Borrowed Bucks Roadhouse in Grand Forks, North Dakota, has recently hosted the following events: Sexy Santa; Miss Hawaiian Tropic International; Springbreak Trip Giveaway; Pajama Party; Snowbunny Party (not the Craigslist “casual encounters” kind); Mr. Boxerball (not “Tyson” but “Joe”); and the Colgate® Country Showdown. Many of these events are sponsored by 97FM KYCK, “The Valley’s Hit Country.” Every week Bucks hosts “Bottomless Thursdays” where “$2 Chuck Norris and Jag Bombs” can be “enjoyed” between 11 p.m. and midnight. And yes, Bucks Twitters. And while all those events sound fun (really), I went to Bucks on Friday to watch the Micro Wrestling Federation.
Read it all.
Why does America’s got Talent host Nick Cannon keep dressing like a piece of the hard ribbon candy that’s been sitting on my grandmother’s davenport since the Ford administration?
That stuff is disgusting.
“You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover — Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out west, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work — to life.”
- Dick Cheney patsy Scooter Libby to self-promoting journalist and war-seller Judith Miller, Sept. 2005
“…the cold though, doesn’t it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs? And then in the summertime such extreme summertime about a hundred and fifty degrees hotter than just some months ago, than just some months from now, with fireweed blooming along the frost heaves and merciless rivers that are rushing and carving and reminding us that here, Mother Nature wins.”
- Alaskan retard Sarah Palin to a rapt nation of boobs and suckers, July 2009
Gawker. Gaaawker. Ugh. For every really good John Cook post that makes me think “the site’s heart is in the right place they’re just page-view whores like everyone else” there’s a post like today’s Associated Press Wants Your Plane Crash Porn.
Ostensibly about how an Associated Press editor is looking for photos of Hudson River’s helicopter-plane joust, the post begins “Ardent defender of their words and content, the Associated Press is now taking their talk to the streets! Where are their photo editors are trolling for pictures of today’s crash these days?”
Project much? Fuck me, Foster. Sure. the douchebags at AP have been a bit ridiculous in their copyright claims against epic douchebag Shepard Fairey but this is actually a case where they seem to be backing their words and want to pay people for their work (or luck). Damn.
Also, since we’re being petty bitches: In your speed to make a (not even relevant) funny about the AP you made an editorial mistake that assures you’ll probably never write copy for the AP. So quickly it seems that you did it twice: “Do you have good plane crash porn? Hit the AP up! They want to buy it and you make you a stah.” (Nice quick correct. BUT!: see screengrabs.)
Again, what’s the point here? The AP wants to pay people for their work instead of, you know, stealing it like most bloggers? How TERRIBLE of them.
Gawker also is quick to call the photos that the AP is looking for “crash porn,” while at the same time running (amateur photos of a picture on a TV!) of the crash taking place in the air. What’s more pornographic than that? In the comments Foster defends himself:
“
Mmmmmmm, yeah. Shill for cash? You mean “engage in a normal journalistic transaction that happens all the time with amateur pics and videos and news organizations?” Dos that mean Gawker “shills” for un-photoshopped mag cobers? And if that’s just a “shill,” what special word needs to be used for Denton’s own addmittance that he’d pay for sources: “I’d love to have [TMZ’s] reputation–as the place you go if you want to make a buck.”
A license plate one would only find in Swede-heavy North Dakota. Isn’t it unAmerican to print foreign letters on AMERICAN license plates? Socialists.
There has been a great deal of talk over having “engaging” discussion during the town hall meetings and trying to find “common ground.” But when the below comment is what you’re dealing with, Pavlovian training of this nature, just where is one to begin? There is no fact or reason you can present to somebody like this that is going to make it through to the shriveled black turd that is this person’s brain.
Via the always comment rich Say Anything Blog.
John Hughes died. The only blogs that did not cover this were the neo-nazi factions and George Sodini’s.
Editors of commercially-viable blogs certainly wrung their hands about this pop-culture news coming, inconveniently, at the end of the day. For the more twee-centric blogs like Gawker, Hughes’ death was potentially bigger than Jackson’s (E.g., Perez Hilton posted the item and it got fewer comments than a later post about Mariah Carey’s appearence on America’s Got Talent.) Gawker of course posted it, but like everyone else, didn’t have time to put together a “10 best of Hughes” or whatever.
