Gesundheit Ain't Quite Right

I wish there were a social convention - a "bless you" or "gesundheit," if you will - for when someone in your midst hiccups. Sneezes are kind of a fun feeling - and then people are polite and wish you well on top of it. Hiccups are mostly uncomfortable and occasionally annoying; surely they are the more deserving of some nice interjection?

Tooling Around Town

In my whistle-stop town outside of Chicago, pretty much everything is walkable, (except for the movies since the old theater got taken over by a lily pulitzer. ugh.) a very welcome arrangement after four years of pedaling and walking around Georgetown, where everything is eminently walkable, if not affordable. A great movie catalog endowed by the funds to save and renovate the now pulitzer-ed theater - and that's a lot of movies, folks - and free cds make the public library an especially tempting walk. Today when I went to trade in After the Thin Man for Before Sunset, the following cars were parked outside: three minivans, two Porsches, and one crank-shaft Model-T. Quite the sight to say the least.

Well Maybe Just a Little Satisfaction, Mick

Since seeing St. Vincent in Millennium Park on Monday night, I have been trying to track down "Black Rainbow," one of the songs off her new album. I'd have caved and bought it from iTunes. Really, I would have. But my account isn't letting my complete purchases at the moment, so I've been reduced to more normal, slightly more amoral tactics. After exhausting The Hype Machine and Dilandau unsuccessfully, I went to a crude Google search.

I was pretty bummed that my review of the concert - which name-dropped the song in question, apparently a relatively rare one - didn't show up till the third page of results. Bummed, that is, only until I saw the next hit down: Sasha Frere-Jones' blog for the New Yorker, and its mention of the song. I felt much less shabby topping that, if only by a spot.

Twilighters: The Fifth Column?

Saw this xkcd comic a few days ago and I didn't really realized how terrible the threat was...

Since Condé Nast himself was a fellow Georgetown graduate (class of 1894), I feel that i can speak on his behalf, at least in this matter, and say that HE WOULD NOT WANT ROBERT PATTINSON TO WIN VANITY FAIR'S HANDSOMEST MAN ALIVE CONTEST. Why Graydon Carter - or more accurately whatever other editor was responsible for the list - put him on there in the first place is a bit beyond me. It seems like asking for trouble. That said, that the Twilight actor is beating Jon Hamm or Brad Pitt or even Johnny Depp in this poll is a bit ridiculous, I think it goes without saying.

Dear tweens, please go pick on the polling results of someone your own size. Like J-14 magazine. Or Tiger Beats. Vanity Fair is serious business - they reported on Plamegate and the inner workings of the Bush White House, and I'd appreciate it if you'd keep it that way by staying out of the way of serious candidates for frivolous polls.

The End Times: Is News Fit To Print?, Part 2

Note: This particular photo is not from my own, very lovely, alma mater.

I cleared out of my house in Washington, DC this past week in a post-graduation rush, and had to get rid of all the accumulated debris of the last year. Packing up has been pretty nightmarish in the past (see freshman year, when i brought 20+ pairs of flip flops alone to school), but this year actually wasn't that bad; moving in two suitcases and a backpack to France and then the same back to DC helped cut down on the clutter. I did have a couple of firehazards I didn't manage to eradicate though: piles of 30 or 35 newspapers Hoyas, Voices, Posts, Times. Moral of the story: I'm a print media pack rat.

I managed to talk myself into tossing most of them - probably didn't need the Tuesday crosswords from mid-October. But a couple of them - a particularly nice photo of construction workers on the front page, the controversial April Fool's issue of the campus newspaper - I couldn't quite throw away. After a year of benefitting from USA Today's collegiate readership program, maybe I'm just reluctant to give up all the great free papers I got.

You'll notice I didn't mention hoarding any Gannett publications (Gannett is the publisher of USA Today, and other non-news-snob-friendly outlets); as I suspect may be the case on many university campuses which participate in the program, the sponsor newspapers were always the last to go. Educated people, or those who hope to become so, still snatch up real live papers - especially when they can get their hands on them for free (or the several tens of thousands of dollars that tuition costs - however you choose to look at it). Maybe a sign of hope? At the very least, the Washington Posts for the taking in the coffee shop are just one of the many things I was reluctant to leave behind this weekend.

