January 2009
64 posts
Upon sobering up I feel a pressing urge to grab the headiest text within arm’s reach and let loose with a flurry of quote posts so that last night’s drunken exhibitionism can be pushed deep into the archives and hopefully go unnoticed by my father (hi Dad!) on the occasion of his next visit to my blog.
But alas, I’m in the office and all the nearest books bear the O’Reilly...
Lest we forget →
Because this was awesome.
Pavement — Range Life
Here’s to a...
Built to Spill — You Were Right
Variations...
The Moleskine of my discontent
Growing up I kept a journal. So far as I can tell this activity served no other function than to sprinkle my remaining lot of possessions in my parents’ basement with a few leather-bound afikomen to be unearthed at a later date, thematically teenaged missives which would afford me little more than the opportunity to feel alienated from the person I once was.
Curiosity sent me delving into...
douchebag
Pronunciation: \düsh bag\ Function: noun Etymology: slang Definition: A douchebag is not defined as simply a series of hand gestures, facial expressions, overly gelled hair or a giant Jesus bling around the neck. A douchebag is a state of mind. It is a place where men go to become scrote. Where machismo mixes with testosterone to form a foul cocktail of rank sewage that smells vaguely of cheap...
The Raveonettes — Do You Believe Her
I prefer androgyny
On a related note, men like Mr. Sussman paralyze me, in a gendered sense: on the one hand I’m morbidly ashamed to be in possession of a Y-chromosome and thereby genetically associated with a whole host of despicable douchebags, though at the same time I can’t stomach the thought of having a womb and being told by said douchebags what I can and cannot do with it.
Deep in Debt, and Now Deep in Worry →
Wherein Ben Stein tugs at your heartstrings with the tragic tale of one woman’s fall from extravagant wealth.
“I thought about Mandela, Dr. King and Gandhi and tried to put some perspective...”
– Rod Blagojevich doubles down on the hyperbole after realizing his Pearl Harbor analogy fell on deaf ears.
Apparently I’m not alone in detecting a subtle whiff of cultural insensitivity from all these white people on the internet making a big to-do over Aretha Franklin’s hat.
Inter Mirifica
On the occasion of the 43rd annual World Communications Day, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a message on the theme of “New Technologies, New Relationships: Promoting a Culture of Respect, Dialogue and Friendship.”
The Pope is “conscious of those who constitute the so-called digital generation,” and he would like “to share with them, in particular, some ideas concerning...
Inaugural quartet performance pre-recorded →
Unsurprising, really: Tatooine’s own Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes probably pre-recorded their shit, too.
“President Barack Obama signed an executive order calling for the closure of...”
– Jay Leno
“Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind. Everything really...”
– Woody Allen, Manhattan.
“It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari.”
– White House spokesman Bill Burton, describing the transition from a modern, web-driven campaign to a technologically antiquated White House.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt
Every website hosts a file that determines those addresses in the domain which can be indexed by search engines and those which are disallowed from being queried against.
The robots.txt file on the newly-updated White House website contains two lines:
User-agent: * Disallow: /includes/
Under the Bush administration, the list of disallowed assets grew to 2,319.
(via YCombinator News)
27.17%
As of today George W. Bush has been president for 27.17 percent of the time I’ve been alive. After today that number will only go down.
43++;
GOP Appointees Scramble for the Few Washington... →
…while hearts bleed and rivers are cried the world over.
PTBNL
At the end of eight long years of very questionable ethics in the George W. Bush administration I half expect the next twenty-some-odd hours to entail a flurry of presidential pardons, akin to those last days leading up to the trade deadline in Major League Baseball.
After all, Ford took care of Nixon while H.W. cleaned up the mess for the Iran Contra crew.
But then I’m reminded: with one...
Merlin Mann says ”good blogs reflect focused obsessions,” that “people start real blogs because they think about something a lot.” In that same vein, I suspect Tumblr’s success is largely due to the fact it provides users with a simple platform for addressing our most focused obsessions: ourselves.
“Young conservatives make me sad. They have names like ‘S.E. Cupp’ or...”
– Clayton Cubitt
Crit Porn. →
God, how I love a good literary smackdown. Like James Wolcott’s tireless bludgeoning of David Denby. Or David Foster Wallace’s polite suggestion that Bret Easton Ellis is a useless sack of shit. Or that time John Leonard bent Dale Peck over his knee.
None of these moments, though, however magnificently indulgent they may be, can compare in terms of the orgiastic excess that is Matt...
The Raveonettes — Dead Sound
…brb.
The word of the day according to the Televator—my pet name for the alternately infuriating and unwittingly hilarious television mounted in a high corner of my office building’s elevators, situated at just the right height as to crane the necks of a herd of bleary-eyed workers at 9am like a standing room only audience at a movie theater with only a front row—is...
The Academic Enclave →
America’s deficit in the ledger of public intellectuals is a phenomenon that has long intrigued me. I remember finding it so foreign when Derrida died and the French press almost immediately began a debate over who was his heir apparent in French intellectual life. That’s a degree of cultural navel-gazing we simply don’t witness stateside, in these days when William James would...
copycats:
“Umbrella” by Scott Simons
originally...
Me: The new coffee maker has an option called "50/50."
Coworker: Yeah, WTF?
Me: I think it means "half-caff."
Coworker: Half-calfs are socks.
Me: Huh?
Coworker: Socks.
Me: Oh--I thought you said 'sophist.'
Coworker: No. That's not a word. Think before you talk.
“One of the hottest philosophical topics on the internet is Ayn Rand. Her...”
– John Lanchester in the London Review of Books.
A few months back we hypothesized that upon beating the “Wax Off” challenge in Geometry Wars 2: Retro Evolved—if it were it even humanly possible to do so—a message would be broadcast on XBox Live and quickly relayed to all the single ladies on the internet whereupon torrents of eligible women the world over, hearing of your unparalleled dexterity, would be banging down...
We work in social media.
Dan: So how's it feel, first day at a new job and all?
Steve: Feels good. I need to tweet about it.
James Newell Osterberg, Jr. and the Stooges...
WatchBOOM.
I have nothing to add to this and no good reason to be posting it, but I can’t not crib such a colorful admonition from my personal fashion consultant against the waterproof footwear I almost (but didn’t) buy last night. Thank you, brainland:
Langer, I have to reiterate:
STRAIGHT MEN MUST NEVER, EVER WEAR KNEE-HIGH BOOTS. I don’t care if it’s 1000 degrees below zero, and freezing...