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Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Apr. 4, 2008”
Wanna see my pot of gold?
Last week at the conference in Philadelphia, one of my advertisers stopped by our booth and asked me to come by to answer a question his coworkers had. Their company is based in a small city.
One said, “On the way to dinner last night, we noticed that some of the street signs are made with rainbow symbols on them. Why is that?”
I looked at them puzzledly. “Seriously?” I asked.
They stared at me. “Yeah,” one said.
“It’s, uh, it’s the gay district,” I said.
“THANK YOU!” one said. “I told you guys! It’s like they’ve never been to a big city before,” he added.
I said, “You’ve never seen that? Rainbow flags? Storefronts with pretty colors? Guys who are much better looking than any guy you’ve ever met?”
“Seriously?” another asked. “Why do you know that?”
“Because . . . I’m aware of cultural symbols and I have lots of queer friends . . .?”
Walking back to my booth shaking my head, I muttered, “What did they think, it was the leprechaun district?”
Writing and Blogging
The NY Observer has a funny article about how there’s no “career path” for writers nowadays, because they can’t work their way up from magazines into high-paying jobs as ‘intelligentsia’ or something, the way they once could. Oh, and writers can’t get expense accounts anymore. I was entertained by its clueless aspiration for a world almost 50 years gone. Or, as this commenter put it:
This reads like a bunch of bitter, entitled, anonymous people trying to rationalize their failures in a piece that is itself a rationalization of its own failures. If there were any numbers or statistics even remotely associated with this bogus trend piece it might be worth discussing, but it’s just empty and lazy.
Anyway, here’s a piece from Donald Pittenger on the use(lessness) of editors, which parallels the Observer article in a neat way. At least, I think it does, but I got no sleep last night, so I may be clutching at straws.
They should lay off the spicy food
I promise I’ll get back to real writing soon.
I plead the Sith
Darth Pimp and his Storm Hos:
There’s nothing I can add to this one.
Hot Chip
Happy birthday / April Fool’s day to Chip Delany! Thank you for keeping faith in my abilities as a publisher, long after a sensible man would have given up.
I’m just easily amused
The pheasants are revolting
I bought a Flip Video Ultra
Stumped
Risk mismanagement
I believe the researchers in question work at the Institute of No Shit, Sherlock:
