Hey! You got Onion in my CNN!

So I'm having lunch at Comet and reading The Onion, when I happen to look up at the TV, which was playing CNN. There's a crawl at the bottom saying something like PORN INDUSTRY WANTS ITS OWN BAILOUT.

You know that Philip K. Dick novel Time Out of Joint, where the main character Ragle Gumm finds objects disintegrating in front of him, replaced only by scraps of paper saying things like DESK and the like? (You know that Orson Scott Card - author of Ender's Game - and the folks who put together The Truman Show should be paying Dick's estate royalties...) This was a more high-tech version, where somehow the world of The Onion had escaped its textual confines and had virally infected the actual news.

That must be the answer. Because with more people unemployed with nothing else to do, how could the porn industry possibly be suffering?

(Next post will not mention The Onion - promise. Unless they pay me.)

a meme before memes

A few years back, amused or annoyed by all the dumb "which X are you?" internet quizzes (not yet called, annoyingly, "memes"), which were inevitably constructed such that after only a couple of questions, it was obvious which results would arise from which answers, I made up one of my own.

It's maybe a little bit less linear than most. (After you take it, click on the "view all results" button to see the rest of the possibilities...)

if this billboard were e-mail, it'd end up in my spam folder

here's wishing...

Amazon's got a new feature, a "universal wish list," whereby you can attach a doohickey to your web browser that allows you to click on it and add any item from any web page to your Amazon wish list.

Any item?

Okay...I can do that (click it bigger):

keeper of the crypt behind the gates of delirium?

Some people age better than others. Rock musicians...are probably "others."

Here's one:



That's Steve Howe, guitarist with Yes.

And here he is without makeup, working the nightshift:

flimsy

I picked up the new Jenny Lewis CD a few days ago, and while it's a fine CD (in many ways it does what Elvis Costello's last album set out to do, but more effectively...), the packaging is annoying. It comes in a cardboard slipcase, so narrow that there's no spine, and with no inner sleeve to protect or hold the disc. There are four small snapshot-like photos included, which are just tossed inside the slipcase. The musician credits are printed on the back cover, along with the usual bureaucratic info...and the admonition DO NOT DROP THIS RECORD.

Yeah? Because the crap packaging means it might shatter?

Apparently major labels have just given up on trying to sell CDs, and are cutting their packaging costs...even though good packaging is one of the few aspects of physical recorded media that cannot be digitally reproduced. You'd think they'd be going the opposite direction, making more packages with aesthetic value in themselves. If this were the only example of shoddy packaging on recent CDs (and I suppose a number of my readers are like, you still buy CDs? Christ but you're old!), I might not be complaining...but PJ Harvey's last release was similarly packaged (although it, at least, had an inner sleeve, if I recall correctly, so there was some friction preventing the disc from just falling out onto the ground).

I suppose you could argue that such minimal packaging leaves a smaller environmental footprint, and if you did, I'd laugh in your face. There's a difference between packaging that's pointless because it's discarded as soon as the product is brought home (such as the nasty, hard to open, finger-slicing molded-plastic cases common on lots of household products) and packaging that's integral to the product and which therefore will not be thrown away, at least not until the product itself is tossed. But cheap packaging like this almost encourages further waste. I'm tempted to scan the cover and back cover and print it out on some decent paper, and put the whole thing in a conventional jewelbox, just so the CD can sit amongst my other CDs and not disappear and become unidentifiable (no spine, remember?). Which would mean I'd be using more paper, and probably more paper overall than a decent package would have used in the actual product.

Perhaps another irony here is that I bought this CD as essentially an impulse purchase: I was buying something else at the Large Box with Red and White Concentric Circles, and it was on sale, so I picked it up. If I'd known in advance the packaging was so flimsy, I might have decided merely to download it.

A musician named Zimmerman, from the same state as the store, had a new compilation of unreleased material out, too, also on sale, which I also picked up. Funny how that one was almost exactly twice the price of the Lewis release...yet it contained not only twice the music, roughly - two discs - but extensive info and documentation, including a 60-page booklet. Of course this suggests another reason for the lame packaging of Lewis's CD: lower production and material costs mean more profits for the label. I suppose Columbia, which put out that Minnesota guy's set, figures the only people interested in a 2-CD set of obscurities by him are old people who'd buy a CD because they can't handle all this newfangled digital rigmarole, whereas Warner Bros. figures Ms. Lewis's fans are just gonna download the thing anyway. It's also just my personal opinion, but I've gotta say Lewis is a hell of a lot more photogenic than that elderly folksinger dude anyway. I guess good on WB for not caving to the capitalistic pressure to exploit a singer's sex appeal. Columbia, on the other hand, saw fit to fill that 60-page booklet with shot after shot of the nearly seventy-year-old Dylan gazingly faunishly at the camera while recumbent in nothing but a snug yet well-filled pair of bikini briefs.