Anyway, Gawker cruises on and then posts one of its “FROM COMMENTS” items, calling out a comment that the editors deemed good or noteworthy. The comment is from starred commentor “RonMwangaguhunga:”
“ Cont..
Moving bit. Almost too moving to be a throwaway Gawker comment. And it is. The same comment is actually a blog post from The Corsair, authored by Ron Mwangaguhunga.
Could the Gawker editors know this? Well, they could have googled the first sentence and found it, like I did.
Does it matter? To their readers, probably not.
XXXL, New Yorker, July 20, 2009
“According to what’s known as the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis, early humans compensated for the energy used in their heads by cutting back on the energy used in their guts; as man’s cranium grew, his digestive tract shrank. This forced him to obtain more energy-dense foods than his fellow-primates were subsisting on, which put a premium on adding further brain power. The result of this self-reinforcing process was a strong taste for foods that are high in calories and easy to digest; just as it is natural for gorillas to love leaves, it is natural for people to love funnel cakes.”
E.g., We’re fatter than our caveman ancestors because out brains are bigger.
Samuel George Morton , Crania Americana: A Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America, 1839
“The Negroes are proverbially fond of their amusements, in which they engage with great exuberance of spirit; and a day of toil is with them no bar to a night of revelry. Like most other barbarous nations their institutions are not infrequently characterized by superstition and cruelty. They appear to be fond of warlike enterprises, and are not deficient in personal courage; but, once overcome, they yield to their destiny… The Negroes have little invention.”
E.g., Blacks are dumb because their brains are smaller.
While watching (live and in the subsequent 6,000 repeats on all channels) the grand put-on that was the triumphant return from Mount Doom North Korea of Al Gore’s interns (”Their North Korean nightmare is over.” - NBC) I could not help but think of the passage from Matt Tiabbi’s excellent Spanking the Donkey describing what he saw during the Bush “Mission Accomplished” event:
“The genius of the Soviet system — and now the genius of ours – was that it appealed not to the hatreds and the passions of its people, but to other, more dependable qualities: laziness, banality, drunkenness, cowardice… The genius of the Soviet system was that it was deep. It was pervasive; its essence ran through the entire society, and after a while did not need to be imposed from above…. you see the same thing here in the States: no job, no health insurance, fucked for life by the credit bureaus, but swelling with pride over the sight of an Iraqi child with a candy bar… the problem isn’t removing George Bush. It’s the rest of it. The whole thing, all around us, the package deal.”
*Shudder*
And, not long after the footage went into high rotation was evidence that Matt, as usual, was right. Screenshot of my Facbook feed:
The classic Slate.com piece is some bit of conventional wisdom turned on its head or some bit of timely trivia writ large. And the classic Slate.com way of delivery is the question. As in its current headliner, “How is America going to end?”
But it seems that lately Gawker.com has been going the way of Slate. Or, to put it more appropriately, is Gawker overtaking Slate at its own game?
Below is a sampling of 20 headlines since the weekend from Gawker and Slate. Can you tell which is which? Answers after the jump
1. Is Thomas Pynchon a Serious Novelist?
2. What’s behind the former president’s “private” trip to North Korea?
3. Did Condé Nast Call In Its Sweetheart Loan to Annie Leibovitz?
4. Are Sarah and Todd Palin Getting A Divorce?
5. Can anyone run this place?
6. Are we done yet?
7. Did Apatow’s Funny Make Any Money?
8. Can Scientists Measure Happiness Through Twitter?
9. Do Guinea Pigs Exist in the Wild?
10. Are You Smart Enough to Join the Army?
11. Why Isn’t Single-Payer “Uniquely American”?
12. Can Bill Clinton Charm Kim Jong Il?
13. Why Are Russian Nuclear Submarines Patrolling the U.S. Coast?
14. Can Obama Make You Buy Health Insurance?
15. How Gay Is Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes?
16. Does Peace Have a Chance?
17. Is Nicholas Cage the New Wesley Snipes?
18. What If Obama Really Were Born in Kenya?
19. Will We Get a Frost/Bush?
20. Is The Obama Message Machine Still Worthy of Glowing Media Praise?
(more…)