Baum continually serves up wonderful detail and phrasing: during Katrina "the tang of a thousand busted-open oak trees made the air taste scrubbed," and after it downtown was full of "law enforcement golf shirts with their guns in the open like the genitals on short-haired street dogs".
"He was busted at the end, absolutely busted.
Jake's avatar — wasp-waisted, nine feet tall, blue — walked through a dusky forest thick with purple, green, pink, and cyan plants that pushed past the boundary of the screen and gently grazed the air, like plastic foliage poking out from a busted terrarium.
Americans who described themselves as satisfied tended to live in places where the quality of life was good by most standards — where the sun shone a lot, the air was reasonably clear, housing didn't leave you busted, traffic wasn't too fierce and so on.
His best sequence began with 2 minutes 8 seconds left in the game, with the Knicks up by 5. Trapped in the right corner, Ward saved a loose ball, going up in the air while hurtling out of bounds, finding an open teammate, like a quarterback on a busted play.
