Tim Gunn's Guide to Polygamist Style: "Let's redefine the prairie dress. Lets get this some style. Let's give it some chicness. And let's help these women look great!" And yes, in case you were wondering about those shoes—he totally recommends "a cute little ballet flat, in a metallic." Thank you for this, Mo Rocca.
Wylie Dufresne + PDT = the $5 Wylie Dog, "a deep-fried Crif Dog wiener nestled against a baton of WD-50 deep-fried mayo" breaded with hot dog bun-crumbs, topped with tomato molasses, freeze-dried onions and shredded romaine. Yes, please! [ via Eater ]
David Sedaris has a (great, of course) piece in the New Yorker, on smoking (and eventually quitting), and I love this bit profiling smokers by their brand allegiences:
Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems for alcoholics, and Mores for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren’t. One should never lend money to a Marlboro-menthol smoker, though you could usually count on a regular-Marlboro person to pay you back.
Can you guess what brand he smoked before reading his essay?
Dial a Human! I super duper love this site and always forget it exists until I have to call Con Edison because their voice menus are so tedious; DaH! tells you which buttons to press and in what sequence so you can bypass the menus and talk to an actual person.
Heidi Montag & Spencer Pratt's tabloid deal, on The Superficial. Well, duh, of course they've been selling their own stories—anyone with half a brain figured that out a long time ago with one look at any of the obviously, terribly staged photos of them allegedly frolicking in the wild. What I'm wondering is if every time Speidi "news" breaks, do Jakob and Julia feel like they missed the boat somehow?
My friend Todd's movie portmanteaus are pretty great: "No Country for Grumpy Old Men: Anton Chiguhr, now in his late 70s, has a humorous feud with his cantankerous neighbor over the new hottie who has moved next door."
How to unlock everything in Mario Kart Wii—and there's a lot of stuff to unlock. I think it's a great touch that you get Rosalina quicker if you have a saved game of Super Mario Galaxy, and it's nice to have another female character to play with, even if her voice/lines in the game are incredibly annoying.
Massimo Vignelli has updated his classic modernist 1972 map of the NYC subway system for 2008, and is releasing a limited edition of 500 36" x 45" prints for $299, all signed by Vignelli and available only through Men's Vogue.
I hate that I can't afford it but at least the proceeds are going to a charity, the South Bronx's Green Worker Coop.
[ via tumbl.us ]
All of the book cover illustrations from the 70s French science fiction imprint Chute Libre are driving me insane, they're so beautiful and just so perfectly of their time. They make me want to have an underground volcano lair to hang posters of them in.
[ via Asphalt Eden ]
From Long Live the Dress (for Now), by Guy Trebay:
Anyone who pays attention to fashion may want to know that those in charge of deciding these things have pronounced doom on the dress.They, meaning mainly fashion editors and designers, claim the dress is dead. Kaput. Three years of women in dresses is enough.
Of course, anyone who pays attention to fashion knows that it's run mainly by gay men and women-hating women—most of whom don't give an honest shit that women actually like wearing dresses because they're easy to wear and oh-so-flattering. Or, you know, that straight men love seeing us in dresses. So fuck the fashion industry and fuck the "full-legged, pleated high- and low-waisted" pants they want us to wear in the fall; my dress-wearing compatriots, let's keep on keepin' on.
Lynchings in Congo as penis theft panic hits capital: "It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny," said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station."
mon.thly.info lets you keep track of your menstrual cycles; it's free, simple to use, easy on the eyes, and once you've put enough data into it, gives you data about your cycles and warns you by email when your next period is about to hit. I think the only way it could be better is if it delivered tampons, put my heating pad in the microwave and massaged my feet.
Which is more awesome: the Fantasy Critical Mass Hand Daggers on the left ("the Ultimate in hand protection" for $95) or the scorpion-like Fantasy Death Stalker Knife on the right (surely a bargain at $69)? I can't decide.
