December 15, 2012
December 8, 2012
November 15, 2012
Fisking the Williams-Sonoma catalog
Drew Magary made a critical mistake once, paying for an overpriced Williams-Sonoma cheese grater with a credit card, thus ending up with yet another glossy catalog landing in the mailbox every year. “Every holiday season, my mail slot gets bukkake’d with monstrous catalogs packed with shit I would never, ever buy, and the W-S catalog stands out among them.”
Inspired by the offerings of the Williams Sonoma catalog, Drew responds to some of the juiciest items:
Item #02-4381232 Acorn Twine Holder
Williams-Sonoma says: “Polished alderwood with 76 yards of linen twine. Made in Italy.”
Price: $26
Notes from Drew: Oh, thank God! Thanksgiving was mere weeks away and I was like OH FUCK, WE’RE OUT OF TWINE. AND WE HAVE NO PLACE TO DISPENSE SAID TWINE. Sure, any asshole can go to the store and buy a roll of cooking string for half a penny and keep that twine in a drawer for the one time per year someone in the house has to tie up a raw turkey only to fail miserably and get salmonella deep inside his palms for years and years. But I want CLASSY twine, you know? I want my twine to say something about ME.
[. . .]
Item #02-741009 Callie’s Charleston Biscuits
Williams-Sonoma says: “Flaky, buttery, and made by hand by celebrated caterer Callie White.”
Price: $72 (set of 24)
Notes from Drew: That’s $72 dollars for biscuits. At Popeye’s, the biscuit comes free with your order. At Williams-Sonoma, it costs you the rough equivalent of your phone bill. How good could these biscuits possibly be? There’s a threshold past which biscuits cannot improve. Even the best goddamn biscuit in the world isn’t $72 better than a Popeye’s biscuit. Unless that biscuit can make you teleport.
And what kills me is that there are clearly people out there who have shitloads of money and NO cooking skills who order this shit. Who are these people? How are there so many of them that Williams-Sonoma can sustain its business model? Are we all just racking up massive biscuit debts that will soon break the economy? I imagine that 60 percent of Williams-Sonoma’s business come from a group of six Persian oil barons, who buy everything in every catalog five times over every year for no good reason at all. Seventy-two-dollar biscuits. WHAT THE FUCK.
[. . .]
Item #02-410423 Assumption Abbey Fruitcake
Williams-Sonoma says: “Baked by trappist monks at a monastery in the Missouri Ozarks. Order early. Supply is limited.”
Price: $39.95
Notes from Drew: Everything about that sales copy just blew my skull. There are trappist monks in the Ozarks? Do they brew artisanal meth? I don’t trust fruitcake to begin with. I sure as shit am not trusting fruitcake that comes from a redneck friar. They’ll swap out uppers for candied fruit. And yet, supply is limited. Apparently, the market for $40 Ozark fruitcake is ENORMOUS. White women from Bridgehampton ALL THE WAY to Westhampton rely on the monks to deliver their holiday fruitcake every year. Ina Garten’s ADORABLE HUSBAND JEFFREY WHO MAKES A LOT OF MONEY loves the sight of a fine white-trash-monk fruitcake any time he comes home. TIE IT UP WITH THE TWINE!
H/T to John Kovalic for the link.
Comments Off on Fisking the Williams-Sonoma catalog
December 25, 2011
QotD: The Prince Regent’s Christmas story
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.Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, 1988
Comments Off on QotD: The Prince Regent’s Christmas story
December 24, 2011
Repost: ‘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.)
Repost: 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!
Comments Off on Repost: Hey Kids! Did you get your paperwork in on time?
December 22, 2011
Pat Condell on the intolerance of diversity
Comments Off on Pat Condell on the intolerance of diversity
December 21, 2011
“It’s A Wonderful Life is a movie that only an Occupod could love”
Michael Graham explains why the much-loved Christmas movie It’s a Wonderful Life is actually awful:
Consider George Bailey. In your mind, you see him after a lifetime of poverty, grief and bad luck, running through Bedford Falls shouting “Merry Christmas you old Building and Loan,” just happy to have a family he loves.
Well I agree that having a loving family can help us all get through crises. (Remember the stewardess in the disaster-film spoof “Airplane?” “At least I had a husband . . . ”)
But the name of the film is “Wonderful Life,” not, “Well, Things Could Be Worse.” And in George Bailey’s case, things are truly tragic.
Smart, ambitious George gets stuck at the modest Building and Loan back in Hickville when his brother marries into a cushy corporate gig and his father dies. After years of dreaming of going off to college, traveling the world and becoming a top engineer or architect, his life is spent scraping by, and helping others do the same.
Somehow the movie — like the Occupiers of today — tries to turn that into a virtue. Despite his wife and kids, George turns down $20,000 a year so he won’t have to work for that “evil banker,” Mr. Potter.
Occupy Bedford Falls!
