Lawrence Durrell

A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.

(Lawrence Durrell was a novelist who is best known for the four novels that make up The Alexandria Quartet.  He was born in India to British parents, and lived in Greece, Egypt, Argentina, Cyprus, Yugoslavia, and France as an adult.  He was married four times, and three of his marriages ended in divorce.)

Lawrence Durrell with Anais Nin

Alexandre Dumas

I confess that nothing frightens me more than the appearance of mushrooms on the table, especially in a small provincial town.

From his 1873 encyclopedia/cookbook, Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine.  Alexandre Dumas -- author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo -- was one of the most widely read authors of his day.  He was also a gourmet and an accomplished cook.  This quote is characteristic of the French in two different ways.  First, its subject is food.  Second, it looks down its nose on small provincial towns.  (Dumas was born in a small town and didn't move to Paris until he was 20 -- in other words, he was a young man from the provinces who tried to conceal his insecurity over his rural origins by sneering at small provincial towns.)

Alexandre Dumas

Rosemary Clooney

Ain't a-gonna need this house no longer

Ain't a-gonna need this house no more

Ain't got time to fix the shingles

Ain't got time to fix the floor

Ain't got time to oil the hinges

Nor to mend the window panes

Ain't a-gonna need this house no longer

I'm a-gettin' ready to meet the saints

"This Ole House" was a #1 hit (in both the US and the UK) in 1954 for Rosemary Clooney.  That same year, she appeared (along with Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye) in the movie White Christmas.  She was the aunt of George Clooney.  "This Ole House" was written by Stuart Hamblen, a hard-drinking radio and movie "singing cowboy" who underwent a religious conversion at a Billy Graham crusade in 1949 and received 72,000-odd votes as the Prohibition Party's presidential candidate in the 1952 election.

Breeders

I know you little libertine

I know you're a cannonball

(From their 1993 song, "Cannonball."  The music video was directed by Spike Jonze -- who directed the movie Being John Malkovich as well many music and skateboarding videos and TV commercials -- and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth.  By the way, you're not seeing double -- band members Kim and Kelley Deal are identical twins, which you would know if you had read 2 or 3 lines a day a couple of days ago.)

Pharoahe Monch

The last batter to hit, blast, shattered your hip

Smash any splitter or fastball, that'll be it

(This slant-rhyming couplet from "The Next Sh*t," from his 1999 album, Internal Affairs, contains not one, but two examples of an apocopated rhyme -- which is a rhyme that matches a one-syllable word with the stressed syllable of a multisyllabic word.  In this example, "last" and "blast" are the one-syllable words and "fastball" the multisyllabic word they are rhymed with.  "Hit" and "it" are another pair of perfect rhymes that form another apocopated rhyme with "splitter."  There's a lot of other stuff going on in this couplet as well, but I see your eyes beginning to glaze over.)     

Dandy Warhols

Here's what I feel,

Ba ba ba ba

Just want a girl

as cool as Kim Deal

Tomorrow is the 50th birthday of Kim Deal -- and her identical twin, Kelley.  (2 or 3 lines a day likes identical twin sisters!)  Kim played bass for the legendary alt-rock band, the Pixies, but is best known as the guitarist and vocalist for the mostly-female band, the Breeders -- she also wrote most of their songs.

Kelley and Kim Deal

Joan Rivers

There is not one female comedian who was beautiful as a little girl.  

(Joan Alexandra Molinsky Sanger Rosenberg is 78 years old today.  She graduated from Barnard College in 1954 with a B.A. in English literature and anthropology.  Her observation is consistent with my theory that no worthwhile rock musician was a good-looking, popular, high-school quarterback.)