Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson are driving across the USA, correcting punctuation and spelling errors in signage and on posters: "Picture a pair of Kerouacs armed with Sharpies and erasers and righteous indignation--holding back a flood of mixed metaphors and spelling mistakes and extraneous punctuation so commonplace we rarely notice it anymore. But they are 28 and idealistic." My kind of people!
May 2008 Archives
Believe it or not, Germaine Greer wrote an entire essay on Posh Spice—and it's positive: "Victoria Beckham may have seemed the least talented of the Spice Girls but her real talent lay elsewhere. She is an artist in the same genre as Damien Hirst: marketing. In an era of bare bellies, painted legs, visible underwear, junk jewellery and grisly computer generated prints, she is a lone champion of elegance for working girls."
(This makes more sense if you read Greer's essay in gallery view, with accompanying photos.)
Besides the MTA and DesignNotes, are there other .info sites worth a damn? I realized a long time ago I was getting a lot of comment spam linking to sites on that top-level domain, so I added it to my filters and have been pretty happy since, but I wonder if there are any other sites besides these two that I should know about.
(Um, so since comments with .info in them automagically get junked, if you're sharing an url please just type .ofni instead and I'll change it manually after it goes through.)
Watching this day in the life-style documentary of Tron Guy at ROFLCon last month kinda makes me regret not going. Man, I love Tron Guy.
[ via Emptyage ]
Bea Arthur's 10 Best Moments: "In honor of her Bea-Day, if you will, we've decided to scour Youtube for some of her greatest moments. What we found, ladies and gentleman, might be the greatest collection of televised moments in the history of the medium." #9, #8 and #1 make me especially happy. [ via B.A.'s Weblog ]
5 Cats that Look Like Wilford Brimley. My friend Mike: "I really like the attempt to represent Wilford in all his divine aspects."
Chris Rock at Time's 100 Party, on whether Hillary Clinton should drop out of the race: "If you leave a club at 1 a.m., it was your choice not to get laid. But if you wait till the club closes, you're ugly, and that's why you didn't get laid."
See also: Hillary GTFO, Hillary is 404
My favorite blog find today is the Chaptzem Blog, which is devoted to news of interest to Brooklyn's Hasidic community. It's a great read, written in English with Yiddish mixed in, and it lets you peek at a community smack dab in your midst that seems like it inhabits its own parallel universe. This email written by a nineteen-year-old who wants a wife is great:
What really breaks me into little pieces is that my mother goes around telling all the shadchunim what a big learner I am and that I need a girl that will support me in learning for many years. I don't know, but I just can't see myself having to sit in kolel for the next who knows how many years just because my future wife and father in law thinks that that is what I am. I can see myself having a shiur every day after work but not to be stuck in a kolel for many years. It's just not me.
I love that his email is so heartfelt, but also that even though the situation seems specific to his community, switch a few words and it's totally something you'd hear from an Asian kid complaining about his mom. Our differences, sometimes they don't really make us different.
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?
