@SandraBernhard
Sandra Bernhard @lizzwinstead hi my lady everyone come support planned parenthood ny this thursday with me lizz and @lisalampanelli all emmy winners!
Sep 19 via webFavoriteRetweetReply

HEY. There is a big Planned Parenthood benefit this week. It will have the lady Sandra Bernhard, and Lizz Winstead, and dreamy foul-mouthed newlywed Lisa Lampanelli, and it is at the Gramercy Theater this Thursday! Here is a special secret price for you, beloved Awl reader, of just $30, because we would love you to attend. (There are also VIP tickets and more expensive tickets, if you’d like to give them more money! Why wouldn’t you?) Buy some or many of these tickets! LET’S DO THIS THING.

This is the time of every year that “This is Just a Modern Rock Song” becomes my favorite Belle and Sebastian song. (Taking over from “Lazy Line Painter Jane” or “The Boy With the Arab Strap,” which rule at other times.) Because now that summer is all-but-technically kaput, and we can finally put the Great Shorts Debate behind us, at least for another seven or eight months, I most often find myself pulling on a pair of corduroy pants in the morning (or, well, in the afternoon or at night, whenever it is that I finally get myself out of the house), an occasion upon which I can’t help but hum the chorus to this great, great, terrific song, which I think is actually more like just the ninth verse, because the song is basically all verse (but I don’t know so much about musical theory), where the words go, “This is just a modern rock song/This is just a sorry lament/We’re four boys in our corduroys/We’re not terrific but we’re competent.” Because that internal “four-boys/corduroys” rhyme is so brilliant. And because I’m putting on corduroys.

According to the historians at the British fabrics company Brisbane Moss, corduroy was developed in the latter half of the 19th century by weavers in the East Lancashire and West Yorkshire districts. It is a “fustian” fabric, which means that it has a higher ratio of “weft” threads — those threads that are woven around and between the “warp” threads that are the ones stretched on the loom. Weft threads can be softer than warp threads, because they don’t have to be as strong, not having to hold up to the stretching.

“In some cases the smooth face of the fabric was interrupted by equally spaced ribs, or races, running the length of the piece, and these could be cut on specialised machines, prior to dyeing, to form ribs of raised pile, characteristic of corduroy as it is now known.”

Those ribs have become known as “wales,” of course, a word that also means the raised welts left on the skin after a whipping. And the number of wales per inch of material varies. The more wales per inch, of course, the thinner each wale. The wale count per inch for corduroy ranges from 1.5 to 21. (Man, 1.5-count wales must look crazy!) Eleven is apparently the standard. (The Levi’s I wore yesterday have 12.) The wide-wale corduroys popular amongst elderly preppies tally something like eight or even six.

Maybach Music Group rapper Wale’s name is pronounced differently, so as to rhyme with the way a person from Boston would pronounce “parlay.”

“Corduroy” is also the name of a famous song by Pearl Jam.

(Who always make for a strong argument in favor of pants in the Great Shorts Debate.)

It is also the name of a bear in a beloved children’s book by Don Freeman. And of one of England’s more popular “acid jazz” bands during that genre’s short, early-’90s heyday.

That song, both surprisingly and not surprisingly, is a cover of a song by Motorhead.

Man, Lemmy is so awesome. More of a leather guy himself, you’d imagine, fabricwise. And given the choice presented by David Sedaris’ advice on dressing one’s family, he’d probably go with denim over corduroy. Which is the only difference, really, when you think about, between him and Stuart Murdoch.

“In just the opening chapters, Thompson gamely tackles nothing less than the roots of religion, the nature of masculinity and femininity, the lasting toll of physical and sexual trauma, our fragile relationship with the environment and, for good measure, why we tell stories to one another.”
 — Yay, the reviews are coming in for Habibi, the monster new book from Craig Thompson. Highly recommended! Can’t read it on your Kindle either, yo!

You should know that it’s subscription-only at the New Yorker, but Janet Malcolm on the photographer Thomas Struth is really right-on: it winds eventually and carefully to the heart of his strangely warm photographs that should be cold. A wee excerpt, in the classic Malcolm style!

Is this the world’s heaviest onion? Sure, why the hell not.

Love “Master of Puppets”? Love “Transformer”? Then you will be really unhappy with the collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica, if this 30-second snippet can be believed, which I personally cannot believe. (via, via)

“The Manhattan meter would have turned 60 on the day of its demise. The cause of death, officials said, was an acute case of obsolescence.”

Oh no. This is not actually how the “tabloid pun headline” is done. I will come over and explain it to your staff for $350 an hour though if you want. (THE STAFF! GET IT?) (via)

Everyone is losing their minds over Netflix’s announcement that they’ll split into two companies: one that does streaming (called “Netflix”) and one that does DVDs, called… Qwikster? (This comes after last week’s Netflix freakout, over changes to pricing which immediately sent its stock down 19%.)

Now everyone is making fun of CEO Reed Hastings on his own corporate blog. But not just there! Everyone is also making fun of them everywhere else for not securing the Qwikster Twitter account before announcing this new company, which is lackadaisically maintained by a madly inarticulate marijuana-loving gamer named Jason Castillo.

I’m about hungry as shyt but my dad doesn’t want to buy me food lik wtfSun May 01 01:59:07 via Twitter for BlackBerry®

Jason Castillo
Qwikster

Good stuff. There is now, of course, a fake Reed Hastings Twitter profile.

@CEOReedHastings
Reed Hastings A customer has just requested a Qwikster DVD mail order catalog…it’s like he read my mind. You’re all getting it now!
Sep 19 via webFavoriteRetweetReply

EVERYONE IS SO UNHAPPY NOW. Also, everyone knows how to run a multimillion dollar company now.

What a remarkable day it was today! All the beauty of autumn without any of its accompanying regrets, because as it’s still “technically” summer you haven’t had time to accrue fall’s failures yet. But make no mistake, summer is over. And with the end of the season, it comes time for us to say farewell to our summer reporters. It seems like only yesterday that we first bid them hello. Time passes so quickly! Let us all applaud them for the excellent work they’ve done. Here are a couple of pieces you’ll want to read again (or perhaps for the first time). Keep an eye out for these names, you’ll be seeing them elsewhere soon enough. Thanks, kids!

Nate Hopper:
• Six Authors Who Were Copywriters First
• A History of the New York Times, Summer Camp and Rich People

Olivia LaVecchia:
• When We Pretend We’re Dead: Eight Actors On Their Death Scenes
• Three Of New York’s Odder Patriotic Relics

Emily Morris:
• Case History Of A Wikipedia Page: Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’
• Peach Honey Chamomile Ice Pops (With Bourbon!)

Myles Tanzer:
• The “Food Porn” Party
• La Toya Jackson’s Book Party

Photo by edenpictures, via Flickr