Bono Becomes Knight of the British Empire – New York Times
Carries this precious quip from rock star/diplomat/public scold/fashion plate/bon vivant Bono
“You have permission to call me anything you want — except sir, all right? Lord of lords, your demigodness, that’ll do,” he told reporters afterward.
>Imagine this head bald<
“A lot of people want to see it shaved,” says Trump of hair
Irrelevance is a theme in FortuneLand of late. Pawn sees no point in even bothering to document the latest imbroglios and revelations coming out of the Bush administration, so his attention has drifted to irrelevant celebrities. In his latest act of radical irrelevance, Donald Trump has made a bet with another vastly irrelevant chap, World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon. Whomever loses must lose their locks as well.
Couldn’t happen to two less relevant guys, or two worse heads of hair.
Trump has 50 percent chance of losing hair – CNN.com
Epilog: Trump won McMahon lost
Here’s a couple of photos from FortuneLand, to show you, the able reader, just how strange real life can be.
See what happened here? Some fool prefers your average conifer to the locally prevalent deciduous trees, so they denuded a friendly pine and strung its balls (as it were) from this lowly bush. So they have unwittingly created a kind of hybrid tree, a chimera if you will. How insanely modern.
Here we see what happens when elitism goes horribly awry. These people have obviously spent a lot of money to inhabit this expensive lakeside home, and to purchase formidable statuary, and even more to have these very fashionable leather frocks custom made for that statuary. See how nicely they fit? Multiple fittings cost money too, you know. Let’s applaud this show of taste on Milwaukee’s East Side.
John McCain has ventured into the Bermuda Triangle of Irrelevance, the Middle East, in an experiment in extreme irrelevancy. He headed out to a Baghdad street market accompanied by 147 soldiers, armored Humvees and helicopter gunships and then scolded the media for not reporting that you can go for a stroll in the newly safe Baghdad. The press met his report with laughter.
John McCain called out by CNN reporter Michael Ware – People
Trying desperately to bring relevance to the region, Nancy Pelosi went to Israel yesterday, where she met with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and got from him an offer for negotiations to take with her to her next stop, Syria, where she is to meet with President Bashar Assad. The Bush administration lambasted her for visiting Syria and meeting with Assad while staying oddly mute on the visit there, yesterday, by a trio of Republican congressmen who also met with Assad.
Hmmm.
Just a quick follow up from THe New York TImes on Sen. McCain’s epic adventure to a street market in Baghdad:
“What are they talking about? The security procedures were abnormal! They paralyzed the market when they came, This was only for the media…This will not change anything.â€
Ali Jassim Faiyad, the owner of an electrical appliances shop in the market, said Monday.
How about this quote:
“like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime,â€
Rep. Mike Pence (R – Indiana)
McCain Wrong on Iraq Security, Merchants Say – New York Times
That’s it, no more market days in Indiana!
Bob Zitter, Chief Technology Officer of Home Box Office, wants to do away with DRM — the term, not the concept. Addressing the NCTA (a cable programming trade group), Zitter proposed changing the terminology. Here’s an excerpt from coverage at Boradcasting Cable:
Digital rights management (DRM) is the wrong term for technology that secures programmers’ content as it moves to new digital platforms … since it emphasized restrictions instead of opportunities.
Zitter suggested that “DCE,” or Digital Consumer Enablement, would more accurately describe technology that allows consumers “to use content in ways they haven’t before,”
NCTA: HBO’s Zitter Says DRM Is Misnomer – 5/9/2007 12:04:00 PM – Broadcasting & Cable
Okay, more accurately describe technology… Interestingly enough, Zitter chose to exercise both sides of his mouth; speaking with the reporter after his address, Zitter added that HBO was ready to provide HD content but was loath to do so until they could ensure that consumers could not “use it in ways they haven’t before” — by shutting down the analog component outputs on most cable boxes:
Theoretically, says Zitter, those analog outputs could be disabled, forcing consumers to use a secure digital connection to watch HD content. But current FCC rules don’t give HBO or cable operators that power, in order to protect consumers who bought early HDTV sets that don’t support digital copy protection. “They say we can’t turn off the analog output,” Zitter notes.
Isn’t it time that the word police cracked down on such blatant abuse of the language?
The New Yorker magazine has one of the most storied style guides in publishing, as famous to some as those of The Times or The Wall Street Journal. They also tend to have more thorough fact checkers and proofreaders, publishing, as they do, only once a week (or two). Oddly, though, this interesting bit of typography crept into both the print and on-line versions of this excessively blogged-about profile of the elusive English graffitist, Banksy:
But for every litter freak or culture purist driven to indignation by Banksy there’s a person who is entranced. While setting up the show in Los Angeles, Banksy ordered a pizza, ate it, and tossed the box in a Dumpster. Within weeks, the pizza box was sold on eBay, for a hundred and two dollars. The seller suggested that a few anchovies that had been left inside might yield traces of Banksy’s DNA.
Dept. of Popular Culture: Banksy Was Here: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
Now Pawn will concede that there is a trademark in the books for the word “Dumpster” but unless there is a record of this particular receptacle bearing that brand name, perhaps someone in rewrite got a little carried away. Call a Dumpster a dumpster, and let’s move on.
Observed near Downer and Webster, Milwaukee, WI
The slug, above, is just one example of the achingly bad dialogue from the movie “Tough Guys Don’t Dance“, written, adapted and directed by none other than Norman Mailer. He could have done us all a favour and left with just the writing credit. Pawn wasted a couple precious hours of his life last night watching this exemplar of bad acting, as Ryan O’Neal, Issabella Rossellini and Debra Sandlund cavort through a pathetic mystery involving several meaningless murders and several meaningless characters.
A particularly humorous scene involves O’Neal and Rossellini’s characters, an apparently adventurous couple, deciding to go visit “The Big Stoop,” a babtist preacher who’s into wife swapping on the side, played by none other than Penn Jillette, of Penn and Teller fame. That character’s name, by the way, derives from the fact that he’s sexually well endowed, but a little dim. Not enough of a man for Sundland, it seems.
John Bedford Lloyd turns in perhaps the most intelligent performance, made even more striking by the stilted and improbable dialog, such as “I am so wrong for this kind of imbroglio.” I’d swear that Kevin Spacey based his performance in “Midnight in the garden of good and evil” on Lloyd’s efforts.
Pawn just loves it when people misspeak, or misstype, and the resultant sentence means something else entirely. One example was in a La Crosse, WI, newspaper where a letter writer, writing about the forces which keep gay people from coming out wrote “People never seem to amaze me.”
Here is another fine example, penned by one Andi, who was responding to an article over at The Caucus at The New York Times about a sequel to the popular Obama Girl video. Note the misspelling of “underlying” in the 3rd sentence (if you can ignore the absurd banality of the opening sentence):
I didn’t realize that our culture had stooped to popifying our politics. Not only that but this is by far the most sexist political ad I’ve ever seen. It is representative of the underling paternalistic value in our culture and supports sexist ideas and social constructs. If this strikes you as an over the top comment think about weather or not there would ever be anything like this made promoting Hillary.— Posted by Andi
Obama Girl 2: Electric Boogaloo – The Caucus – Politics – New York Times Blog
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