unspeak

here's a blog that disassembles the words of dissemblers: steven poole's unspeak.net. his book just came out, and i'm afraid the too-convenient barnes & noble will get my money again because i really want to read it. poole, who writes for the guardian, does an orwell-style dissection of common sound bites—'climate change,' 'war on terror,' 'muslim community'—to reveal the partisan viewpoints bound up in them. entire chapters are devoted to 'freedom' and 'terror,' and poole also pays attention to more minute shifts in idiom—e.g., how using 'asylum seekers' for 'refugees' shifts the emphasis 'from what a person was fleeing to the demands he was making on the country he arrived in.'

as for the blog, the may 18 entry on global warming is rote, but the previous ones on 'islamic terrorism' and 'turning points' are really sharp.

because the nyt won't print the word 'cooter'

from the below-mentioned "war on contraception" article:

"The linking of abortion and contraception is indicative of a larger agenda, which is putting sex back into the box, as something that happens only within marriage." —William Smith, vice president for public policy, Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.

back in the box, eh?

guess that's what the anti-gay activists are going for, too.

p.s.

i've committed the folly of backposting. scroll down to april 18 if you want to see something old but new. man, it's like april 18 is dead but now all these illuminating letters from it are coming out posthumously.

almost done

last week, from sunday to saturday, i wrote about 7500 words. i have maybe 1500-2000 to go, plus an internship application that is making me nervous as hell, before wednesday, when ed and i leave for germany. 2 classes down, 1 to go, and maybe i can finally drink that bottle of prosecco on top of (oops—now in) my fridge, waiting since the last time i did craploads of work but couldn't pause for more than a day before beginning anew.

from friday morning to yesterday at 4pm, with a pause somewhere in there for 3 hours of sleep, i wrote my anthropologie piece. i think it's a good draft and i'm excited about it. i cracked open a beer at 3, once i knew it was safe and had the ending cinched. there are only two kinds of papers that call for beers in the home stretch: really good ones and really bad ones.

then, in honor of anthropologie, i put on a dress and went to manhattan to drink a gin & tonic before heading to a rooftop barbecue. i was in bed by 11, tho, and every time i got close to sleep, i'd start trying to edit the random sentences that were running through my head. i remember having lots of trouble with subordinating clauses. then i'd get frustrated and remember i was finished with my article. this happened maybe 5 times before i fell asleep. it was just like in high school, when i'd spend all week studying and when i was finally finished and sleeping over at my friend's house, i'd be falling asleep and scrambling to list the 4 main functions of the judiciary branch and their significance.

anyway, hooray for spring, which i have completely missed, and on to read the sunday times. i'm glad someone has finally done the article on the war on contraception, even tho i almost can't bear to read it.

also: thankyoustephencolbert.org has 51,524 thank-yous as of this posting. mine was 37,840 or something, and that was on wednesday. it'd be way cool if it got to 100,000.

this has been a post about numbers.

unanticipated perk of nyu library database access

dr. phil's advice columns in the oprah magazine are more interesting than ann 'here's the 800 number for the domestic abuse hotline' landers, yet also uninhibited by the nyt mag ethicist's occasionally tiresome mantle of intellect and do-gooderism. they are pure voyeurism, and dr. phil's answers have a satisfying pop (which the meandering and verbose cary tennis of salon would do well to learn from).

through eight months in the journalism program, it had never occurred to me to use my proquest and nexis access to read trash. yes, i have arrived. tho i still think a real-life subscription to us weekly is in order, since you can't see pictures in the databases. goodbye mother jones, hello brangelina.

a downside to this unprecedented wallowing is realizing to an even fuller extent what a retard chuck klosterman is. oh well. i suppose knowledge has always had its compromises.

poisonous people who unfairly escape retribution and humiliation

or, people i shouldn't let get to me, but who do anyway.