History Wonk Band Names

... too bad I have zero musical abilities

1. Robert Capa’s Mexican Suitcase
2. The Defenestration of Prague
3. Jeremy and the Benthamites
4. Tycho Brahe’s Metal Nose
5. The XYZ Affair
6. Triumph and the Wills

The End Times: Is News Fit To Print?, Part 1

In a weirdly incestuous newspaper cycle, I just got not one, but two emails from my WaPo breaking news alerts heralding the demise of The Boston Globe by the hand of the weakening Grey Lady. The Post is reporting that Arthur Ochs Sulzberger and Co. have filed 60 day notice of closure with federal authorities in the wake of failed union negotiations. Speculation is that this may just be a particularly hard-line bargaining measure to break writers, mailers, and printers down further, but it is certainly not without a whiff of industry demise. To threaten such extreme measures, whether or not they are empty, exposes the rotting financial state of America's newspapers to the public. There isn't much mystery left...

I can't help but think of one of the hundred great lines from Paul Simon's Graceland: "Everybody sees you're blown apart,
Everybody sees the wind blow." This is almost unforgivably bad, I will be the first to admit, but I'm a print media sentimentalist. The front-page photos marking the shuttering of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer were heartrending when I happened to pick up the times a few weeks ago, and I really don't know what I'll do if the Times-Picayune closes; no one could ever match that for names.

Seeing the best and brightest of the golden age of objectivity so vulnerable is sad and slightly terrifying not just because its the kind of industry I might once have hoped to work in; not just because, to paraphrase the Guardian, people are facing a world without reliable news for the first time since the Enlightenment (the Enlightenment!). It is also because I love doing the crossword puzzle; because in the fifth grade, when I wasn't allowed to see Titanic, I saved the Arts and Entertainment section with a half-page photo of Leonardo DiCaprio during filming; because my grandmother used to ship me comics sections from the Omaha World-Herald by the box because in that department at least, the Times had nothing on it; because everyone I grew up with got their name - or picture - in our local paper at least once, and sent a copy to all their relatives; because my list of life goals includes worming my way into the Vows section; because my father has the front page from when the Berlin Wall fell; because I remember the first day that the Times printed in color - it was sometime during Lewinskygate; because I used to pull the blue newspaper sleeves over my shoes on rainy days to puddle jump.

Don't get me wrong. The internet, or hearsay, or whatever it is we've chosen to replace this can do some pretty great stuff too, I'm sure. But without real media, new media won't have anything to reblog, or mock, or debunk. Without real live papers you miss out on wedding announcements for scrapbooks, or clippings for your grandparents, or historical records for your kids. Newspapers make stuff real. Meta-news just doesn't make for great rainboots.

Gov't 2.0

I just discovered that No. 10 Downing St. (the White House with a British Accent) has its own Twitter! I'm not certain that this is legitimate, but it seems like it might be. It certainly seems like a great way for the executive to get their news stories out there, and just imagine, if Kim Jong Il or Castro had a twitters, we'd never have to worry about them falling off the radar. The real question, however, is this: Barack Obama did a great job of mobilizing social media during the campaign (including twitter), but will he be able to keep this up when he's in office? As has been widely reported, he's already being forced to give up his Blackberry and email, but might the UK's example prove that its okay for government to have a presence - if an extremely filtered and controlled presence - on social media sites and web 2.0 in general?

Its a Small Small World

Woah. Now that Google Reader has had its very own Tina-Fey-like makeover, where the greatness of content remains largely unchanged as the outer shell is streamlined, it is also picking up and recommending Tumblr feeds. Is this the sign that all the matter in the internet universe is collapsing inward into a black hole? I'll let you (or someone, anyone, really) be the judge of that.

Macy's Thanksgiving

In spite of all my objections to Macy's (see: buyout of Marshall Fields, terrible dressing room lighting) I'm pretty won over by their new commercial, and a total softy for the Parade.