Comments Off on “It’s A Wonderful Life is a movie that only an Occupod could love”
December 20, 2011
Reason.TV: Grandma got indefinitely detained (A very TSA Christmas)
Comments Off on Reason.TV: Grandma got indefinitely detained (A very TSA Christmas)
Next on the protest agenda: Occupy Xmas
Patrick Hayes talks about the new agenda item for the self-declared 99%:
At a time when Occupy protesters are closing up camps the world over — either due to force by the authorities or because it’s too cold to protest outside — the widely acknowledged founders of the Occupy movement, Vancouver-based magazine AdBusters has claimed protesters’ next move should be to ‘Occupy Christmas’. The rationale for this, is as follows: ‘You’ve been sleeping on the streets for two months pleading peacefully for a new spirit in economics. And just as your camps are raided, your eyes pepper-sprayed and your head’s knocked in, another group of people are preparing to camp-out. Only these people aren’t here to support Occupy Wall Street, they’re here to secure their spot in line for a Black Friday bargain at Super Target and Macy’s.’
What bastards the 99 per cent are! Occupy protesters have experienced an ordeal akin to Christ being nailed to the cross, and all the greedy, selfish, Judas-like masses want to do is shop! The new Occupy protests began on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) in the US last month, where goods are heavily discounted in shops in an attempt to kick-start spending and get shops’ P&L sheets ‘into the black’ in the run-up to Christmas. Occupy protesters left their tents and headed to the malls to tell consumers — or ‘cum-sumer whores’ as some protesters put it in their leaflets — to stop buying Christmas presents at discounted prices for their loved ones.
The idea behind this, as AdBusters — renowned also for founding Buy Nothing Day — noted is that ‘Occupy gave the world a new way of thinking about the fat cats and financial pirates on Wall Street. Now let’s give them a new way of thinking about the holidays, about our own consumption habits… This year’s Black Friday will be the first campaign of the holiday season where we set the tone for a new type of holiday culminating with #OCCUPYXMAS.’
Comments Off on Next on the protest agenda: Occupy Xmas
December 19, 2011
Kelly McParland: “Norwegians are the most revoltingly perfect people in the world”
Don’t worry, my Norwegian friends, it’s just small-minded Canadian jealousy that you tend to beat us in all the “Smug Country” polls and your national monopoly is even more constricting and incompetent than our equivalent national monopoly:
Everyone knows the Norwegians are the most revoltingly perfect people in the world.
They consistently top all lists of Things Good Countries Do.
They give more to foreign aid than just about any other country in the world. Countries are supposed to give 70¢ for every $100 of national production, but hardly any do. Norway gives about 40% more than the benchmark. They’re sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in oil profits, and instead of blowing it on short-term expediencies (like a certain western province we could mention) they squirrel a lot of it away in an investment fund to help maintain their high standard of living when the oil runs out. And believe me, their standard of living is high: a cradle-to-grave nannyism that revolts conservatives but seems to work for Norwegians. (In Norway, life is so soft that even cows are required to have rubber mats in their stalls so they can rest comfortably between shifts).
They’re so perfect they’re annoying. Even Swedes get tired of hearing about them. So it’s kind of fun to read about how they’ve completely buggered up their supply management system, so that the entire country has been stripped of its butter supply just as Christmas arrives and everyone gears up to make lots of stuff for which butter is required. And if it reminds you of Canada’s own supply management system (think: dairy products and Quebec), all the better.
Comments Off on Kelly McParland: “Norwegians are the most revoltingly perfect people in the world”
December 16, 2011
Reason.TV: Christopher Hitchens – Bah, Humbug on Christmas
Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011.
I’m saddened to write that the great essayist and writer Christopher Hitchens is dead at the age of 62. He had been weakened by the cancer of the esophagus that he disclosed publicly in 2010 and the treatments he had undertaken to fight his illness. Reason extends its condolences to his wife, family, and friends.
As is clear to anyone who has read even a sentence of his staggeringly prolific output, Hitchens was the sort of stylist who could turn even a casual digression into a tutorial on all aspects of history, literature, and art. As a writer, you gaze upon his words and despair because there’s just no way you’re going to touch that. But far more important than the wit and panache and erudition with which he expressed himself was the method through which he engaged the world.
The Toronto Star has a small collection of quotations which do give a sense of the man’s range and wit:
5. About Sarah Palin: “She’s got no charisma of any kind, [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.”
6. “If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.”
[. . .]
8. About Mother Teresa: “She was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”
9. “Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.”
[. . .]
12. About Michael Moore: “Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.”
Comments Off on Reason.TV: Christopher Hitchens – Bah, Humbug on Christmas
A very Calvin & Hobbes Christmas
H/T to Chris Myrick for the link.
Comments Off on A very Calvin & Hobbes Christmas
December 9, 2011
“An ‘American tradition’ is anything that happened to a baby boomer twice”
Hard to refute the latest xkcd take on Christmas music:
