Affluenza: March 5

I'd love to see a Vinn diagram of "wants well-designed minimal dining room furniture" and "wants a pool table":

http://www.fusiontables.com/

(Sometimes it can be hard to parse my comments on these things, so let me be a bit less opaque: I think these are pretty awesome.)

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Finally, a tote bag that lets everyone know you're a l33t h4x0r AND a total badass that the world better not mess with:

http://nexus404.com/Blog/2008/02/29/cool-binary-code-tote-bag-suits-geeks-with-serious-attitude-issues/

This is probably the most pitiful thing I've ever posted here.

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Speaking of tote bags, you guys know I'm not the biggest Stephen Colbert fan...the man himself is fine, but his fan club annoys the everliving shit out of me. However, I saw this last night at Barnes & Noble--uh, I mean a funky yet charming local independent bookstore!--and it cracked me up:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Stephen-Colbert-Natural-Canvas-Tote-Bag/Promotional-Concepts/e/9780641891748

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At first these Chocolate Pencils seem sorta dumb, but they're actually pretty whimsical and clever.

http://www.roadsidescholar.com/2008/02/29/cool-and-clever-chocolate-pencils/

Sure, you could do the same thing with a Hershey's bar and a potato peeler, but who are you...Alton Brown? Nice tiki shirt, you fucking nerd.

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Karl Lagerfeld's utterly redonk carousel set for Chanel's fall 2008 show:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/29/style/rchanel.php

http://www.papermag.com/blogs/2008/02/chanel_carousel_best_set_ever.php

Mickey Boardman is a professional writer. He got paid to write that.

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Clay Moulton's master thesis is the Gravia lamp, an LED powered by gravity, which just took second place in the 2008 Greener Gadgets Design Competition:

http://www.core77.com/competitions/greenergadgets/projects/4306/

Nice catch, blanco niño, but too bad your ass got SAAAAAAACKED:

http://dansdata.blogsome.com/2008/03/03/stop-press-pixie-dust-unsuitable-for-household-lighting/

http://pesn.com/2008/02/19/9500471_Gravity_Lamp/

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It's A Log You Idiots, part of a continuing series:

http://designstudio.whatiftheworld.com/products/the-euco-bench/

http://www.designlush.com/main.php?id=9_1&subid=2

http://www.showlifestyle.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=8&products_id=112

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Chiasso's Baroque Bathroom Scales:

http://www.chiasso.com/store/item.aspx?ItemId=54141

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Stamp the image of the Virgin Mary on your toast:

http://www.worldwidefred.com/holytoast.htm

[For those of you keeping track, this is not technically a toaster concept.]

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Gmail Soap. For some reason.

http://interiordesignroom.blogspot.com/2008/03/gmail-soap-available-in-russia.html

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Outdoor Themometer by Rosendahl:

http://www.emmohome.com/35610.html

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Neat article on organizing your bookshelves by color instead of, say, usefulness:

http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2008/01/25/organizing-bookshelves-by-color/

Since when did COLOURlovers have articles?

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Molly sends us this pretty incredible spread of wedding cakes that will make you feel bad about your lifestyle:

http://www.brides.com/brides/cakes

We particularly like the cake with the baroque filigree.

Dixie Gas wants us to know that she is totally in love with Roberto Cavalli's Spring 2008 ready-to-wear collection:

http://www.style.com/fashionshows/collections/S2008RTW/complete/thumb/RBTOCVLL

I couldn't agree more. Ladies Of Affluenza, you have some shopping to do.

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Julius Popp's water printer:

http://nickpapageorgia.blogspot.com/2008/03/julius-popp.html

Blah blah blah: No, Julian, It's not a "metaphor for the incessant flood of information we are exposed to" it's just a really cool installation.

I'm not being snarky here...it doesn't have to about anything other than blowing people's minds. If your goal as an artist is to make people go WTF? instead of NFW!, then you are a lazy failure and should be ashamed.

Now I Know What an Etui Looks Like

Geek Out New York on the 2008 American Crossword Tournament:

http://geekoutnewyork.com/2008/03/crossword.php

This is a great article, well-written and funny, but I'm just as impressed by what the author, John Teti, has done: left his computer desk and produced an original piece of reportage. The "are bloggers the new journalists?" argument rages on, despite the fact that most bloggers AREN'T doing any real journalism...mostly they're just riffing lamely on the work of real journalists. Bloggers are journalists the same way tour guides are architects.

So it's nice and even a little inspiring to see someone create original work for his blog.

Elsewhere on his site is this neat tribute to Teti's Friendly Local Game Store:

http://geekoutnewyork.com/2008/02/strategist.php

That picture of game shelves stretching back to the vanishing point seriously made my heart hurt. Christ, I wish this town had a FLGS. Oh, don't get me wrong, we have a game store, and it even has a decent selection, it's just run by humorless socially awkward dicks who consider selling board games to be a necessary evil so their Warhammer store can stay open.

I mosty just run in, pick up my special order*, and run out. How nice it would feel to be part of a gaming community that wasn't comprised of, as my favorite writer puts it, guys with their "creepy dusters and that classic militaristic fervor of a guy who would NEVER survive in the military."

