Yes, it would seem that sometime in the last decade, the American people have become so fat and so happy and so inordinately lazy that they no longer want to put their own wear, sweat and stress into their Levis. Nope, it seems that the entire country will only buy jeans that have already been worn into a shambles, reduced, as new, to the rags I already had at home.
You’ve got new jeans at the Gap that look like they’ve had non-union and unlucky sweatshop employees of Sri Lanka of all shapes and sizes stuffed into them and then dragged for miles along country roads. They’ve got jeans with the off-the-rack look as if they’ve been sandblasted at a construction site in Tijuana — after Happy Hour.
You’ve got jeans that look as if the person inside them was persuaded to run through a scene of “Dirty Dancing” with a belt-sander.
You’ve got jeans that seem to have been stolen out of a wedding reception in Afghanistan after a predator strike went terribly wrong.
And you’ve got jeans that I swear have the finish and light golden color stained deep into the blue that you could only get if you buried them in a Chicago feedlot and let several herds of cattle rain down on them for a month.
Pre-shredded, pre-torn, pre-raveled at the seams, pre-faded, pre-pissed upon and a dozen other industrial or inhuman processes all combined to give me a section of men’s jeans at the Gap that looked like the changing room right next to a mass grave. All displayed proudly and marked and priced as “New.”
Gerard Vanderleun, “Pre-Owned Jeans”, American Digest, 2011-01-08
January 9, 2011
QotD: New jeans? Sure. New-looking new jeans? Sorry.
January 2, 2011
Dave Barry’s 2010 review
Who better than Dave Barry to recount to us the manifold miseries we endured and depths of despair we plumbed:
Let’s put things into perspective: 2010 was not the worst year ever. There have been MUCH worse years. For example, toward the end of the Cretaceous Period, Earth was struck by an asteroid that wiped out about 75 percent of all of the species on the planet. Can we honestly say that we had a worse year than those species did? Yes, we can, because they were not exposed to “Jersey Shore.”
So on second thought we see that this was, in fact, the worst year ever. The perfect symbol for the awfulness of 2010 was the BP oil spill, which oozed up from the depths and spread, totally out of control, like some kind of hideous uncontrollable metaphor. (Or “Jersey Shore.”) The scariest thing about the spill was, nobody in charge seemed to know what to do about it. Time and again, top political leaders personally flew down to the Gulf of Mexico to look at the situation firsthand and hold press availabilities. And yet somehow, despite these efforts, the oil continued to leak. This forced us to face the disturbing truth that even top policy thinkers with postgraduate degrees from Harvard University — Harvard University! — could not stop it.
The leak was eventually plugged by non-policy people using machinery of some kind. But by then our faith in our leaders had been shaken, especially because they also seemed to have no idea of what to do about this pesky recession. Congress tried every remedy it knows, ranging all the way from borrowing money from China and spending it on government programs, to borrowing MORE money from China and spending it on government programs. But in the end, all of this stimulus created few actual jobs, and most of those were in the field of tar-ball collecting.
December 30, 2010
Font geek humour
How geeky do you have to be to find this sort of thing funny as hell?
H/T to Eric S. Raymond for the link.
December 24, 2010
Hey Kids! Did you get your paperwork in on time?
If you hurry, you can just get your Santa’s Visit Application in before the deadline tonight!
December 23, 2010
QotD: Welcome to New England
In New England in December the cold does not come in on little cat feet. Instead some mountain god of the great north woods throws open the door to Canada late one night. When you step out the next morning your scrotum promptly goes into hibernation somewhere around your arm pit. The cold gets hammered down tight. And it stays that way. Until, oh, somewhere in the middle of March.
I’d come to New England after many years away and, in Seattle, thought I’d packed well for the trip. I’d made a point to bring my very warm Seattle jacket. I stepped outside into the New England winter this morning and between the door and the car I knew, based on testicle retraction velocity, that my coat had nothing to say to this winter. I might as well have packed and dressed in a Speedo. At least I would have been rapidly arrested and taken to a warm jail cell until my need for medication could be determined.
