Show Acting Alone Page 262 like Shanny when confronted with the indecipherability of headlinese, a language that couldn't have cut mustard even in Sam's pud comp class. Even frontside-out the headlines always gave Sam trouble - partly because in most cases he couldn't be less interested. Stuck on a big word, the speedfreak flopped his paper shut so he wouldn't be compelled involuntarily to keep staring at the puzzle. Sam glanced at the front-page lead story, head-on now. Even if a story were about one or two people he knew in person in the real world, old solipsist GTA Sam could never bring himself to do much more than skim the hideous "inverted pyramid" style of newspaper articles. Such a utilitarian language infected" Sam's style - not only of writing, but of thinking and feeling and living. Especially so soon after sipping on the fine, vigorous prose of the Kansas Review of the Collective Humanities, inverted pyramids such as the one on the front page today gave Sam a strange bad feeling. Maybe it was a mere motiveless biochemical slump coming on, but Sam, glancing at the paper, got a slight, half-formed "premonition of doom. Sam was so accustomed to being utterly bewildered at the goings-on in the great world that he didn't even think twice when his pain-bleary eyes, or his peripheral subconscious vision, or an afterimage of same, presented him with the strange, surreal headline: FORMER OSTRICH SOUGHT FOR NAZI RAID. Why would anybody seek a former (meaning, presumably, dead) ostrich for any reason, much less for a Nazi raid? For feathers to decorate head gear or something? Mascot maybe? "I don't know where Dr. Abraham is, Sam. He must be sick I think |