Tuesday, June 27, 2006

It’s Actually Kevin Spacey All Along

And he wants you to put up LSAT flyers. From the job listings provided by Harvard’s Student Employment Office:

27. FLYER DISTRIBUTION [OFF-CAMPUS] [SUMMER]
Location: TestWell / LSAT 180 (Off-campus)
Pay: $12/hr, Hours: 3-6 hrs, either one-time or weekly (summer)

Post flyers on all legal boards on Harvard campus, in yard, academic building, Houses, public spaces, etc. Can be done as a one-off, or as a weekly gig for the next 4 weeks. Harvard students only, please (access to Houses requires Harvard ID). Needed asap (ad posted 6/27); can start immediately if this is up in time...

Contact: Keyser Sozé 617.301.3467 jobs@testwell.com

(Emphasis added.)

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

GRAPEFRUITLIVEBLOG2006: The Finale

Today I was sad so I just ate without blogging. Sorry.

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

GRAPEFRUITLIVEBLOG2006: I Warned You

<liveblog>

Star Jones2011EST: I just put away a solid half-can of organic vegetarian chili, and I’m spoiling for a fight. A fight with a grapefruit, that is — and boy howdy does this one know how to put its dukes up. Weighing in at 22 ounces (I just checked), with a street value of fuck I threw the receipt away yesterday, Star Ruby — named after its two idols, Star Jones (left) and Jack Ruby — has all the heft and swagger of a true competitor. I, on other hand, am afraid of using knives.

Fuck it, though. I’m getting the knife.

2014EST: Okay, so just a butterknife. Still enough to pierce Ruby, though — a silver dollar’s worth of peel excised. You know, before like a week ago I’d’ve just cut this shit in half and scooped out the sections with a spoon, although I don’t think the specialized grapefruit spoons — which to me don’t really help much anyway — are available to me right now. But my ladyfriend’s mother told me there was another way. And she ate monkey once. There was a paw in her plate!

2015EST: Blogging is hard work! And distracting. I need to peel more. brb, blog.

2020EST: I’m pussying out and only eating half. Don’t look at me like that. As it turns out, the grapefruit put up less resistance — in fact, the peel is delightfully spongy to the touch; I could strip grapefruits (grapefruit?) all day — than the fucking plastic wrap, which I always manage to twist and fold and cause to self-adhere. A sticky situation lol. So for those keeping score: 0–1, grapefruit–me; 1–0, universe-minus-grapefruit–me. Better than usual.

2023EST: Goddammit I need to start eating. Hm: pretty good. Grapefruit is really a bizarre food for some caveperson to decide to cultivate and consume, because it just barely crosses the boundary line between edible and not; the bitter aftertaste probably triggers some reptile-brain retching instinct wired into the back of the tongue. Maybe, as Michael Pollan suggests in The Botany of Desire, people really did have a much milder notion of “sweetness” until the advent of industrial, refined sugars; to the leatherlike tongue of a Cockney chimney sweep, c. 17whenever, a grapefruit may have been as sweet as it got. This calls, of course, for a Wikipedia consultation.

2027EST: I navigate away from Star Jones’s official web site. (Note the slogan on the top: “I am the author of the only dictionary that defines me.” Let’s see…nothing on dictionary.com. Nothing in the OED. Nothing on Wiktionary. I guess she just has some private dictionary in her house that she works on in her spare time, modern-day Samuel Johnson that she is. Unless…Gasp! Star Jones is the author of urbandictionary.com! And apparently she hasn’t kicked that self-esteem problem yet:

  1. star jones

    57 up, 6 down

    Jabba the hut's long lost cousin. Does payless shoe ads where they dont show her feet in shoes because she has giant foot fat leaking out of the shoes. Once ate a whole man.

    I be Star Jones yo! Im a lawyer.

  2. star jones

    39 up, 1 down

    Why are you so surprised that Maurice will tease out your wigs but won't play with your titties? Girl, you are star jonesin!!!! You better annul this mess, before he runs off with your shoes.

  3. Star Jones

    40 up, 9 down

    The co-host of ABC's "The View". She is a lawyer. She tries to bring insight to legal aspects of a topic on the show, but somewhat ties the topic back to food, or men. Uses the words "Allegedly" "I am a lawyer" "Delicious" for anything you can think of. Hillarious/irritating diva. Millionaire.…

  4. star jones

    31 up, 6 down

    another name for "earth"

    also another way to say "to steal food"

    Marni! You so just Star Jonesed my gummy bears!!!!!

“Another name for ‘earth’”? Star’s a weird lady.

