The Internet really is getting stupider. The gals over at Racked had to explain to their outraged commenters that their 5-year-old fashion week correspondent was kind of a parody of the very real weird teen blogger fashion world mania. Their commenters actually went a little nuts: “Can we please have bloggers and editorials by grown ups, real editors, with actual jobs, and, gasp, life experience. Maybe women and men? Over 20 years old? PLEASE?” AND! “I guess your blog cant pay enough to hire an adult writer to blog abt fashion week. I wont be visiting your site again.” At least the 5-year-old was using apostrophes?

Awl pal Rod Townsend has started a website for homosexuals. He’s staking out the “postfabulous” space, which I’m pretty sure I’m not in (I’m either pre-fabulous or so post-fabulous I can’t remember fabulous?), but surely a rich vein. Anyway, go say hi.

“As the Olympic cauldron is lit, the unique magic of the Olympic Games will be released upon us. Magic so rare that it cannot be controlled by borders. The kind of magic that invades the human heart touching people of all cultures and beliefs. Magic that calls for the best that human beings have to offer. Magic that causes the athletes of the world to soar-and the rest of us to dream.”
-Slate’s Olympics Sap-O-Meter is back! Now you have no excuse for actually watching the Olympics!

I have no idea how solid this is or what it will even entail, but I’m gonna put myself down on the list as “very favorable” anyway: “Andy Serkis, famous for pioneering motion-capture performance in The Lord Of The Rings, King Kong and the upcoming Tintin films, has revealed he will collaborate with musician Nick Cave on a motion-capture movie of The Threepenny Opera.” If you’re scoring at home, I’m also VERY EXCITED for Serkis’ turn as Ian Dury. [Via]

The LA Times is going to town on the Xalisco (north of Puerto Vallarta!) heroin dealers, in their series on the Evil Scary Super-Black-Tar Heroin, delivering an award to these dealers for Excellent Drug Business Practices. (This is part of the paper’s very dramatic MEXICO DRUG WAR extravaganza.) Our hardworking Mexican friends take phone orders; deliver by car; they are not particularly prone to violence or gun-toting; they take customer satisfaction surveys; they sell in smaller amounts; they have cut consumer prices in half; and their heroin is just better. Sounds awesome!

What does this all mean? Your mileage may vary, but it means they are creating heroin users, according to the LA Times. “Competition among the networks has reduced prices, further spreading heroin addiction.” Also: their business practices are described as “often creating demand for heroin where there was little or none.”

Does that make sense? Do people who don’t want to do heroin start doing it because it is a good bargain?

I assume that is the same sort of reasoning in which sex education makes teenagers into sluts and a lack of non-firebombed abortion clinics makes everyone kill their babies.

Meanwhile, the facts are that where these black tar heroin dealers establish themselves, the numbers of people entering drug treatment and people overdosing rise dramatically. Thing is, only one of those things is a bad thing.

“I don’t owe him shit. He really screwed my life up, is how I look at it.”
-Samuel Joseph “Joe The Plumber” Wurzelbacher is not kindly disposed to John McCain. In fact, his enmity toward the Arizona senator is so strong that he is no longer a supporter of Sarah Palin’s, due to the fact that she supports McCain’s re-election. And, as regards President Obama: “I think his ideology is un-American, but he’s one of the more honest politicians. At least he told us what he wanted to do.” Now you know!

“Anyone caught listening to Brazilian funk-a pounding beat often with sexual lyrics that grew out of Rio de Janeiro’s slums-or rap during the Carnival period would have to turn it off or face arrest and up to six months in prison.”
–Mayor Jose Neto of Sao Lourenco, a city in southeastern Brazil, has banned certain kinds of music during his country’s world-famous party season. Sure, baile funk can get pretty crazy-what with the “corridors of death” and all-but everybody knows where this kind of thing leads: a remake of Footloose, scheduled to hit theaters next year.

“In weather like this it’s impossible to show love to nature, and I know the argument that says it’s lack of love for nature that’s got us into this mess. Without going so far as climate change denial, I don’t hold with quid pro quo explanations of natural events. This blizzard is an act of motiveless malignancy and there’s an end of it.”
I’m a big fan of Howard Jacobson’s, so it’s not surprising that I enjoyed his column about the blizzard in Washington. You might too! In other weather-related postable material, this time-lapse video of The Great Snow-Ploughing Of ’10, as seen from Brooklyn, is very cool.

“It’s impossible that you have a million subscribers paying 50 bucks a year and it can’t work,” said Dave Eggers last Thursday, about the death of Gourmet, over at the Berkeley School of Journalism. Yes, that is actually impossible! And not so great that he keeps opining about the death of publishing with a complete lack of understanding how publishing works. Each issue of Gourmet actually brought in revenue of $1.18. A one-year subscription could be had at $15. The $50 a year figure is nonsense. And yet! He’s right at heart, if not in fact. Gourmet made (and obviously spent!) a lot of money-they made $12 million in the third quarter of 2009, and made $14 million in the last three months of existence. But the way they made money was from a thing called advertising. Back in both 2006 and 2007, the magazine’s fourth quarter income was around $45 million-also known as “boat loads of cash.” But even in a bad ad market-could you or me or Dave Eggers put out Gourmet with revenue of “just” $52 million a year? Um, YES. And how! But then we are not a silly, misguided, over-spending magazine company. (Or are we.)

Finally, something worthwhile from the Olympics! There’s a little too much Lester Holt here for my taste, but otherwise it is pure bear porn. If you like bears (you do) you will enjoy this very very much. I am also going to toss in a bonus: this all-time classic of the bear rub video genre.

[Extremely tangentially related.]