I run into these guys every time I go to buy board games, and lately I've been thinking about how they are TOTALLY the modern-day equivalent of Don Quixote.

Think about it: they're so addled by their consumption of media that their waking life has become a sort of dreamworld where they star as the ultimate badass, during which they pontificate at length about the particulars of their delusions, and all attempts to dissuade them from this certainty gets absorbed into their self-mythos or just ignored.

(Also: frequently accompanied by fat guys.)

I'd love to see someone make a modern-day Man Of La Mancha about a sad sack military fetishist's increasingly pitiful adventures with his adoring chubby sidekick.

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*The way they do special orders is so annoying, too...you're not ordering it for YOU, you're ordering it for the store. When it comes in, they just put on the shelf and yu better hope you get there and buy it before anyone else does.

How To Cook Everything Vegetarian

After grappling with a leek on Saturday while preparing split pea soup, I found myself thinking that surely there must be some kind of 'user's manual' for vegetables...something that tells you, say, how to cook everything.

Later that day I was by Barnes & Noble, so I went to their cookbook section and found this:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Cook-Everything-Vegetarian-Meatless/dp/0764524836

Uh...HOLY CRAP. Like everyone else in the world, I'd always eyed Bittman's original classic, but there were just too many sections I didn't care about.

But this is awesome. It's a thousand pages long, and has in-depth instruction on how to select, prep, and prepare every vegetable, fruit, rice, grain, bean, herb, pasta, mushroom, and specialty vegetarian item in the entire world. Seriously.

Like the original How To Cook Everything, he gives you a bunch of recipes for each item. The recipes are (ahem) minimalist, of course, and unlike a lot of vegetarian cookbooks he doesn't include a lot of fake meat or dairy products. Most of them are just, you know, Broiled Leeks With Butter.

Be warned, though...he doesn't skimp on the butter or the cheese or the eggs. (One of the negative reviews on Amazon call the book How To Cook Vegetables With Cheese. Heh.) However, since the bulk of the book is about preparing produce, there ARE a bunch of vegan recipes, and in most non-vegan recipes he takes the time to explain in each instance what can be taken out to render it so.

Here are some sample recipes:

http://www.howtocookeverything.tv/htce/MoreRecipes/list.html

In the store it's $35, but Amazon has it for $24. I just bought it at the store cause I wanted that shit IMMEDIATELY. I'm not kidding or being sarcastic when I say that I probably would have paid $350 for it. It's that awesomely useful.

Big Mom must be so disappointed...

There's a story about the New Orleans Police Department looking for a body out in the bayou, a notorious dumping ground for murder victims.

The chief homicide detective took a class of police academy cadets out to the swamp to help in the search. "Remember," he warned, "we're looking for a white male, six feet tall, with blonde hair. If you guys start yelling every time you find a dead body, we're gonna be here all day."

I'm starting to feel the same way about these stories of memoir writers revealed as liars...if I start featuring every single one, we're never gonna get anything done.

Today's story is some chick who wrote a hilariously awful book I'd never heard of about being a white girl who was a drug runner in South Central. Do publishing industry players have their heads so far up their asses that this story even sounded remotely plausible?

Anyway, the best part is that she was busted by her own sister:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/books/04fake.html

That article is notable for a couple of other things:

1. How confusing the Times house style is when the article includes more than a handful of players...good luck keeping all those Ms.'s straight!

2. It also feeds into my current obsession with pictures of what people my own age look like. For the record, that is what a lady I could have gone to college with looks like now. Huh!

Back to Margaret Seltzer for a minute. She was the recipient of a lot of pre-publication buzz from the Times, including a glowing review by Michiko Kakutani and a Home & Garden profile that I guarantee you will be the funniest thing you read all day:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/garden/28jones.html

Gawker wonders: could it have anything to do with the fact that Seltzer's long-time editor is the daughter of veteran Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath?

http://gawker.com/5003499/lying-authors-ties-to-the-times-book-review

This nugget blows me away: "A Book Review editor, Barry Gewen, said last year he had never met Kakutani in 18 years at the paper."

Finally, there's this blog post from Book Reporter, which reads like an email forward my mom sent me:

http://www.bookreporter.com/blog/blog/2008/03/memo-to-authors-if-you-lie-in-your.html

Now send this to ten other people or something bad will happen!

The post sets out some good (if a bit obvious) points, but I want to take issue with number four:

"4) Did you ever think....hmmm...this could be a powerful fiction story? I do not need to make it MY story!"

The fact is, we're in the middle of a huge memoir craze right now, and any vaguely successful memoir sells about ten times better than any novel that's not about a boy wizard. This isn't to take any culpability away from the authors in question--they're not just liars, they're greedy liars!--but it explains why these books are written as phony memoirs instead of poorly-written novels.

When James Frey was being busted, he claimed that he had submitted the work as a novel, but the big bad publishing house insisted he call it a memoir instead. At the time this seemed like the last refuge of a despicable worm, but since then we've heard this from other writers as well. Considering how profitable the memoir business is, it's not too hard to imagine, is it? If the lie isn't caught, great. And if it is, just throw the writer under the bus. "We feel shocked and and betrayed by this author's actions..." and so on.

