May 2009
Cooking blogs and their baffling success
What’s up with those cooking blogs anyway? They always have this cheesy premise like I’m a mom from Tucson and my kid doesn’t see colours!
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Spiritual Grubbiness
Saw Crumb last night. Found that the Crumb bros. were at the bottom of my list of people I’d like to have over for dinner. In particular: Maxon. Charles, inexplicably, was my favorite; he wouldn’t wear his teeth and he seemed the most honest, the most relatable. Robert was functional, but there was something unsettling about that when I saw him in contrast to the other two (Maxon chilling at the Windsor Hotel, Charles in a creepy bedroom at his mother’s house and with a quaalude-droopy style about the arrangement of his face). I can now add Crumb to the short list of movies (Chuck and Buck, Pink Flamingos) that make me feel as though I need to bathe in Soft Scrub and toss off a few Hail Marys.
Time to add Gummo to the ol’ queue.
“Always contest speed camera tickets, no matter how guilty you look.”
—A guy who just beat a $200 DC speeding ticket. Turns out the photo was too blurry. I was in and out in an hour and didn’t even have to plead!
Is there a way to search for flights from a given city to anywhere, and then sort them by price? I hear about super low fares, but the only way to really find those is to just stumble on them.
Kayak and other fare aggregators mandate that users input a destination, but I’m not interested in going to a specific place. Is there a website that allows for this kind of search?
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And once again, I want to pour out a 40 for James Cameron.
jgh:
Terminator 2 is underrated. It still holds up today. Fffuuuuuu
Underrated? Seriously? Is this a little known art-house flick? It’s in the top 100 box office hits of all time with a 204 million box office take.
Holds up today? Like it came out in 1965? Does it have special effects that include pie plates on string?
This post has all kinds of “WTF?”
Love ya, but sometimes your whole “I’m 23” thing needs to be reigned in before your Tumblr elders flip ya for real.
I’m stepping in with the defense, DisapprovingMoPitznkey! T2 was obviously a very successful movie. But “underrated” means that it’s never on the cultural radar anymore [are you kidding me?! tbs and spike show it at least once a month and the new terminator is about to come out, let alone the popularity of the sarah connor chronicles], and that’s kinda pathetic considering that I can’t think of many action movies (things that improve with Moore’s Law and inflation over time) in the past 5 years that clearly exceed it. It is the archetypal action movie, it has aged quite well, and it is the perfect example of its genre [no, con-air and the rock (both were remastered and rereleased by criterion. and i could go back further but won’t) hold those places. t2 is sci-fi, NOT action. and t2 is horrid and deplorable when compared to other films in the sci-fi genre]. So perfect, that Arnold was compelled the next year to make an action movie whose sole basis was to parody himself while continuing the blow-shit-up formula.
And yes… it holds up for something that was so dependent on ground-breaking CGI [the effect was first mastered for the abyss two years prior]. There are movies where the effects shots look kinda awful not long after the movie comes out… and there are movies where the effects are nearly seamless. Hey, I’ll name a few! The Empire Strikes Back, Ghostbusters, Jurassic Park, Titanic, The Dark Knight. This is why no one’s going to give a shit about Gollum in 10 years the way no one gives a shit about Jar Jar Binks right now [bullshit. the cgi in lord of the rings was impeccable and far more groundbreaking than anything on your list besides the star wars nod (also: show me a fucking scene in ghostbusters that used “groundbreaking cgi”… most of it was practical/stopmotion) and if you knew your stuff here, you would have mentioned legend, for which the “morphing” algorithm was developed, thereby breaking ground for all kinds of new effects]… aside from having poor writing, the entire character is going to look so visually primitive it’ll be embarrassing. I think all of these movies are worth rewatching every couple of years, especially when Hollywood is trying to push a bad Brett Ratner movie on us again. Or something with Shia LeBoeuf in the lead [or perhaps another addition to the overwraught terminator franchise?].
This whole T2 thing was discussed in-person the other day, and it was agreed by all who participated. It’s worth repeating.
[don’t test me on this shit, ya twenty-somethings.]
/thread
“
From 1968 through 2008, the GOP largely controlled the narratives shaping our discourse. Democrats held the White House for twelve of those forty years. But even when Bill Clinton began a two-term reign, he was assailed by wave after wave of gong-show public attacks. He and his wife were serial murderers; he himself was a major drug dealer. Vince Foster’s suicide was “investigated” again and again. And again! And once more after that!
That was ugly public conduct. It was also blatantly nuts.
Just how crazy was this era? Let’s pose a question to younger readers: Did you know that the Clintons used condoms and crack pipes for ornaments on the White House Christmas tree? After former FBI agent Gary Aldrich made that and other preposterous claims in a crackpot, best-selling book, Tim Russert devoted the bulk of a worried hour to The New Yorker’s outrageous attempt to fact-check Aldrich’s claims. Today, Russert’s scolding cross-examination of Hedrik Hertzberg and Jane Myers reads like a fever-dream from a deeply lunatic era. Here are five consecutive questions he posed to the people who’d dared to fact-check a nut, at a time when cans of salted nuts were visibly running the discourse.
RUSSERT (5/27/97): Have you ever made a mistake, Jane?
RUSSERT: Have you ever been sued in your professional career?
RUSSERT: Do you have a philosophical or ideological bias to your reporting?
RUSSERT: Will you tape-record conversations in the future?
RUSSERT: Rick Hertzberg, The New Yorker magazine has had some difficulties in the past, being challenged and sued. On this story you will state again, emphatically, you stand by—other than the fact that you just mentioned, involving the date of Regnery’s brother, the date of his death—every other quote in this story, you stand by?
Have you ever made a mistake! Yes, he actually said it! (Sorry—no transcript is available on-line.) In the previous segment, Russert had been much more deferential toward Aldrich and his misused publisher, the high-minded well-meaning Al Regnery.
” —(via offnotesnotes)
Oh wow. I remember being told about the condom Christmas ornaments when I was an adolescent. My mom would literally shiver with disgust when the first lady’s name came up in dinner table conversation.
Also:
- Bill Clinton raped many womens.
- The Clintons were responsible for many “suicides”
- Hillary was probably Janet Reno’s lesbian lover.
- Bill snorted truckloads of cocaine while president.
- and dozens more.
“…the reason people miss fundamental truths about economics is that economic thinking usually requires at least two steps of logic to arrive at truth, whereas the common man is only willing to take one step at most.”
—Why Do People Instinctively Embrace Protectionism?
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“Today, I was getting ready to make notecards for my vocab quiz tomorrow. I wanted to use colorful ones but couldn’t find any. So I just used the white ones. MLIA”
—MyLifeIsAverage
