Certain headlines really grab you. Like the iconic 1983 New York Post cover “Headless Body Found In Topless Bar,” or the timeless zinger from the front page of a 1935 issue of Variety; “Sticks Nix Hicks Pix.” This morning’s main Drudge Report headline was a nice A.M. wake-up (what, no flashing siren?), and really captured my mood (of late). “MYSTERY: TRASH BAG IN SPACE.” What was the story? Oh, some NASA space shuttle snafu where they thought they had spotted a UFO a few days ago… then they thought it was a vital piece of shuttle machinery… in the end it was a bag of garbage. I didn’t need to read it. But now that I haven’t, I wonder: really? Is it from a plane? Or maybe from a really exploded trash truck down on Earth – it’s contents projected outward? Or like maybe a trash bag from someone’s house? All the way out there in space? Jeeze, talk about taking out the trash. Don’t they want to go through it? It’s legal if it’s not on the owner’s property you know. This is exactly why Drudge is my morning computer start-up page. Mere inches below this declaration was the sub-head “Elizabeth Taylor fed to the sharks…” The story? Liz was in the scuba diving in the ocean I guess. To the right of that was a picture of Madonna from her recent concert tour with the headline “NBC To Air Live Madonna Crucifixion…” (oh if only!) All of these snaps and headlines were right next to serious, real-world news links. Drudge’s notoriety may be in post-ballyhoo limbo, but the muck raking/candy bag/closet-Warholian sensibility of his website is a window shop that still automatically re-polishes itself every 200 seconds.

Related? Here are some more famous and not so famous quotations about trash:

“Last night I dreamed that the whole world had blown up. Just blown into smithereens. But the weird thing was, nobody knew it had happened. They just kept wandering around on their own little chunk of debris floating out there in space, everyone isolated from everyone else, acting as if everything was normal.”
– Susan Berman, in Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens

“People say I’m extravagant because I want to be surrounded by beauty. But tell me, who wants to be surrounded by garbage?”
– Imelda Marcos

“I felt like a piece of trash. I felt dirty and I felt used and I was disappointed.”
– Monica Lewinsky

” I got 96 tears in my 96 eyes, I got a garbage brain, it’s drivin’ me insane…”
– The Cramps, “Human Fly”

“Well the main thing they can do is not go to the movies. It is an odd dilemma. On the one hand, film is the art form of the 20th century, undeniably … As Lenin said, ‘the most powerful tool ever invented to influence the mind of man.’ Undeniably the American art form, too. And yet more and more, we see films made that diminish the American experience and example. And sometimes trash it completely.”
– Charlton Heston

�??I know a man who doesn’t pay to have his trash taken out. How does he get rid of his trash? He gift wraps it, and puts in into an unlocked car.�??
– Henny Youngman

“If I had a bad performance in a particular leotard, I threw it in the trash.”
– Mary Lou Retton

“A guy walks up to me and asks ‘What’s Punk?’ So I kick over a garbage can and say ‘That’s punk!’ So he kicks over a garbage can and says ‘That’s Punk?’, and I say ‘No that’s trendy!”
– Billie Joe Armstrong

“I lived through the garbage. I might as well dine on the caviar.�??
– Beverly Sills

�??Marriage is not just spiritual communion, it is also remembering to take out the trash.�??
– Dr. Joyce Brothers

�??To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.�??
– Vladimir Nabokov

“I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.”
– Sigmund Freud

“It’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people! They’re making our food out of people!”
– Detective Robert Thorn, in Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green

“The lowest form of popular culture – lack of information, misinformation and a contempt for the truth – are the reality of most people’s lives. Misinformation has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
– Carl Bernstein

“Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.”
– H. L. Mencken

“The best way to prepare to be a programmer is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system.”
– Bill Gates

“Romance is not trashy. There’s passion in romance. There’s imagination. There’s beauty. Besides, you can find some nice things in the trash.”
– Richard LaGravenese, from The Fisher King

“When you fall for the garbage man, you end up with the garbage, man.”
– Hole, “Berry”

“In Beverly Hills… they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.”
– Woody Allen

“We need welfare and you can’t have my fucking shoes!”
– Holly Woodlawn, from Paul Morrissey’s Trash

“Trash Star Found in Trash Can”
– 1970 Daily Variety headline touting Holly Woodlawn in the film Trash

“Television’s perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don’t have to concentrate. You don’t have to react. You don’t have to remember. You don’t miss your brain because you don’t need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man’s nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn’t got the price of a television set.”
– Raymond Chandler

“GEOLOGY, n. The science of the earth’s crust –to which, doubtless, will be added that of its interior whenever a man shall come up garrulous out of a well. The geological formations of the globe already noted are catalogued thus: The Primary, or lower one, consists of rocks, bones or mired mules, gas-pipes, miners’ tools, antique statues minus the nose, Spanish doubloons and ancestors. The Secondary is largely made up of red worms and moles. The Tertiary comprises railway tracks, patent pavements, grass, snakes, mouldy boots, beer bottles, tomato cans, intoxicated citizens, garbage, anarchists, snap-dogs and fools.”
– Ambrose Bierce

“Remember you’re a star. Never go across the alley even to dump garbage unless you are dressed to the teeth.”
– Cecil B. De Mille

“There was a beauty in the trash of the alleys which I had never noticed before; my vision now seemed sharpened, rather than impaired. As I walked along it seemed to me that the flattened beer cans and papers and weeds and junk mail had been arranged by the wind into patterns; these patterns, when I scrutinized them, lay distributed so as to comprise a visual language.”
– Sinclair, in Philip K. Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth

“The Symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.”
– from Philip K. Dick’s Valis�

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