Category: Uncategorized

I’ll be in Times Sq, picking up a new Amex. I’m the one NOT wearing cargo shorts.

“After an imaginary trip through the center of the world, a white car and its caravan have appeared at the center of the Galleria, cracking the floor and destroying its precious marbles.” It’s by some friends, the artists Elmgreen & Dragset, and was installed in the center of the Mall of Milano by the Nicola Trussardi Foundation.
Some merchants complained about the piece and damage to the “precious marbles.” I think the bigger worry is that the piece’ll get subsumed by the guys on Jason’s Matrix thread. I mean, the Merovingian may swear in French, but he clearly buys his marble in Italy.

W as in Whitney. Houston. She met with Ariel Sharon while visiting “family and friends” in Israel.
Houston’s no stranger to Mid East politics. Last fall, while the US was cookin’ up wild reasons for invading Iraq, it ignored the horrors Saddam Hussein inflicted on his people during sham elections: non-stop playing of his campaign theme song, Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” I give Sharon six months, max. [thanks (?), Gawker]

there is a high correlation between the annoyingness of a persons ringtone & their slowness to answer it. this is especially true of the 1812 overture ringtone.

So Friday, when I responded to a friend I haven’t seen for a while, a friend who, after guessing incorrectly on my email/domain format, spammed every possible combination of greg@, gregallen@, greg.org, greg.com, gregallen.com, gregallen.org, etc., I somewhat haughtily included a this URL in my coordinates: http://www.google.com/search?q=greg. Somewhat haughtily and somewhat hastily.
When I sent the email, I was at #5, but yesterday, when I showed off to a good friend, Haniel Lynn, I’d dropped below 20. (I’m back at #6 now, so I don’t know what’s going on.) What we do know: I’m superficial (i.e., I cared enough about a one-name Google ranking to show-and-tell people), and relying on Google for any sense of your own self-worth is dubious at best.
[update: Read Jeremy’s discussion of how other first-name-search-obsessed people fared in Google’s recent PageRank machinations. Misery loves company. (Thanks, Tyler.]
That’s when Haniel showed me his own Google-induced folly. Somehow, the Wharton Usenet servers attached his name to someone else’s lameass 1995 review of the 90’s Manchester band, Stone Roses. (Haniel Lynn’s graduate class of 95; the reviewer is an undergrad, class of ’96.) Whenever he’d show up at a new client’s office, or interview someone for a job, they’d try to work Stone Roses into the conversation. Or if they didn’t, they’d quiz his colleagues after he left, impressed but confused at how an X’ed up groupie could find his way to McKinsey. All they really did, though, was blow the cover on their Googling.
My advice to Haniel: be on more panels, get quoted in articles more, and (obviously) get a weblog.

Apparently, he’d cut yer ass off in a bumper-stickered Volvo. Drive safely. God (&I) CU

Hmm. In order to run them through military tribunals, the guys (and kids) at Guantanamo are finally getting defense lawyers, which means they may finally be charged with something. Sounds like progress. On Google News, the link reads, “Prosecutor says tribunals will be fair,” but when you click through, the actual Wash Post headline reads, “Both sides say tribunals will be fair trials.” Of course, you’d expect them both to say that, since they both report to the Pentagon’s general counsel’s office.
What I didn’t expect is the chief defense attorney, Col. (I swear) Will A. Gunn, saying, “I immediately recognized the glamour position was that of chief prosecutor, the opportunity to be America’s hero.”
And speaking of glamour in the courts (and glaring shortcomings in the justice system), over at The Morning News, glamblogger Choire Sicha does a play-by-play of his stint on jury duty. Alas, he didn’t get picked for a trial.
I realize now, too late, that if only I’d been reading W, not The Believer, my own jury duty report and reflection would’ve been much spicier. Not that it’da been much use for the fellas in Guantanamo, though.

Put this in the “seems so wrong, feels so right” category*. Tad Friend & some friends conquer Paris on some Segways. Sure, it’s a corporate boondoggle, but that just adds to the giddy, entertaining genius of American Empire.
I remember when a New York friend–who affected a bilingual answering machine message and pretended to forget words like “fork” (“Give me that, how you say, fourchette.”) after a measly three-week sejour, a three-week sejour–took the new, how you say, Roller Blades to Paris. She was not only an alien, she nearly killed herself ten times a day trying to skate over all the paving stones. Well, she should’ve waited. Segway sails over them and their crazy unpaved parks with American savoir faire, technologically superior, aloof, and head-and-shoulders above the shockin’ awed crowd.
* Nothing smacks the smugness right off your face like Googling for half-remembered “something so wrong/feels so right” lyrics. Let’s see, did I hear it from The Backstreet Boys, Bryan Adams, Taylor Daynes, Air Supply, or Tia Carrere in Wayne’s World? I’m now available for iTunes Music Store commercials.

