Orienting Arrow

A longass time ago, my friend Siobhan wrote a book that was funny and informative. I drew some pictures for it, and I think we all learned a little something in the process (about how I am bad at leveraging opportunities to do things I actually like instead of working for the same company for twelve years or whatever it is now just kidding please keep employing me I need the healthcare: anyway, that is what we all learned).

It was called "30 Things Everyone Should Know How to do Before Turning 30", although you may know it by its German title (interesting sidenote: although they kept the "30" in the title of the German edition, the "How to eat a lot of cabbage before invading Poland in a well-made car" chapter was you know what it's not even worth finishing that line let's just go to the next paragraph. GERMANS, RIGHT?).

AND BUT SO
In addition to looking at archived emailed from the early aughts to remind myself that I'm not as clever/funny/smart as I used to be, I sometimes search for this book, and here is what I saw today: this book, which is $1.54 for a used copy is currently going for between $93.55 and $184.13 for a new copy.



NOW THEN
Later on, my friend Siobhan wrote another book called Hipster Haiku. This book featured zero illustrations by me (whoever's decision that was, I bear you no rancor, I pretty much maxed out my ability to draw hands with the first book).

BUT
Let's see how this book is doing OH INTERESTING IT IS AVAILABLE NEW FOR $4.22.
Look, this is a funny book. This book is funnier than it should be. I think if you were to read it what would happen is you would likely marvel at the funniness therein. But $4.22? I think we see what's going on here.

HENCE
For a limited time, I will draw a picture on any book you want for the jaw droppingly low price of like I don't know a dollar or something (higher if I have to draw hands).
I can basically guarantee (definition 4: "v. to guarantee sarcastically") that the book will increase in value TENFOLD within six years. I am contactable at pmortensen at g ma i l dot com (ha I just tricked some spambots SUCK IT SPAMBOTS I AM ONE STEP AHEAD OF YOU LIKE BOBBY FISCHER ONLY A NONANTISEMITIC VERSION, although I do plan to die of renal failure in Reykjavik, like him, so. OK call it even).

This is a limited time offer. Once I am a millionaire I will probably stop to focus on damaging my kidneys and/or working on my parody of that Beyonce song tentatively titled "Shingle Ladies (Put Some Acyclovir On It)". That joke should probably have gone on Twitter and not here; I think that's how Twitter works. SO CONFUSING. Anyway, go ahead and send me money. THANKS

This didn't say what I thought it said

When I Squeeze My Mind Grapes, the Resulting Wine Metaphor Trends Toward the Upper Echelons of the Middle Brow

On the bike path today I was behind a guy with extremely localized butt sweat such that if he had been wearing Winkers, it would have been like in Henry and June when Maria de Medeiros taps Fred Ward on the shoulder during Un Chien Andalou (or maybe Heddy Lamar in Ecstasy Featuring Heddy Lamar I can't remember) and anyway Fred Ward turns around and his face is blanked out by tears.

OPEN LETTER TO WINKERS CREATORS: PLEASE MAKE FRED WARD BIKING SHORTS

this is just in case you forgot

what it felt like

Tom Delay to Appear on Dancing with the Stars

Respect.


Presumably dancing to La Cucaracha will be deemed a little too inside baseball.

Whatever, SUGAR LAND PRIDE Y'ALL!!!!!!111!11

Also, Baylor pride.

Full disclosure: Tom Delay was an exterminator in Sugar Land and I grew up in Sugar Land and later went to Baylor and Tom Delay is whatever you call the cancer that cancer gets.

Adwear

This is only allowed to work once every fifteen years[*], specifically I refer to:
USING POETRY TO SELL ME PANTS

And I don't know how they (= advertisers) know when the fifteen years is up (maybe Start>All Programs>Accessories>Calculator? I DON'T KNOW) or whose turn it is to employ said advertising technique, but Max Blagg shilling for GAP from 1992:



..has toootally been replaced by Walt Whitman unknowingly (?**) shilling for Levi's, a pants concern:



(N.B. remember when Gap was called "The Gap" and remember when they announced they would no longer be selling Levi's and would instead sell their own brand and our moms were like, "Whaaaaaat?" and then it turned out to be a good idea (for a while)?)

I'm all like:
On the one hand it would seem that in the course of using a poem for advertising jeans, anything is likely to happen.
But on the other hand, this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding similarity between poems used for advertising jeans collected in widely different ad agencies.
Therefore the problem: If the content of advertisements for pants is contingent, how are we to explain the fact that ads from different agencies are so similar, LOL?

