Here’s a reminder from the people at NBC that news was just as vapid and useless three decades ago as it is now, so don’t feel too bad, I guess.

Are you a man who skipped breakfast today? You may be dead already!

by Michael Paterniti

Michael Paterniti’s new book, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese, is his first since 2001’s Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain. It’s out next week, and is already available wherever you purchase books, be it Powells, Amazon, McNally Jackson, Barnes and Noble or a bookstore near you.

It’s about cheese! “A wild and amazing ride,” says George Saunders. “It made me want to move to Spain,” says Elizabeth Gilbert. (Hee.) And: maniacally fun and discursive, says The Awl. How so? Here is a single footnote from the book. Or, should we say: a single footnote with nested footnotes with nested footnotes? So great.

“The first people we meet are… a pair of pentagram-doodling teenage metalheads with big dreams for their still-unnamed two-man band…. They’re the stars of album opener ‘The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton’ a song that, if not the definitive Mountain Goats song, at least deserves an undisputed mention in the top 5. This isn’t a statement you throw around lightly about a band this prolific, but ‘Denton’ feels like a dizzyingly succinct crash course in everything that makes the Mountain Goats great. In just two-and-a-half minutes, Darnielle pulls off three whiplashing tonal shifts…. It’s brilliantly structured and smartly crafted, but it wouldn’t be half as stirring if it were recorded with more polish. ‘Denton’ is an imperfectly sung ode to all the songs that don’t get sung because of the people who put into the singers’ heads that the only songs worth singing are the perfect ones.”
 — Oh my God, guess what’s more than ten years old.

“Page Morton Black, the cabaret singer whose sprightly rendition of [the Chock Full o’Nuts jingle] in radio and television ads was indelibly engraved on New Yorkers’ brains at midcentury, died on Sunday at her home in the Premium Point enclave of New Rochelle, N.Y. She was 97.”
 — I am NOT from midcentury, although some days it feels as if I am, and I can assure you that even those of us who grew up in this area as late as the nineteen hundred and eighties still have this song stamped indelibly on their brains. I imagine 30 years from now people will be feeling a twinge of nostalgia for the Empire mattress song in the same way this news affects me today.

“Resveratrol has received widespread attention as a possible anti-aging compound and is now widely available as a dietary supplement; much has been made of its role in explaining the cardiovascular health benefits of red wine, and other foods. In a new study, researchers at The University of Copenhagen surprisingly discovered that eating a diet rich in antioxidants may actually counteract many of the health benefits of exercise, including reduced blood pressure and cholesterol.”

For a second there it seemed like Travis would be the next big thing, but that didn’t happen and instead we wound up with Coldplay. I guess in the scheme of things it doesn’t make much of a difference, and in the end the only thing we can be fully certain of is that we are all going to die and the world will continue to turn as if we never made a difference during our time upon it, which we didn’t. Anyway, Travis frontman Fran Healy turns 40 today. Good for him!

“The iPad generation will learn fewer words, experts fear, as using text messages, emails and computers to learn could be stunting children’s vocabulary.”

Things to do are sometimes W E I R D.

★★ The blue matting led through the dunes and into a white eastern glare that hit the face like talcum powder blown by a hair dryer. The storms that were supposed to have broken the heat wave had failed to appear on the drive down, and now were a day overdue. As the sun got higher, it was easier to bear; the glass-blue water left cool air in the zone where it foamed. Sometime in the sunny afternoon, a brief shower splashed on the skylight. By the time the children could be changed into swimwear and convinced to go out, thunder was rumbling and the lifeguards were ambling up onto the matting, the newly emptied beach stretching out behind them. A scalloped rim of bright white separated the hazy slate blue sky from the slate blue of the storms. Finger-sized drops dotted the boardwalk. The toddler, uninterested in omens, did not want to be pried out of the toy store, and howled all the way through the race back to the rental house. Shafts of sun came sideways, shooting antipersonnel heat rays through the rain. Out the window, for a moment, someone saw something sinister hanging down from the churning clouds. The partial-sea-view condo assumed a new set of salient features: creaky frame construction; nothing resembling a basement, only a half-bath under the stairs for an interior room. But the clouds flattened back up where clouds should go, and all that touched down was rain. Under the edge of the front porch roof, one pair of flip-flops sat dry, while the pair beside them held little puddles. In the dark, dull residual lightning flashed, somewhere off beyond the dumpsters.