I got to go once or twice when I was little, but my favorite Thanksgiving tradition has been rolling out of bed and down the street to Linda's house to be awed by the Rockettes and disgusted by the Mike Miller dancers (as I am even as I type) while she makes green bean casserole. Linda has had a slightly more sophisticated Thanksgiving in Paris this year and last, so I'm twittering the Parade instead, and I've got to say, this is the best in quite some time.

exhibit a: actual talent is performing - James Taylor, Miley Cyrus, Idina Menzel, Kristen Chenoweth
exhibit b: the Rockettes looked surprisingly cute
exhibit c: the surprise Rick Astley performance/rickrolling reference gained them some coolness cred
exhibit d: the Keith Haring balloon piloted by his dad (who looks just like him) was touching and arty
exhibit e: a bizarrely funny moment with a briefcase drill team seemed biting and ironic given the current state of the businessman

Shocker: AOL Hometown Folds

I was never really an AOL nut, so I can say that I know what their Hometown Service is, but I ran across a message announcing that today - Oct. 31, 2008 - their operations would be shutting down. I'm mostly just frustrated because I can't get the result for my google image search of "Monica Lewinsky Cigar Aficionado Cover," but for any of you still living in the AOLUniverse perhaps this is a sad day.

But hey, at least the site with the announcement has a nice Halloweeny color scheme:

Name Dropping

A few days ago, a post popped up on everyone's (and by this I mean my) favorite femiladyism site Jezebel about Juicy Campus. Jezebel blogger Dodai faulted the Gossip-Girl-gone-horribly-wrong, rumor-mongering site for a business model which essentially "involves humiliating women". To a large extent, I think this is well merited criticism, but to be fair, this is exactly the sort of reaction you would expect Jezebel to have, both on behalf of and as a function of their readership. Juicy Campus is gross, but its equally gross for men and women pilloried on the site. To be frank though, sticking up for the guys trashed on Juicy Campus was only my second instinct. My first went a bit more like this: "Georgetown!!!"

I love it when Georgetown gets name-dropped in the pop-culture world. I loved going to a midnight showing of Syriana at the Georgetown AMC and cheering along with everyone else when the Saudi prince talked about his degree. I loved it when the Gossip Girls debated about the Duke's alma mater. I feel like place-pride is pretty important to me, in general. A survey of some sort claimed that Chicagoans love Chicago more than any other city's residents love theirs. This certainly seemed to be evident in Grant Park last night with the crowd's deep feeling that Barack Obama was their man, and I think i take that with me too.

The Olympics Opening Ceremonies Recap in Advance!!!

Or at least at less of a delay.

I had the great pleasure of being live-chatted opening ceremony snark from Paris this morning.

