Since the dawn of time man’s greatest dream has been to create an alcoholic beverage in which one can freely indulge without fear of bodily recriminations the next morning. Are we finally nearing the achievement of society’s greatest goal? To-of course-Britain!

An alcohol substitute that gives the drinker the pleasant feelings of tipsiness without an unpleasant hangover, is being developed by researchers. The team, led by drugs expert Professor David Nutt, has developed the drink using chemicals related to the sedative Valium. It works on the nerves in a similar way to alcohol causing feelings of well-being and relaxation.

Unfortunately, and isn’t this always the case, there’s a but: “But no matter how many drinks the consumer has, they should remain only mildly drunk.” Mildly drunk? Mildly drunk? Fuck that shit! I want to get paralytic. I want to wake up the next morning with a feeling of mounting dread that only increases as I check through the evening’s receipts in an attempt to piece together whatever kind of terrible, viscious unpleasantness I forced friends and complete strangers to endure. And I want to do it all with a COMPLETELY CLEAR HEAD. Screw you, British scientists, for raising false hopes. No wonder everyone gets so stabby over there.

And also in further data-crunching, this analysis of the New Yorker’s fiction section. “Just 10 writers account for 82 (or 23%) of the 358 stories to appear over the last seven years. Just 18 writers account for 124 (or 35%) of the stories.” That is almost okay, since there were 12 Alice Munro stories published in the last six years. (Which serves to assist in getting their lady-boy ratio up to 36.6%.)

OH COME ON: “A new ranking of 200 jobs in the US in 2009 puts “Reporter (Newspaper)” as #184…. Newspaper reporter came in between Seamen (#183) and Stevedore (#185). For those unaware, a stevedor (according to a google) is someone who loads and unloads ships.”

Local gay cat (pictured, above) somehow loses gay blog gay animal gay holiday gay outfit contest. (NB That is not our Cat, it is merely a local cat heretofore unknown to us but decidedly a highly enjoyable one.)

“It’s very odd to witness a part of the political discourse where one side understands that its actual views are so completely socially unacceptable that they can’t be expressed, and must be replaced with nonsense terms.”
-Jonathan Chait is referring to the religious right’s opposition to the appointment of Amanda Simpson, a transgender woman, to the Department of Commerce, but he really could be talking about any number of things.

Californian engineering firm Samson Motorworks is developing a motorcycle that will transform into a mini two-seater airplane: “The company is building a prototype of its Switchblade Multi Mode Vehicle, or flying motorcycle, and hopes to sell a $60,000 do-it-yourself kit as early as 2011. (Engine and avionics are sold separately, for about $25,000 total).” Excuse me? A DO-IT-YOURSELF-KIT?! To build a motorcycle that will rocket into the air? Like a jetski that flies in the sky, you say. That people will assemble at home. How many people will kill themselves with this? It’s like, Well, I’m pretty sure I followed those directions right. That video they included seemed pretty self-explanatory. Let’s go! Speaking of video: how about a soundtrack on the one above, Motorworks? I mean, entice me to my death. How sweet would that clip be set to a little Freedom Hawk?

“I think the real and most fundamental problem Jews have with Palin is not her gleeful ignorance, but her willful divisiveness. More than any politician in memory, Palin seems to divide her fellow-Americans into first class and second class citizens, real Americans and not-so-real Americans. To do her justice, she has never said anything to suggest that Jews as Jews fall into the second, less-real, class. But Jews do tend to have an intuition that when this sort of line-drawing is done, we are likely to find ourselves on the wrong side.”
-David Frum offers a theory on why Jews might not be favorably disposed to Sarah Palin.

“Homing pigeons can famously find their way home over long distances, and there have been many reported instances of lost cats turning up at their owners’ houses. But one dachshund in Bredstedt, a small town in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, showed herself to be even smarter than those animal navigators. She turned herself in at the local lost-and-found office.”

