Category
consternation
-
04.24.09‘MEMBER WHEN MISSHAPES WAS A THING?So I'll agree with all the super-defensive hipsters who declare that making fun of hipsters is played out when hipsters, you know, stop being so ridiculous and easily-made-fun-of, but in the meantime I think it's an okay rule of thumb to accept that if the words "Urban Outfitters," "PBR," or "tofu" appear in your ostensibly hilarious critique of The American Hipster (see how those were all in the same post? That's what the internet calls a "fail."), you are probably covering ground not only well-trodden, but well-stomped-on, well-screwed-on-top-of, and well-shat-on--which means, sure, it's fertile ground, but dude, it's been shat ...
-
03.23.08GLASS IT UP!There is nothing that exasperates me more1 than having someone speak to me while I am trying to listen to This American Life; when I listen to the radio, I am listening to the radio and doing nothing else--sipping some tea or nibbling on shortbread, perhaps, but really, doing nothing else--I simply do not have the cognitive capacity to truly process complex aural information2 if I am the least bit distracted by anything else--I have tried to catch up with Ira Glass while baking or reading or soundlessly practising guitar fingerings and I have discovered that any other task is ...
-
02.27.08Oh, to be au courant![No wonder monetizing eyeballs1 isn't working for traditional media outlets trying to transport themselves meaningfully to the web;)] I've been reading New York magazine over RSS for some time now and always thought that most of their content didn't come through the feed to tempt me to buy the magazine itself (yeah right), but upon picking up the magazine for the first time in quite a while I realized that its heft (relative to a static screen at least) gives the impression of content that is simply not there; once you strip away the advertisements (of which there are many) ...
-
02.20.08Erm…It's been a while since freshman year of high school, but this cloying New York Times article about The Great Gatsby as inspiration for immigrant youth is egregiously inaccurate, not to mention downright annoying1; it could have been a marginally interesting article about contemporary reinterpretations of the American dream, but instead settled for romanticizing immigrants who romanticize our good ol' U.S. of A.--a myth, I think, whose time has come to expire--based on a embarrassingly pigheaded reading of the aforementioned book. . .shame on you, NYT...shame. Naturally, I'm not the only one who noticed.↩
-
02.18.08Relevance alert.Whoa...I never thought as semicolons as rare in usage or erudite in nature, and most certainly not as a "pretentious anachronism," as they are referred to in this New York Times article today, which has since sorted out my linguistic misperceptions; I'd like to think that my punctuation is up-to-date, hip, and relevant to today's youth--I mean, anachronistic? Really?--but evidently I am a stodgy prescriptivist living in the grammatical past, mired in syntactic history, and increasingly alone in pretentious punctuating.
-
02.07.08Yes, it was an OutKast cover.Some 16-year-old boy in skinny jeans, a dumb hat, and a dumber haircut is playing the exact same song I have been practicing (I initially and intentionally used the British spelling practising, but changed it just in case someone thought it was an ignorant misspelling; I would have chosen the Anglo version if only Firefox were a bit more worldly1 and thus accepting of the spelling of my choice) on guitar...his skills are superior to mine and I am thus thoroughly put out, mostly because this is the second time today that my petty insecurities have made me feel like ...