Swans on Tea

I was very recently reminded of a one-page story that appeared in the New Yorker some years ago. It drops the prefixes or otherwise negates the meaning of some common words and phrases. The bridled style is very settling.
Thanks to the wonder of the intertubz, it appears online.
How I Met My [...]

“Is that what you want, Mary? A farter?” Tucker/Norman, “There’s Something About Mary”
To the Royal Academy of Farting, Benjamin Franklin, c. 1781.
That the permitting this Air to escape and mix with the Atmosphere, is usually offensive to the Company, from the fetid Smell that accompanies it.
That all well-bred People therefore, to avoid giving [...]

The War on Photography
Photographers being treated as security threats, because that’s how Hollywood portrays things
A movie-plot threat is a specific threat, vivid in our minds like the plot of a movie. You remember them from the months after the 9/11 attacks: anthrax spread from crop dusters, a contaminated milk supply, terrorist scuba divers armed with [...]

Mechanization and Standardization
. . . and how some people resist it, thinking manual labor is best.
Given an infinite number of monkeys with Excel, you can produce the client reporting.
(And for those of you who live in 2007 where the idea of having human beings actually touching data is out of the misty past, I bring [...]