Whoa!
Hey World, how’s it going? Oh? Great, I’m glad to hear it. Um . . . this is just a little thing, please don’t worry about it, uh . . . but, yeah, it’s spelled W-H-O-A. Everywhere I look lately it’s misspelled and I wasn’t going to say anything, but it’s so awfully ugly with the “h” at the end.
No, no. This is more embarrassing for me than it is for you. No seriously, I’m the one who should be sorry. I just, well, I just thought if I was making such a silly blunder I would want someone to tell me. That’s right, World, “Whoa.”
Okay, cool. See you around.
Today’s Hipsters, Tomorrow’s Asshats
Is Adbusters the single most obnoxious magazine on the face of the earth? If their articles matched their headlines, and their execution matched their ethics, they’d be a valuable cultural resource, as well as a kickass read. I would be willing to bet that on a checklist of political positions and beliefs, Adbusters and I would agree about 98% of the time. It’s not their politics I object to. It’s their holier-than-everything-all-the-time posturing, combined with the fact that their articles read like the diary entries of intelligent but under-achieving 8th graders. Also, their high-gloss “I went to design school but I’m still punkasfuck aren’t I please tell me I am oh tell me please” aesthetics. It’s Disneypunk, and I just can’t figure out how the people who produce it live with themselves, or why they don’t use all their energy to do something useful for the causes they champion, instead of striving to be the vapid polyanna incitement-jockeys of the blinders-on knees-jerking nobody-likes-you-and-there’s-a-good-reason-for-that Left.
When Tao lived here he had a free subscription, I think because he was in it once, and the issues still show up. I usually just let them pass me by, but I flipped through the most recent one because there was a cover story about the ubiquity of what we’ll call porno-culture, and I thought that might be worth reading (it’s also online). Boy was I ever wrong. See if you can get through the whole thing. I’ll wait here…
Open letter to the underemployed
Graduate school is fun huh? Or are you just ‘in between’ ‘real’ jobs with the economy n’ all? Or maybe you have 12 roommates, sleep in the pantry, and can afford this HTMLGIANT lifestyle. Coming here everyday and refreshing the browser every 20 seconds and gravitating towards arguments is not going to get you on the road to self-sufficiency. Maybe I’m gettin’ old, but sometimes I just want to scream get a real job, like the one I’m at right now, refreshing the browser every 20 seconds and gravitating towards arguments. Let’s just say I’m neglecting my work and boss is not happy. When HR/payroll pulls the rug, can that pantry fit two? I always feel like somebody’s watching me. Yah, my boss. Chapbooks are nice, but health insurance is better. Get a job jerkfaces.
Mean Thursday: #VALUE!
I don’t know if you’ve read about this anywhere, but via Galleycat a few weeks ago I clicked on a link to a downloadable story written in an Excel spreadsheet. It’s author, David Nygren, wrote a story and typed its various parts into columns.
Reactions on the internet have been, um, confusingly positive, based on my lazy web browsing. 10,000 people have downloaded the story. The comments section at his blog is full of praise. Other blogs and sites link to it. Even a blogger for The New Yorker picked it up, though she was deadpan in her post:
A writer has “built” a short story using an Excel spreadsheet divided into three columns: one for action, one for dialogue, and one for internal monologue.
I wonder how tempted she was to put those quotation marks around writer.
Sorry, David. I’m just teasin’ ya!
Mean Monday: Fuck Everybody, I Hated This Book
Hi. I am in a really bad mood although I was in a worse one a few hours ago but I just paid a woman to make me lift weights for an hour and feel maybe a bit better? Hm. Nah. I came home from working out and spent 30 minutes or so cleaning up cat urine. My house still stinks to high hell. I hate my old cats. I am going to have them put to sleep. I hate them. They pee everywhere. Also, when I was working out? I smelled cat pee. I took my clothes out of a laundry basket full of clean clothes and so what that means is one of them got in the laundry basket and peed on my clean fucking clothes. Hi, lady who worked me out! I smell like cat piss! Be my friend! I was hungover when I got to the gym- hi, scotch and a pack of cigarettes, I hate myself more than I hate everybody else- but now I am not so hungover. One of my cats slept on my head though last night, so I am asthmatic today because of that. Fuck everything. It’s raining like crazy. READ MORE >
Mean monday (statistical interlude)
In an effort to reimplement the somewhat abandoned concept ‘mean Monday,’ I’ve decided to take the mean testicle count of our contributors. For you lit-freaks that blow at math, the ‘mean’ or ‘arithmetic mean’ of any given set is “the sum of all of the list divided by the number of items in the list.” ‘Average’ is too broad and generic a term, as it may mean (no pun intended) ‘median’ or ‘mode.’
