A podcast about books & life — not necessarily in that order
Sorry to be posting so infrequently, dear reader. This headcold’s been whomping me, and I’ve been on a rough production schedule for the magazine. On top of that, I have to head out to Anaheim on Sunday for another conference. I’m guessing that the architecture won’t quite match up to Chicago’s.
We’ll catch up next week, sometime.
The true cost of the War on Drugs was the 3 minutes of my life that were wasted in CVS on my lunch break when I bought some decongestant.
I had to bring a product-card to the front checkout so they could give me the decongestant. Then was told I had to sign a registry book with my name, address, time of purchase, and quantity of pseudoephedrine.
So I’m afraid that “Ambulatory P. Groin” of “1313 Mockingbird Ln.” might find himself getting a visit from the DEA sometime soon. He probably shouldn’t have bought “one pound” of the product, but hey.
(I wonder what expression the clerk would have had if I walked up with 200 product-cards and dumped them on the counter. I swear: when I get over this headcold, I oughtta start a meth lab. This is worse than those Truth commericals.)
Ladies and gentlemen, I hope I’m not too far behind the cultural shwerve on this one: Gino the Ginny.
(It’s a video, it’s got loud music, and it’s got crass language; you’ve been warned)
I follow Page 6 in the New York Post pretty devotedly. I’ve never been one for the supermarket tabloids & gossip mags, with their overriding fixation with pregnancy, but Page 6 usually gets is just right, with embarrassing celebrity stories, blind items that Amy & I occasionally suss out, and a seeming moratorium on Paris Hilton items.
I don’t link to the items because they go dead within a week, and it always makes me sad to look over blog-archives and find dead links. I’ve got issues.
Anyway, in the past week, Page 6 raised an interesting question in the VM household. See, a few months ago, there was an item about Stephen Baldwin’s residence in near(ish)by Nyack, NY. Baldwin, a born-again Christian, so objected to a local porno store, he began writing down the license plates of cars in its parking lot, for publication in the local paper.
Last week, the column reported that Baldwin’s moving out of Nyack for another town in Westchester. The thing is, the item referred to him as “the least-famous Baldwin.”
Well, we thought, it’s pretty easy to say that Alec‘s the best known, but what about the rest? I know Daniel Baldwin best from his crack-binge blowout a few years ago, but Amy sez he’s pretty well known from being on Homicide.
But Billy? More famous than Stephen? Sure, he’s married to Chynna Phillips, but could we really say that Billy’s Dagwood Bumstead haircut in Sliver outranked the “Oswald was a pussy” line from The Usual Suspects?
Fortunately, a week later, they followed up with an item referring to Stephen as “[t]he third-most famous of the acting Baldwin brothers,” which sounds better. Unfortunately, the item was about how Baldwin’s actually moving because he’s stuck for cash.
All of which gets me to this weekend’s movie revelation: The Cooler. Sure, William H. Macy was great as a down-on-everybody’s-luck casino jinx, and Maria Bello was flat-out great to look at, but Alec Baldwin was absolutely fantastic as the casino owner. I was amazed at how he devoured the role without playing up the “Look at me! I’m Alec Baldwin!” face. He seemed to revel in the past-his-prime-ness of the character.
He’ll always be the most famous of the Baldwins to me. Even if Page 6 reports more terrible details of his custody fights with Kim Basinger.
There’s a player on the Cubs named Angel Pagan. I think there’s also an episode of Buffy with that title.
Goodbye, cockney! Hello, Jafaican!
The NYTimes tries to discuss the phenomenon of Page Six. They don’t do a very good job, but it’s better than the Times’ half-assed attempt at its own gossip column.
George Will blasts the GOP (collaterally damaging the Dems) with his apolcalyptic column about the move to restrict “527” political donations:
David Dreier (R-Calif.) explained, sort of. He said he voted against McCain-Feingold because “dictating who could give how much to whom” violated the First Amendment, but now he favors dictating to 527 contributors because McCain-Feingold is not violating the First Amendment enough: It is not “working as it was intended.” That is, it is not sufficiently restricting the money financing political advocacy.
[. . .] Oh, so that is what the First Amendment means: Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech unless speech annoys politicians.
That “L word” I mentioned? It comes up in the conclusion of Will’s column.
Here’s a beautiful slideshow about our Golden Age of Skyscrapers, by Slate’s Witold Rybczynski. Except for the Gehry design for the NYTimes building. I hated that.
Fawaz Turki explains “How To Lose Your Job at a Saudi Newspaper”
What mattered was that I had committed one of the three cardinal sins an Arab journalist must avoid when working for the Arab press: I criticized the government. The other two? Bringing up Islam as an issue and criticizing, by name, political leaders in the Arab or Islamic world for their brazen excesses, dismal failures and blatant abuses.
[. . .] My first provocation was — horror of horrors — to criticize Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak after he cracked down on human rights activists several years ago. My second occurred soon after the failure of the Camp David accords when I called for the resignation of Yasser Arafat as head of the Palestinian Authority.My last was to write about the atrocities Indonesia had committed during its occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999. For that transgression, my Saudi paper showed no mercy. I was out the door. No questions asked, no explanations given. You don’t write about atrocities committed by an Islamic government — even when they’re already documented in the history books — and hope to get away with it.
In other depressing news from the Islamic world, it appears my buddy the Brooding Persian is pulling the plug on his blog. I hope that’s not the case; while his posts could get insanely overlong, he offered me a vitally important perspective on life, politics and religion in Iran and on earth. And he also reminded me of the importance of The Iliad.