Gerard Vanderleun, “The Gift of the WalMagi”, American Digest, 2010-12-23
Not everyone can get into the Christmas spirit
Ethan Greenhart wants to rename Christmas as “Turkey Genocide Day”:
Just as there’s nothing civilised about organising society around the wants of Gaia-mauling human beings, and nothing green about traipsing halfway across the planet to trek with donkeys in Peru (how do you know the donkeys want to trek?), so there can never be anything ethical about a holiday whose centrepiece is a dead bird sexually molested by sage; whose star turn is an obese man who drinks that imperialist tipple Coca-Cola and delivers yet more stuff to already stuffed brats; and where taking a tree from a forest, humiliating it with tinsel and sticking it in a living room is seen as a perfectly normal — nay, fun — thing to do.
This is no holiday; it’s a hell-iday for the defenceless creatures and plants of this ball of gas and air we have arrogantly labelled “Earth”. The signs were there 2000 years ago when a knocked-up teenager enslaved a donkey and forced it to carry her hundreds of miles to Bethlehem before ousting cows and sheep so she could give birth in their home.
If that weren’t bad enough, so-called “wise men” (another contradiction in terms) raided nature to find gifts for the resource-user that this young woman unthinkingly gave birth to, including myrrh, which is literally made from the blood that oozes from the wounds of the Commiphora species of trees, and frankincense, which is stolen from the Boswellia tree.
And so it was that this 2000-year-old orgy of animal enslavement, human breeding and gift-giving became an inspiration to the brainless inhabitants of Christendom, who every year ape the Holy Family by abusing animals and dishing out unnecessary gifts and calling the whole stupid shebang a celebration.
Overall, not a bad rant, although it only manages a close second to the Prince Regent’s complaint:
Edmund: So, shall I begin the Christmas story?
Prince: Absolutely! As long as it’s not that terribly depressing one about the chap who gets born on Christmas Day, shoots his mouth off about everything under the sun, and then comes a cropper with a couple of rum-coves on top of a hill in Johnny Arabland.
Edmund: You mean Jesus, sir?
Prince: Yes, that’s the fellow! Just leave him out of it — he always spoils the X-mas atmos.
H/T to Roger Henry for the link.
December 22, 2010
QotD: A Christmas Carol
It’s Christmas time, and that means it’s time to enjoy A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’ melancholy tale of a productive businessman who gets worked over by three meddling supernatural social workers one Christmas Eve, transforming him into a simpering socialist.
It’s almost as sad as Star Wars, really.
Douglas Kern, “A TCS Christmas Carol”
Bad Boy Fencing Star Implicated in Yet Another Jewel Heist
December 21, 2010
‘Tis the season to hate the senders of boastful holiday letters
Gregg Easterbrook receives the perfect, perfect holiday letter:
Don’t you hate boastful holidays letters about other people’s fascinating lives and perfect children? Below is one Nan and I received last week.
Dear Friends,
What a lucky break the CEO sent his personal jet to pick me up from Istanbul; there’s plenty of room, since I have the entire aircraft to myself, to take out the laptop and write our annual holiday letter. Just let me ask the attendant for a better vintage of champagne, and I’ll begin.
It’s been another utterly hectic year for Chad and I and our remarkable children, yet nurturing and horizon-expanding. It’s hard to know where the time goes. Well, a lot of it is spent in the car.
Rachel is in her senior year at Pinnacle-Upon-Hilltop Academy, and it seems just yesterday she was being pushed around in the stroller by our British nanny. Rachel placed first this fall in the state operatic arias competition. Chad was skeptical when I proposed hiring a live-in voice tutor on leave from the Lyric Opera, but it sure paid off! Rachel’s girls’ volleyball team lost in the semifinals owing to totally unfair officiating, but as I have told her, she must learn to overcome incredible hardship in life.
Now the Big Decision looms — whether to take the early admission offer from Harvard or spend a year at Julliard. Plus the whole back of her Mercedes is full of dance-company brochures as she tries to decide about the summer.
