Category: etc.

Because there have been helicopters flying over the house in DC every five minutes for the last hour, apparently. Maybe we’re in the flight path to Camp David, or maybe we’re too close to Cheney’s house, which is where I’d imagine any coup would start.

Is that you CANNOT get Red Vines at a NYC deli. You have to go to freakin’ Target in Queens somewhere, and that’s only if you’re lucky.
DAY-UM.

I was out of town for the holidays [anything big happen while I was gone?] Anyway, for one dollar, less than the price of a subway token, I scored this sweet Transit Workers Union commemmorative t-shirt at the D.I. [aka Deseret Industries, the Mormon-run version of Goodwill] in St. George, Utah.
Not sure if anyone’s ever even heard of the TWU, but I thought it’d be a real kick in the pants to wear this around town.

Like a planet of xenophobic aliens on Star Trek, Typepad has erased the last week from everybody’s memories blogs. Most unusual.

I know that any day now, hundreds of readers will be emailing me, asking for suggestions on how I’d like my gifts wrapped. The answer is below. To the swiftest 150 or so of you, I suggest Cool Hunting’s limited artist-edition wrapping paper. There are two sheets of each of three designs in each set, so if for some reason you’re giving me fewer than six large gifts, you could share amongst yourselves. Above is Derek Aylward’s design. Is it tacky to mention the price? No, it is not. $24.

If six sheets aren’t enough, or if you’re too slow, I suggest the silvery silhouetted goodness of 2×4’s “New World Order” wrapping paper for Cabinet Magazine. 3 sheets are $10, and you can fit 6-9 in each mailing tube.

Want to see whose naughty and/or nice? Check out the greg.org advertisers; there’s a little of both:

NY Doll: The Movie

Backstage: The Magazine

Nokia: The Mobile Phone Lifestyle Company

Aqua Teen Hunger Force: The Badass Animation

MSNBC: The TV Network

Daddytypes: The Weblog For New Dads
Isn’t symmetry lovely? God bless you advertisers, everyone.

Living in both towns for a few years, I should be used to this by now, but it never fails to amuse. The Washington Post dispatched a correspondent to uncover rumors of hipness in Williamsburg. Brooklyn. You know, to distinguish it from the expensively fabricated, “keepin’ it real” dress-up themepark built with lots of parental money:

… Grand Street is a rich gallery row: The “chess set” of pedophiles and their victims at Ch’i disturbed; a collection of deli coffee cups at City Reliquary amused; and Martin Gurfein’s kaleidoscopic scenes of daily life at the Hogar Collection dazzled….
…I assumed that the gig by Montreal’s Bell Orchestre would be a casual CD-hawking session in a corner of the shop. But Sound Fix hides a back room that’s like a slice of fin-de-sicle Vienna, a dimly lighted, sofa-filled bar/coffeehouse with pressed-tin walls. It was crammed with Billyburgers who clearly knew of the band…

With this much hipness sloshing around the scene, I predict that one day soon, someone will write a book about one of these young, edgy, emerging musicians, and it will be a smash.
No, Not That Williamsburg [wp via gawker]

I’m totally with her on the Calypso Hamptons hegemony, but for someone with spreads in Southampton and Montana [or is it Wyoming? or both?], Alex Kuczynski sure spends a lot of time thinking about Pottery Barn.
In the Sort-of Ethnic Home [nyt]

Regine posts about British designer Tom Hawes’ line of skateable street furniture which, despite having come about “by recognizing skateboarding as an unstoppable urban pathology,” makes me feel good. Finally, someone’s thinking of the children.
skateable furniture [via wmmna]

The sagest exegesis, however, comes from one of three short, squat, mushroom-Afro’d white teens who emerge from Royce Hall in Acid Mothers Temple T-shirts with ehhh-whatever sneers on their faces. “It’s not that I don’t like feedback,” one of them shrugs, clearly at the beginning of an aesthete’s lifelong journey of cred-proving. “It’s that I don’t like this feedback.”

Terry Riley’s birthday concert; armchair juroring Berlin’s baldfaced copy of the Turner Prize; the New Yorker Festival’s fashion panel.
It’s not all whipped cream these days at the Artforum Diary; there are some sweet berries of art experience there, too.
Deaf Jam [artforum diary]

Rang dang diggity dang-de-dang…
Just when you think this remix of George W. Bush covering “White Lines” couldn’t get any better, comes this line about two minutes in:

Some a**hole took a picture
of Kate Moss doing lines,
And now she’s being victimized
for imaginary crimes

White Lines, sung by a guy who knows [thepartyparty via waxy]

Rang dang diggity dang-de-dang…
Just when you think this remix of George W. Bush covering “White Lines” couldn’t get any better, comes this line about two minutes in:

Some a**hole took a picture
of Kate Moss doing lines,
And now she’s being victimized
for imaginary crimes

White Lines, sung by a guy who knows [thepartyparty via waxy]

This is apparently going down tonight, 9/18. I hope someone called craft services. Remember, you heard it here third:

The Los Angeles Lunar Society advocates the secession of Venice from the city of Los Angeles, and does not preclude the use of revolution to achieve this end. However, many Lunar Society members are involved in work of one kind or another for the Hollywood dream factory and we were therefore forced during August’s full moon meeting to recognize that a Venice revolution might interrupt some production schedules.

–An Army Of None [theresalduncan.typepad.com]

Garrison Keillor is going after Rex for his “A Prairie Ho Companion” t-shirts. As if Keillor wasn’t unfunny and annoying enough already.
A Prairie Homeboy Companion [mnspeak, via fimoculous: “oh yeah, I got cease and desisted.”]

For several months in 1999, it seemed the only reason I even had an email account was for sending and receiving copies of this article from The Onion. Then the chain was broken, The Onion had no online archive, &c., &c., no need to bore you with the details. Now that the paper has made their entire archive available online, I have a reason to log back in to my hotbot account. Thank you, The Onion!

“I was at the Olive Garden by Woodfield Mall,” Koechley said, “when I noticed a small sign stating that the restaurant was one of over 1,500 Olive Gardens nationwide. I didn’t think about it at first, but later on it hit me: There are only about 40 of them in Schaumburg. Where are all those others?”

Schaumburg Man Dimly Aware Of Shadowy, Non-Schaumburg World Out There [theonion.com via waxy]