Comment dit-on "bandwagon?"

My French textbook ("new for 2008") has blogs in it. So, chapters 1-4 we get "le blog de Léa," and 5-8 "le blog de Hassan" and so on, giving us an inside view into the exciting lives of young French people.

This is, of course, bullshit. For one thing, the blogs don't contain nearly enough spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes. For another, they're even more inane than most real blogs. One was about how Léa needs a new dress, and another was about how she needs to move out of her parents' apartment and find a place of her own.

I realize that the contrived nature of these is due to their being a pedagogical tool, and that reading an actual French blog would tear my brain up and melt my face at this point, but the blatantly faddish nature of les blogs et les blogeurs* irritates me every time I have to read them.

*they even have a fake Mac interface, so that they're more trendy. Ack, pbbbt.

I'll see what I can do

Avid readers of this blog know about my strange fixation on Pulp's "Common People." and my love of science fiction. Well, friends...enjoy.


(via io9)

Recursive Memes, pt. 2

So, after I found the original through stumbleupon, and then made a response poster, I revisited the site and found this justification from the author. Money quotes have been bolded by me.

I don't need to hear another word about the North Korea picture being inaccurate. I know the picture is from Vietnam, and I know it won a Pulitzer Prize, and I know it's one of the most famous pictures in the world. That's why it instantly popped into my head when I wanted a picture of North Korea acting like a bully . . . I couldn't very well settle for a picture of Kim Jong-il just standing around looking angry . . . it had to be one-on-one bullying, and the famous pic snapped by Eddie Adams was the first that came to mind. So please, enough with the North Korea image.
I am not a racist. I got a lot of those comments, which surprised me, because not one of the posters is about race. [...]As for the Vietnamese picture working for North Korea, well, it's close enough, isn't it? I needed a picture that at least looked like it was from East Asia. Vietnam was close enough.

So, yeah, it's a stupid demotivator humor site, but still. "Close enough?" A split-screen of a starving kid and Kim Jong Il in those stupid glasses wouldn't have worked? You had to use one of the best known photos of the Vietnam war, and then complain about getting caught? That's a wee bit dickish.

Commercials are Bunk #4

So, I'm up late watching Law & Order and fixing a review of a local play, and this commercial comes on talking about "tender chicken marinated in the Tuscan style, served on a bed of long-grain rice with fresh greens." I think "great, another goddamn pretentious Healthy Choice commercial," and then the voice over continues "that's what's in restaurant-inspired Fancy Feast."

Fancy Feast. Fucking cat food.

Let that sink in for a second. Cat food. There are bare shelves on food banks around the country, the price of food is rising terribly, package sizes are shrinking at the same time, and there are people just off our coast in Haiti eating mud to have something in their stomachs.

Cat food. There are cats in this country - these are animals with brains the size of walnuts and an outsized sense of entitlement - eating better than, at a guess, 80-90% of the world's population. The really sad thing about this is that cats were originally domesticated to prevent food shortages.

Now, most food commercials annoy me. It rankles me a bit when frozen convenience food tries to go all foodie on me. The idea that I can steam pasta fresh in my microwave sounds, well, like dumb.

But fucking cat food with "chicken marinated in the Tuscan style?" That's pure, unmitigated bullshit.

There was an earthquake

Coco Wang did comics based on stories she heard and saw about them. They're worth reading.