Housekeeping

I suddenly feel like this blog isn't intellectual enough.

There. Oh, no, wait. We don't like Friedman anymore because of the whole Iraq thing.

How about her? She's a bit of a dramturg in her own right. This looks like it might be interesting, although maybe that's just because of the font.

My sister went here and she's smart. Maybe if we look at the home page for a while, it'll rub off on all of us. Phew. I feel a bit better.

I'm Looking For Another Job

Does anyone have any ideas? Michael? Don't say plumber or Honeybucket sales rep.

Metropolitain Market: "Would You Like Your Overpriced Oscar Meyer Sandwich Meat in A Bleached Bag That Smells Like A Laurelhurst Soccer Mom?"

Do you ever wish your food was all lit up like it was on stage? Would you be willing to pay extra monies to see your Pedigree Dog Biscuits and Kix Cereal and Vitamin Water under signs that spell out their names in flowery chalk lettering? Well, of course you fucking would! You're a consumer, and consumers are apparently dumb as shit and should be treated as such.

Okay, seriously folks: Metropolitain Market sucks a big floppie donkey dick. There are dozens of items there that cost over a dollar more than they do at Safeway, and they don't taste any better just because they were handed to you in a bleached paper bag by a salesclerk who's wearing a nice shirt.

Why do I care? It's close to my old house. And I have some friends who worked there and hated it. Also- I wanted to write about it a while ago and then actively tried to lose interest in the matter, but then, like a toilet bowl flush that does not actually flush your poop but brings it closer to the tip of the toilet rim (something which did not just happen to me) the idea would not go away, no matter how hard I tried to flush it away.

Reading The Corrections Will Make You Cry All Over Yourself

Next time you're moving into a new apartment alone in a new area of town and you have nothing to do because your boss is on vaca, make sure you don't read Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" unless you want to cry yourself to sleep at night and have mini panic attacks about the symbiotic relationship between someone else's writing and your own life.

The Corrrections (thus far...I've only read the first 200 pages) is all about East Coast longing, adult-onset misanthropy, terrible parents who show their love by nagging and wishing you were someone else, the burdens of a good education, and the terrors of being a lonely writer. Some reviewer lady on the back cover called the book "darkly funny" but I think she meant "just plain bleak."

My parents are wonderful people, but that doesn't stop me from being able to relate to all the themes of this book.

Update! I'm not reading it anymore! Aren't blogs fascinating repositories of knowledge?

Escape From The Other Real Bitch Island

This is an interesting article about the Kriyas Joel Hasids of New York; a cultish village of Jewish men and women who terrorize their children with tales about their coming place in hell, force their women to wear ugly, poorly hemmed skirts so as not to attract male attention, and digest the universally fuzzy-wuzzy symbol of the rainbow as an indication of the coming worldwide apocolypto-flood ("not even Noah will save us from this one!") Oh, and they also believe stars are just "holes" poked in the trashbag God has wrapped around our tiny, doomed planet.

One girl named Gitty escaped this heady mixture of religious terrorism and misogyny and fled to Williamsburg, the hip part of Williamsburg, where she spoke to New York Magazine's Mark Jacobsen, a cool-Jew journalist dude, about the phenomenally phucked up years she spent living under the Jewish Gestapo. She's now trying to get her daughter out of the cult as well, but her ex-husband is trying to prove to the judge that she's a pot head, even though she's only smoked once in the past few months. The whole piece is totally involving and interesting and just read it, okay?, so I can feel like I didn't just waste a half an hour of my life gaining new knowledge I won't be able to share with anyone.

Interesting as well: it appears some of Gitty's old nemesis from her shtetl years have unearthed this article on the web, and are using the comments section to blast her for her scandalous NY Mag photos and for shitting all over their religious way of life. It's an all out secular vs. non-secular war...as if the christian religious fundies one day all decided to descend on Jezebel! (Even though I guess they'd have to gain commenter cred first). It's a public shaming as only a large internet public forum and tons of angry people who just discovered the internet can provide. You've been warned.

The PI on Hempfest: "It's a Beautiful Thing, Man"

Thanks, PI, for this:

"It's a beautiful thing, man," said 17-year-old Brad Taylor, who said he was attending Seattle Hempfest with his friends for the first time. "No one's hassling us, everyone here is totally into this stuff."

So, apparently most of the people at Hempfest this year were inarticulate high school students.

How long did it take you to find your interviewee, PI? Five seconds? What about Rick Steves's fight to make marijuana legal? What about the fight for decriminalization?

No, no, according the PI, Hempfest is all about selling bongs:

"I mean, don't you think we'd sell a lot of stuff at a festival like this?" McClatchy asked. "Hell yeah we are!"

Because, you know, you can't buy your bongs anywhere else, at any other time, in Seattle.

You'd think a citywide paper could use Hempfest as a springing off point to talk about the huge amount of money our country wastes cracking down on pot smokers. Oh, right.

John Stewart: The Most Trusted Man in TV News?

The New York Times has a love note for John Stewart this morning.

I think the most interesting part of the article is when we're offered a look at the daily anger, shock, and dismay that provides creative fuel for the writers.

The day begins with a morning meeting where material harvested from 15 TiVos and even more newspapers, magazines and Web sites is reviewed. That meeting, Mr. Stewart said, “would be very unpleasant for most people to watch: it’s really a gathering of curmudgeons expressing frustration and upset, and the rest of the day is spent trying to mask or repress that through whatever creative devices we can find.”

Seattle's Semi-Retarded Monthly Magazine Horrifies Me

Today at the dentist's office, I was asked by the oral hygenist if I wanted to read Seattle Magazine or Seattle Metropolitain while waiting for the dentist to arrive.

"Get this shit away from me!" I yelled when she laid the magazines next to me. Then I began to cry.

"It's only going to be a few minutes," she said. "Why not just sit back, relax, and read a bit?"

"I can't! I won't! I shant!" I yelled. She sort of shook her head and walked out of the room.

The cover of Seattle Magazine had a picture of a woman hiding behind a white curtain, one high heel hovering in mid air, an arm stretched out, perhaps dancing quietly to herself.

"I do not want to read you," I said to it. "You see, I like to not think about things like Shrek the musical."

"Your average Seattle city slicker knows as much about rodeos as a ranch hand knows about soy lattés," it said back to me.

"Don't call me a Seattle city slicker!" I responded. "I am just a boy! Just a boy waiting to get his teeth cleaned!"

"It used to be that people came to the Pacific Northwest for the mountains and the water," it continued.

"NO!" I responded. "Okay, maybe."

"Now we can add another recreational element to that line-up: the burgeoning boutique environment,"

"WHAT?! That doesn't even make any sense. How is shopping recreational? How does it have anything to do with mountains and water or people moving here? You can't link those sentences together!"

Seattle Magazine looked back at me, embarrassed. "I'm sorry," it said. "I was written by the semiretarded woman who sat next to you in journalism class and told you she wanted to work at VOGUE, then I dabbled in corporate blogging for Starbucks until I finally was offered this magazine gig. I am semiretarded, so I am able to pull together basic sentences rife with cliche. If I was full-on retarded, I wouldn't be able to do that. So that's something, right? Look at my wacky collection of doorknobs! I make lists in my sleep! You can be in them! I'll call you 'most influential seattle douchebag.' How's that?"

"Okay, fine."

Ugh

An entire Ny Times Magazine devoted to...trolls?

This mag used to be good, now it looks like it's groping around for a way to stay relevant.