(You guys! Did you know French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss is different from jeans maker Levi Strauss?)

(Develop this thought.)



*(Shaggy's "Boombastic" doesn't count)

**Or maybe knowingly; I may be confused.
SPOILER ALERT: DON DRAPER'S REAL LAST NAME IS "WHITMAN"!
SPOLIER ALERT II: RACHEL MENKEN REJECTS DON DRAPER NÉE WHITMAN AND MARRIES A GUY NAMED "TILDEN KATZ", WHICH IS LIKE THE 1960S WAY OF SAYING "ADAM GOLDBERG" SO THIS MAKES ALL OF THE DEUTSCHER GRUß IN THE ADVERTISEMENT AT 0:27 OK? OR MAYBE IT MAKES IT NOT OK IT IS SO HARD TO TELL WHAT TO THINK WHEN I AM THINKING ABOUT BUYING PANTS


Anyway, this just makes me want to wear more pants.

SORRY, FANS OF ME WITHOUT PANTS.

I can't stop watching the trailer for the new Harry Potter movie

I am sort of excited?
Even though I haven't enjoyed any of those movies, except sort of the third one (#CuarónFTW: I think the most geniusy thing in that movie was that they were periodically wearing street clothes and it actually seemed like they were imperiled, which when they were wearing wizard robes, it was easier for me to just say, oh, they're fine; they're wearing robes).

Note that I am aware:
Trailers aren't movies (unfortunately), but this was easily the best book in the series, and look at the trailer! Street clothes! Eeeeeeeee!

But so anyway with the new movie coming out tomorrow, one's thoughts turn to Choire Sicha's comments on the original trailer at Radar.

Except one can't:
I had a post ready to go (and if you read this in an RSS reader, I had a post, fullstop) that linked to the old Radar piece which continued the above thusly:

Still worth reading

But also:

(1) It is weird to read it now in the new post-human Radar format with what is CS's "voice", but without any credit given to him (although I give it liiike one more year before the whole internet will be using that "voice") (which means he really should get his book out soon before it's too late) (Choire Sicha: take off your robe!) (metaphor).

(2) It's totally crazy to me that it was only a year ago that those guys were at Radar. It seems like FOREVVVVER ago.

Maybe it's different for you!

(note use of SichaPoint (tm) at the end of that sentence to prove my earlier point about the whole internet.)

Except, wait, because then I actually read carefully, and I was wrong?
The post on Radar is actually not that post anymore (with the exception of the title, which no longer makes sense?) -- it's been pruned of the Ian McKellen misattribution that allowed people to dismiss the whole thing, as well as a lot of other fun stuff that caused people to look for an easy way to dismiss it.

And so to Google (sorry, Bing)!
To search for key phrases I sort of remember from a year ago!
Internet Archive: I am sorry to tell you that you are not helping me today.
Today, helping me was Queerty.com, which my spending time on, in trying to track down some of the original text, will assure mistargeted google ads for me for about a week. You know what, I can take it, because: haha that url made me laugh although it took me a minute to get it so I also felt stupid.

Anyway, some partially reconstructed text from the post, from Queerty.com:
Now we find that Voldemort's own sense of evil came to him as a torture in the night of his youth. And then there's the train chugging its way to Hogwarts, and all the boys in the private school jostling in the halls, and there's Ian McKellen [sic] handing Harry Potter some big crystal memory dildo, seriously


Unfortunately, the rest may be lost to history
just kidding probably not, I'm probably just bad at the internet.

Still, New Watered Down Posts on the Current Version of Radar Online: You are my own personal Person from Porlock.

MJ

I was about to say Alex Balk wins the internet, but now it looks like The Onion just won the internet.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to Alex Balk.

The Franzen/Munro Debacle of 2009

Good tip: stop at the end of the first page, so your hate can continue to fuel you like a cancer.

That's how cancer works, right?

Kallisti!

Despite the fact that DC Comics are totally the worst ever, I love this [nsfw] painting (fourth down) by Isabel Samaras, The Judgment of Batman from 1996, that replaces Hera, Athena and Aphrodite with the only true Catwoman, Eartha Kitt, Lee Meriwether and Julie Newmar.

