So if there’s a more harmonious union than bacon and chocolate (which there isn’t), it’s most likely saving the environment and tossing back vodka; the only other drinking-while-green products I have seen are unappetizing wines occupying a lonely shelf at Whole Foods (poor things seemed almost ghettoized, even compared to the paltry local wines section) and a serendipitous mention of green bars I came across while composing this sentence–luckily, my drinking habits are not quite so habitual as to warrant any real time spent on reconciling them with 500-mile or 250-mile or 100-mile nonsense, but I feel for the eco-friendly drunkorexics nonetheless.

TAGGED: drinking • food • green • ridiculosity • vodka

At risk of sounding like a White Whiner, I simply cannot comprehend why it requires such great bodily, mental, and spiritual strength to find chocolate that satisfies me; I am not particularly particular–promise!–all I want is an ethically-traded, organic, seventy-plus-percent, independently-produced bar with few additives, which really isn’t too much to ask for–in fact, for a good while I had what I coveted in Dagoba, a former favorite of mine due as much to the taste of the chocolate as to its name (homophonous as it is with my favorite Star Wars system), but they have since been bought out by Hershey’s, tarring them with the unacceptable brush of corporate shame; in any case, I hope that mulling over the memories of my cacaoed past somehow convinces me that the bacon chocolate bar that grabbed my fancy yesterday while browsing the posh grocery store down the street is worth its $7.99 asking price–which, of course, it most likely isn’t, but the obscenely titillating combo of bacon and chocolate makes me think there is a clandestine epicurean-dreams-into-tempting-realities converter lurking nearby…

TAGGED: BACON • caprice • chocolate • food • nomnomnom • starwars • whining

I suppose the initial narrative of the Democratic primary season–black folk verses white women folk–was becoming tiresome to the media, so they are now looking to the political leanings of mediocre MCs like 50 cent (“He hit me with that he-just-got-done- watching-’Malcolm X,’ and I swear to God, I’m like, ‘Yo, Obama!’”) and DMX (“Barack Obama?…That ain’t that nigga’s name.”) as a measure of public opinion; in an age when LOLNIGGERS is par for the YouTube comments course, and when there are legitimate and hilarious intersects between the hip-hop communities and Obama’s campaign, it’s a bit scary to see folks like Matthew Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan reporting on the inane gibberish of second-tier gangsta rappers alongside their usual insight.

TAGGED: eyeroll • politics • vexation

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 suffiently distracting to keep me from following the stories at hand and, yeah, while I know there is a sense in which I should be participating in the TAL backlash, my social circle is not white or upper-middle class or generally StuffWhitePeopleLike-ish enough to care about affecting an air of NPR fatigue–but for me, after years of having Glass’ voice as soothing white noise, I find myself prompted to pen a hagiography based altogether on his arresting patois³.

1. An admitted bit of an exaggeration. For effect, you know.↩
2. This American Life: complex aural information. Heh.↩
3. Though perhaps I am in the minority in finding his voice so pleasant; it has been suggested that the show be called “This American Lisp”: Dude, you’re a radio presenter. See a speech pathologist already. Hm. I suppose for every empty critique of TAL that in one contradictory breath mentions yuppies and hipsters and the literati, there is a hilarious one precipiced on speech impediments (admittedly, I could personally live without hearing Sarah Vowell ever again for the rest of my life). [NOT LISPIST]↩

TAGGED: glee • vexation • whiteboys

As nauseating as it sounds, I cannot stand non-web-2.0 sites; I initially chalked it up to a design issue, but I now realize that is much, much more–I am lost without the ontology of tags (and the promise of emergent meta-data!), the dearth of read/writedness (I do not fear the new online colectivism! I embrace it! Whole-heartedly, even!), superflous page-loads (eff synchronicity and hand me the AJAX!), and un-open formats–and, well, you know: there’s also the fact that serif fonts, unrounded corners, and unmuted, harsh colours make me want to stab myself in the eye¹.

1. Alright, so maybe it is just a design issue.↩

TAGGED: bloviating • geekery

I have not seen No Country for Old Men (and have little desire to), but I have noticed a tendency of those who [presumably] have to mention “No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh” as a paradigm of acute brutality, which is just to say that I try to keep tabs on how chunks of arcane collective knowledge make their way into my working cultural vocabulary; it is a phenomenon I have attempted to chart for some time–indeed, I can tell you precisely how I came to unequivocally know who Paris Hilton is¹, and will soon be done with charting my increasing familiarity with Sienna Miller²!

1. This is a lie.↩
2. Who?↩

TAGGED: lies • popculture • ridiculosity

So you know how sometimes your midichlorian¹ count feels abnormally low and anxiety is high and your nose is getting sore because you’ve used up all the Puff’s with Lotion and Vick’s^TM (third time today I’ve extolled the virtues of said product, by the by) and had to switch to crude pedestrian tissues AND THEN you realize that the finale of Project Runway is THAT VERY EVENING and even though you’re pretty sure that the quaalude-ridden lady is going to win even though New York Magazine totally disagrees but that kind of makes you more excited because it adds more tension–you know that feeling?²

1. Confused? Urban dictionary is here to help! Word imagined by George Lucas to totaly fuck-up The misticism surrounding the force in Star Wars. Hm.↩
2. It rocks.↩

TAGGED: popculture • ridiculosity • starwars • w00t!

So this is what a professional troll looks like, and this is how they are properly fed, and this is how they keep trolling, and this is how the cycle continues¹…for your consideration, my friends, Charlotte Allen: the philistine’s Maureen Dowd–but you know, it’s well worth it when gleamingly enlightened diamonds like this make their way out of the rough.

1. Women hating women-hating women. Heh.↩

TAGGED: disgust

[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) and the space-hogging photo illustrations (which are just as numerous as the advertisements) and the white-space-maximizing layout design² there’s like four New-York-circlejerk articles in the entire thing, which truly begets the question: why am I reading New York Magazine anyway as if I’m not from the land of the Grand Ole Opry, The Vols, and Graceland, as if a toponymic pop-culture magazine can give me all the cred I need to be the urbane sophisticate I yearn to embody³?

TAGGED: bloviating • coveting • fronting

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.

TAGGED: bloviating • eyeroll • NYT