I have to admit, I was kinda bummin’ for a while. The week HBS’s most powerful alum decides he wants to fly in a fighter jet (n.b.: not the one he went AWOL from during Vietnam), my Wharton alumni magazine arrives in the mail with the cover story: “Wharton entrepreneurs capitalize on trends in the food industry” about a dude with a crepe stand.
But then a boost to my alumni pride, via this exchange (in the article not about blogging):

And then there was the tall, good-looking young blond woman holding a purse made out of a Mexican cigar box. She had on a sunburst-print minidress by Ms. [Benhaz] Sarafpour.
I [fashion reporter Cathy Horyn] asked her if she worked for the designer. “I’m a student at Wharton,” she said. “At the University of Pennsylvania.”
Adopting that tone of voice reserved for small children, I asked the woman what she wanted to be when she grew up.
“Well, my dad’s in real estate, so I’m planning to go into that.”
“And what’s your name?”
“Ivanka Trump.”

[Sidebar: Never mind that Ivanka’s been modeling for six years, since she was like 10, and that Horyn should’ve seen her in several shows, at least. I’m sure the NYT would never run a reporter’s so-good-you-can’t-bear-to-factcheck-it story.]

I just found this bizarre “feature” on my My T-Mobile two-way text messaging site. It’s called the Funny Message Generator, and it inserts one of the following allegedly funny phrases into your message. IDGI. Here’s a screenshot
> Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines.
> He/she was so ugly that whenever they would go into the bank, the electric eye would water.
> You are unique like everyone else.
> Why is abbreviation such a long word?
> ywnbwihttygmac–You will never believe what I have to tell you. Give me a call.
> N-Sync and the Spice Girls are the same band. Have you ever seen them at the same time?
> U R it. Write me back.
> Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
> I need your help stamping out, eliminating and abolishing redundancy.

Graydon Carter better get a haircut. According to this Observer article, he may be due in court, to explain why his first film, The Kid Stays In The Picture, the Robert Evans story, is reminiscent of, inspired by, slightly similar to an utter appropriation of the 15-minute film director David Weisman’s made as a pitch for an Evans documentary. If your tendency is to dismiss such claims as weak attempts at coattail-riding, please reserve your judgment until Carter explains his “the producer thanks” credit for Hector Babenco, the director of Kiss of the Spider Woman. Brilliant story. [Read my first KSITP post, and listen to an excerpt from the, ahem, addictive audiobook.]

…in front of my house. Bringing the car into the city + alternate-side parking + pumping WiFi out your window = posting from said car, now double-parked, waiting for the Brownies to pass you by.

NPR’s Fresh Air may be the only media outlet with a linguist on its masthead. Check out Geoff Nunberg‘s fascinating 29 April discussion of the Right’s writers’ distinctive and repeated and rhythmic use of conjunctions, a rhetorical device known as polysyndeton. Nunberg (whose site at Stanford has a transcript and extensive excerpts in the footnotes) traces polysyndeton’s “voice of the common man”-ist usage from Walt Whitman through some thought-provoking film world sources.

Hear she got some friends together and put on a show. Missed it. Sushi & too-low-flying airplanes in Arlington. When Tina first broached Topic A, she threatened/promised more Larry than Charlie; if Gawker’s transcript of the Brown-on-Diller&Gladwell action’s any indication, she delivered. We can’t say we weren’t warned.
But in her Times column, she kicks herself (“I should have booked Celine Dion.”), Philip Johnson-style, who quickly called himself a whore before anyone else could beat him to it. But in an article where she also describes the dismal White House Correspondents’ dinner, is not the whores, or even Celine Dion (ba-dum-bum), but a horse, whose image lingers longest. Not just any horse, mind you, a “Republican warhorse,” the best the dinner could do in the “celebrity” department, Bo Derek.
“Horse,” a not-unimportant word to the actress herself (more on that later), turns out to be one of only nine words (7 distinct words, 9 total) I actually remember hearing from Bo Derek’s mouth, in a torturous scene from Tarzan, the Ape Man. Derek, as Jane, and her father (played by the late, lamenting Richard Harris) had been captured by (literally whitewashed) savages. As the savages prep her as an offering to their Chief, Bo, on all fours, moans the immortal line, “They’re painting me! They’re washing me like a horse!” It’s worth noting that the director who put Bo in this scene was her husband (and Richard Harris age-alike), John Derek. (See another clip here for some equally unforgettable readings.)
Rather than buy this horrible movie (which is only on VHS, anyway), why not get Bo’s revealing new book about her relationships with her creepy old ex-husband and his other ex-wives, Ursula Andress and Linda Evans. It’s title? Riding Lessons: Everything That Matters in Life I Learned from Horses Let’s see Rick Santorum explain that one. Forget Celine. Tina on Bo and Rick: now that’s a 3-way worth watching

There are so many pear tree blossoms blowing around outside, it’s only a matter of time before the Last Unicorn comes scampering down my street, with Jack following behind, spouting ridiculous dialogue.