Nicholas is his same old self, juggling the karate lessons plus basketball, soccer, French horn, debate club, archeology field trips, poetry-writing classes and his volunteer work. He just got the Yondan belt, which usually requires nine years of training after the Shodan belt, but prodigies can do it faster, especially if (not that I really believe this!) they are reincarnated deities.
Modeling for Gap cuts into Nick’s schoolwork, but how could I deprive others of the chance to see him? His summer with Outward Bound in the Andes was a big thrill, especially when all the expert guides became disoriented and he had to lead the party out. But you probably read about that in the newspapers.
What can I say regarding our Emily? She’s just been reclassified as EVVSUG&T — “Extremely Very Very Super Ultra Gifted and Talented.” The preschool retained a full-time teacher solely for her, to keep her challenged. Educational institutions are not allowed to discriminate against the gifted anymore, not like when I was young.
Yesterday Rachel sold her first still-life. It was shown at one of the leading galleries without the age of the artist disclosed. The buyers were thrilled when they learned!
Then there was the arrival of our purebred owczarek nizinny puppy. He’s the little furry guy in the enclosed family holiday portrait by Annie Leibovitz. Because our family mission statement lists cultural diversity as a core value, we named him Mandela.
Chad continues to prosper and blossom. He works a few hours a day and spends the rest of the time supervising restoration of the house — National Trust for Historic Preservation rules are quite strict. Corporate denial consulting is a perfect career niche for Chad. Fortune 500 companies call him all the time. There’s a lot to deny, and Chad is good at it.
Me? Oh, I do this and that. I feel myself growing and flowering as a change agent. I yearn to empower the stakeholders. This year I was promoted to COO and invited to the White House twice, but honestly, beading in the evening means just as much to me. I was sorry I had to let Carmen go on the same day I brought home my $14.6 million bonus, but she had broken a Flora Danica platter and I caught her making a personal call.
Chad and I got away for a week for a celebration of my promotion. We rented this quaint five-star villa on the Corsican coast. Just to ourselves — we bought out all 40 rooms so it would be quiet and contemplative and we could ponder rising above materialism.
Our family looks to the New Year for rejuvenation and enrichment. Chad and I will be taking the children to Steamboat Springs over spring break, then in June I take the girls to Paris, Rome and Seville while Chad and Nicholas accompany Richard Gere to Tibet.
Then the kids are off to camps in Maine, and before we know it, we will be packing two cars to drive Rachel’s things to college. And of course I don’t count Davos or Sundance or all the routine excursions.
I hope your year has been as interesting as ours.
Love,
Jennifer, Chad, Rachel, Nicholas & Emily(The above is inspired by a satirical Christmas letter I did for The New Republic a decade ago. I figure it’s OK to recycle a joke once every 10 years.)
December 19, 2010
Something else for your Christmas list
H/T to Gerard Vanderleun for the link.
December 15, 2010
Scott Adams on Sweden
Michael O’Connor Clarke linked to Scott Adams’ thoughts on Sweden:
I am always amused by the strange impact of unintended consequences. Julian Assange simply wanted to release some embarrassing information, have hot sex with a Swedish babe then have hot sex with an acquaintance of that same babe one day later. That’s just one example of why the Swedish language has 400 words that all mean “and your cute friend is next.”
But things didn’t turn out as Assange hoped. The unintended consequence of his actions is that he managed to make Sweden look like a country that’s governed by congenital idiots and populated with nothing but crazy sluts and lawyers. And don’t get me started about the quality of their condoms.
To be fair, I don’t know if Assange’s alleged broken condom is because the product was defective. We have good evidence that Assange has the world’s biggest set of nuts, so assuming some degree of proportionality, he’d put a strain on any brand of condom that didn’t have rebar ribs.
Assange had a lot of help making Sweden look like the last place on Earth that you would want to take your penis. [. . .]
If you haven’t read any background about the so-called rape charges against Assange, you really should. Apparently Swedish laws are unique. If you have a penis, you’re half a rapist before you even get through customs. And if your condom breaks, that’s jail time. What I’m saying is that the Club Med in Sweden is a nervous place.