Thank god I'm kidding, please.

might be a bit difficult to obtain...

I'm (still) in the midst of digitizing my CD collection, and I ran into Polvo's first EP. The name of the "label" (I think it's really just self-released) is "Jesus Christ," and I think it was chosen solely to allow the following copyright notice that appears at the bottom of the back cover:

Unauthorized reproduction without the express written consent of Jesus Christ is prohibited.

departures

A feature article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel the other day described the journey of comedy director David Zucker (a native of a Milwaukee suburb, Shorewood, and best known for his involvement with brother Jerry and Jim Abrahams in the production of the Police Squad and Naked Gun movies) from his liberal background to his current conservatism. At first, my reaction was, okay, some guy becomes more conservative as he ages - nothing very unusual there - but at a specific point in the article, I realized Mr. Zucker had departed the plane of reality. He's quoted describing Barack Obama as "an extreme left-wing candidate who doesn't represent the country."

Uh-huh. Exactly which positions of Obama - who's reliably liberal on social issues (as are most Americans) and moderate on economic issues (as are most Americans) - are "extreme left-wing"? Funny how the folks who make such accusations never back them up (nor are asked to: bad enough in a biographical puff piece like this one, but plain irresponsible in political reporting). And that "doesn't represent the country"? Apparently all those folks who voted for Obama in the primaries, and who gave Obama lead in most polls, must not be from this country. And Zucker has swallowed the lie that McCain represents "lower taxes." Here's a chart (whose presentation, from wealthiest to poorest taxpayers, gives casual readers a false impression), demonstrating that for most Americans, except the very wealthiest, Obama's tax plan will lower taxes considerably more than McCain's will.

And, sadly, dirt and grime have at last vanquished their mortal enemy: I refer, of course, to Mr. Clean: the actor who portrayed the eponymous cleaning products spokesperson, House Peters Jr., has died at the age of 92. That New York Times article describes the career of Peters - one of many bit actors who are all but forgotten now - but fails to explain where the rather exotic (for its time) image of Mr. Clean came from. I mean, nowadays bald-headed, muscular guys sporting white t-shirts and an earring are everywhere (although few have the illustrated Mr. Clean's bushy white eyebrows), but back then, that look must have seemed quite bizarre.

particularly amusing for our British friends

Charlie Parker's hell

I used to hate banjos. I thought they were inherently corny, and they had a sort of unpleasant metallic twang, rather as if someone had taken a set of those old, spring-based doorstops and pitched them up painfully.

I started to come around a little bit. I realized that those very same sonic qualities could be musically effective in certain minor-key settings (credit 16 Horsepower here), and for whatever reason the corn factor was reduced somewhat, so that when folks like Surfin' Sufjan Stevens started putting banjos on his recordings, they added an interesting texture to a rich sonic tapestry.

But then, you know, Stevens became the god of the musical blogosphere, and a zillion other bands decided that, hey, let's listen to Philip Glass and old folk records, and let's throw a banjo, a French horn, and two old guys playing zithers on every other song, all while singing with affected innocence about...corn. Or dusty old roads. Or the wheat swaying in the moonlit breeze. Of Pittsburgh.

And now I pretty much hate banjos again. (Not quite as fond of old Surfin' Stevens yet...and by the way, Suffy: if you're really going to record an album for every state, it's been, what, nearly three years since Illinois? I don't think you're going to live to 175...)

do as I say, not as I do

Back when all those moralistic right-wingers were appalled at that nasty Bill Clinton and the horrible things that slutty Monica Lewinsky did to him that their wives would never do, we heard lots of talk about how it was all the fault of the damned Baby Boomers; that the moral degradation unleashed by hippies' wanton sexuality had led to a "permissive society" that gave lecherous goats like Clinton the feeling that it was okay to ruin interns' dresses. Even then that self-righteousness was rather a poor fit - Newt Gingrich, avatar of the right at the time, leader of the 1994 midterm rebellion (remember the "Contract With America"?), back in 1980 had served his first wife divorce papers in her hospital bed after her surgery for uterine cancer - but now that Sarah Palin, Republican vice-presidential nominee, has a 17-year-old unmarried yet pregnant daughter, maybe the idea that liberal parents are to blame for all that licentiousness leading to teen pregnancies will evaporate in the rhetorical haze. Of course, the head of the Republican ticket, John McCain, can't exactly take the moral high ground here either: McCain was a serial adulterer before starting his affair with Cindy Hensley, for whom he eventually left his wife, also disabled, also in 1980. (That was a really bad year for medically challenged wives of conservatives, apparently.)

except the one guy who says "I'm not!"