But I'm more concerned with the idea that a memoir and a novel are indistinguishable aside from where they're shelved in the Dewey Decimal system. A memoir is an entirely different form from a novel, with completely seperate rules of construction, and those who are saying "just call it fiction" are being disingenious at best.

Imagine slapping "A Novel" on phony-baloney memoirs A Boy Called It or Running With Scissors. Forget for a second that Pelzer and Burroughs are mediocre writers...that's not what I'm talking about here. Considered as novels the books just don't work: the timeline is too compressed, the viewpoint is too narrow, the prose is too matter-of-fact. They literally couldn't be marketed as novels. Memoirs and novels have different goals, and you can't just call a memoir--real or imagined--a novel any more than you can call a personal essay a short story.

As for why the authors didn't just write them as novels in the first place...well, I know we're not supposed to make value judgements about genres, but let's be real: writing a novel is fucking HARD, and uses different muscles from telling a straightforward story about your upbringing. I don't want to get into a pissing match about genres, but I think it's safe to say that writing a bad memoir is much easier than writing a bad novel.

I should know: I'm a huge liar AND a bad novelist.

Fail Dogs

There was always something really charming about the LOLcats and the way they recontextualized our notions of the feline personality: instead of aloof and slightly arrogant, the LOLcats presented themselves as amiable goofballs, a little naïve but always enthusiastic. "Of course we don't know proper grammar...we're just cats!"

Well, on the other side of the coin, Fail Dogs presents dogs not as man's best friend or noble companions but as utter fucking retards:

http://faildogs.com/

And though the site is only a few days old, I find myself wondering how this most recent Internet folk art will degrade. When I first saw the LOLcats, maybe a year ago, they seemed so fresh and original...I couldn't imagine that the humor would ever get stale. So what happened?

What always happens: the fad was discovered by the mediocre, the wannabes, the bandwagon jumpers, and none of those Lollers Come Lately got the point.

I Can Has Cheesburger turned into just misspelled cutesy-pie baby talk, which wasn't at all what was so attractive to the original fans of the first LOLcats. (Plus, they don't even get the misspellings right.) At a certain point the site became indistinguishable from Cute Overload, when just a few months before it was as diametrically opposed to it as you could be while still featuring pictures of kittens.

LOLsecretz reinvigorated the form for a while, but in an act of clear-eyed self-appraisal that seems almost like a kind of heroism, they realized the vein had run dry before they wore out their welcome:

http://lolsecretz.blogspot.com/2008/01/has-been-pretty-gret-aktually.html

So I'm curious how the Fail Dogs concept will get corrupted...it's literally only pictures of unimaginably stupid dogs with the word FAIL written beside them. In theory they could run forever and still retain the same essential spirit they had on Day One.

But just because I can't imagine how the meme could possibly degrade doesn't mean it won't happen: the lamest and most hackneyed minds of our generation are undoubtedly working on it even as we speak.

Comic Sans Is Illegal

Stickers that graphic design assholes can put on poorly-designed work:

http://www.design-police.org/

Christian Lander Interview

A two-part interview with Christian Lander, the writer of Stuff White People Like:

http://theassimilatednegro.blogspot.com/2008/02/stuff-white-people-like-interview-part.html

(This is the last I'll post about this site, I swear.)

File Destructor 2.0

File Destructor creates custom-made garbled files that you can use to extend deadlines an extra day:

http://www.xnet.se/fd/

"Higher fences" apparently not an option...

Universal Studios has tried to block a bike path along the Los Angeles river, because of fears that aspiring screenwriters will hurl their scripts onto the NBC lot:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-bikelane27feb27,0,5229089.story

Favorite quote from a discussion thread about this: "You know how trolls feel about their opinions? Writers feel that way about their ideas." HA!

Rotten Girls

Molly sends along this interesting article about fujoshi, the female otakus:

http://uk.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUKT30561220080229?pageNumber=4&virtualBrandChannel=0

Here are two pretty great video clips:

http://darkdiamond.net/web-notes/the-world-of-fujoshi-the-female-otaku/

Interestingly, whereas those two links equate fujoshi to "girl geeks," the Wikipedia entry on fujoshi is only concerned with their interest in slash fan-fic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujoshi

I wonder if the Reuters article does this to whitewash the term, or if Wikipedia has confused effect for cause. That is, Harry Potter nerds are ALSO interested in romantic couplings of (underage) fictional characters, but by and large that's an offshoot of their fandom, not the reason they got into the world.

I suppose the truth is somewhere in the midde, but a good rule of thumb is: If you have two explanations, and one of them is "Wikipedia sucks," always choose that one.

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Speaking of, librarians have ANOTHER reason to hate Nicholson Baker: he loves Wikipedia...

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131

Actually, this article--a review of a book called Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, the existence of which makes my head explode--is an interesting read, full of great observations, even if I don't share his enthusiasm for the faith-based encyclopedia.