There is nothing, really, as enjoyable as a silly story about silly people and their silly lives. Such monkeys! Why are we all so funny? (Spoiler: it’s because late-stage capitalism renders us with too little to worry about.) Thank the Lord for this very silly story in Vanity Fair about the extremely silly Sally Quinn. God bless us every one! Here are two sentences that made me roll about on the floor in delight.

1. “After the firestorm, she entered the concrete meditation labyrinth her husband had built for her on their country estate in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, to think.”

2. “After an astrologer told Sally that [her son] Quinn would benefit from yoga, she had lunch with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who recommended her own teacher, Pary, whose students included David Gregory and Rahm Emanuel.”

Oh, the whole thing is a delight. I mean that. It’ll make you want to join the Peace Corps or take up arms on behalf of something radical or, more likely, to go off and spend some poor person’s day’s-worth-of-wages on gourmet small-batch ice cream. Who cares? What does it matter?

The latest attempt to at least minimize the amount of oil flooding into the Gulf of Mexico has been halted because a saw got stuck in a pipe on a well. The mission now is to retrieve the saw. Plan B? Get another saw. And that’s what we know right now.

There they go. Sailing out of our lives the same way they just sailed in. Sniff. (Photo by.)

This is very true, from one David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker: “One of the great Web orthodoxies was that no one would read anything of any length online. Bullshit.” Yes! It’s one of the most pleasing and surprising facts of the Internet! Anyone who says that long-form writing doesn’t perform well online is working for some MSN celeb picture site or just hates words.

If director James Cameron, who “was among a group of experts called in to meet with officials at the Environmental Protection Agency to help come up with ideas to deal with the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico,” actually does provide a solution to the problem, well, good lord, can you imagine the swelling of his already massive ego? I don’t know if the world is ready to confront something that gigantic. I mean, the thing is going to be so big that we’re gonna need to call in Jerry Bruckheimer to consult on how to blow it up.

“Even if Israel seizes 100 more ships on their way to Gaza, even if Israel sends in troops to occupy the Gaza Strip 100 more times, no matter how often Israel deploys its military, police and covert power, force cannot solve the problem that we are not alone in this land, and the Palestinians are not alone in this land. We are not alone in Jerusalem and the Palestinians are not alone in Jerusalem. Until Israelis and Palestinians recognize the logical consequences of this simple fact, we will all live in a permanent state of siege-Gaza under an Israeli siege, Israel under an international and Arab siege.”
–Israeli novelist Amos Oz has an excellent op-ed in today’s Times.

A couple years ago Oz wrote a beautiful and creepy and sad short story called “Waiting.” It’s here, if you’re in the mood for a short story.

Alabama held primary elections yesterday! Lets see how some of our pals did: In the race for Agriculture Commissioner, angry man with horse and rifle Dale Peterson failed to win the Republican nomination, running a weak third with 27%.

Congressional candidate Les Phillip-whose main qualification for the office appeared to be the promise that, as a black guy, he could say terrible things about President Obama without fear of being called racist-also came third in his contest. (This was an interesting primary: Incumbent Rep. Parker Griffith, the freshman who switched to the Republican party back in December, was unable to win over the voters from the party he jumped to.)

And businessman Tim James, scourge of child molesters and non-English speakers alike? The idea of giving him the Republican nomination for governor did not exactly make sense to the majority of voters: He and a Tuscaloosa physician will await the results of a recount to see who faces Bradley Byrne in a runoff for the nod. (Roy Moore, the former Chief Justice who was relieved of that post after refusing to follow a federal order to remove a monument to the Ten Commandments from the state courthouse, placed fourth.)

There were no interesting clips on the Democratic side, but in case you’re scoring at home, State Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks beat Rep. Artur Davis for the gubernatorial nomination, crushing Davis’ dream of becoming the first African American to win that spot. “This is not exactly the speech I’d planned to give tonight,” Davis said during his concession. Davis, who hoped to win the nomination by running against pretty much everything Barack Obama proposed, lost to Sparks by about 62–38%.

I have to tell you, this is the most closely I’ve followed Alabama politics since, well, ever. Let’s hope the general election provides just as many crazy-ass viral videos as the primaries did. It might be the only chance to get Americans interested in civics that we have left.

Just kidding! Here’s the real video with Larry King.

Heh.

Dear Todd and Chris,

Sorry for spilling grain punch all over the box of “Calvin and Hobbes” T-shirts you were hoping to sell.

