If you've been harboring fantasies of sleeping with portly British provocateur Christopher Hitchens, hold on just a minute: he snores. It's hardly his biggest personal flaw (educated guess), but he does manage to crank out thousands of words on his snoring affliction for Men's Vogue, as part of his ongoing quest to pre-empt any and all criticisms of himself so that he can continue to talk bad about whatever he likes in peace. Here, his long-suffering (educated guess, again) wife describes the experience of a Hitchens family slumber:
"What's it like?" I asked her when I decided to face up and write this essay. "Well," she said as if she had had plenty of time to think about it. "It's a sort of one-man symphony orchestra. It ranges from a whistling bird to the sound of big boulders falling down a ravine. There's a chain saw in there somewhere. And a sniveling child making those noises that children make when they've just stopped crying: a sort of honk. A lot of the time it's in 4/4 or 6/8 regular time, but the worst is when it turns arrhythmic and cacophonous. And then sometimes it's just old-fashioned snoring, like Popeye or Homer Simpson."