Is this not a great shirt? Click the link to buy it for me. I wear a Men’s Large. E-mail me for shipping info. Thanks.
The Black Laser
See this?
Do you know what this is? If you’ve been keeping up on all the blogs, you do, but let me illuminate you in case you haven’t. This magical little turd is the new SARCASM PUNCTUATION MARK which you can buy from US-based Sarcasm Inc., whose site is down right now, for use on the Mac, Windows, the iPhone, Blackberry, whatever.
Seriously, guys? Are you kidding me? That is the stupidest fucking idea ever. I’m not even going to indulge these people by posting sarcastic remarks in this post. Do we really need to dignify sarcasm with a brand new punctuation mark? And do we really need to BUY IT? I’m pretty sure I get all my cues regarding whether or not a statement is sarcastic from context, just as people have done it since the beginning of verbal communication. No doubt sarcasm has been around that long.
What’s next? The irony mark? Maybe a schadenfreude mark? How about a mark to indicate that I’m writing something in an e-mail to someone that I don’t really care about but feel obligated to explain so that they’re not confused even though it would only take them two minutes to research it on Google? Give me a fucking break. As David Lynch said, “Get real.” How about you learn to insert the proper clues into the text to indicate that you are being sarcastic? If you can’t do that, it’s probably best to leave the fucking sarcasm out of your work e-mails. Stick to declarative statements and everything will be just fine.
Dear America,
New York City has been holding out on you.
I’m not talking about musical theatre or the nightlife or whatever things people come to New York from all over the country to experience. No, I’m talking about what might be the single greatest beer in the entire history of the universe, Sixpoint’s Righteous Rye. Never before has a beer so tasty, so dangerous, exerted such pressure on me to drink it. It makes most other craft beers seem like the cans of Hamm’s sitting in your trunk while you’re at summer school when you’re 16.
Brooklyn Brewery? I love you, but no.
Dogfishhead? No!
Smuttynose? How I adore your IPA, but, still, no.
Europe? Your dogged adherence to tradition is commendable, but no.
Asia? Not in a million years.
Africa? South America? Australia? No! No!! No!!!
And while I would love to recommend that you fine folks around the country go to your local purveyor of fine beers and purchase a six pack of this mighty beast of a drink, you cannot. Sixpoint does not bottle beer. You can only get it on draught. It’s even difficult to find sometimes in Manhattan, but it waits for me like a patient friend when I come home to Brooklyn. Always there. Always happy to see me.
Sixpoint, you have brightened my life with the Righteous Rye and I thank you for it.
To the rest of America, when you’re in town on vacation, take a break from the tourist crap, take the subway across the East River, find yourself a nice little bar, and get a Sixpoint. You will thank me for it.
Check out their site: Sixpoint Craft Ales
Is John Carpenter’s The Thing the best horror film ever made? Well, don’t let me ruin the rest of your life for you, but the answer is, “Yes.”
Is it, then, any surprise that the best horror film ever has inspired the best piece of fan-fiction ever? One with perhaps the greatest ending line I’ve read in ages? No, no it is not.
If you’ve never seen The Thing, go. Do so. I’ll wait.
Ok. Wasn’t that good? I know. So awesome.
Now, read “The Things” by Peter Watts. It’s long, but worth it.
Go. I’ll wait.
Conan is having troubles with NBC. In his statement about it, he is never anything but classy, respectful, and honorable about being fucked by his network.
People of Earth:
In the last few days, I’ve been getting a lot of sympathy calls, and I want to start by making it clear that no one should waste a second feeling sorry for me. For 17 years, I’ve been getting paid to do what I love most and, in a world with real problems, I’ve been absurdly lucky. That said, I’ve been suddenly put in a very public predicament and my bosses are demanding an immediate decision.
Six years ago, I signed a contract with NBC to take over The Tonight Show in June of 2009. Like a lot of us, I grew up watching Johnny Carson every night and the chance to one day sit in that chair has meant everything to me. I worked long and hard to get that opportunity, passed up far more lucrative offers, and since 2004 I have spent literally hundreds of hours thinking of ways to extend the franchise long into the future. It was my mistaken belief that, like my predecessor, I would have the benefit of some time and, just as important, some degree of ratings support from the prime-time schedule. Building a lasting audience at 11:30 is impossible without both.
But sadly, we were never given that chance….
You can read the rest of the statement here. It’s worth your time.
Personally, I think Conan is hilarious. His time on both The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live were halcyon days for both those programs, no doubt due to his intelligence and quirky sense of humor. His late show has always been worth watching, even if you had to watch something else while Leno was snoozing it up on the Tonight Show. When he was given hosting duties on the Tonight Show, it was as if something magical had happened, as if Carson finally had a proper successor. To have it taken away so that Jay “Mr. Doritos” Leno can go back to putting us all to sleep at the 11:35 timeslot is a real shame.
My friend Charles has sworn off iTunes for 2010 in favor of the humble vinyl LP. Why would anyone do something so progressively insane you ask?! I could waste my time explaining it or I could just copy and paste his explanation. Here’s what he has to say about it.
I promise this will be the only post of philosophical musings on here, but people have asked so I think it needs to be said: Why am I doing this?
Literally as long as I can remember, I’ve been “into music”, whatever that means. My parents claim that they got me playing an instrument when they walked into the kitchen to find I had constructed a xylophone out of building blocks, playing “Camptown Races”. I’ve played in various stupid indie rock bands, full orchestras, and recorded solo, but this blog isn’t about creation. This is about consumption.
I’m a collector, and a pirate, with a maximally efficient way of acquiring new media. Literally thousands of albums, months of music sit on my hard drive, a string of 1s and 0s magnetized on discs spinning hundreds of miles per hour. I try not to discriminate when it comes to music, downloading everything from the new Lil John rap-rock-autotune debacle to Daniel Johnston, to Phoenix, to Trentemøller to La Bouche to Steely Dan to Shearwater. Which is great! I get a wide variety of music and influences, and am always hearing something interesting as I make my way through recent downloads.
The problem is that I’m always making my way through recent downloads, never able to focus on any music and give it the respect it deserves. The music I do care about has equal footing with the dreck, making it hard to zero in on what should be at the forefront.
Not only that, but when I do find something I love, something important to me, it’s still barely real, a digital representation on a storage device. That’s not to say that it’s not about the music, it most certainly is. When I moved abroad, I culled and razed, and got rid of everything physical, moving to all-digital. I showed up with a suitcase, a laptop and an iPhone, and that was enough to keep me going. But for the longest time, I’ve had what I care about be bits of data, and the physical media I own be the hilarious 1 dollar records from Half Price Books, the CDs I bought in high school and hung on to for no reason, the stuff that I never return to.
This year is about turning that around.
Starting Jan 1, 2010, through Dec 31, 2010, I’m giving up the digital, as much as is possible. I’ve moved my iTunes library to an external disk for safekeeping, bought as many of my favorite records as I could afford, and will be listening to only records, cds, and tapes to the best of my ability. If I want to listen to a record, I’ll have to go over to my pile of actual music, choose something, put it on, and listen to it.
There’s no shuffle, there’s no thousand songs in my pocket, there’s just albums. Wish me luck.
Neat. Keep en eye on his progress at his site, Year of Record.
By the way, that’s him, rocking out to Meatloaf’s “I Would Do Anything For Love” with his pinky raised all genteel and shit, in the post below.