1. PR people, esp. in press offices
2. real-estate agents you aren't paying
3. real-estate agents you are paying
4. subway pushers
5. hairdressers who don't listen

suggestions welcome.

hooray for backposting! i meant to add this at the time and now i'm typing in preview mode and the letters pop up in the heading right as i type them.

yesterday i interviewed for an internship at a magazine i'd really like to work for. i thought i would just be talking to this one scruffy guy who recently graduated from my program, but instead i was faced with a mini-conference room of 3 important people to charm. i think it worked—they asked me to bare my soul, talk about my dream job, what i really want from work and hence life, and i totally confessed to wanting to be a series of old men: harper's ed lewis lapham, septagenarian (but so sexy!) brit artman john berger, and my media theory hero thomas de z, the only one of the group under 60. i left feeling pried open and good, but slightly embarrassed in that morning-after way, when you wake up realizing you got too drunk on a first date and revealed your soul to a cute guy you'd like to see again, except he hardly talked about himself at all.

myself as a man

it has taken me till 4 to start on the day's task, even tho i got up at 8:30. that is because it's a tedious one. for my anthropologie project i must transcribe an hour-plus-long interview (normally i reconstruct conversations from my notes, which is faster, but this must be a word-for-word transcription, as stipulated by the prof).

i'm doing slow playback so that i can get everything, which makes my interviewee and me sound like men. stoned men. yet gay, because we are being chatty women, talking about clothes, and that rhythm and inflection comes through even in slow-mo.

this is funny because the company is run by a gay couple, who live in philly but keep a pied-a-terre in manhattan. the headboard on their bed was inspired by an english garden gate from the 1870s, i recently learned from a shelter mag. they had repros made for the store, and now you can own one, too—for $1,348.

sparkles, ruffles, and other grownup pursuits

almost two years ago i found this bag at a now-defunct boutique on curry row in the east village. but like so many over-the-top things that i love, the purse, i determined after a mental assessment of my wardrobe, belonged with dorothy.

i was right, but later i missed it dearly, just like dorothy now misses the ruffle she cut off the bottom in a pointless bout of asceticism. we both looked for the bag online, googling for the mysterious 'malina' scripted in plastic and dangling from a removable string on the handle. nothing. the boutique made it out to be from a local designer, which is probably true, if by designer you mean machine and by local you mean china.

fast forward to last weekend, when ed and i were eating at a peruvian place around the corner from our apartment. the woman at the table next to us had a bag that looked just like this one, except it was pink and had brass handles. when i interrupted her conversation with her date, i learned that she had gotten it on the street in new orleans and that her date hates holding it for her.

less than an hour later i had found the same green one as d's on ebay and bought-it-now. along with my yellow cherry dress from anthropologie, this bag signals my early-life crisis, in which i buy up fashion items i could've only dreamed about as a five-year-old.

still looking for those blue-gray sparkle mary janes, tho.

amazing and pathetic food-industry interest group

i'm up early/late preempting a hangover with leftover chinese and cheese toast. this week's new yorker is on the table, opened to an ad that says 'concerned about mercury? you shouldn't be, unless you eat this,' around a fictional can of whale meat. after some explanatory text that poses a no-win hyphenation setup—'heavy fish-eaters'—the ad says 'fish is good for you. baseless anxiety (or whale blubber) isn't' and refers the reader to fishscam.com.

the page is run by the innocuous sounding center for consumer freedom, whose press releases unite the government and PETA in a conspiracy to make us all anxious as hell and not buy foods that are good for us.

here's my favorite quote:

'Is there any doubt that the animal rights movement is targeting your kids? In a new report, "Your Kids, PETA's Pawns," the Center for Consumer Freedom explores how one group, the $24 million People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), devotes substantial resources toward capturing children -- the next generation of potential meat eaters, milk drinkers, circus-goers, and fishermen -- in its cult-like web.'

and this headline from the fishscam site should retire to the onion: Fishy Mercury Scare Based On Study Of Whale-Heavy Diets, Says Ad in U.S. News & World Report.

now in brooklyn: edwards key lime

the pie finder is wrong! heretofore unavailable in new york city, the delicious key lime pie has found its way to target on atlantic avenue, formerly a total hellhole. now it's a total hellhole with a prize gleaming in the freezer section.

i got the last one. not even a whole pie, but the box of two slices, which cost $2.02. i am serious, this pie is better than any i have ever made. and yes, it's frozen. the best way to eat it is only partially defrosted and accompanied by cheap asti, as we in jam304 found.

in other news, i got really excited and then partially bummed, but still sort of excited. my culture-critic hero, thomas de zengotita, was slotted to teach a class on the history of media theory in the fall in a different program. i emailed him—spending hours on a few simple lines, of course—to ask permission to register for it, and he got back to me very quickly. unfo, the class will be next spring, after i've graduated (unless i get especially delinquent these next few months), tho i imagine i'll still be able to audit.

he signs his emails 'tdez.' that's pretty awesome.

fifteen minutes early and 3.5 months late

as of 11:45 last night, i am finally done with my incomplete. now i can in good conscience drink the bottle of prosecco ginny brought before my last week of school in december. tho it was not a gift meant in reward for finishing, it became a symbol for it, and so all winter and through the very late beginning of spring here in ny (i.e., last week), that beribboned bottle has sat atop my fridge, taunting me with the knowledge that i have made it halfway through the program without managing to finish my first semester. but now. it is time to drink. at 8:56am saturday morning. yeah. no. instead, it's time to go to the whitney biennial.

look at these pictures of my cats

if it's true that the engine of technological progress is porn, it's equally true that feline fixations bring up the caboose. either way, you can't get on the web without being inundated with pussy.

and so, in lieu of getting a little too friendly with ed's digital camera, i present pictures of our new(ish) kittens, peas and tilde. peas is peas's full (and birth) name, given by his foster mommy. his sisters, carrots and potatoes, made their home with a man who probably didn't stick with their original names. but peas can never be anything else. after considering some unfortunate names for sugar, his adoptive companion (ranging from 'poops' to 'Qs'), we settled on tilde (formally: mrs. tilde [~] peabody). her feisty pursuit of anything that moves—feet, for instance, but more often string attached to something jingly—is often punctuated by desperate cartwheels and three-foot-high leaps, and so she has quickly earned the nickname tilderator.

	peas is the stripey one. he has lots of riblike stripes on the skin of his belly, giving him the appearance of wearing one of those skeleton-torso shirts, but on his whole underside. tilde has patches on her skin that line up exactly with the patches on her fur. the black over her eyes extends in a V-shape down the back of her head, mullet style. shown here keeping some sort of mafia secret.
	this candid shot reveals peas's softer side, thanks to ed's ruthless paw-parazzi pursuit.
	tail-er trash?
	tilde wows with her catlike ninja skills, while peas exhibits his catlike...skills.
	also it snowed here. this is the basketball hoop in our downstairs neighbor's backyard.

penises change the world

today in slate, kent sepkowitz contends that debates over how best to measure wangs will train us to be more critical of studies' methodology, thus making way for a less dupable populace when it comes to studies that actually matter.

bra size, for instance.

really? reminds me of that n+1 article on reality tv, in which mark greif argues that by working ourselves up over who's getting voted off the island, constituents are better prepared to participate in democratic government. what are we still doing with c-span, then? that money belongs to murdoch.

so it turns out size does matter. but for a better-informed democracy, not sex.

happy valentine's day, all you patriots out there.

will provide hours of nostalgic, slightly derisive fun

there's a section for davidson college on ratemyprofessors.com. profs get ratings on easiness, clarity, helpfulness, and—gratuitously (or perhaps not?)—hotness, signified by a red chili pepper next to their names. malcolm campbell got one chili pepper; shireen campbell got 3. my favorite so far is d. robb's entry. the vast differences in response to him ('MOST BORING MAN ALIVE' vs. 'clear, precise, and rigorous') reflect the vast differences in humor level among davy students.

durwin striplin, chem prof and onetime wailer for the briefly incarnated band enormous power, also got a chili pepper. enormous pepper, greg pointed out. just the fact that there is a person named durwin striplin walking around on this planet is cause for celebration.

also, someone thinks randy ingram looks like kevin spacey. another compared his class to dead poet's society. kuzmo, too, is 'a professor out of a movie,' though the 'evil-twisted-santa-claus exterior' is agreed to be just that.

i can't believe shaw smith and cort savage haven't gotten any chili peppers.

two extremes

either i can't get myself to slow down, or i can't get myself to do anything at all. mostly the latter. i'm not very interested in what i'm supposed to be doing, which is finishing that class. i am, however, intensely interested in season 3 of gilmore girls, which i am inadvertently cut off from because lost highway was at position #1 in my netflix queue the moment they received the last disc i returned, and i had forgotten to move the next gg disc up front. i will often fool myself into thinking i am using netflix to watch actual movies, and then at the last minute i'll reshuffle my queue. but this time i happened to be shopping at the co-op and sticking my face in the adoption window of the kitty clinic when the crucial moment arrived.

