Similes from the New York Times

SIMILES FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

1. Each slice was perched on a round of Italian bread, but most of the men ate only the meat and stacked the bread slices in front of them, tallying their gluttony like poker players amassing chips. (Paul Lukas, 1/30/08) 2. The tiny Ms. Dundas, her mud-brown hair in an unflattering mop, scampers around the kitchen like a frenzied squirrel as Lenny tries to attend to all the pressing tasks at hand. (Charles Isherwood, from a review of a revival of the play Crimes of the Heart, 2/15/08) 3. Like rival warships pulling into the same small harbor, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton held rallies hours apart and exchanged oratorical barrages here Sunday. (Michael Powell, 3/3/08) 4. Like a stray strand of spaghetti just outside of the dinner plate, the route of the G subway line runs, for the most part, from Brooklyn to Queens ? but decidedly not into Manhattan. (Anthony Ramirez, 4/9/08) 5. Mr. Gibson, who sat back in his chair and wriggled his foot impatiently, had the skeptical, annoyed tone of a university president who agrees to interview the daughter of a trustee, but doesn't believe she merits admission. (Alessandra Stanley, about ABC-TV anchor Charles Gibson's pre-election interview with Sarah Palin, 9/12/08) 6. As thin as an iPod Nano, as full of adolescent self-display as a Facebook page, "Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist" strives to capture, in meticulous detail, what it's like to be young right now. (A.O. Scott, 10/3/08) 7. Like water rushing over a river's banks, the federal government's rapidly mounting expenses are overwhelming the federal budget and increasing an already swollen deficit. (Louis Uchitelle and Robert Pear, 10/20/08) 8. They sprinted through the tunnel toward the victorious visitors' locker room. Quarterback Brett Favre and cornerback Ty Law, two of the oldest players on the Jets, bounded up the ramp like children in a footrace instead of golden oldies with 32 years of combined N.F.L. experience. (Greg Bishop, 11/24/08) 9. Getting between a broker and his bonus is like getting between a schnauzer and his lunch bowl. He may not bite you, but you are going to smell his breath. (Alan Feuer and Karen Zraick, 1/31/09) 10. So much, yet so little, is known about Dorothy Wordsworth that she is impossibly attractive to biographers and scholars, who glide down her empty expanses like skiers, some of them leaping from helicopters to explore the stranger, more forbidding peaks. (Dwight Garner 2/25/09) 11. As for the veal, it was pounded so thin when I had it that I could have read a Bumble Bee label through it, and it adhered like wet tissue paper to the plate. Its texture was off- putting; its taste, sadly muted. (Frank Bruni, 3/4/09) 12. When Jimmy Fallon showed up on NBC's "Late Night" last week without a sidekick, it looked like yet another sign that the Ed McMahon era is over; so many talk show hosts work solo that the second-banana position seems almost as obsolete as the foretopman or the Linotype operator. Even the word sounds antiquated: current parlance favors the more "Top Gun"-ian term, wingman. (Alessandra Stanley, 3/8/09) 13. Pithy little life lessons keep coming at you in Michael Jacobs's "Impressionism," as if off a conveyor belt in a greeting card factory. But the one most immediately relevant to this undernourished play, which stars an ill-used Jeremy Irons and Joan Allen, has to do with looking at life as if it were an Impressionist painting. (Ben Brantley, 3/25/09) 14. The slim red envelopes [of Netflix] are everywhere these days, each packed with a single DVD, pumping like platelets through the nation's mail system. (Michael Wilson, 3/29/09) 15. Indeed, goats have long held a lowly reputation. Scavengers, they are falsely accused of eating tin cans. Their unappetizing visage is simultaneously dopey and satanic, like a Disney character with a terrible secret. (Henry Alford, 4/1/09) 16. Watching "The Philanthropist," a moribund revival of a 1969 play by Christopher Hampton that opened Sunday night at the American Airlines Theater, is like being stuck in a stuffy room with a bunch of pompous, malicious or dreary writers and academics. (Charles Isherwood, 4/27/09) 17. Above the cobblestone streets, in her Balinese-inspired living room-cum-office, Diane von Furstenberg is stretched like a cat on the couch, coolly gazing beyond the Buddha statues and glass terrace doors at the rain. (Stephanie Rosenbloom, 7/18/09) 18. The "garden platter" consists of whatever was picked fresh that morning. On a recent visit, the greens, snap peas, tomatoes and squash tossed in a white wine vinaigrette tasted like summer in a bowl. (Emily Denitto, 8/14/09) 19. Water levels have dropped more than three feet in the last 10 years and explosive algae blooms, which cover the lake's surface like a coat of thick green paint, are choking off the fish. (Jeffrey Gettleman, 8/16/09)

Source: http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/teachersatwork/1967/ STUDENT SIMILES Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

He spoke with wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature prime English beef.

She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.

The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and "Sex in the City" comes on at 7:00 pm instead of 7:30pm.

Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot oil.

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

Even at 86, Grandad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

The dancer rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

He was in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

She was as easy as the TV Guide crossword.

She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

http://www.caughtatwork.net/wisdom/view.php?itemid=283