Penny Arcade, on what makes a troll: “Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad”
Design world superstar Stefan Sagmeister says the framework he works with is whether you can touch someone’s heart with design: “Quite a while back, a friend of mine named Reini was coming to New York and was worried none of the sophisticated New York women were going to talk to him. So we ran a poster on the Lower East Side that had his photo on it and said, “Girls, please be nice to Reini.” He got a girlfriend out of it.”
This totally slays me: Alone In The City of Order & Desire. Oh Kfan, If I had Warren Buffett money, I’d give you a full-time position just being awesome all over the internet.
Restaurant critic Giles Coren’s nasty emails, foul-mouthed and excoriating, are so over the top that they’re hilarious, especially if you’ve ever worked as a writer and have ever been edited by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. Coren basically takes the nastygram you’d write to be therapeutic but immediately delete, ups the asshole factor by a factor of ten, and then actually presses send:
The joke is gone. I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you’ve fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don’t you read the copy?
Garrison Keillor on the craziness of the current political attack ads:
It’s an amazing country where an Arizona multimillionaire can attack a Chicago South Sider as an elitist and hope to make it stick. The Chicagoan was brought up by a single mom who had big ambitions for him, and he got scholarshipped into Harvard Law and was made president of the law review, all of it on his own hook, whereas the Arizonan is the son of an admiral and was ushered into Annapolis though an indifferent student, much like the Current Occupant, both of them men who are very lucky that their fathers were born before they were. The Chicagoan, who grew up without a father, wrote a book on his own, using a computer. The Arizonan hired people to write his for him. But because the Chicagoan can say what he thinks and make sense and the Arizonan cannot do that for more than 30 seconds at a time, the old guy is hoping to portray the skinny guy as arrogant.
So true, and so ridiculous; hopefully people will see right through it. In the meantime, it’s pretty funny that Paris Hilton’s energy plan is better than McCain’s—unfortunate in a practical sense, but still funny.
I’ve been enjoying Fashionista for a while and was pleasantly surprised to see that they picked my friend Dan as the star of their daily street photo feature last Friday. He always looks effortlessly cool, we should all be so stylish.
The Strand‘s classic tote bags are iconic for New Yorkers and out-of-town bookworms, but the first three bags in their new Artist Series are fantastic—David Hockney’s and Art Spiegelman’s are lovely, but my heart belongs to Adrian Tomine’s. [ via Racked]
“If you think of Matthew McConaughey as a celebrity product, he’s one of the most consistently branded and immediately recognizable products on the planet. In most photos, he is a) on a beach, b) in shorts, c) holding a surfboard, d) wearing a do-rag, e) drunk, or most often f) a combination of at least 3 of these. Matthew McConaughey is his own logo, and it looks like this.“ (Posts like these are why I love Amy’s Robot so much, and why you should too.)
Many thanks to Salon’s Rebecca Traister who wrote this great ode to Dana Scully, saving me the trouble of doing it myself:
Scully was a leading lady to fall for, a smart-girl icon who was (and would still be, alas) a rare television bird: professional, independent, unsentimental. She liked boys’ things: Her favorite movie was “The Exorcist,” her favorite book the phallic classic “Moby-Dick”; her nickname from her father was Starbuck; she wrote her thesis on Einstein’s twin paradox. She was the opposite of squeamish. In possibly the best “X-Files” episode of all time, the vampire farce “Bad Blood,” there is an ur-Scully scene: She is doing an autopsy after a long day of chasing the undead through a small Texas town. Annoyed, she sighingly hoists the departed’s heart, lung and intestines onto the scale, reading their weights into a tape recorder. Then she opens up the victim’s stomach and starts poking around with her scalpel to determine his last meal. “Pizza, topped with pepperoni, green peppers, mushrooms.” Here she pauses, looks up briefly from the bloody innards. “Mushrooms. That sounds good.” She orders a pizza.
The new X-Files movie opens this Friday—I’m terribly excited to see it, despite the stupid subtitle (“I Want to Believe”). If you’re a) in the city and b) not creepy, ping if you’d like to come with. Oh, and because it really is great, here’s a clip of that autopsy:
Helen Mirren, on the perils of youth: “Your twenties are torture, really, because you don’t know what you are going to be or whether it’s all going to work out, and you are supposedly an adult but you haven’t really learnt anything. You’re always looking for your own place in the world, but you’re insecure – you think you’re wonderful one minute and you think you’re a disaster the next. I think your thirties are a wonderful time.”