Courtesy of the Smithsonian:
Check out the bosoms on Our Lady Freedom, too, as she grips the sword and the flag in the milky clouds over wine country. Somebody knew exactly what they were doing. Well, that, or Lacan was right. Can't it be both?
Note: I received no permission of any kind from the Smithsonian. That's what makes it funny.
With respect to ex-governor Spitzer, have truer words ever been spoken?
In honor of the first ever google search for '"that's what she said" "henry james"' (so far as I know), the first ever HJ single page twofer. Sorta.
Get rich quick scheme 1a: I'm going to start handing out otherwise-blank businesses cards that say,
I'm going to hell.
One of my best friends is coming to visit me over spring break. I can only convey my excitement over this prospect by quoting the entirety of the message that he sent with his flight itinerary.
"Here it is. Lets smoke pcp."
Holy moly.
I did $9 worth of laundry today. Three loads in, like, industrial strength washing machines. I am the filthiest boy in town. I would bemoan the fact that I seem to be the only person who ever cleans out the lint catchers in the dryers if it weren't for the fact that I only clean out the lint catchers because there is always noticeably more lint after I am done with the dryers than was in them before I began, and, despite what you would think to be the relative anonymity that comes with such an ignominy, this makes me feel ashamed. I don't want to be judged, even if the judger hasn't got a face to put with the name -- which will inevitably be something like "lint boy" or "Linty McLinterson." I would call such a person "Master Lintinand Lintington, Esquire, of Lintingham Village, Lintshire, just outside Linton, Englint." I have never considered myself an especially linty person, especially because I only very rarely have to dig it out of my bellybutton with a ballpoint pen cap after vainly fishing for a while with my stubby little fingers. But I may after all have to reconsider. I don't know exactly where lint comes from. Nor do I know why people get the hiccups, which I do not have, but in which I am nevertheless mildly interested. The mysteries are killing me.
(I actually have fabulous fingers.)
I'm reading this novel with a character named Olive in it, and every time I read the name Olive, I instantly want to eat some olives. The problem is, Olive plays a pretty significant role in the novel, and I have the willpower of a slobbering dog in the refrigeration facilities of a third-world morgue during a brownout.
Me : olives :: ravening dog : putrefied corpses
This one's almost too easy. Almost. Shooting fish, but, as the man said, I don't see nothing wrong with a little bump and grind. Click to embiggen.
An instance of superhuman biblio-crate digging led my friend Robert to stumble upon "this little gem" in a used book store.
I can't tell you how glad this makes me feel.
Nor can I tell you how much I want this confluence of royals -- the King of R&B and the Prince of slacker pop -- to be something more -- either on purpose, or by a cosmic flux or divine intervention -- than a mere coincidence.
Stephen Malkmus : barber :: R. Kelly : hoes
The happy upshot of embedding being disabled for the "I'm a Flirt" video is that I can now post this unaccountably compelling mashup of that song and Broken Social Scene's "7/4 Shoreline."
It doesn't quite work when the harmonies kick in (stupid modalities), but I'm not complaining. It's the delicious confluence of chocolate and peanut butter. By which I mean, black people and Canadians.
Yes, I ought to be working. Especially considering I've got it in my head that the Oscars might be a beautiful, terrifying train wreck to watch after 8 days of prep. It's been a slow year for me, cinematically. Of the movies up for awards, I've only seen There Will Be Blood, about which I generally agree with the more dismissive, less orgasmic side of the critical discourse -- fine movie, sublime individual performance by Danny Day. And let's be straight here, the score would get about 10% of the attention it has if it weren't by Johnny Greenwood. Though I am grateful for the fact that it was, in the grand tradition of Ennio M., confrontational, which is something arthouse cinema hasn't been enough of since it slid into a complacent funk after France and Sweden gave us the depressing half of the 60s, and we realized that life is a game that can't be won.
Speaking of foreign countries, here's my favorite-ever LastFM comment.
I've been on LastFM for about a year now, and all it's really done for me is make me more self-conscious and affected when I listen to music. It tracks everything you listen to, so I get it in my head that I want the public facade of my taste to accurately reflect my taste. Except my taste is a good deal worse than I want it to be, so I find myself listening to way more Tom Waits than I would otherwise care to, because he's one of the most popular artists for people like myself to pretend to like. But that's only half the story, since I pirated the man's entire discography from bittorrent, and if I'm going to disrespect him like that, I might as well, you know, try to appreciate him, too.
So LastFM has been good to me, insofar as it's been one more public profile to hawk-watch, even as nobody cares what it looks like. It's the online equivalent of a garden of plant-sculptures, carefully cultivated with lawnsheers but behind impregnable estate walls. (In this case, estate walls of indifference). So the question now becomes, why did I sign up for MOG the other day? MOG does exactly the same thing as LastFM. Exactly. But now I have both. And that, my friends, is unnecessary. I sometimes yearn for the days when I had 5 TV channels and a computer that went "bing bong skreeeeeeeee" when it connected to the internet. But then I reconsider when I realize that I've been lucky enough to experience all the benefits and perks of aging, like getting an oil-change in the ghetto, and standing in front of a vast trough of white onions in the grocery store and trying to figure out which one to buy, with precisely no criteria, for a recipe I don't know how to make.
I was sautéing garlic at 9:30 this morning, and I had the heat too high, and when I poked in the spatula to stir the rapidly blackening, horribly stinking bits, the pool of oil exploded into a tiny yellow geyser and burned my face and my hands. Fortunately, my glasses took the brunt of the blast, or I'd be blinder than shit. I've never been so lucky to be... uh... blind. Every 8 months or so I make a 3-week self-taught Master Course stab at learning how to cook chicken, and it always ends in near disaster. But that's ok, because it will give a body something useful and interesting to learn once I get a PhD in literature, which, it's more apparent than ever, is a more egregious racket than the Irish mob.
To wit: Jacques Derrida makes a stab at most baroque "that's what she said" moment of the year with this doozy of a dandy of a meaningless clause.
What's that you say? You don't understand what that could possibly mean? Well, you're in luck, because he includes an enlightening graphical representation of the phenomenon, "double chiasmatic invagination of edges," which consists of, as near as I can tell, a stick-figure bajingo with an eye ("I"?!) in the center.
This is what I do all day. We call it "hermeneutics." Hermeneutics is Greek for "a federally subsidized system of spousal hiring which allows aggrandizing bullshit artists to self-mythologize to the point that they're convinced they're doing vital work." Welcome to the fold, brothers.