Knifecrime Island is now Frosty Prison Island, where none can leave their homes for fear of being glassed in the face and left in a snowdrift. To survive, “‘a large number’ of elderly customers are snapping up hardbacks as cheap fuel for their fires and stoves.” Yes. ENGLAND GRIPPED BY WIDE-SPREAD BOOK-BURNING FOR SURVIVAL. A good old-fashioned home book-burning party, how deluxe. The Guardian, somewhat offended, suggests alternatives, such as the burning of cow dung. Those liberals just want England’s fine pensioners to face our fine American death panels.

One thing I very much enjoyed over my Christmas vacation was the New Yorker profile of Vampire Weekend. It was pretty great! It is not online, because why would you put a piece on a band that is wildly popular amongst the youngs up on the Internet? (I KNOW, you have your reasons, New Yorker, I’m sorry, I will shut up.) But here is a “fair use” (??) excerpt of one of the best parts of the piece. In it, the members of Vampire Weekend-who are being followed by, in addition to the New Yorker reporter, a documentary camera crew-go to visit and interview Tom DeLonge from Blink 182, who greets them with his own documentary camera crew. Amazing! This piece is so highly enjoyable, from beginning to end. And yet I will complain that it suffers a bit from between .75 to 1.25 of the two big afflictions of magazine essaying.

First? Some amazingness:

Then [DeLonge] screened a trailer for a movie that his new band, Angels & Airwaves had produced, called “Love” — images of an astronaut in a space station over swelling music.

Batmanglij started giggling, and DeLonge turned and looked at him.

“Uh, I just thought of something fun that we could do with our band,” he said.

“That’s rad,” DeLonge said evenly. “Cool.”

The Vampire Weekend members got up to leave. DeLonge shook their hands and said, “Consider this stuff.” Then he asked, “Why are you guys so mellow?”

Basically I am all “asd;fjklasdlf;jadsf” over this.

So these two afflictions!

• You are all familiar with the Historical Pullback. This is the often-tedious thing where, when you are documenting a modern life, suddenly there is a section that begins, “In 1680, a man first affixed a stamp to an envelope. Meanwhile, in Denmark….” And this is sometimes fascinating and most often irrelevant.

Remember in Rebecca Mead’s excellent College Humor profile, when, after discussing REVENUE MODELS of the website’s attendant business arms, she suddenly comes out with this:

Students have been prone to bawdy humor since at least the Middle Ages-witness Chaucer’s “The Milleres Tale”-and the themes of American college humor have proved remarkably resilient over time. An editor of a book published in 1950 entitled “A Treasury of College Humor” remarked that “although the atomic bomb, and other timely trivia, may momentarily intrude, broad and universal themes-the fate of the football team, the perusal of sex, and the imbibing of alcoholic beverages-remain predominant.”

That goes on for a while-”College humor suffered a decline in currency in the nineteen-sixties and the first half of the nineteen-seventies”-until we return to our young heroes.

This is all interesting but it is irrelevant to the piece in particular because the young fellas of College Humor are, by and large, completely uninterested in the history of humor in colleges. Should it be relevant to them? Maybe! Do they stay up at night thinking about Chaucer? Oh, how I doubt it. (What does Chaucer know about CPMs, hmm?) My point is that having information-dumps in a profile that is totally unrelated, in any real fashion, to the lives of its subjects is wrong-thinking. That it’s relevant to the reader-maybe-is secondary.

• You are also definitely familiar with The Problem, which is a thing that happens earlier in this piece.

The Problem is what gets pitched in a meeting or in an email, and sometimes accidentally ends up in a piece The Problem is, in this case, that Some People Say Vampire Weekend Burned Too Fast, or maybe They Sold Out, or There Was Some Controversy From Some Quarters Over Whether They Were Ripping Off African Music, or Can They Have Sophomore Success In This Critical, Critical World, or whatever people were arguing on their blogs.

You know what? I don’t want my magazine profiles to “teach the controversy!” I don’t really care what some people have asserted. It’s fine if you have to get some hook to get the editors to cover something that is maybe outside their comfort zone. Leave it there!

There is so much exquisite, revelatory live action in this piece that The Problem section-which, to its credit, is fairly brief-seems extra-deadening. But once you skim past it-which is all you can do, as a reader-the rest is heaven.