Every five years, Milwaukee milks several hogs' teats worth of dollars from bikers returning upstream whence their iron ponies spawned, and...okay, gotta cut back on the metaphors here.

So day and night, the air is filled with Harleys lustily farting potatoes, so Rose has to put on headphones at work and we have to turn on the A/C rather than open the windows at night. And far be it from me to criticize all those bucks flowing into the city's coffers courtesy America's motorcycle-loving gentlemen and ladies, but...sometimes I think the city just went straight to central casting and asked for several thousand biker-looking types.

Because about three-quarters of the bikers look exactly like you'd expect Harley guys to look, and most of that remaining quarter takes its visual cues from slightly less popular variations (i.e., the younger, thinner Harley guy rather than the older, fatter, graybearded Harley guy). And if seeing the same thing over and over again eventually renders it invisible, I think black and orange will be imperceptible to my vision by the end of this weekend.

The funniest thing to me is the cliche about bikers has it that they're the last remaining bastion of freedom, individuality, and all that, wind blowing on the open road and brushing the dead bugs from their beards...and yet a more conformist, brand-oriented bunch of consumers I've never seen. And they roam in gaggles, like a bunch of freshman all Abercrombied and Hollistered, but branded with Harley-Davidson and lifestyle-appropriate hangers-on. (Mr. Daniel, I'm looking at you.) I can hardly blame every business in town for festooning itself in black and orange and cordoning off parking spaces with hastily lettered "BIKERS ONLY!!" signs, since obviously once this crowd dedicates itself to consuming something, it grips it like a pit bull and returns to it like Robert Downey Jr. to rehab.

Thus I've taken the liberty of redesigning the H-D logo and rendering it as a flag, to be flown until tattered from the proud sissy bars of Harleys everywhere:

probably never heard of the Rolling Stones, R.E.M., or Elvis Costello titles either

The annual "Mindset List," released each year by Beloit College and intended to help professors avoid references their students would fail to understand, seems increasingly to be a guide to how out of touch its creators are with the students whose mindsets they purport to be describing.

This year's list, for example, refers to All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (a book which had its cultural blip in the sun and then justly disappeared back in the Pleistocene Era, although its corn-likker faux-folksy proud dumbness annoyingly lives on), to Wayne Newton (and his mustache, the presence or absence of which is approximately as interesting to students as that of Kaiser Wilhelm's), and to Roseanne singing the national anthem. These are sort of meta-clueless references, in that not only would today's students not get them, most of today's adults would wonder what's next, a figure of speech relating to horses and buggies?

And for a document originating from a college, there's some awfully sloppy copy-editing going on - either that, or (per the second item on the list) it's a trend in Beloit for karaoke machines to sport diapers.

(Unrelatedly: I tend to collect phrases whose sound I like, but sometimes the meaning or image evoked by the phrase sits awkwardly next to the phrase itself. For example, this one: "Scottish erotica." "Sloppy copy-editing" - used above - works quite well, however.)

most...boring...cover...evar

A few weeks back, I picked up a free paperback copy of a P.D. James mystery via the UWM English Department's informal book exchange. I didn't really pay much attention to the cover of the book (despite my belief that "don't judge a book by its cover" is a ridiculous aphorism, at least taken literally), but it's a good thing I wasn't relying upon the designers' marketing skills to sell me a copy, because this has to be the lamest, most generic cover design I've ever seen:



The typography for the author and title are generic but serviceable...but there's something about the placement of the promotional quote and "also-by" tag that irritates...maybe because all the text is centered? And I don't like the "Queen of Crime" tag in the red band - I don't like the spread-out letter spacing, nor the needless quotation marks, nor the fact that the asterisk indicating the source of the quote is crammed up against the closing quotation mark, defying the spacing of the rest of the text in that red band.

The perspective of the space is just bizarre - either that, or someone hired a German Expressionist carpenter to do the fenestration for the room. We have a generic-looking woman in a minimally-defined room, with what look to be some papers or envelopes and a glass on the edge of the frame. Outside the open window, a man in dark clothing is walking. This only barely even suggests the notion of "mystery" - it would perhaps be more effective if the man were looking toward the woman, but no - he's apparently caught in the midst of merely passing by her window, and given that the trimming of the foliage in the background implies that there's a path of sorts he's walking on, he can't even be accused of sneaking or lurking. The woman can't be placed in any clear relation to the papers: are they on a desk? Is she seated, looking off to the side of them? Or is she standing, in the foreground, looking just to our right? And that perspective plays havoc with scale, as well: the room appears to be sunken in relation to the path outside the window, unless the woman is seated and we're intended to be a dwarf standing nearby.