2043EST: I think I’m supposed to go to Wikipedia and research grapefruit(s) now, but I already finished the first half while I was reading up on Star Jones. I can’t tell you how often this shit happens to me.

</liveblog>

Stay tuned for tomorrow, when I eat the other half. I hope it’s okay just sitting in the refrigerator inside a sandwich bag, even though it’s not a sandwich.

A Place of Business in the North End of Boston

Guy’s Men’s Salon.

Sunday, June 18, 2006

We’ve All Had Those Days

“We may have been changed into crystal beings, but nothing can change our determination to fight against villainy wherever we find it!”

Source: Justice League of America 25 (Feb. 1964).

I’m Not So Much a Bread-Winner as a Bread-Buyer…

SPECIAL FOR MACHINES…but if there were some contest I could enter for which the prize was bread, I would probably go ahead and enter, as long as all I had to do was buy a raffle ticket or submit my name and address.

Gotta love liberal food guilt. I just returned from purchasing sliced bread at a nearby Whole Foods Market — this despite my well-known aversion to sliced bread, compared to which almost every human invention is “the best thing since.” One of the breads I didn’t buy contained “VITAL WHEAT GLUTEN,” which, as it turns out, exists. At the time, though, I assumed this was a “the lady doth protest too much” assertion — like, okay, Whole Foods customers, we know this ingredient sounds hell of suspicious and not 100% natural or even particularly tasty, but plz bear with us. Trust us. This shit is vital to our operation. An amusing misunderstanding, I think you’ll agree!!

I also bought a grapefruit and am considering live-blogging the eating of it later tonight. Eating of it? More like feeding of it. To myself. Mmmmm.

Okay guys, bye! :)

Friday, June 16, 2006

Well, Maybe Conceptually

C. “Roast Beef” Kazenzakis From Things I Figured Out: Reader Submissions, via Lifehacker (which mistakenly calls it “Things I’ve Figured Out”):

milk is a bodily excretion, and drinking it may be the worst idea conceptually!

On an altogether different note, behold James Joyce’s dirty letters to his wife, which were mentioned in the badass New Yorker article about Joyce’s dickwad grandson:

To NORA

Dublin 8 December 1909

My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if a gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual, fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her.

Via Reverse Cowgirl.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

This Is Basically the Plot of Transamerica, Right?

oh yeah baby eat that CaI just furtively popped two VIACTIV® Calcium Soft Chews into my hungry — and effeminate — maw. That’s right — VIACTIV®, The Calcium Women Want™. Shit really hits the spot. Probably less to do with the calcium or the genderbending than the sweet sweet corn syrup — ingredient number one and a real treat after literally hours without industrial sugars in my bloodstream — but I’m trying not to probe too deeply.

This represents something of a disturbing trend in my life, if, as most now agree, two is the new three: I also remember quite enjoying Quaker Instant Oatmeal Nutrition for Women, especially the Vanilla Cinnamon flavor. “A unique combination of nutrients designed to meet a woman’s special needs”? I won’t take this flagrant reverse discrimination sitting down. At least not without bowl and spoon in hand.

Yeah so I have big hooters now. : (

News You Can Use: Internets Edition

Prince performed at the 10th Annual Webby Awards. He also won a lifetime-achievement thing. ¡¡Spit take!! This reminds me a lot of that time in Achewood when Roast Beef was caught trying to have sex with a web site, but I can’t be arsed to track down the link. Also, it wouldn’t really be enlightening. But seriously, Prince played an acoustic guitar in front of an audience of bloggers and Thomas Friedman — last seen about two thirds of the way into this video clip trying to put the moves on Rocketboom’s Amanda Congdon (“What’s really cool is people like you who are just carrying around cameras and interviewing me…It’s really kind of what my book is about!…So this is really cool!!” — I bet ol’ horndog Tommy would really like to flatten her world). Also, Prince has to remind the bloggers to clap along, several times. Apparently the last thing he said on stage was “Everything you think is true.” See also “From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!”

Anakin SkywalkerPrince

Monday, June 12, 2006

Profiles in Tautology: Lindsay Lohan Edition

“I don’t need to do any more kid movies,” she says. “The word ‘kid’ makes you feel like a child.”

Via Defamer.

Saturday, June 10, 2006

Seriously, Nelly Is in It

I just took a Greyhound bus from Boston to New York. The in-ride film? The Longest Yard. You know: Adam Sandler (?!) stars as a washed-up quarterback who goes to jail through various Courtney Cox–related plot mechanisms and ends up leading a football team of convicts, including Nelly and Chris Rock, against the corrupt prison guards. There are some lessons learned about race. I mean, I know it’s a remake, but this shit is just criminally retarded. Put it in jail and don’t let it play football. And the worst thing is that I’ve already seen the damn movie — on a previous Greyhound bus ride.