Okay, here we go: there are 11 male contributors, all of whom (presumably) have two testicles, giving us a total of 22 testicles. There are 3 female contributors, giving us a total of 14 total contributors. Take 22 and divide by 14, and you have 1.57 — the number of testicles each contributor has. (Juxtapose this with 0.43 ovaries per contributor.)
Mean Monday: Baudelaire’s Preface to The Flowers of Evil
Another Drunk French Dude
Baudelaire was sort of mean-spirited. I would have liked to have gotten drunk with him, maybe just once though, and then probably I would stay away from him. But damn, the preface to The Flowers of Evil is brilliant. The dude was a first class asshole. Baudelaire would have liked when Brian Johnson sang, “you get into evil, you’re a friend of mine:” READ MORE >
HTMLGIANT Presents: Coal in Your Stocking
The other night at Poison Girl, I met a poet named Christian, an aquaintance of Gene Morgan. Christian was out for the reading and also celebrating his having been accepted to the program at The New School. During a hiccup in the conversation, Christian asked about HTMLGIANT, saying he hadn’t read it since Secret Santa. I asked him why, and he said something like, “Well, I feel ashamed of myself. I never sent off a Secret Santa gift. I couldn’t figure out what to get her.”
So I told him he should still do it, he had time, why not send off a gift? It’s okay if you can’t figure out what to get her, I said. The idea is to send a surprise, something you admire and want to share with someone else.
Yes, he said. I understand, he said. Yes, I should, he said. He said he was sorry, and he wrote this on the back of a receipt to show his sorrow. He said that I should post it for everyone to see:
Despite this apology (is it sincere? can it be sincere with three exclamation points? the underlining? the ‘ya’ll’? the cursing? I don’t know), I sadly doubt he will ever send off the gift, though I hope he will prove me wrong.
Regardless, I’d like to present him with HTMLGIANT’s first ever Coal In Your Stocking award.
Christian, for your lack of effort, I say congratulations! Good luck next year in school, and while I hope the best for you, I also have to say this: may you receive lots of coal in your stocking during the holidays.
Now I throw you to the wolves.
I know all of this happened a while ago, but I can’t help but post this last bit: those of you who still haven’t received gifts, I’m sorry. Those who took part, but didn’t send off a gift, please please do that.
Mean Monday on Sunday Night: PR’s Office
This is my office where I work about six months of the year. I was just there this weekend and I took some pictures to share with you all. I am a slob. I roll around in a pile of dust and books. Make fun of me. Talk about how happy you are that you don’t really know me. I am going to explain stuff and post some nice close-ups after the jump:
How to Irritate and Confuse People: A Case Study
I don’t know what it is about the internet that causes people to forget what it means to be a human being. Look at the speed at which comments threads degenerate into hateful, vitriolic invective–people spew things out via their fingertips that they wouldn’t say out loud to someone who was mugging or divorcing them. But it’s a two-way street, and to me, what’s perhaps more interesting than moments when somebody forgets that s/he is talking to a REAL PERSON, are moments when the writer seems to forget that s/he him/herself is a REAL PERSON. I’m not asking for Victorian etiquette here. I’m just saying that when you pop into a stranger’s inbox, unannounced, in a message with no subject-line, from a personal email address with a joke-name (“redhotstudonearth”–seriously) asking that stranger to give you things without explaining who you are, what exactly you’re asking for, what you hope to do with it, or why you deserve it… I mean what do you expect is going to happen?
After the jump, the transcript of an utterly surreal email exchange I had yesterday, with annotations.