The quality of the drawing is pretty weak as well: I think they were going for a sort of stylized, clean-lined pulp-fiction look, but instead everyone looks carved from wood, particularly our black-clad, hatted gentleman - who, now that I look more closely, might be just a cardboard cutout, like those promotional statues of Jar-Jar Binks used to sell Star Wars novelizations that were usefully non- flame-retardant (not that I'd actually know that and the statute of limitations has expired anyway).

shorts-circuited

According to this article in The New York Times, it's now okay in some places to wear short pants to the office - so long as they're "dress shorts" accompanying a sufficiently formal ensemble. Uh, no.

More proof, as if any were needed, that "fashion" is a sort of large-scale performance art piece involving dares, bets, and provocations to see just how ridiculous and humiliated fashion victims can get.

The Times helpfully accompanies the article with three photos.



Now, the first gentleman is almost acceptable. The shirt is properly unbuttoned, matching the inherently casual character of shorts - although he loses points for nerdishly tucking in the shirt, and the tight fit of the pants makes him look a bit Pee-Wee Hermanesque.



This man looks unaccountably pleased that he's wearing the sartorial equivalent of the mullet: business on the top, party on the bottom. There is absolutely no reason to wear a jacket and tie with shorts. None. Sorry. Go home, put on a pair of pants, or put on a nice casual shirt and enjoy a fun round of golf.



What can I say about this guy? He's not helped by his goofy facial expression and incipient beard; he looks rather if he'd just been awakened, told to put this outfit on, and now is having second thoughts ("are you sure this is what you want me to wear?"). Who can blame him? Let's see...what look like dress shoes, with no socks...pants nicely creased that abruptly cut off an uncomfortable interval above his knobbly knees...a jacket that looks a bit small...and a shirt that, given its slight sheen, open collar, and straight lines at the bottom (obviously I'm no clotheshorse or I'd know the technical term for this...), reinforces the "just woke up" thing by looking rather like a pajama top: I think this isn't a model at all, but a fellow who was very, very hungover, who wandered out the door and was set upon by photographers before he got the chance to realize just how incompetently he'd dressed himself. Go back to bed, sleep it off, and when you wake up, assume it was all a very bad, very silly dream.

show me the monkey!

A curious phenomenon - which inspired a book a few years back - is the number of well-known women - Jane Goodall, Birute Galdikas, Laura Bush, and Dian Fossey, to name four - famous for living with and studying various primates.

was he also bitter and clinging to religion?

Meet one of my neighbors:



This charming fellow (whom we've never had the pleasure to meet) lives about two blocks from us. Apparently, after a long hard morning battling more than a few bottles, he decided his lawn needed mowing...but sadly (for his lawnmower, but amusingly for several Google pages' worth of bloggers already), the mower wouldn't start. Our neighbor called in the assistance of a Mr. Winchester.

As it happens, most mower manufacturers do not recommend gunfire as an effective remedy for start-up failure.

also includes free gravity

A proposed high-rise condo in downtown Milwaukee seems to have run out of useful promotional ideas: the first line of its advertising trumpets the building's "24-hour skyline."

As opposed to all those other buildings, which shut down the skyline during certain hours of the day.

an editor who auto be replaced

Minor snurkage.

Since I come from a state that once elected a man named Homosexuallord Nelson senator (he was the founder of Earth Day) and which has a town called Homosexuals Mills, this item makes me happy, cheerful, and carefree.

Or homosexual, if you prefer.

(My favorite comment is a few down from the top: one "Stew Mulligan" asks, "is this the same site that refers to our current white house administration as George Vagina and Penis Cheney?")

crosstalk

I'm no longer of any particular religious faith, but I was raised a Christian. And sometimes I see certain products marketed by or to Christians, and I ask myself, what were they thinking?

For example, earlier today at a candy shop in the Milwaukee Public Market I saw an enormous chocolate cross - about 8" high, say. Yes, consider that your Lord Jesus Christ suffered and died for you to absolve your sins - now, in remembrance of His sacrifice, enjoy this yummy chocolate replica of the implement of His torture. Wha-?

Or these little items: I guess these cute little fluffy crosses might be an ideal way to introduce toddlers to the Christian faith - just as Jesus can comfort you in your time of sorrow, these cuddly crosses are smooth and velvety and pillowlike. (Not intended for actual crucifixion.)

Probably much more intrinsically offensive than either of the above, though, are the bumper stickers that make of religion essentially just another product - by borrowing well-known commercial catchphrases and adapting Christian messages. "Things Go Better With Christ!" "Got Jesus?" etc. I seem to recall reading that Jesus and the folks who were bringing the marketplace into the temple didn't get along so well...