My subway reading the past couple of days has been the Bruce Sterling collection Globalhead. This morning I was sailing right through—until I decided to change things up and take a different route to work. When I hopped onto the 6 train downtown, I entered the flow of a voice that made continuing to read impossible.

The owner of the voice wore a strip of newspaper pinned in her hair. She sat looking at nothing and no one, and her first rant was about how Bush should be impeached. Fair enough. Her next rant was a long, vulgar, and virtuoso screed against Condi Rice, which I wish I could reproduce in full but which ended with the phrase "got-damn bitch-ass skank."

I sort of lost the thread when Bill Gates became her next target—don't you know that AIDS isn't the problem, Microsoft is the problem?—but it occurred to me to wonder if anyone had bothered to tell her that the Democrats won Congress last week.