Tennis, no one?

Cary Tennis of Salon.com's "Since you asked" column has such a way with words.
He describes one person as

"... an exploding Pinto, an old bag of spoiled peaches. He's a frown
magnet, a disappointing afternoon. He's a bad gasket, a supermarket go-back, a
failed experiment, a wilted head of lettuce. He's yesterday's jacket and
tomorrow's bad shoes rolled into one... a divorce lawyer's meal ticket and that's
about it. ..."

That's just one example of a certain sumpin'; it's keen observation, wit, sense, sure he's piling on the descriptions, but never a word astray. Let's see if I can find another example. Ooh, here's one:

"Here are some things about other people that I think you should
know: People sometimes do things for no reason except they just want to... For
instance, a person will want an ice-cream cone, and next thing you know he's
walking down the street toward the place where they have the big cardboard
barrels of many different flavors and the people behind the counter in aprons.
If you ask him if he believes in ice cream, he might claim to have no particular
passion or belief in ice cream itself. Nonetheless, he wants an ice-cream cone
and so off he goes, jingling the change in his pocket. One day in the future,
when sufficient computing power exists, we may be able to say with some
certainty why a particular person arose from a desk at a particular time of day
to go get ice cream. But until then, we just say, "Oh, Hank? He went to get an
ice-cream cone." "

This isn't really the best stuff, just gleaned over 15 minutes or so. And so ends the first of a very irregular feature on Writers I Like.