For once, I’m not talking about Britney and Paris– instead, it’s the a talentless blonde that people actually take seriously: Ann Coulter.
Oh, I know, I know, it’s supposed to be a joke, like that classic Michael Richards act about lynching.
It’s funny– until this, I hadn’t really taken Edwards seriously as a threat, but now that he’s getting so much attention from Ann, maybe he’ll get more notice among human beings with actual souls.
On further reflection, the problem with Fast Company is not the silliness of pretending it’s not about Ducatis, or the unfortunate title (the same as the much-parodied business magazine) but that it’s simply a mediocre story, ill-structured and ill-told. I’ll accept less-than-stellar writing to read a really compelling story like Ultramarathon Man, and great writing can make anything seem interesting, like Paul Theroux’s account of being bored and drunk on the Trans-Siberian railway. But Gross manages neither. His memoir meanders through the moderately successful relaunch of the company and his frustrating relationship with a closeted boyfriend, then stops without ending: the boyfriend is still closeted, the company is muddling through, and Italy is still charmingly different from the US. The only things Gross learns are how to ride a bike and how to buy expensive custom shoes. His readers are even less well served: we don’t learn anything at all from his experience and are barely even entertained.
Bookdwarf brought home a motorcycle-related galley for me. Scheduled for publication in May 2007, Fast Company: A Memoir of Life, Love, and Motorcycles in Italy is the story of a man who goes to Bologna to do marketing for a struggling motorcycle manufacturer in the mid-90s. This manufacturer is carefully unnamed, but it’s obviously Ducati. Ducati is known among motorcyclists for several things, all of which are described in the book: making high-performance motorcycles that are expensive to maintain, the mid-90s meltdown and turnaround led by brash Americans, the “naked bike” craze being led by the Monster series, and the unconventional desmodromic valves in its engines. Changing the trademarked words to “Beast” and “cosmodromic” doesn’t make it less obvious. Nor does putting the silhouette of a 1980s-style Japanese cruiser on the cover– not when the author is shown on the back page posing next to a Ducati 996 and wearing Ducati-branded leathers. Least effective at hiding the identity of the company is the Library of Congress cataloging in publication data, where the entry “1. Ducati (company)” has been carefully crossed out with a black magic marker.
The book itself is OK. Gross goes to Italy, gets some fancy clothes, a hot skinhead boyfriend, and drinks coffee in a colorfully stereotypical Italian town. He’s a reasonably good writer, but I’m still unsure why they’re pretending the book isn’t about Ducati.
Via Crooks & Liars, a pointer to WaPo article on a boy who died for lack of dental care.
Now, in defense of the US private medical system– the medical system did not kill that child. It merely failed to care enough about keeping him alive. And you know, it sucks. Kids die. We can’t save them all.
But given the choice between an $80 tooth extraction and a $250,000 intensive care stay for an abscess which has spread to the brain, which will you pick?
I mean, aside from “leave him in the street to die more cheaply.” We may be talking about a poor black kid in the DC suburbs, but it’s not like it’s New Orleans, where the medical system can get away with euthanizing the uninsured and using their bodies as a substitute for sandbags to hold up the levies.
I’m kidding, I’m kidding. There’s no medical system in New Orleans.
There’s quite the history of people using their feces to express rage and disrespect for employers– see Urban Dictionary for details. In the case of Central Square, though, it’s more likely to just be one of the homeless people needing to answer the call of nature. In the stairwell of my office building.
Sadly, none of us had the presence of mind to take a picture.
There’s something to be said for the sad nobility of this David Shrigley+Blur+Shynola animation, which depicts the doomed romance between a fairy and a squirrel, but in the immortal words of Morrisey, “it says nothing to me about my life”.
Who was it that first said go eat a bag of dicks? Because that says something to me about my life, as does this video of two incredibly cute puppies doing puppy things:
Credit for being first probably goes to Best Week ever. Still, some time after November 23, 2011, when tween America’s sweetheart becomes yet another piece of meat in the machine of celebrity destruction, I will here in the Google index with the phrase “the inevitable Hannah Montana sex tape.”
… even the Japanese diplomatic corps is rude to you.
… ministers in allied countries are routinely murdered for failing to veil themselves.
… you’re the only major industrialized nation to boycott the International Criminal Court, because you’re afraid of being held liable for war crimes.
… one of the most popular television shows among your people is a weekly apologia for torture.
Need I go on?
Everybody loves a funny t-shirt. OK, many people, including me, like funny t-shirts from time to time. But I am growing tired of the fact that none of these hip t-shirt companies that keep popping up have ideas of their own: Derek Zoolander Center for Kids t-shirt at Noisebot, Derek Zoolander Center for Kids t-shirt at Snorg Tees. Let’s Hug It Out t-shirt at Snorg, Let’s Hug It Out at Noisebot.
According to the Noisebot “About Us” page, “Every one of us here at NoiseBot.com is in our 20’s. We don’t just sell this stuff. We live it every day.” Wow, man. That’s deep. You youthful entrepreneurs sure have hit the nail on the head. Your entire business is making ugly screenprints of other people’s stupid jokes. You’ve got a real sustainable brand there, because nobody else has ever thought it would be funny to do a half-assed Will Ferrell impression.
This is popping up everywhere, but I’ll jump in too: Talking Points Memo and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution both cover GA state legislator Ben Bridges’ memo stating that all of contemporary astronomy, physics, and biology are actually an ancient Jewish conspiracy based on the Kabbalah. Although Bridges now denies writing the memo, he also refuses to say he doesn’t believe it. This is a memo which actually promotes fixed-earth cosmology. Next up, Lamarckian evolution!
I suppose that science is complicated enough now that Arthur C. Clarke is being proven right, and people just throw up their hands and think of it as magic. But for those dedicated to, you know, accuracy and truth, have a look at the Scientific American guide to debunking creationist nonsense.
I’d love to see what RedState has to say about Bridges and the teaching of science in science classes, but they seem wholly immersed in cheering on the Iraq bodycount this week.
Secretly Ironic 