Gary Weddle, a Washington school teacher, was so rapt by the news following September 11th that he forgot to shave for a few days. OK. Makes sense. It was a trying time.

Somewhere along the way, though, he decided to turn his accidental and understandable lack of grooming into a statement of sorts, vowing that he wouldn’t shave until Osama Bin Laden was either caught or killed.

The result? Well, I don’t know about y’all, but I’d say he now looks an awful lot like Osama Bin Laden.

You’d think someone would share the irony with him, but I’m guessing it’s one of those things where you’d just get a blank stare.

Read on

Want to reduce yourself to an impersonal string of bars and numbers? Hell yeah, you do!

Enter a few simple personal facts about yourself and this site will generate a print-ready barcode that you can take to CSIS, the Army recruiting office, the Department of Homeland Security, your tattoo artist…wherever you want!

Better yet, post it on Rage Against the Machine fansites and swap stats with your privileged yet inexplicably alienated friends!

Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” has become 2006’s “Hey Ya”, and with good reason. Both songs are crazy catchy, danceable, and fun for girls and boys (the idea being that if girls have fun, especially on the dancefloor) then boys will too. The song also made history by being the first cut to hit the top of the UK charts on the basis of digital alone.

Today, Slate has a nice piece on the origins of the song, a few speculations as to why it became so wildly popular, and the number of cover versions the song has already generated.

What we’re witnessing is canon-making in action. Once upon a time, dozens of vocalists would rush to record the latest hit from a new Broadway musical, and many of those tunes have stayed with us, lodged in the American Songbook. Current popular music is aggressively post-Tin Pan Alley: Rhythm has replaced melody as pop’s driving force, and in an age in which many of the best songwriters are rappers, the songs that can be reinterpreted by anyone other than remixers are getting scarcer. (There’s just no way to do a serious cover of, say, Jay-Z’s “Izzo.”) What all the covers of “Crazy” are telling us is that it’s destined to be a modern standard.

Hyperbolic? Maybe a bit. Music-geek navel-gazing? Unquestionably. But worth a read (assuming you care about this sort of thing). And not completely crazy.

Read on

New Yorker editor Bill Buford has been on my must-read list for weeks, ever since a friend recommended Among the Thugs, which recounts his adventures with the soccer hooligans of England. But another of Buford’s books, Heat, has jumped the queue. It’s the story of his time among another group of alcoholic, lusty, passionate, volatile and often unhinged testosterone addicts: namely, Food Network celebrity chef Mario Batali and his kitchen staff.

The premise of the book is simple: Buford, a seasoned journalist and life-long desk jockey, goes to work in Batali’s kitchen, first as a “prep bitch” and, eventually, as a pasta cook, line cook, and so forth. Along the way, he also travels to Italy to meet the 60-something woman who taught Batali to make pasta, and to England to meet one of the few chefs that’s more eccentric than the so-called Molto Mario: Marco Pierre White.

Buford’s sometimes a bit precious, but having worked in kitchens for many years, I can speak to the accuracy of the picture that Buford paints. And with the book weighing in at almost 300 pages, it’s a pretty complex picture. Though it contains no recipes, Heat makes you want to get into the kitchen and get cooking. I can’t think of any higher praise than that.
A great read. Highly recommended. If anyone has Among the Thugs and wants to loan it to me, I’ll trade you for Heat as soon as I’m done.

Nokia announced that in the wake of the success of some of its product rivals like the Motorola Razr and the LG Chocolate, it will start giving its new phone models actual names, as opposed to model numbers. It’s mind-boggling to me that it’s taken people this long to figure out what seems to me to be the most basic of lessons: people won’t buy what they can’t pronounce, let alone remember.

Now if only Motorola, who arguably started the phone naming trend with the Razr, and continued it with the Rokr and Pebl, would buy a vowel and/or a dictionary.

Read on

In an apparent attempt to “avenge” the death of Crocidile Hunter Steve Irwin, some of his more rabid fans have apparently embarked on a campaign to mutilate stingrays, in some cases cutting off their tails.

Wrong on so many levels. Here are 5:

a) Irwin was a conservationist and would never condone such idiotic cruelty.

b) Stingrays, primarily composed of cartilage, aren’t likely to understand concepts like vengeance, so performing mob-style hits on members of their extended “family” seems, er, a little misguided.

c) Dangerous: hey, didn’t a stingray kill Steve Irwin or something?

d) Who has time? Who actually has time to kill stingrays in “tribute” to somebody who — if he wasn’t dead and if he had any idea who you were — would kick the living Christ out of you for performing your tribute in the first place?

e) As Mark, who sent me the link, has already pointed out, the whole is a complete, if parodic, rip-off of The Life Aquatic.

Read on

Sometimes the Onion nails it. This is one of those times.

“From the wreckage and ashes of the World Trade Center, we have created a recess in the ground befitting the American spirit,” said New York Governor George Pataki from a cinderblock-and-plastic-bucket-supported plywood platform near the Hole’s precipice. “This vast chasm, dug at the very spot where the gleaming Twin Towers once rose to the sky, is a symbol of what we can accomplish if we work together.”

It’s funny because they said Pataki.

Read

Complaining that his impending exit was a little tumultuous owing to the icky fact that people started leaving the party and/or calling for his head, Tony Blair weakly offered:

“I would have preferred to do this in my own way”

Well, last time you did things in your own way, it was called the Iraq war. Now you’re gone. So I guess the lesson there is that you should be careful what you ask for.

But he wasn’t done:

“We can’t treat the public as irrelevant bystanders in a subject as important as who is their prime minister,” Blair said. “So we should just bear that in mind in the way we conduct ourselves in the time to come.”

Same lesson applies there, I’d say. Give the people what they want, or they won’t be your people anymore. He rolled the dice of history and came up snakes.

Read on

The buzz around last night’s Toronto International Film Festival North American Premiere of the Borat flick has been justifiably huge, and the show’s been sold out for some time. Unfortunately, the lucky viewers who had tix will have to go again when it’s released in November, because a projection-room snafu stalled the film halfway through. Michael Moore, who used to work as a projectionist, tried to step in and fix the projector. No luck.

Moore used the opportunity to wax political and remind us all that he’s well-versed in Canadian politics:

He asked for a show of hands as to how many people thought the Borat screening would resume. The majority thought it wouldn’t.

“The new Conservative government has destroyed Canadian optimism!” Moore wailed.

I’m sure the audience was irritated — by the projector snafu and/or by Moore — but it must have been an interesting experience.

Adding to the thre-ring circus was the fact that Borat appeared in a horse-drawn cart pulled by peasant women. The horse, of course, rode with Borat in the cart.

Read on

Thanks to Oli and Mark for the Borat buzz.

UPDATE: Someone’s posted a gallery of Borat’s arrival at the premiere.

A laugh-out-loud piece from Wired about blog culture, including a list of the ultimate fantasy blog posts for some of the more popular ones. But the best bit is right here:

Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you’re about as likely to find someone else interested in it.

Read