It was the first semester of our freshman year of college, on the second floor of Marshall Dormitory, in the grim, cinder-block room you two shared with a guy named Scott. I lived down the hall, in a similar room, with my roommates Sean and Jeremy.

We’d only known each other for a month or so. We’d only known anybody we knew there for a month or so. And probably because we were all trying too hard to make people like us, you guys decided to invest some money in printing up a line of the copyright-infringing, familiar-comic-strip-characters-acting-naughty T-shirts that were so popular on college campuses at the time. (Are they still so popular? Probably.) You recruited another guy in our dorm, Jeff, a talented sketch artist, to draw a facsimile of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes drinking alcohol. It was a business venture. You weren’t trying to break any new ground.

What should the shirts say, though? What clever slogan to represent our college and its personality? Something our fellow students would see and not be able to live without. Something to make people say, “Yes! Yes! I need that!” We all pitched in with ideas. I forget who came up with the one you chose, but I prefer to think that it was not me.

“Connecticut College,” the shirts were to say on the front, with a picture of Calvin and Hobbes laughing with cans of beer in their hands. Under the picture were the words, “When it’s night out…” Then on the back of the shirt, the pair would be depicted lying prone, with X-marks in their eyes, under the punch line: “We BLACK out!!!”

You brought the design to a silk-screener at the Crystal Mall and put in an order for 200 shirts for $400. You planned to sell them for $10 each.

A couple weeks later, the shipment arrived in a cardboard box the size of a large television set. Many of us in the dorm bought one the very first day. We were being friendly, supporting you in your endeavor. I wish I could say the purchase was as far as my support went, but I actually wore the shirt a few times. Once on a day when my parents and eleven-year-old sister had come to visit. My father was sick with cancer at the time, and remembering the tired, defeated sound of his voice when he asked me why I would ever wear something like that in public, well, this apology isn’t just to you.

Credit the student body’s collective taste: the T-shirts did not sell like hotcakes. You guys unloaded maybe twenty more in the following days, but after that the mostly-full box of product sat in your room next to Todd’s bunk.

Also living in our dorm that year were a group of sophomores we looked up to and hoped to befriend. From time to time they would mix up a punch made with Kool-Aid and grain alcohol in an orange Gatorade cooler and serve it, for some reason, out of a plastic decoy duck someone had brought to school. They did this in the hallway this night, and we joined them, and I drank too much. (Which, really, when drinking grain-alcohol punch out of a plastic duck, is the point, right?) One of the sophomore guys, Carter, drank too much, too. And at some point, unluckily for you, the party migrated from the hallway into your room. And probably because we were having trouble standing, Carter and I found ourselves sitting on the big cardboard box, cackling like the type of idiots who would wear t-shirts that say, “When it’s night out, we black out.” Then we started pouring full cups of the punch over each other’s heads. The alcohol stung my eyes. I don’t remember a lot more. Because, you know, it was night out…

The next day, it was discovered that the punch had dripped through the box and soaked through the t-shirts, dying some solid, leaving even the least affected with a few small splotches of pink. All pretty much unsellable.

You guys were unhappy. But, largely because of Carter’s elder status, your loss was chalked up to collateral party damage. The shirts were your responsibility, you should have moved them, or spread a tarp over them or something, before allowing such obviously inebriated fun-loving innocents into your room. You’d made most of your money back already, anyway. We’d mostly cost you potential profits.

In hindsight, the ruination of those godawful t-shirts was a good thing for everybody. A good thing for the world. The less chance another father would have to see his son wearing one, the better. But still, businesswise, I probably owe you some money.

Maybe, just maybe, the just-announced investigation by the US Attorney General into the companies involved with the Gulf Oil Disaster will actually reveal something illegal and they can be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law (this may at some point come to involve a sudden reversal of my strong opposition to the death penalty), despite any possibly changing liability caps. Or maybe not! The best part is that, despite the oily consequences, it’s perfectly likely that everything was perfectly legal. Still, I’m looking forward to how Anne Womack-Kolton explains about how BP will be fully cooperating. (Or, you know, maybe she’ll get confused from the Cheney years and start rambling about how BP has executive privilege.) In other news, the Justice Department “does not have policies or plans for responding to a W.M.D. incident,” says… our government. So PLEASE don’t attack us with any of them there those WMDs right now, thank you.