Discovery that there is someone alive in the world named Isabel Samaras who paints things like this via: 

the deeply awesome Learning 2 Share where those of you who came here by searching for "nsfw batman" should head now in order that you may also enjoy Batgirl -- Too Torrid For Tots! and the (literally) jawdropping Boy Wonder I Love You (which, just when you think Batman kissing on Robin is all played out (apologies to Isabel Samaras and the fifth one down (ibid.): maybe it wasn't in 2002), this song will make you want to see nothing but Batman kissing on Robin for the rest of your life in hopes that this will somehow irritate Burt Ward).

In conclusion, DC Comics are totally the worst ever.

how to make me sad

It makes me sad when I try to make a joke and people (1) take it seriously and (2) respond to the joke earnestly; therefore, this post on this "collaborative" blog that hasn't been updated in over two years due to lack of energy and/or interest by two of the authors and the fictionalness of another author makes me sad.

Someone should really do something, or something.

get experienced

Choire Sicha deconstructs AO Scott's review of The Girlfriend Experience in The Awl.

Good stuff in both links. However! Left out of both the review and the translation are the following important points:

(1) You are not allowed to see the film unless you have sat through a minimum of five mumblecore movies.

(2) "Grey's Anatomy" remains a good title for a movie review; why hasn't anyone done this?

(3) In an effort to leverage off of existing irony, Sasha Grey just secured the contract to be the new face of Ivory Snow (along with a resurrection of former taglines "Will Wash Anything" (!), "No chapping" (!!) and "it floats" (..?)).

(4) I think if I saw this movie I would feel gross and sad, but I still think I want to see it more than Che.

(5) "It's nice to be liked, but it's better by far to get paid."


Tangentially Related:

about which, : (

spacial neglect

Just getting around to this now, but the New Yorker profile on neurologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and mirrors and phantom limbs from a few weeks ago was pretty fun, especially all the slams at Freudians!

(And as a sidenote, the Rotating Charlie Chaplin mask mentioned in the article is truly fucked and will surely be the prion-laced fodder for many sleep disorders to come. But how much better would a rotating cortical homunculus have been? Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, you have dropped the ball. Resurgent Community of Brooklyn Artists living near the Gowanus, get on this.)

We found this phantom limb article to be a nice expansion on the other time The New Yorker talked about phantom limbs in “The Itch” (mostly memorable for the proximity of the word “itch” to the word “annals”, but still). It also dovetails nicely with the July 2007 article about phantom limbs that was in The New Yorker, oh and also that Richard Ford story that was in the March 2008 New Yorker where he talks about phantom limbs and the Edwidge Danticat story that talks about phantom limbs in last November’s issue.

By our estimate this is the 704^th time The New Yorker has talked about Phantom Limbs since mid-2007.

Just what is going on here?

While the Freudians have theorized that David Remnick wishes his mother had a penis (source: Janet Malcolm), the coördinated (diaeresis joke) effort on display implies someone on high is trying to cry out for help!

We therefore helpfully posit that the following is what we’re talking about when we talk about phantom limbs:

1. That feeling that overcomes the guest chair across from Charlie Rose on the two nights a week that Gopnik is not a guest
2. Calvin Trillin’s copy editor since 2001
3. Anthony Lane Week during David Denby Week (felt by everyone)
4. The “Shout” part of “Shouts and Murmurs” whenever Steve Martin phones one in.
5. The little bit I crumble inside when they fill the whitespace with a “Block that Metaphor” (bump up the leading; only Tobias Frere-Jones is going to notice and Sasha’s three years older, so he’ll keep him in check)
6. Something about Malcolm Gladwell pulling off his wig and it’s really been Christopher Walken this whole time but he still feels like he has crazy hair or something I don’t know

But these have all been with us for a while now, so there must be some other reason for the up-tick, and we now get to the point where we light a candle instead of cursing The New Yorker’s darkness; i.e., we have a solution!

1. Hold up a mirror to the Dan Baum Twitter.
2. The pain will all soon go away.
   

I guess that's accurate..?

NYer:

Block that metaphor!

That night everyone who had ever worked at WFMU fell asleep

and they all dreamed the same beautiful dream.



via.

no relation

I've never even been to Denver.

Buy one for Ron Mallett today

I like this Sam Pottsesque shirt from Qwantz. It would be useful for when it all goes down.

But there is a basic problem:
There should be instructions for how to make a mirror at the top and then everything else below it printed in reverse, Memento-stizz.

