Tell Me You Didn't See This Coming
A film critical of the MPAA get rated NC-17. What are the chances?
Wes Phillips
Extreme Origami?
Don't laugh until you see the pictures.
RadioShack Fires Staff By Email
RadioShack, the second-rate phone store that used to sell electronics, just fired 400 employees by email. Classy, no? But here's my question: Considering that the last five times I tried to buy basic computer supplies at RadioShack (yes, I'm a slow learner, but it is just around the corner), the employees treated me as if I were asking for unobtainium, are the 400 people who've been let go capable of accessing an email account to find out they've been made redundant?
N'Italian Lessons 101
Learn the Northern Jersey dialect of Italian. Think The Sopranos. Racy language alert—or is that redundant after mentioning Tony's gang?
Katrina: One Year Later
Photographer David Burnett has posted his series of photographs of the Gulf coast, taken last January and published in the new National Geographic. It's stunning stuff. Burnett has the eye for both the big picture and the telling detail—his photo of the refrigerator-magnet–covered car of a worker at the garbage dump where they destroyed "white goods" is surprisingly touching and human, even though no people are shown.
The IMglish Dictionary
The fabulous Nancy Friedman of Away">http://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/">Away With Words points us to BuzzWhack's "The IMglish Dictionary." IMglish, as in the instant message version of English, for those of us who lack fast thumbs or crackberries.
Bob on Bob
The brouhaha over Bob Dylan's recent Rolling Stone interview surprised me. Dylan cryptic, caustic, and cranky? What a shock. Has he ever held a straightforward interview where he kept on topic? Louis Menand reviews Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews.
Time Before Time
You can make an omelet out of an egg, but you can't make an egg out of an omelet. Sean Carroll finds this almost strange, because "the fundamental laws of physics themselves are symmetric and don't seem to discriminate between the past and future."
A. N. Wilson Gets Pwned
Now, this is revenge served cold!
James Ellroy on The Black Dahlia
And his mom, of course—and the upcoming movie. The Virginia Quarterly, which is rapidly becoming my favorite periodical, published Ellroy's afterword to the new edition of The Black Dahlia.