The Fire Tetrahedron, from Hobart Institute of Welding Technology.

“People ask me, ‘What do you do?’ And I tell them I’m a writer, but always with the silent reservation, ‘I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.’

“I like to stay in my room. I have an office and I go there every day and write. I used to think I’d like to be a fireman—in fact, I still would—and the only drawback I could see was coming back to the firehouse, after a day of fighting fires, and still having to put in an eight-hour day writing.”

– David Mamet, excerpted from “Mamet Talk” by Lillian Ross, The New Yorker 05.19.2008.

Fire extinguisher diagram from United States Patent 7188679.

The New York Times has posted a glorious interactive graphic of box office grosses from 1986 to 2008. See how blockbusters spike and then fizzle away and word-of-mouth favorites extend into plump worms. I love how the graphic turns the film industry into a thorny, twisting vine of earth-toned globs — clumped together artery-clogging fat sediments, writhing, with neat Helvetica labels.