He now reached to a bulky furnacelike compartment of the slicing machine and forcefully pulled its two panels apart. Inside, pistons fired and, centered in this confusion, six shining apples atop six separate cylinders spun furiously on their axes while the entire mechanism supporting them rotated. The whole thing resembled some science-fiction rib cage, as if the small, whirling apples inside were the organic parts powering the entire machine.I love this stuff: the way aerodynamics force jumbo jets to look like sharks, etc. Anything that makes a big mechanical contraption look like it's cousing to some organic thing. But in a letdown, the article provides no picture of the anthropomorphic machine described. And so I read it and I think, Aw bullshit. If the machine really looked like a rib cage, they woulda showed it.
Meanwhile, about ten pages later, Dan Halpern's piece on on the rodeo business begins with this pitch perfect opening sentence:
Generally speaking, you could rely on the hands to get to the Gator Bar by midmorning and begin on the whiskey and Cokes forthwith.You don't even want there to be a picture, because the camera can't give you an image any better than the one that sentence gives you. From the clinical "Generally speaking" to the colloquial "begin on" to the eyes-of-god "forthwith," that's how you do voice. Bang: you know these guys.
