Which Quote Is More Nauseating?

Sometimes I regret reading the paper over breakfast, when I come across stories such as To Buy Children’s Gifts, Mothers Do Without. Cue the icky-sticky strings:

Come Christmas, McKenna Hunt, a gregarious little girl from Safety Harbor, Fla., will receive the play kitchen and the Elmo doll she wants. But her mother, Kristen Hunt, will go without the designer jeans she covets this season....

“I want her to be able to look back,” Ms. Hunt declared, “and say, ‘Even though they were tough times, my mom was still able to give me stuff.’ ”

Martyr mom Kristen Hunt with the all-important stuff she bought her daughter for Xmas. (Instead of buying a play kitchen, why not save the money and just--gasp!--spend time with the kid in the real kitchen and--double gasp!--teach her to cook?) Photo for NYT by Charity Beck.

On the other hand, there's On the Block: Anarchy and Nostalgia, about Christie's recent auction of punk memorabilia. Cue The Ramones!

“I lived through it, and now I can afford it,” said [Scott Wittman, Tony- and Grammy-winning composer and lyricist for “Hairspray”], who like many of the buyers viewed the sale as not just music history but also New York City history.

“I look at it as revisiting my youth,” he added. “I ran into John Varvatos,” the designer whose pricey boutique now occupies the former CBGB space on the Bowery, “and I said, ‘I used to throw up in that corner.’ It brings a tear to my eye.”

The infamous men's john at CBGB, courtesy of urinal.net. (The women's was just as terrifying. I made it a point to go at home, a few blocks away, before I went to the club. And to drink as little as possible once there.)