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

So, catching up with my neglected OPML file, I see that several of my favorite blogs all made posts about Valentine’s Day, which, even though I do sorta kinda have an ersatz boyfriend of sorts, isn’t all that significant to me in either a positive or negative manner; my real cause for glee once the holiday arrives is for discounted delectables in the days afterwards–the same chocolates I know and love, but at fifty percent off because they’re wrapped in pink and red–who can complain?!

TAGGED: chocolate • food • nomnomnom

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.

TAGGED: grammar • language • shame

Finally, after almost three years, Pandora is properly pandering (heh) to my lousy musical tastes; my Mirah radio station is serving up gem after gem, a good twenty minutes have passed with nary a thumbs down, and I’m finding myself more than content in gentle lo-fi grandeur (no, “lo-fi grandeur” is not an oxymoron–I know what I mean), and by the by who knew that Mirah was queer–tfti, Wikipedia!

TAGGED: glee • music

The first, last, and only person to whom I showed the treacly Will.i.am (do not phunk with his heart) Yes. We. Can.¹ video had the most bizarre reaction: he felt neither unduly inspired nor unduly dismissive, he just kept asking me who the different celebrities were and twenty seconds before it ended shrugged, turned away, and declared, “I don’t recognize any of these people,” a sentiment at which I felt quite aghast²; I didn’t even consider that its validity as a political statement/art/campaigning tool/wev would be based on the relative percentages of A-, B- and C-listness of the people involved, but apparently he was not the only one and now I feel duly embarrassed to have turned down my snarkitude for a few moments by sharing it with someone, even if I presented it as an interesting cultural artifact as opposed to an effective call to the barracks³…*sigh*…meanwhile, I never noticed that The Onion A.V. shamelessly ripped off New York Magazine with their Tolerability Index, which, missing an axis, is but a bullshit bootleg version of The Approval Matrix⁴.

TAGGED: gall • politics • popculture

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 I have not yet surpassed the emotional age of fourteen, though I will note that, over time, Sex and the City has made me a bit less shameful about feeling that way, which just proves that both her diminutive height and weight does not keep Sarah Jessica Parker from changing the world, one pussyfooted² twenty-something at a time.

TAGGED: getoffamylawn • neuroses • shame • spelling