The Memory Hole - NYT Aug 17 2006

The ruling that stopped the Florida recount and handed the presidency to George W. Bush is disappearing down the legal world’s version of the memory hole, the slot where, in George Orwell’s “1984,” government workers disposed of politically inconvenient records. The Supreme Court has not cited it once since it was decided, and when Justice Antonin Scalia, who loves to hold forth on court precedents, was asked about it at a forum earlier this year, he snapped, “Come on, get over it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/15/opinion/15tues4.html

This one surprised me because the writer actually went to the trouble of explaining the reference; most of the times I've seen memory hole, Big Brother, Newspeak, etc., there has been no explicit citation of "1984."

Gilda Radner - NYT August 13 2006

One of these occurred in March 2004, at the National Building Museum in Washington, when Mr. Lieberman joined the other losing Democratic presidential candidates of that year to rally around their presumptive nominee, John Kerry. In his brief remarks, Mr. Lieberman took note of all the nasty things they had all said about one another during the proceeding months. Then he shrugged.

“It’s like what Emily Litella said,” Mr. Lieberman said, referring to the old “Saturday Night Live” character played by Gilda Radner. “Never mind.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/weekinreview/13leib.html

Whac-A-Mole - MSNBC/Financial Times August 9

John McCain, the Republican senator, said last week US forces were playing "Whac-a-Mole" – an arcade game in which you hit a mole over the head until it appears from another hole – following the decision to redeploy troops from Mosul to Baghdad. Likewise, Chuck Hagel, another Republican senator, said: "Are we going to put our troops in the middle of a civil war? Who are they going to fight? This will be slaughter of immense proportions."

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14274962/

The Borg - NYT June 8

"Google is like the Borg," said Milo Medin, a computer networking expert who was a founder of the 1990's online service @Home, referring to the robotic species on "Star Trek" that was forcibly assembled from millions of species and computer components. "I know of no other carrier or enterprise that distributes applications on top of their computing resource as effectively as Google."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/technology/14search.html