Morning Reading List 12.06.10

Three stories to put on your morning reading list:

*Slate‘s Jack Shafer explores his complex and sometimes heated relationship with Hotmail and Gmail. Please, Gmail, now that you have him where you want him, don’t try any funny mind games and don’t break his heart. (His story appeared in Sunday’s WaPo and on Slate.)

*NYT‘s Robert Pear writes on the famed comparison of laws and sausages. There’s a real sausage maker out there whose offended by the comparison. And the metaphors are aplenty. “The legislative meat grinder turns out many strange products,” writes Pear, who dots the story with “pork” and “sausage” and “laws” and so on.

* Peter Boyer tackles the subject of the new House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) in a piece dated Dec. 13. Headline: “House Rule: Will John Boehner control the Tea Party Congress?” As opposed to The Daily Show’s “orange” and other descriptions of  “bronze” and “spray-on skin” to name a few, Boyer calls Boehner’s skin tone “mahogany” and his voice a “smoky baritone.” (Smoking being the key point.) The family portion delves into far greater detail than most stories on Boehner, discussing his mother’s smoking until the end, even while on oxygen. And the “inevitable” nickname Boner? Confirmed. He had it in high school.

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