30 eHow Articles in Ascending Order of Usefulness
by Ned Frey
30. How to Laugh Like Whoopi Goldberg
28. How to Fart With Your Armpit
26. How to Dye Hair With Kool-aid
24. How to Light Farts on Fire
23. How to Build a Catapult With Popsicle Sticks
21. How to Dance the Cotton-Eyed Joe
19. How to Remove a Tick on the Scrotum
16. How to Blow Your Nose in Public
15. How to Defecate Outdoors When Camping
11. How to Train Your Cat to Use a Toilet
10. How to Laugh at Yourself So the World Laughs With You
9. How to Urinate Outside Discreetly
8. How to Appear Intelligent Even When You’re Not
4. How to Make Yourself Get Out of Bed in the Morning
Ned Frey (a k a MisterHippity) knows how to make a list.
Van Halen Seeing How Much Of An Album Can Be Recorded In The Short Blips Of Time They Can Bear To...
Van Halen Seeing How Much Of An Album Can Be Recorded In The Short Blips Of Time They Can Bear To Spend In A Room With David Lee Roth
“Most recently, the band toured with founding brothers, Eddie and Alex Van Halen, its original lead singer, David Lee Roth, and Eddie’s son, Wolfgang, playing bass. The group is currently in the studio recording an album with Roth that is due for release in 2011.”
-I saw them play in Atlantic City three years ago and it was great fun. (The pre-recorded keyboard part for “Jump” played at the correct pitch that night.) But the world needs a new album from the original Van Halen line-up like David Lee needed those white fur après-ski boots 30 years ago.
Knifecrime Island Puncturists Now Working Family Celebrations
“Knife crime has to be discouraged, and the only way it can be discouraged is if people know if they carry knives, and are caught carrying knives in a public place, they will be sentenced to a term of imprisonment. For an unknown reason you took the knife used for cutting the christening cake and hid it in your sock. Having been set upon by others you produced the knife and inflicted extremely serious injuries on your cousin. You weren’t intending to inflict those injuries on your cousin, but you were intending to inflict injuries on those you saw as attacking you.”
-Judge Guy Whitburn sentences Karl Thompson of South Tyneside, England, to two years for inadvertently wounding his cousin with a knife which he-well, it’s all there in the quote. The stabbery in Britain is really just something else. One can only imagine what happens after a bris.
A PowerPoint Presentation About Airport Hotels
by Thomas Blair
After completing an introductory English as a First Language class this spring, “Thomas Blair” decided to become a famous writer. Alas, he discovered that all those jobs are taken. As a stop-gap, he has decided to direct a non-polemical feature-length documentary film about doping in the sport of professional bridge. He’s that close to booking the Buffet interview. You can fall in love with Mr. Blair here.
Hungry America Gets Angry, Famous America Gets Silly
We live in two Americas. In the first America, movie stars Michael Cera and Jason Schwartzman can take up a good two minutes of local news time to “do the weather.” In the other America, an irate woman can assault a fast food employee for refusing to serve her chicken nuggets.
Either way, they’re all on TV. So maybe there’s just one America after all.
ProPublica: The Future of Serious News is Clearly Patronage
“I won’t be offering somebody 50 grand or 100 grand more than they’re making to jump ship, nor will I ask them to take a pay cut” is what Paul Steiger told the New York Times in 2007, when he launched the nonprofit investigative news outfit ProPublica with the $10-million a year backing of the Sandlers, then recently extremely rich off the sale of their mortgage-broking outfit to Wachovia. That may be so! A look through ProPublica’s 2009 taxes has at least four reporters making around $200,000 last year. For 2009, the organization’s revenue after expenses was a negative $2,038,033. (I guess they had donations from 2008 to spend through?) It seems to me that some efficiencies could be introduced into this system, not that it matters to the funders. (Though, you know, I certainly won’t be donating to them any time soon! I don’t give money to nonprofits at which the executive director makes more than half a million dollars.) Just for scale: the entire cost for the New York Times Company for three months is basically $500 million, and they have to like, print and distribute a newspaper, among other things. (via)
Old Men Using Bikes To Snag Young Chicks
“With a bike, it’s all about fitness, strength and stamina. But in some ways a top of the range bicycle says many of the same things about you as a sports car — they both have a rugged, dangerous element to them.”
-Psychologist Cliff Arnall explains the logic behind the idea that bicycles are the new Ferraris when it comes to signaling midlife crises in middle-aged men. I am not exactly sure why riding around on something that squashes your nuts flat like a penny on a railroad track will somehow increase your attractiveness to the opposite sex, but then again I hate bicycles and the people who ride them, so maybe I’m not the best person to judge.
Erykah Badu And Rick Ross, "Window Seat" Remix And "Turn Me Away (Get Munny)"
Here’s the good-looking cliffhanger of a new video Erykah Badu made with Rick Ross, who everyone for some reason loves right now. I don’t much. “BMF” is great. Really great. But like Ross’s first big hit, “Hustlin’” from 2005, it’s mostly the beat. Made by rising Virginian producer Lex Lugar, it’s big and open in a way that suits the heavyset rapper’s blustery style. But most everything else I’ve heard leaves me pretty cold.
While people, some of whose opinions I very much respect, gush over the “lush,” “magisterial” soundscapes of the “Maybach Music” “series, those backdrops never sound right for his raps. Badu sounds okay on that stuff, Barry White would sound better. Ross sounds just sounds off-pace and swallowed up to me, and-I really don’t know what it is that people are hearing-his lyrics are really never anything to write home about. He often doesn’t rhyme and he usually gives the impression that he thinks what he’s saying is extremely momentous-and it’s not. When he calls himself “Biggie Smalls in the flesh” on the oddly interesting, but still mostly clumsy “Tears of Joy,” you wish Lloyd Bentsen was standing at a podium next to him.
Women Of Advancing Years Dominate Fashion Mag Covers
“They’re cool, fashionable, interesting, compelling — they have something to say. I love that they’ve grown into their style. One of the things about getting older is you do grow into your sense of self. You don’t look victim-y anymore.”
-Laura Brown, projects/features director at Harper’s Bazaar, explains why the covers of all the September issues of fashion magazines are filled with old ladies.
Plagiarism is Everyone's Business and Business is Good
“The concept of plagiarism, however, is learned in more specialized contexts of practice entered into only by a few; it’s hard to get from the notion that you shouldn’t appropriate your neighbor’s car to the notion that you should not repeat his words without citing him.”
–Stanley Fish tries to make the argument that plagiarism is an “insider’s issue” for academics and specialists. Stanley Fish is totally missing the fact that there’s been a worldwide exponential explosion in the number of authors and publishers in the last 15 years. Now word and idea theft is everyone’s business-and it’s big business, from social media to classrooms to gaming to content farms.