Nancy Franklin, on my favorite fake reality show, in the, uh, New Yorker:
"I have yet to hear any character on the show say something interesting or funny (though there are a couple of moments that call up bits in Jessica Simpson’s reality show several years ago, such as her breaking her head over the conundrum of “chicken of the sea”) or see anything that expands my sense of what it’s like to be a young person in Los Angeles. But “The Hills” isn’t aiming to stimulate or inspire; I think people watch it mostly to figure out why they’re watching it."
Audio portrait of a wet blowjob and whispered dirty talk. Part IV. Clayton Cubitt has been posting these for a while but this is the first one I've actually listened to; I thought it probably be gross but it's actually very intimate—and really, really hot. I wonder what it would be like to listen to this on my iPod during a long subway ride.
Someone over on ohnotheydidnt scanned in EW's preview of the upcoming X-Files movie, I thought this was the most interesting bit:
"Whatever happens, Carter and Spotnitz both believe the real key to The X-Files lies in Mulder and Scully's relationship, which promises to be a big part of the new film. The series ended with the duo in love and on the lam, and Carter says the movie will be "true to the stories that we've told, and to that final episode." But just like here in the real world, time has passed. "Mulder and Scully have not been frozen in ice," Duchovny says. "They've been leading some kind of life, together or apart, in some parallel dimension. They've had experiences that we'll never know about."
I started watching the show when it first came out, literally half a lifetime (my lifetime) ago, so as you can probably imagine I'm both terribly excited and completely terrified to see this movie. I can't believe Chris Carter gave it such a stupid name; you'd think he'd have learned his lesson from Fight the Future, but I guess that was too much to hope for? In the parallel dimension where I have a kajillion dollars and could buy him out, this movie would be written and named by Darin Morgan instead.
My favorite restaurant in Chinatown, New Green Bo on Bayard, turned ten recently and changed their name: "We're 10 years old, and we have so many nice customers, so we made it Nice Green Bo." I love that. [ via Eater ]
Japanese Anatomical Charts, beautiful, delicate and a bit mad, over at the Morbid Anatomy blog.
angry asian man did a great interview with John Cho recently; this is my favorite part, Cho explaining why he thinks Harold & Kumar resonated so strongly with Asian American moviegoers:
I think there's something, from a racial standpoint, an attitude that feels accurate... And I think it might be the fact that it addresses race as we do—as people of color do—that we're aware of it, that we live with it, but it doesn't consume us. And sometimes, white media thinks that we're obsessed with it, and then Asian American films... we make films that obssess over our race. It's an hour and a half of people talking about what it means to be Asian.
But Harold and Kumar addresses it, then doesn't, then addresses it, then kind of addresses it, then laughs at it... and then somebody smokes pot. You know, which kind of feels like life, which feels accurate.
Which brings me to Stuff White People Like, which lots of people—most, if not all, of them white—sent me all throughout March. if you're wondering why I never talked about it here, it's because it really ticks me off and I couldn't articulate why until Adam put his finger on it, in a conversation with someone else:
me: it’s all over because it’s by white people for white people and it doesn’t challenge them on race
bexns: so white people trying to make fun of themselves?
me: it’s a celebration of whiteness pretending that it’s a critique of whiteness
Bingo! So of course, one of the top posts on there is entry 11, asian girls, and the person that sent Stuff White People Like to my alumni mailing list was a jackass I briefly dated who turned out to have a raging asian fetish. Ugh, so gross.
Carl Zimmer's Science Tattoo Emporium: "Underneath their sober lab coats and flannel shirts, scientists hide images of their scientific passions. Here they are revealed to all." [ via PixelFish ]
One perk of being in a polygamous cult: great hair. The Guardian made me laugh today! [ via Amy's Robot ]
Funny comment on Ernie's post about trying to unplug:
Procrasturbation, n. – Wasting time by doing a less onerous task. Particularly popular with freelancers and those who “work from home”. Example: rather than doing my taxes, i decided to finally do last year’s spring cleaning.