Apparently, though, I’m alone in my animosity toward The Longest Yard. Thanks to the frankly diabolical machinations of a young couple who passive-aggressively ousted me from my original seat, I ended up in the very back of what Greyhound quaintly calls “the coach.” Right next to the bathroom, just where I like to be. And as it turned out, the second the movie ended, literally a dozen people raced back to pee. No one had done so previously. In other words, a non-negligible fraction of the bus population “held it” for as long as two hours because they could not tear themselves away from the comedy stylings of NFL superstar A. Sandler. Even the upper-crust dude next to me, Atlantic Monthly in hand, seemed entranced.

Sometimes I despair.

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Lede Poisoning

Mostly for job-related reasons, I’ve subscribed to some Crimson RSS feeds. Right now the paper is running a lot of retrospective pieces, as befits commencement season. But goddamn, I know they’re probably understaffed and all, but couldn’t they have avoided all the lookalike ledes?

  • While an undergraduate at Princeton University, when Caroline M. Elkins informed her parents that she would be majoring in African history, they were “a bit horrified.” [btw that sentence is ungrammatical] A professorship at Harvard and a Pulitzer later, the Elkins are probably glad their daughter did not major in economics. [#]
  • When they published their working paper “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” in March, the authors anticipated criticism. But even Kennedy School of Government Academic Dean Stephen M. Walt and University of Chicago professor John J. Mearsheimer could not have predicted the transatlantic storm that their paper unleashed. [#]
  • When he chose to write his senior thesis on the Zimbabwean government’s manipulation of the media, Amar C. Bakshi ’06 never thought he’d be a target of the repressive regime himself. [#]
  • When Elizabeth Cary Agassiz helped found the “Harvard Annex”—the predecessor to Radcliffe — in 1879, it is unlikely that she could have imagined a day when — down the street — women would outnumber men in caps and gowns in the Yard. [#]

All from yesterday’s edition, catblogs. One suspects less a lazy editor or a house style than a clasically namby-pamby–liberal conception of history, shared among the whole Crimson hive: to wit, history is 100% contingency, accident, unexpected consequences, anything could happen, rags to riches, Horatio Alger, hoist on own petard, blog blog blog. When I stabbed myself in the eye with a fork, I never imagined I would soon develop X-ray vision in the other one. Park/driveway, drive/parkway. Expect the unexpected. No deep structure — not even Ungerian loose linkages within a semantic whole. Karl Marx is spinning in his grave, which is conveniently located next to Brian Eno’s. Also I think Jim Cramer might be tearing up a little.

In other news news, David Zhou utterly ignores the whole Born Confused angle. Fucker. And in related pun news, we’re now down to “‘Mehta’-Morphosis.” Ick. Let’s just hope the scandal never mehtastasizes any further.

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

“I Was Able to Get a Sense of His Soul”

Remember when Bush said that about Putin? Pre-9/11 and everything. Since then, I think, we’ve come to believe that Bush claimed to have looked into his counterpart’s eyes and to have actually seen into his soul: for instance, googling /bush see soul putin/ throws up 346k results. Nonetheless, back then, our president (“President” if you’re the New Yorker) had superpowers (“Soul sense…tingling!”); now only the Scientologists do.

Anyway, Putin's clockwork soul is now on the fritz, and the wear is showing:

“What if my grandmother had certain sexual attributes?” Mr. Putin snapped, the wire service reported. “Then she would be my grandfather.”

The Times style guide is a bit too strict on attributions, Shane added, his blog noted.

Monday, June 05, 2006

only in bOsToN lolz

Overheard today: “He was wicked chill.”

Seriously a girl said it! on the street & everything hahahahahahaha

Because You Demanded It

I hate to be a “link-blogger,” friends, but, um:

The upcoming comedy “Little Man,” directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans, shows the same knack for creative casting as 2004’s “White Chicks”: This time around brother Marlon plays a baby.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: the above quotation actually comes not from the linked story but from its summary, as it apeared in my MTV News RSS feed. Yes, I have one.)

Okay, you need to see more:

“It does sound like one of those ‘Hey, those guys were high!’ concepts,” laughed 35-year-old Shawn Wayans recently [I love that “recently,” don’t you? Is there some kind of national-security secret that would be divulged if the reporter got more specific about the time?]...But when you see it all put together, it’s funny.”