that show is sweet valley high for my adult life. which is great and terrible at the same time. the problems—not the overarching dramatic ones, but the ones that get resolved within each episode—are of the kind that only really count as problems on tv. in the episode i just watched, rory is mad at her grandpa for setting up a 'spontaneous' meeting for her with his friend, the head of admissions at yale. and she wasn't prepared. oh horrors! after a family-laundry scene in the echo-y and quite gilded chamber of a yale building, lorelai and rory huff away to the comfort of tacos, and later, before studying, rory smooches her new bad-boy boyfriend (who raises eyebrows around town but isn't so bad that he's not way into books) outside a gas station. meanwhile lorelai has ample opportunity to say things like, 'don't study so much that your head gets so large and grows into a bald and shiny egghead, because i want to go shoe shopping tomorrow.'

why do anything other than watch this show? seriously. the only good reason i can think of is that there's a finite number of episodes. i guess the only way out is to get sucked into the final season of six feet under, which i was afraid to watch because i was too embarrassed for claire. hbo is my methodone (sung to the catchy tune of 'angel is my centerfold').

good news re: kitty adopting tho, because i found one today. it's a boy, 7 weeks old, and we get it in the next two weeks once it's neutered. gray tabby-ish with darker stripes and blue eyes. name and pictures forthcoming. what would a blog be without pictures of a cat? time to put tinfoil on the chairs.

i can anticipate the good grammar

i love cut-and-paste cover-letter writing. that could be the next magnetic poetry set. remind me to sell that.

i'm applying for jobs because for nearly 24 hours i've been toying with the idea of going part-time with school. i hear there's an onion internship. maybe i could sell them my cover-letter magnetic poetry idea.

went to the acupuncturist today for the second time. it was awesome. which was awesome, because last time it was not. except strange thing: the office had this lingering smell underneath all other odors (soap, copy paper) of weed. maybe the doormen sneak in there at night? maybe there's something i didn't know about chinese herbs—namely, that they're not plural after all.

happy new year from: the drunk people

ed intervened just before i cracked open a smirnoff ice and took me home. it was that kind of night.

deep down, walmart knows my soul

i have the greatest hoodie ever. a beatles yellow submarine hoodie. and i got it at walmart of all places, thanks to a tip from the publix checkout girl in gville who was wearing one. i bought the last one, and the rest of the rack was kiss and acdc and that was it. when every other five-year-old's drool-spotted chin was reflecting the glow of star wars laser swords, mine was shining in the light of the beatles' huge bellbottoms and the mickey-mouselike ears of the head blue meanie. psychedelic graphics are perfect for five-year-olds. and now that our morally repellent superstore has placed one of its invisible fingers on the pulse of my first childhood salivation, i am sold.

no matter how i save it, the picture will not appear upright. below the logo it says nothing is real.

so most of you have prolly gotten emails from me about that 'video games that help you focus' story i'm working on. i have spent 2+ weeks thinking about this stuff, and so it has dawned on me that journalists lead strange lives. here are some highlights:

i heard from an equipment salesman that fortune 500 companies (which he would not name) and the accounting firm ernst & young have had these programs in place to help their employees' business performance. after i got off the phone with him i realized he was just reading off the sidebar on his website. he wouldn't give me any more details about what these companies had been up to. so i, like a freak, called up ernst & young and said, 'so, there's this thing where you play a video game with your mind, and you do it by sticking electrodes on your head...no, i'm not kidding. this is real...did you ever have a program like this for your employees?' she had to get back to me on that one.

and that, strangely enough, happened not to be the most out-of-left-field question this PR lady had been asked recently.

i also ended up calling an indiana funeral/medical services company that another equipment website claimed would appear in a harvard business review article about their success with the technology. no luck their either. not sure what's up, but maybe these salesmen just make stuff up, not expecting the mothers of ADD children to call Polly PR to confirm.

i've also been getting hundreds of message-board postings via email, mostly from professionals on a yahoo forum. they are a wild bunch, posting robustly even at 11pm on a saturday night during the holiday season. [and i, the shut-in journalist, was close at hand to read them.] aside from all the expected internet-forum backbiting and mudslinging, one of my favorite dr.s must use bartleby's quotations like a thesaurus. there are like 3 mentions of historical figures, along with the quotes they are most famous for, in every email. george santayana, fdr. it's the email signature as email. this person also wedged in a comparison of the group's debate about licensing to the christian reformation. just as luther proclaimed that all should have direct access to god through personal readings of the bible, so too should neuroscientists be generous with their prefixes: ph.d.s and other fancy-degree holders shouldn't monopolize the administration of brain training.