Andrew Sloat’s 22nd Amendment

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Why We Curse

Fucking brilliant article on the linguistic perspective of swearing: What The Fuck? by Steven Pinker

Mos Def & Kanye – Freestyle

Another Chinese Toy Recalled

Want To Kill Some Time?

Wikipedia articles about unusual places, names, people, and cultural artifacts.

Damn Straight!

9/11 Is Over By Thomas L. Friedman

In his latest opinion piece, 9/11 Is Over, Thomas L. Friedman leads off with a description of an Onion article and then gets in some zingers of his own:

We don’t need another president of 9/11. We need a president for 9/12.

9/11 has made us stupid.

Guantanamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty.

Those who don’t visit us, don’t know us.

Fly from Zurich’s ultramodern airport to La Guardia’s dump. It is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones.

Mad Men On AMC

There were seven deadly sins practiced at the dawn of the 1960s: smoking, drinking, adultery, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism and racism. In its first few minutes “Mad Men” on AMC taps into all of them.

This new drama set in the golden age of Madison Avenue serves as a bridge to a faded and now forbidden world.

Men wore white shirts, drank Manhattans and harassed compliant secretaries in the elevator. Everybody read Reader’s Digest. Jews worked in Jewish advertising agencies, blacks were waiters and careful not to seem too uppity, and doctors smoked during gynecological exams. Women were called “girls.” Men who loved men kept it to themselves.

The magic of “Mad Men” is that it softly spoofs those cruel, antiquated mores without draining away the romance of that era: the amber-lit bars and indigo nightclubs, soaring skyscrapers, smoky railway cars and the brash confidence that comes with winning a war and owning the world. It’s a sardonic love letter to the era that wrought “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and “The Best of Everything,” but homage is paid with more affection than satire.

The advertising executives, who called themselves “mad men,” were at the front of the consumer rat race, hypnotizing the American buyer with huckster campaigns created off-the-cuff in smoky meeting rooms or on a cocktail napkin at El Morocco. The advertising business was flush, blissfully unburdened by aging readerships, failing newspapers, DVRs or the Internet, and only barely accountable to the federal government or public opinion.

And that kind of unbridled freedom is the series’s one speck of sentiment, evoking nostalgia for a time before the current audience-knows-best rule of business, in which viewers vote on who gets to become a pop star, publishers ask readers to choose their authors, and politicians ask viewers to decide what issues they should discuss.

In recent years there have been a few movies set in the late ’50s and early ’60s and directed in that vintage style: before “Good Night, and Good Luck,” there was “Far From Heaven” in 2002, a loving tribute to the full-throttle melodramas of Douglas Sirk. In 2003 Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor were paired in “Down With Love,” a sendup of Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies.

“Mad Men” is both a drama and a comedy and all the better for it, a series that breaks new ground by luxuriating in the not-so-distant past.

Virtual Friendship & The New Narcissism

Christine Rosen — who you might remember as the crypto-techno-conservative author of The Age of Egocasting — is back with another tirade in The New Atlantis: Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism. Actually, it’s one of those foreboding pieces that you will want to dismiss, but it’s also fun to read — so you’ll probably make it through all 12 printed pages only frowning (and grinning) a few times.

Good Bad Not Evil By Black Lips

Black Lips can, to date, be depended on for raucousness, irresponsibility, occasionally pissing in their own mouths onstage, and sloppy garage tunes indebted to noise and punk as much as the band’s Southern roots. Given all that, the idea of them hitting anything outside of a niche audience seemed slim. They’re a go-to band for filth-rock puritans, even as their unhinged live shows have helped them slowly gain a larger audience with each album’s release.

Good Bad Not Evil, however, is the record where naysayers, disinterested friends and acquaintances, and anyone else within earshot has to sit up, shut up, and listen. The “garage rock” tag will perpetually follow this band, and while I’m not saying it isn’t sometimes apt, there’s a difference between being a revival act and seeming blissfully out of time. Black Lips’ idea of being topical is writing a jilted love song to a girl named Katrina from New Orleans, and their idea of diversity is writing a country song about breaking a death to children (and sounding terribly inconvenienced by doing so). It’s as if they missed the past 30 years of rock history; perhaps they drank the memory away.

While it may not be as blistering as the band’s early work, or even this year’s “live” Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo– because where else could you really go after that?– Good Bad nonetheless stands tall in their catalog for finding a way to turn it down without becoming tame. Here, Black Lips fold all of the bacchanalia into the corners of direct, vintage pop songs, so that the new tracks have taken on an ominous tone without being quite as off-the-rails as the band’s reputation would suggest. Note the brief moments of backwards guitar in the otherwise, uh, lean “Lean”, a twangy undistorted march with plenty of echo on the ragged vocals.

The band is still preoccupied with its reckless bad-boy image, as “Bad Kids” is a country-inflected sing-along to the merits of irresponsibility that sounds so puerile it’s almost self-deprecating. Still, they’re hardly one-note here: “Cold Hands” is the record’s lead-off single and probably its catchiest song, but it’s more wounded than brash, lyrically occupied with trying the straight and narrow and failing rather than eschewing it entirely. It’s a nice change of pace that hits a new emotional center– for two-and-a-half minutes anyway.

Throwbacks to earlier albums– such as “Slime and Oxygen”, with its stomping circular rhythms, caterwauling guitar bends, and more-than-usual vocal echo– already pale next to the braver material. Even the record’s few missteps are at least adventurous, including colliding immaturity with more mysticism on the toy-piano-led “Transcendental Light”. Were you to grab any of their older records– which you really should– you could hear a band out-freak the best of them. But Good Bad Not Evil is evidence that they want to do something more, which is heartening– and here they’ve accomplished it.