Related: Prince Charles Pushes Wedding Back a Day.
Elsewhere: Deconstructing Harry
Category: Shallow
Bloggers, or ‘Web loggers,’ may not have invented April Fool’s Day (that would be Pope Gregory with his conversion to the eponymous Gregorian Calendar in 1582), but as with so many other things, they have taken credit for improving on it.
As the clock struck midnight on April first, several prominent bloggers created puckish, at times almost humorous, stabs at April Fool’s content. As you might expect, many were parodies of other websites and the conventions of the medium. “Bloggers are a world onto themselves,” said Jeff Jarvis, who runs the website Buzzmachine.com and who actually called this reporter himself assuming she’d be doing this story. “So, of course, they’d parody their world.”
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A Modest Proposal
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One Word For You: Premium
Remember the party scene in The Graduate where Benjamin Braddock is buttonholed by his father’s friend who has one word for him, “Just one word”?
Well, we have one word for you: Premium.
Due to the amazing success of our reader feedback module (you know, the little “Did you find this content useful?” radio buttons that have sprouted up on this site like wild flowers on the side of the highway), we’ve decided to go premium. Following the successful model of Salon and several other pay-per-view sites, we’ve implemented a premium area to provide our core readers with the best this site has to offer.
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From, The Five Obstructions, Jørgen Leth, 2003.
Lord Byron once called shaving “A daily plague, which in the aggregate, may average on the whole with parturition.” After looking up that last word, it’s obvious that this Byron fellow probably had no idea how to shave. Had he been lucky enough to live in the era of informative how-to websites such as this one, he could’ve learned in eight simple steps.
Following these eight steps, you’ll be a smarter and closer shaved man than Lord Byron could ever have hoped to be.
Categories
Some Jokes Just Write Themselves
Meet the Tuminator, by Barry Wigmore, Daily Mail, March 29, 2005.
Curing Obesity through Sterility: California ‘s Controversial Program Under the Microscope, Pacific Northwest Medical Journal.
Related: Is it April Fool’s Day already?
Categories
First Impressions Of Beck’s Guernica
As some have noted, Beck’s latest work, Guernica, is his most mature offering to date. At a time of war, the artist has brought us a wrenching, disturbing work that confronts his fans while pushing his oeuvre into newer, more challenging directions. It’s a breakthrough—and a triumph.
Guernica emerges after Beck’s much-remarked upon ‘Blue Period,’ in which his work wallowed in despair. While sadness was the dominant feeling in his recent work, Guernica‘s prevailing emotion is anger: anger at war, anger at the flaws of his fellow man, anger at the simplistic head-on view of reality. Guernica shows us different sides of man, the various, conflicting dimensions in each of us. All at once. Every character in Guernica is twisting, groping, angling for recognition. As we’re reflected in Guernica, people are complex, frightening, and beautiful beasts.
These are just preliminary thoughts. Fans and historians will be marveling over Guernica for generations. And then it will be covered by callow idiots.
Categories
Separated At Mirth
Once Were Worriers: Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo in 1999 (via CNN)
Art and Commerce.
The truth about art and commerce is not unlike a certain movie title about cats and dogs: the two don’t always get along. In fact, they rarely ever do. And like animal lovers, sometimes you have to choose which you want in your life more: art or commerce. You can’t have both, unless you want your house torn apart and your life to become a dizzying mess of complications and compromises.
I was reminded of this fact this weekend while reading The New York Times‘ ‘Arts & Leisure’ section, particularly two stories that, while not linked editorially, were nonetheless inverted images of each other. One reflected art (more or less), the other commerce (pretty much intrinsically).
The already heated debate about the proposal for a new West Side stadium for the New York Jets has reached a new level of outrage and absurdity this week with the stunning news that the Jets are to be sold to Pakistan!
Now, I’m sure that the NFL would like to expand into Central Asia, but it seems like a losing proposition to try to impose, top-down, an American-style football regime in an area of the world that has had no experience with it. On the plus side, Gang Green’s color scheme matches the Pakistani flag rather nicely, so perhaps there’s hope after all.
[Thanks to Lamont Cranston for the tip!]
Now only $9.99 at The NBC Store.