Only 58. Damn.
Month / December 2005
Saturday — Overhyped or Misunderstood?
As my colleague Scott Esposito (who, for the past day or so, has seen his thoughts after December 11 undisplayed, along with several other noble Typepad bloggers, thanks to the supreme incompetence of Six Apart[1]) has pointed out, Slate’s top 10 list is a rather pedestrian list, with the only notable contributions from deputy editor David Plotz and editorial assistant Blake Wilson. Could it be that the young ‘uns over at Slate are the only ones over there reading outside of the box (Phillip Roth, Ian McEwan, et al.)? The continued praise for Saturday[2] continues to perplex me. And I’m a hard-core McEwan fan. Is it a generational thing? Or am I just missing something beyond an overwritten Mrs. Dalloway homage with a few good confrontation scenes? I’m always willing to shift my arguments. But for the love of literature, If there are any Saturday fans in the crowd, please help a clueless white boy out.
[1] An issue with the primary disk system? Running diagonistics on the device? That sounds to me like an incompetent tech support team without a backup system, not unlike Microsoft releasing a security patch to Internet Explorer after the hole has existed for years. The moral of the story: If you value the half-life of your posts, back up your shit up, yo.
[2] If you’re interested, my review is here.
They’ve Also Discovered That the Arcade Fire is a Really Cool Band!
The Book Babes have discovered that the New York Times Book Review isn’t covering fiction very well.
Translating The Real 400 Pound Gorilla
It looks like King Kong is a box-office turkey, having ratcheted up a mere $9.8 million on opening day. To offer serve the public, I have translated Universal’s spinspeak into regular vernacular:
UNIVERSAL SPINSPEAK: “It’s a great start.” (Nikki Rocco)
REGULAR VERNACULAR: “This is the worst beginning we ever exepcted.”
UNIVERSAL SPINSPEAK: “We’re very pleased with the word-of-mouth that’s feeding back to us and the film’s playability and reviews are great, so we’re looking forward to the weekend.” (Nikki Rocco)
REGULAR VERNACULAR: “Our test scores we’re through the roof. What happened? An example must be sent. I’ll have Bob get the guillotine out and roll a few heads through the publicity department. But it’ll have to wait until this film really tanks over the weekend.”
UNIVERSAL SPINSPEAK: “We knew we weren’t launching a sequel and it’s at a busy time during the holiday season, so I was thrilled to see the numbers were close to $10m.” (Nikki Rocco)
REGULAR VERNACULAR: “Remakes of film classics have marketability, my ass! We’re sticking with remakes of television series. Hell, we’ll be lucky if this thing clears $40m by Sunday.”
Thank You, U.S. Senate!
It’s always a pleasure to see the President get his ass knocked to the ground. Here’s a list of the Patriot Act provisions set to expire in a few weeks.