I’d go to Fandango immediately if my fingers weren’t sweating so profusely. fuckfuckfuck. End of article:

[On the set, Shawn Wayans said], “I go, ‘Yo, Marlon, go get me some orange juice for Keenen!’ So yeah, we family.”

Soon the family will welcome a bizarre-looking baby into its ranks. Among these potty-mouthed big brothers, one can’t help but feel that he’s in good hands.

Bizarre-looking baby? Hm. Note the suspicious resemblance:

by this point i think it’s kind of cute

Commit That

One of my favorite songs by Dipset cutie-pie Juelz Santana — he of first-verse-of-“Hey Ma,” I’m-eighteen-and-live-a-crazy-life fame — is “Kill Yourself,” which, according to the ID3 tags on my MP3 of the song, was on some fake “advance” version of Santana’s recent album What the Game’s Been Missing! “Kill Yourself” is one of those tracks that harps so insistently on a single absurd theme that one can’t help but fall under its spell; in this case, the theme is the necessity of the listener’s suicide. To wit:

Commit that!
Commit that!
Cock your shit back
And commit that
Suicide, yes, suicide.
Take a .45 and bang:
Kill yourself!

And that’s the chorus. The plot gets even thicker when Santana starts rattling off different suicide techniques that you — yes, you — ought or ought not to consider. Being “dragged over a lake,” for instance, is too good for you; best to “tell your man to go to the roof and drop a rock on your head.” This all relates to the big think piece about the use of the second person in hip-hop that I’ll one day write.

Anyway, I was poking around on Google to see if anyone else likes this song. As it turns out, Last.fm has caught 274 people listening to “Kill Yourself” — a clownish 1.7% of the pro-(Sant)ana population as a whole. Some of those brave 274 have taken the time to tag the song, too:

User Tags
dipset fun hip-hop

I suspect that the Santanaficionado “xkiz” contributed the “fun” tag. After all, the dude has clocked 182 Juelz listens in the last week alone, not even counting the 56 Diplomats songs, which probably include at least a few Santana appearances. Even at second place, Lloyd Banks (59 listens) doesn’t come close. Always a bride’s maid, never a bride.

I’m not the first person to notice xkiz’s predilection. First entry on his “Shoutbox":

NessDX said:
wow. a lot of Juelz. lol. :)

Nor am I the only one worrying about tagging. If you check out Young Jeezy’s Last.fm page, you’ll see “ambient” listed under “User Tags.” Now, I’ve certainly used Jeezy as background music in the past, but all the same, I’m sure Brian Eno is spinning in his grave right now.

Actually, two people tagged Jeezy “ambient.” Did they mean Ambien? (In the tags shoutbox, deus_exmachina says, “i bought crack from this guy once.” teflon_hearted replies (though not really, since this is in reverse-chronological order), “AYYYYYYYYYYYYYYE!”)

There’s less support for “rap it up” — just one user tagged Jeezy with the phrase. Likewise, one vote was cast for each of “jukejukejuke,” “rap i guess” (um), “my black side” (mine too!), and “shake shake.” Also: “black.”

As for the alluded-to worrying, I guess it’s mostly just me and mikey_oakcrest wringing our hands over this folksonomic foofaraw. No sir, mikey is not fucking happy about this stuff:

correct tags plz??
who the fuck would label Young Jeezy as metalcore???

But don’t be fooled by Mikey’s number-one favorite tag, “emo”: the dude’s a true fan. Five days after complaining about Jeezy semantics, and three days before today, he made the big announcement:

young jeezy
i’m going to see Young Jeezy tonight

Dinner and a movie, I imagine, a little Bright Eyes playing softly on a phonograph in the background. Jeezy puts balsamic vinegar on his salad, thinking this a classy move; he’s left the ghetto behind, he eats at the Spotted Pig with Jay-Z, etc. Mikey cringes inwardly, knowing that balsamic’s beyond played, a childish, Olive Garden–level tactic at best. Some chasms can never be crossed. Mikey cries that night, only half for himself.

Kill yourself.

Sunday, June 04, 2006

The Inspiration

I may here close my introductory speculations with the general remark, that as no human face divine ever passed before the mortal gaze that was not well worth looking at, for some odd reason or other, so no keyhole in Christendom or out of it was ever cut, bored, or chiselled, that was not, for some similar odd reason, worth peeping into or listening at.
—Laman Blanchard, “Confessions of a Keyhole,” New Monthly Magazine & Humorist 69 (1843), 328.