This way, I won’t have to take my shirt off all the time to read it and I can thereby avoid frightening the old-timey people with my sixpack.

All that aside, a great effort and I can't wait to see cowpox up close.



(also with a backwards shirt, you could also potentially take credit for backwards writing before da Vinci does. TAKE THE CREDIT)

INVISIBLE SKI HELMET

um: hey video editors, please think twice before using the "Impact" typeface, is all we're saying

time flies like an arrow

fruit flies like a banana

Stan Apps, at whatever his blog is called today, has a post about reading text backwards.

which post brings to mind an Anecdote:

When I first moved to Chicago (the first time) (in 1996), I went to the Loop to what was then Marshall Fields to look at the Christmas display and not knowing that the window displays would tell a narrative, I started on the wrong end and worked my way backwards. The window display that year was based on A Christmas Carol, and so the story went something like:
A repentant man buys a goose, then grows increasingly cynical.

(I did this in subsequent years; all Christmas stories backwards are depressing, which is to say more accurate, except for The Nutcracker, which evades explanation in either direction.)

I am also reminded of sitting in a movie theater, which I would have spelled "theatre" at the time, with my friends, waiting for Arachnophobia (‽) to start and talking about running movies in reverse (Kurt Vonnegut does this in Slaughterhouse Five, but we didn't know that): my friend said, "Jaws is about a shark that keeps throwing up people until they open the beach."

This is great!

But is it too great? It seems stolen from something he would have seen on HBO, which I did not have. Googling it now, I find references to it in basically these exact words, though not many, so maybe it is true that we were all funnier a long time ago. Reading old Outlook archives seems to confirm this.

n.b. The picture above of Stan Apps holding a sword is one that I found looking through an Outlook archive. He is not holding a sword because he is about to cut some Gordian Knot of Poetry by reading it backwards; but he is holding it hilariously because this is around 1994, a time when everything was hilarious.

W/R/T poetry, though
Other than liiike Philip Larkin, who for some reason I find hard to get enough of, I don't read much poetry, unless it's in the NYer and it's short enough (sorry, @Erato!) and is hopefully about someone who used to be a dog, but if a poem does manage to get itself read, I usually forget I'm supposed to be paying attention and when I get to the end, I definitely read it backwards (but it's cool: I think we all know that Leonhard Euler figured out the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem by starting at the end and working backwards), based on my misunderstanding of the way "poetry" works, viz--:

(1) a good poem is one that has a real sockdolager at the end
(2) find the sockdolager, and you will "unlock" the "key" to the poem (note: these are metaphors)
(3) then you can go back and reread it with "what you were supposed to have gleaned from it" the first time through in mind

BECAUSE APPARENTLY POETRY IS THE DEATH STAR
It is all defensive and tricky, but there is one hole you can shoot your "photon" into and then it explodes (it is possible I read that narrow fellow in the grass thing too many times in school).

AND SO WITH THIS IN MIND WHAT CHANCE DOES READING FORWARD HAVE:

For: reading bottom to top will increasingly be the practice as we all start going through old email threads in our Outlook Archives to see how funny we used to be and to try to figure out what happened (I was really funny over email in 2000.) (i.e., before the events of 9/11) (but after Kurt Cobain died! Strange!)

All of this to say:

if you sometimes find yourself missing the Silver Age of the Internet when everyone was funnier (before they "bought the goose") (see what I did there?), and regret specifically the deletion of the entire tmftml blog at popfactor ("popfactor"!) and more specifically regret that the Elizabeth Skurnick "Ballad Of The Love-Scorned Anywoman" post is gone: fear not, it is also here on her own blog.

Note: even though it is poetry that is not about a dog, it should be read forward, due to the sockdolager.

Afterthought

On post-hipster.com, which I'm going to call post-chipster.com in my head startiiiiiiiiiing now, Chip has put up some tracks from the Little P-Slope Band that Could, The Sacred Monkeys of Bali. In particular, may I direct you to the first track, Bob Ross.

As you'll recall, the choice to change the song's focus from Werner Herzog stunt double Bill Alexander to Doug Henning stunt double Bob Ross has long been regarded as the point at which the band jumped the shark (source: SMOB: An Oral History, With the Emphasis on Oral, Just Kidding, there wasn't actually much Oral) due to the band's attempt to access a more "mainstream" demographic, to say nothing of the loss of the "Rootin' Teuton" line).

STILL: worth a listen if only to speculate on what might have been.