Month / June 2006

by Edward Champion

Google Search Results & Web Discourse

One of this website’s strangest developments is that a throwaway blog post I made in December has become a bit of a support group for people to complain about Ohio. This has happened because, apparently, I am the number one Google result for the term “Ohio Sucks.”

I pretty much approve any comments that come through on that entry. I grew up in a number of crummy impoverished suburbs. So I can understand the need to vent. But the thread has transformed into something that has revealed reasons for why people stay there, with various people contemplating its identity and why they continue to stay there. The phenomenon is not unlike what was once described in this New Yorker item. Could it be that Google search results actually empower people to communicate in a constructive manner and that the resulting discourse (framed, I might add, within an information structure) causes people to find meaning rather than engage in another pointless flamewar? Maybe this is the phenomenon that Wikipedia has tried to latch onto: given a textual context, Internet communication becomes meaningful and orderly in a Howard Rheingold kind of way.

by Edward Champion

Say It Isn’t So

halloates.jpgIf you are of a certain age, you will recall that, a few decades ago, Hall & Oates rose mercilessly to prominence, invading the airwaves as the equally disgraceful Captain & Tenille waned (proving that the music industry always has room for at least one abject duo). If, like me, you harbored any hopes that their careers were over for good, it is my sad duty to report that, like Glenn Close emerging from the bathtub, Hall & Oates are touring again. Inexplicably, most of their tour runs through Canada. This mystifes me, as I thought that Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Wolf Parade, the Unicorns, and the Arcade Fire were proof positive that Canadian music lovers had certain standards. Apparently not.

Or perhaps it is Hall & Oates who believe that their climb back into the hearts of those who hold onto their LPs of Huey Lewis, late Genesis and Eddie Money with a brio comparable to Franklin Mint plate collectors will be a smooth and steady one, with Ontario’s cool winds sailing south through Toronto into the unquestioning reception of East Coast listeners looking for bland and inoffensive music. Consider Daryl Hall’s words of wisdom:

“I think a lot of people have different ideas about our origins and our purpose, and what makes us tick musically. So I thought, ‘OK, once and for all, I’m going to define it. And we’re going to go out there and show where we came from and who we are.’ “

I think it’s safe to say that anyone who hears the lines “I can’t go for being twice as nice / I can’t go for just repeating the same old lines / Use the body now you want my soul / Oo forgot about it say no go” knows exactly what they’re in for. That Hall & Oates made millions with such lines is criminal, but that they couldn’t even spend ten bucks on a rhyming dictionary is unpardonable.

Perhaps we should just be grateful that John Oates shaved off that silly moustache.

by Edward Champion

A Roundup from Mr. Beleaguered

This week has been trying to kick my ass, since much of it has involved getting up at the ass-crack of dawn to do work. Some of it relates to this site (and specifically The Bat Segundo Show #50, which is shaping up to be a stellar podcast that, trust me on this, you won’t want to miss). Some of it does not. But what this means essentially is yet another roundup instead of a post proper.

  • Paul Constant offers a belated BEA report, bemoaning its commercialism and confessing that the only reason he came was for “books and free shit.” There’s just one problem with Constant’s griping: he comes off as an asocial sourpuss who seems wholly incapable of mischief. If I ever got the chance to meet Pat Buchanan, I would have had considerable more fun with him than Constant did, asking him if his views on “traditional roles” for women might have something to do with the one and only “traditional” sexual position he had tried with his wife. But that’s just me.
  • Moleskinerie has launched a second Wandering Moleskine Project, whereby several notebooks will be sent around the world, filled up and then scanned for the masturbatory pleasure of Moleskine junkies like me. I have an erection just thinking about it.
  • Bad enough that J.K. Rowling has been named by a The Book magazine poll as “the greatest living British writer,” but it seems that five Scots have sullied the list of twenty. It’s not that the Scots in question are bad writers. But the Scotch pentad insists that the twenty duke it out properly for “greatest” status with a haggis-eating contest.
  • Here are Michiko’s last five fiction reviews: Hated it, hated it, okay, hated it, and okay. Meanwhile, Michiko’s been giving great raves to nonfiction books, even the An Inconvenient Truth book tie-in. I’m all for a discerning critical eye, but if Michiko hates fiction so much, why does she continue to review it?
  • We Need to Talk About Kevin author Lionel Shriver confess that she was jealous of her partner’s uncanny success in publishing.
  • Borders has axed 90 corporate positions. Is this another telltale sign of a corporation opening too many stores while not having the dinero to do so? Borders spokesperson Anne Roman says that it has something to do with re-evaluating its five-year plan. Which makes me wonder whether Borders is styling their business strategy along certain historical parallels, given its egregious history.
  • A bill is about to be signed by Bush will raise the indecency fine from $32,500 to $325,000 per incident on television and radio. The disturbing thing about this bill is that this applies to “obscene, indecent, or profane material” and the bill, to my speed-reading eye, is based on complaints received by the FCC alleging that a broadcast contains “obscene” material. Since “obscene” is an entirely subjective term, instead of railing against nipples (which I happen to find far from obscene myself), I hope that the moralists in our nation will see fit to lodge their complaints about the real obscene elements: the miasmic advertising, the spineless and sycophantic questions asked by the White House Press Corps, the reality TV shows, and the vacuous celebrity interviews which ensure that television, for the most part, remains a dull and soulless medium.
by Edward Champion

Christopher Hitchens — Cocksucking Conspiracy Theorist?

Vanity Fair: “Stay with me. I’ve been doing the hard thinking for you. The three-letter “job,” with its can-do implications, also makes the term especially American. Perhaps forgotten as the London of Jack the Ripper receded into the past, the idea of an oral swiftie was re-exported to Europe and far beyond by a massive arrival of American soldiers. For these hearty guys, as many a French and English and German and Italian madam has testified, the blowjob was the beau ideal. It was a good and simple idea in itself. It was valued—not always correctly—as an insurance against the pox. And—this is my speculation—it put the occupied and the allied populations in their place.”