No two farts smell the same, says the man with the worst job in the world. [Via]

When Matt Bai, a Times reporter and Yankees fan in his early 40s with two children, wanted to buy a new house, the mortgage brokers laughed at him! But he had perfect credit, and had only bought his last home six years ago! (It was a “center-hall colonial on a corner lot three blocks from the subway and American University.”) Then he found out that his nanny had a very bad mortgage on her house, the payments of which were 75% of her income. And so he bought a new house, a “spacious, if deteriorated split-level,” even though the counter tops were ugly, with a nice, 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage. And then he wrote about all of this at work.

This Russian anti-smoking billboard (which apparently reads “Smoking in child’s presence is a much bigger torture for him. You don’t care?”) is kind of graphic, I guess, but it’s still better than our own PSAs. I mean, it sucks for the baby and all, but I’d much rather deal with that than think about losing my fingers or having a giant hole in my throat. Also, shouldn’t that baby be on its back? You don’t want it to get SIDS.

“In addition to these legal issues, one group will be hit especially hard — our senior citizens. Always the wisest folks, seniors have been against this bill from the beginning. And for good reason. Obamacare cuts a half-trillion dollars in health care for seniors to lay the foundation for socialized medicine.”
-Actually, I should have clicked “close tab” when I read the words “an Ideas piece by by Rep. Michele Bachmann, Rep. Steve King,” but I guess I’m a glutton for punishment. This was far enough, though.

A study of 224 publications that were launched between 1986 and 2006 and honored as a best new publication by the Library Journal found that: “34 percent of these newly launched ‘best’ magazines failed within the first five years, with 13 failing within their first year alone. And while another 37 percent of these magazines are still being published, Black notes that this number is skewed because it includes some launched as recently as 2006.” (Other studies show a “90 percent overall failure rate of magazines launched between 1985 and 2002.”) But now? Or at least, between 1994 to 2003? 54 percent failed in the first five years. The good news is that they don’t really make new magazines anymore, I think.

As part of their continuing campaign to prove to the world that Sarah Palin is going bald, the folks at Wonkette point to this photo. In the interest of fairness, we should note that it might not be a wig at all. It could just be a huge mushroom cloud rising above the mountains behind her.

“Bands such as the Cockney Rejects, the Angelic Upstarts — Marxists from South Shields managed by a man [journalist/manager Garry] Bushell colourfully describes as ‘a psychopath — his house had bars over all the windows because people had thrown firebombs through it’ — Red Alert, Peter and the Test Tube Babies. It briefly stormed the charts. The Angelic Upstarts followed the Cockney Rejects onto Top of the Pops, while Splodgenessabounds made the Top 10 with the deathless Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps Please. But today, if the general public have heard of it at all, they tend to agree with the assessment once offered by journalist and broadcaster Stuart Maconie: ‘Punk’s stunted idiot half-brother, musically primitive and politically unsavoury, with its close links to far-right groups.’ It is, asserts [English nationalist/television critic who once tried to get a comedian banned from live broadcasts because he made a joke about fisting the Chancellor of the Exchequer Garry] Bushell, ‘without a doubt, the most misunderstood genre in history’.”
-There’s a delightful history of the Oi! genre in today’s Guardian which I think you’ll rather enjoy.

“There was a donkey painted like a zebra, hitched to a cart full of sombreros, a Tijuana photo opportunity. But no smiling tourists stepped into the picture frame.” Ha ha. Wait, really? 18,000 murders in three years and now Tijuana is empty? But… but… but the U.S. had 17,000 murders in 2006 alone! The murder rate per population in Mexico isn’t even double ours. But. WHY was the donkey painted like a zebra though??? I don’t get it.

“A busy day consists of two ‘live’ hedcuts, drawings that are due to run in the next day’s paper….. Each intricate portrait can take up to five hours to complete, with countless little dots. But in an emergency, artists can produce one in as little as two hours, with more lines and fewer specks….

‘Because we are essentially tracing the photograph, a lot of people think it’s not a big deal,’ says [Hai] Knafo. ‘But it is.’

‘We have our little tricks,’ says Noli Novak, who has been with the Journal since 1987. ‘A portrait with less dots will take less time.’

‘People at the Journal don’t even know there’s a whole department doing this,’ says Novak.”
-Never before have I read a piece about working commercial artists that, instead of making me either envious or awed, makes me instead suspect of their entire line of work! And yet here we are.

“In the early days of the administration, aides said, Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton treated each other gingerly, using Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. as an informal go-between. ‘Hillary would say to me, ‘How do you think I should present this to the president?’ Mr. Biden recalled in an interview. ‘And I’d say, Whoa, just present it to him. And Barack would say, ‘Does she know what a good job I think she’s doing?’ I’d say, Just tell her.’”
-The big long piece about the relationship between President Obama and Hilary Clinton that Mark Landler and Helene Cooper wrote in today’s Times is a heartening, even heart-warming read. But journalists should stop deleting the word “man” from the beginning, middle and end of every sentence Joe Biden says. Just transcribe the guy verbatim.