me: i should trade in my euros before they are worthless
okay
will the opening ceremonies make me hate china more?
or less?
Linda: ummm...
you probably more.
me: oh dear
this will be an interesting night in taht case
Linda: they make pretty much all other olympic opening ceremonies like they were trying to get by on the cheap.
Linda: so yeah...
probably not going to think so highly of them.
me: hmmm
they probably killed panda babies
and did deals with the devil
but in any case,
im quoting you
in my facebook event
Linda: that sounds really plausible.
me: you are soooo secret sourcey
Linda: oh yes because i'm seven hours ahead and no network has such a death grip on the olympics here.
six
you are hosting an opening ceremonies event?
me: still
indeed
we are ordering chinese
and then
we are playing games on sunday
Linda: very cool.
me: donde did you watch?
Linda: through the olympic website...through france.
they show events live.
but i think it is having problems
oh well no parade of nations for me.
me: sad
are you watching it even as we speak???
Linda: well i have been for the past hour
for a while i was so bored, i was thinking of live blogging it.
but i figured that would look sketch if someone came in.
and now the connection kind of died.
wait the danes just passed
the order is really strange.
it is now uganda
me: i dont get it
is this like
the order in romanized chinesse?
Linda: i think so.
closest i can approximate.
though it is now going us
Us
because it was ukraine and then uruguay.
but as far as i can tell they are still near the beginning.
argentinian team is HOT!
me: this is super odd
hahahahhaha
i want to live blog you narrating it to me
Linda: uzbek team...not so much.
[sidebar: did you know that russia is kind of currently invading georgia]
me: ummm
nope
not so much
Linda: yeah it's kind of bad.
me: silly medvedev
i will look at this
Linda: yeah well its funny in the british papers, it takes a while to realize that medvedev is president.
because they all went for quotes to putin in china instead of medvedev in moscow.
also the chinese way of pronouncing countries is very interesting. i'm still not figuring out the order.
also girls in white shirts jumping around the track that the atheletes are walking on. isn't that exhausting?
cuba is getting big cheers.
and president bowed...? wow you are really going to hate china more.
still worst thing about it are the ugly suits they are wearing.
omg...when you watch? look at the girls in the white...they are wearing ugly go go boots.
me: ahahahhahahahah
im on it
sorry
metting with boss's boss
Linda: no i'm sorrry...i'm being obnoxious...
okay well talk to you later.
me: nono
are you leaving work?
Linda: no.
me: I AM COOLER THAN THE OLYMPICS
Linda: okay.
sorry.
i thought you had to go to the meeting.
me: you should parle with me
nope
jsut did
sorry
Linda: okay...also really strange music selection that is not synced to the countrie.
it is like ethnic.
but like strange mexican music with african countries?
and yes, you are cooler than the olympics.
ummm isn't the belarussian president like CRAZY????
me: i th ink???
but they are my fav. olympic nation
Linda: belarussians?
why?
uhoh white outfit girls are not synced. i think heads are going to roll tonight.
me: sad
but true
Linda: oooo so protest by work today...
tons of riot police
either anti-China or pro-Tibet.
not sure.
me: hmmm
i will guess the latter
Linda: meh...sarkozy is there.
people were pissed.
everybody loves the canadians
but their outfit is ugly like whoa!
me: are they wearing roots?
oh noes
Linda: no didn't you know...roots lost the contract.
me: way worse than rl toolyness
hahah
Linda: because they started making u.s. outfits.
me: i like that you saw the devastating import of that
Linda: and then the u.s. switched to ralph lauren.
wow but it's so ugly.
i think my retinas just detached.
me: wow
this is a sad sad downfall
i once bought a too-short unflattering roots shirt
to pay homage to the cheated canadian figure skaters

All overly controversial opinions are probably joking - lighten up!

Baisé

The euro is trading above 1.6 dollars. Semi-regularly. In fact, it hit an all-time high yesterday. Happy (belated) Bastille Day.

In consoling news for Americans however, even foreigners can't afford to live abroad necessarily. Food costs were rising five percent per month for a bit and while we may be Europe's "bargain bin" as per Slate and this post, this is still only for those who aren't subsisting thanks mostly to price-controlled bread.

The Inertnet

Briefly believed Brian Eno had died today, thanks to a lame Twitter hoax I stumbled across. That'll teach me to visit the real internet.

Some good, if obvious aggregators:
The Hype Machine - Music
Ffffound! - Pictures
Cribcandy - Furniture/Home Design

Things I Miss, Part 1

riding on trains
valuable, heavy coins
not getting mocked for wearing a scarf at all times
cheap flights
sensuous badoit bottles
walking quickly
my apricot body wash
kirs
the cool graffiti
monthly transit passes
intimate movie theaters
agrum
going to paris
cheap strawberries

more as i miss it

Political Figures By Whom I Am Inappropriately Charmed:

1. Richard Nixon
2. Pat Buchanan

In other news, I said this blog would be more than just study abroad, but there are probably still some frenchified wrap-up thoughts in weeks to come that might trickle out. Bear with me. Or don't.

Cool Graffiti from Lyon, Take 2

I really like the way the graff is wrapped under this bridge I walk over on the way to school. Its more subtly done than this picture makes it out to be.

Overheard

... At a café on the quai:

Brit: "I'd like a little kitten; I'd just hate it to become a cat. Maybe we can get a kitten that will become an elephant?"

Cool Graffiti from Lyon, Take 1