This got me thinking about my favorite ways to procrasturbate from particular things—I tend to answer my email backlog when I don't want to work (but would feel too guilty browsing Flickr or Facebook), and when I don't want to put away the clothes on my floor I usually take the trash out and sort the recycling. Actually, I've already worked out how to make procrasturbation work for me: I hate running so much that getting a treadmill would probably drastically improve both my productivity and my room's tidiness. Alas, no space in my old school tenement apartment...
I put off reading The GQ Q&A: Keith Richards for a few days, which I came to regret after getting to the seventh paragraph, in which we learn that he wears purple Uggs. Let me repeat that: Keith Richards wears purple Uggs. Things just keep getting better and better the further you go—and I mean that non-ironically, you hipster asshole. This is seriously one of my favorite interviews of all time.
Onsen tamago is a delicate egg dish commonly served at hot springs hotels in Japan: "the eggs are ‘poached’ inside the shells; when they’re ready, you crack it open into a bowl filled with a mixture of dashi, mirin and soy sauce, sprinkle over some spring onions, and slurp it all down. [ via finn del.icio.us ]
Favorite bit of FourFour's latest America's Next Top Model review:
"I cannot believe that there's someone ON EARTH who's so into being indie-cool that they wouldn't own up to even having heard a Britney Spears song. And if that were true, wouldn't avoiding Britney Spears' frequently ubiquitous pop songs require a ton of time and effort? You want us to believe that you don't care Lauren, but I think it's obvious that you care too much. Revise and give into the Britney."
I actually like Lauren a lot, because a) she takes great photos and b) most everyone I know and love is rebellious to the point of annoyance about something, but if Anil has taught me anything over the years, it is to not have any patience for when people are being snobby about pop culture. Also: "give into the Britney" is now in my lexicon.
I love Chris's Invincible Super-Blog for setting the lyrics of Pulp's Common People to visuals from Archie Comics, it's totally brilliant. My favorite version of this song is actually William Shatner's cover, from his 2004 album Has Been, and I say that a) completely without irony and b) having heard Jarvis Cocker himself sing it last year. Here, have a listen:
[ via Fluxtumblr ]
VS Naipaul: The Long Arrival, by Robert McCrum. Good long two part piece on the man widely considered to be both the greatest writer in the English language and a total jerk; it makes me feel even guiltier than usual for not having gotten around to reading any of his work yet. Really though I am posting this mainly to say that you kind of really have to love a country in which a writer can just use the word "valetudinarian" in a newspaper and not have their editor change it or make them explain it, just letting it sit in context. Vive la reine!
I have a confession to make, something that's been churning inside me for a long time, waiting to be let out. There is a truth that needs to be told and that truth is this: I kind of really, really love Céline Dion.
One sleepless night years ago I watched Oprah's behind-the-scene special of her Vegas show right before it opened and I realized that, as Rich of FourFour put it recently after watching her DVD special, she is "a fucking spaz. There's almost a druggy effect due to her aforementioned goody-goody rep: watching this stuff, I felt high because I could not believe that boring old Céline was capable of being such a ball of weirdness. Her M.O.R. reputation is hilarious because she is, in fact, all over the road." If you cannot imagine this, and believe me I understand why because I was once like you, all will become clear after watching this clips reel he put together:
Right? She crazy! You might not ever want to hear the Titanic theme ever again—no one does—but you can't tell me that that is not a person whose goofiness you'd find endearing if you met her in the flesh.
P.S. Like Rich, my love does not extend to her music except for two songs—a good pop song is a good pop song, and I keep it real. The title of this entry gives the first away, feel free to speculate on the second one or confess your own affection in the comments.
P.P.S. If you too have love in your heart, you will find the Céline Dion Workout parody pleasing.
