Sat, March 31

March Hysteria Dept.—11:25 PM

This year's random Final Four non sequitur quip:

Joakim Noah looks like a gargantuan hybrid between Sméagol and Audrey Tautou.

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Mon, March 26

Manthony

Another bi-weekly Survivor update. (Look for this trend to continue, since I'll be sequestered without TiVo or Internet as part of this week's Bahamavention.) (Read more.)

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Tue, March 20

Let the kickbacks and graft commence—9:54 AM

Last night, I was appointed to a one-year term as the vice president of my condo association board. The mini-coup that led to this is an entertaining story for a longer post, but it turns out moving to Florida is exactly as Seinfeld depicted it.

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Mon, March 19

wake with the sun—10:20 AM

Another in a series of random doodle sketches I've created while sitting around watching TV. I liked how it turned out, so here it is.

Considering the TV is on anyway, I suppose I should be doing sketches more like this gallery of South Park family portraits (not that I could with my talent). I like these a lot; although Kenny's mom has been made unrealistically hot, I love the interaction between Eric and Mrs. Cartman.

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Thu, March 15

OMG! J and T went to V with R!—11:43 AM

FameTracker and the beloved Television Without Pity got bought, which prompted me to visit FT, something I always seem to forget to do more often. When I got there, I noticed that the venerable FameTracker Forums seemed to have disappeared from the site. (Shows how often I visit; this happened two years ago this month.)

Some Googling and visiting of related sites unearthed the fairly entertaining story of how this came about, but that's neither here nor there.

The point is, I'm passing some time today reading The Vine, which is an advice column by Sars, one of TWoP's newly wealthy founders. I've mentioned the Vine before (and in fact, Arksie and I have sent in letters). It's a fun read. I also read Annie's Mailbox (by the editors of the late Ann Landers) and Miss Manners in our paper during lunch, so I'm obviously a total idiot, but I do it mainly to enjoy Miss Manners's dripping contempt for most of her own "gentle readers" and to laugh at the people on both sides of the Annie desk. (The odds are very nearly even that a given day's Annie headline will include the word "hubby" – almost all the questions are about the sex drive of one spouse or the other failing to match up, or about neighbors or relatives that do something stupid. And almost every single response includes a recommendation of "counseling.")

Anyway! Sars is way better than the syndicated newspaper advice columnists, because she prints letters that are far more interesting, and she's a little more catty and "tough love" in her replies. But one thing Annie has over her is an insistence on editing letters to comply with a simple standard for changing names to protect the innocent. The neighbors will be referred to as "Sue and Al" or the cousin will be called "Daisy." The quotes are enough to let us know that it's not her real name.

On the Vine, you frequently get people referring to their friends as J, T, or C, maddeningly vague in that this lacks often-necessary gender context, and also it's just hard to remember who's who when all you have is one letter. The reason most people have multi-letter names is that it's easier to form an association with that than just an initial. Also, people will write something like, "for anonymity's sake, we'll call her 'Daisy'" and Sars – an editor by trade – is seemingly too polite to edit this down to just "my friend, 'Daisy'." This drives me up the wall like the title card in the early moments of Enemy of the State: an overhead establishing shot of Washington, D.C., with the frame nearly filled by the Capitol building, still sports a title card, "Washington, D.C." Where else might this be? Similarly, why else might we be calling her "Daisy?"

If I were Sars, and I had my own advice column, I would replace J, T, or C, with "Jim," "Tammy," or "Carolyn," and I would trim – or flat-out reject – letters with long-winded explanations of exceedingly simple conventions of the advice-letter format. I only mention this now because I wrote about The Vine a couple of years ago, this was already driving me batty back then, and for some reason I didn't mention it before.

This, however, is the best re-working of a cutesy anonymous sign-off I've ever seen:

Signed,
Did You Catch The Linda Ronstadt Reference In Paragraph Two

Dear No,
[...]

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Hillary: Plankton-lover?—10:54 AM

Just when you think the campaigning for the '08 presidential election has started way too soon, you realize it actually started a couple hundred years ago.

Apparently, genealogists are the new swift boat vets, because there are stories swimming around about Obama's great-great-great-grandparents and Romney's great-great-great-grandparents as if this has any bearing on a) the personalities or ideologies of the candidates; or b) anything else. It reminds me of the Scott Adams post Your Ancestors Disgust Me, which is on another topic but makes the same point.

Go back far enough and every candidate's ancestor is a slimy eel-fish with legs. And we can all agree that guy was an asshole. If you're going to pick apart our early-bird presidential front-runners, do the decent thing and start with some dumb thing they did in college.

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Thu, March 8

Magnets Are Magic!—7:46 PM

Issue #22 of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern arrived in yesterday's mail and it is... awesome!

The McSwys folks have always been at the vanguard of publishing and bookbinding norms (sometimes to their own detriment), but this time they've outdone themselves!

The book presents itself as a thick and sturdy hardcover tome, but it is actually three separate smaller paperback books which attach by magnets into the hardcover spine. You can pop 'em out, read 'em, then pop 'em back in – and even change the order. It's the durability and shelf appeal of hardcover, and the flexible portability of paperback! This is the future of publishing! All books will be published this way within five years – there's absolutely no downside. (Except maybe the books erase your hard drive if you put them in your carry-on alongside your laptop. Somebody test this out!)

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Wed, March 7

Battle for My Hate!

I've struggled with early episodes in each season of Survivor. I thought I needed to know the contestants well enough to write about them; turns out, I just have to know them well enough to loathe them. (Read more.)

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This Modern World—4:22 PM

It's great when you can tell within seconds how thoroughly you will hate someone. When they refer to cars as "cocoons" that keep them "insulated from the people around us," and say that only family and co-workers "saw us stripped of the metal that clothed and protected us," you just know they're pretentious assholes.

Which is fine for them. I'm sure they've got plenty of friends who appreciate their semi-poetic diatribes about how stupefying the suburbs are, how the Internet diminishes social interaction, candy is bad, cell phones are evil, and the only people who really have it figured out are the Amish.

In this particular story, it's another case of people too self-absorbed to realize that they can change things about their lives without swearing off TV, selling all their cars, or making some other monstrous change. Want a better rapport with your video store clerk? You don't have to sell your house, just strike up a goddamn conversation with your video store clerk.

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I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke—3:44 PM

People who don't drink Coke are almost as bad as people who don't watch TV. (Of course, as in the TV case, I'm referring to the willful abstainers – those who think they have something over on the rest of us because they "never touch the stuff." People who medically must avoid soda are fine with me. Ditto for people who don't drink Coke specifically, but still enjoy a refreshing soda beverage – your Mountain Dew, your Sunkist, your various bizarro black cherry creme soda concoctions...)

Of course these people are giddy as pigs in shit when it comes to the announcement of new healthy-style sodas from Coke and Pepsi, and very happy to publicly congratulate themselves for their own purity when the New York Times makes the mistake of asking for their thoughts on healthy Coke.

I couldn't resist a sincere reply:

I love Coke and I'm frustrated that anyone would give them a hard time about contributing to obesity. It's not meant as a health tonic; you're just supposed to enjoy it now and then as a treat. Nothing tasty is good for you, that's why as adults we're expected to take care of ourselves and practice moderation. I wish there were a pledge I could sign to tell Coke that I promise to buy Coca-Cola Classic forever, so they could breathe easy and stop producing weird-tasting low-cal variants!

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Tue, March 6

I Stand with Ann Coulter

Not really. But I do think she accidentally made a pretty good point about the entertainment press, stupid celebrity publicists, and our right to our own private hate. (Read more.)

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