Now that it’s cooling off and I’m taking the train and bus more, I’m reading more. I’ve just started on The Electric Michelangelo, which begins with a portrait of a downmarket northern-England seaside town, where the protagonist spends his childhood. According to the back of the book, he’s going to grow up to be a tattoo artist in Coney Island. Reviews are good, and Bookdwarf liked it. So far, I like it as well, although the prose is a little overwrought in places. Still, it’s nice to read something and know that the writer has paid a lot of attention to how the words sound and feel together, and tried to make it beautiful rather than just easy to digest.
Author: Aaron Weber
Advice from… Philosophers
Ask Philosophers, at Amherst: it’s basically an advice column by the philosophy department. Most of the questions are a little more serious than this one, about the ethics of switching allegiance from one sports team to another, but they’re still pretty neat. It’s almost as amusing, and perhaps more useful, than The Non-Expert, whose slogan is “Experts answer what they know; the Non-Expert answers everything.”
Impactful Copywriting
The latest issue of Ad Report Card from Slate covers the most recent Miller High life ad campaign, involving no humor or irony. The critic notes: “It’s always a dangerous game to guess at how ironic (or not) the kids are being these days: Are they drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon to be funny? Do they actually just like it? Are they not even sure anymore?”
And you know, I have no idea. PBR is good for the money, which is to say, it sucks but it’s cheap. I fully expected Miller High Life to battle Schlitz for supremacy as hipster swill, but if it’s going to move upmarket as this article predicts, I’m guessing that means Miller has decided to leave Schlitz and PBR to have the alterna-swill category and want to fight for the mainstream-swill category with Bud.
Side note on market share: Budweiser seems to be stuck in a plight similar to that of Harley-Davidson: they are losing market share at the very high end (custom bikes or microbrews) and at the low end (Hyosung, Kawasaki, Schlitz, Miller). What will they do about the squeeze?
Harley Davidson seems to be expanding into new markets: They’re advertising the Sportster in women’s magazines (women now buy 10% of new bikes, and rising), they bought a sport-bike company (Buell), and they’ve built a line of bikes that don’t look much like their past efforts (V-Rod, etc). Bud is focusing on more niches: they’re the official beer of every sporting event you could possibly imagine (Gay Ultimate Frisbee of Northwest Minnesota? Check.) and are constantly developing more niche products (B-to-the-E, Bud Select… ).
Will it be, as they say in the biz, “impactful”? Hell if I know.
How I Feel About the Red Sox
Note that this is almost a week after I hit my face on the bedside table at the hotel. The original bruise extended pretty far up the forehead and was swollen to occlude my eye.
Flyover territory
I’ve always regarded Indiana as a land of homespun wisdom, sweet corn, and eighteen kinds of pie, but with books like Jesusland, about the travails of an interracial family living out there in the 80s, I began to wonder if its friendly reputation concealed some kind of dark underbelly.
Yes it does. Oh, my, yes it does. Apparently, according to several news articles, this is for real: A bill that would ban unmarried people and gays from getting IVF donations. (Apparently doesn’t require this if you’re planning on being the parent of the child– only for donations which would mean that one genetic parent wasn’t involved after the birth). But still– something that would require you to go through a placement agency to adopt a zygote? Something which could deny you that permission if they thought you weren’t religious enough, or didn’t have good taste in flooring, or had too-good taste in flooring and and might like the flooring more than the child and try to return it? Sure, I’ve often said you should need a license to raise one of those things, but I was joking!
Fortunately, the news articles note that “Indiana Lawmakers Seek to Ban, Control Assisted Impregnation”. So unassisted, miraculous impregnation is still in the clear.
Date with Destiny
Well, this Saturday I have a 10:00 AM date with a 1.4 liter (excuse me, 88 cubic inch) twin-cylinder engine attached to a Harley Davidson. They didn’t have the futuristic-looking V-Rod in stock, so we’re going with the Heritage Softail Classic, which is sort of a retro-touring-style bike, and has the advantage of big comfortable passenger seats.
1.4 liters is almost twice as much engine as I have even contemplated wanting. Yes, I’m getting the extra insurance.
It’s interesting when people die
I found out by watching the TV at the gym that Lisa Marie Presley has done a cover version of Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry.” It’s practically written about her, and she does a good enough job with it, with the style evoking 80s hair bands and the movie clips evoking 90s media frenzies. On the other hand, the heavy breathing goes way past “sexy” and “creepy stalker on the phone” to “has she got asthma?”
That was one of my favorite songs when I was about ten, but I thought it was actually about laundry.
Enviable?
Notes in my ongoing obsession with people who have funny names and interesting jobs: Improper Bostonian shopping columnist Mopsy Strange Kennedy and the futurist and trend-tracker Faith Popcorn. Maybe I should change my name to something more interesting, or start going by my middle name or something.
Will there be a place to plug in my laptop?
Spook, the new book on the afterlife by Mary Roach is due out this month. Roach is most known for her earlier book Stiff, a witty layman’s approach to what happens to our bodies when we die: burial rites, brain banks, medical cadavers, interviews with forensic entomologists, the whole deal. The book even made a short appearance on Six Feet Under.
Spook continues the funny, informative approach in her desire to find out what the afterlife is like, starting with whether there’s a place to plug in her laptop. Along the way she covers ghosts, soul-weighing, and ectoplasm, and makes short detours into quantum mechanics, information theory, and one man’s search for the moment that a soul enters a human embryo.
Both books have the same winning balance of humor and information, and I recommend them strongly.
Tragedy leads to laughter
We make jokes about things because they are horrible, and laughing about them somehow makes them seem less horrible. For example, these horrible tattoos, which I found courtesy of the rather wonderful Modblog (as in body-modification blog. Not for the squeamish).
Or our president, as in the joke that my brother sent me today:
Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing. He concludes by saying: “Yesterday, three Brazilian soldiers were killed.” OH NO!” Bush exclaims. “That’s terrible!” Bush’s staff is stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the president sits with head in hands. Finally, the president looks up and asks, “How many is a brazillion?”
Secretly Ironic 