I was having a hard time making up my mind about Assange. On one hand, he might be hurting the interests of my country and putting people in danger. Death to him! On the other hand, a little extra government transparency might prevent more problems than it causes. Hero! It was a toss-up. Then Sweden turned Assange from a man-whore publicity hound into Gandhi. Advantage: Assange.
December 14, 2010
QotD: Buzzword Bingo, resumé edition
Are you a motivated multitasker with extensive experience that has helped you become a results oriented team player?
Does your online resume say you have a dynamic and innovative skill set which has led to a proven track record of being entrepreneurial in a fast paced world?
Then congratulations, you’ve successfully used all 10 of the most overused buzzwords on LinkedIn in just two sentences.
[. . .]
And just so you know we tried, we did manage to get all 10 buzzwords into one single colossally cringe-worthy sentence sure to make any human resources manager’s skin crawl.
Heaven help the poor guy who has this phrase on his LinkedIn profile:
“Hi, I’m a motivated multitakser with extensive experience as an entrepreneurial and results oriented team player whose innovative and dynamic skills have helped me become adept at working in a fast paced world with a proven track record.”
Ta-da!
Matt Hartley, “The 10 most overused employment buzzwords on LinkedIn”, Financial Post, 2010-12-14
December 8, 2010
Worried about your upcoming citizenship test? Publius has the answers for you
Publius has done all the hard work for you so you can ace the new citizenship test:
So from the mouth of well meaning ignorance, how would a typical Canadian fare on Mr Kenney’s new immigration test? Thanks to the vast resources of this blog, and its network of agents and correspondents through out the Dominion, we have located the typical Canadian. He’s a male in his late thirties and lives in Kenora. Which I think is in Alberta. But from Toronto it’s hard to tell. We brought the typical Canadian to our high-tech testing center at the corner of Center St and Universe Ave, in downtown Toronto. Here is the test. And here is the typical Canadian’s answers:
– Identify four (4) rights that Canadians enjoy.
The right to complain about the weather. The right to complain about how taxes are too high. The right to complain that the government isn’t spending enough money on me or my community. The right to stand in the middle of the cookie aisle at Loblaws and block everybody’s way (I know who you are).
-Name four (4) fundamental freedoms that Canadians enjoy.
The freedom to speak, unless it offends a politically influential minority group. The freedom to own property, unless it offends a politically influential environmental group. The freedom to protest, unless it offends visiting dignitaries. The freedom to bitch about the weather, unless it offends a co-worker who is a ski-nut.
[. . .]
-What did the Canadian Pacific Railway symbolize?
That graft, corruption, political manipulation, juvenile anti-Americanism, and screwing over people who don’t live in Ontario and Quebec, has been a Canadian tradition since the beginning.
-What does Confederation mean?
Like federation but with more “con” in it. Like transfer payments.
[. . .]
-What is the role of the courts in Canada?
To uphold the laws of Canada, unless it conflicts with their personal political beliefs. At that point they just make stuff up, and then use some latin terms to cover their tracks.
-In Canada, are you allowed to question the police about their service or conduct?
Yes, but not during the APEC conference, the G20, or if you’re living in Caledonia.
Has anyone seen this Taser?
John Oates has a bit of fun at the expense of the Metropolitan Police:
Police appeal for missing Taser
Shocking loss, but stunning Christmas presentThe Metropolitan Police ia appealing for the return of a Taser and four cartridges that were left on the roof of a police car, which was then driven away…
A Met firearms officer attended an early morning briefing at Norfolk Row, Lambeth. After the briefing, possibly focussed on coffee and a bacon sandwich, the copper put the Taser on the roof of the marked police car and drove off.
An hour and a half later it dawned on the unfortunate officer what had happened, by which time the Taser was no longer on the roof.
December 4, 2010
Insults in other languages that don’t translate well
A fascinating thread on AskReddit asks “What are your favourite culturally untranslatable phrases?”
Language warning, so I’ve put it below the fold.
