Also, as bonus, I caught this NPR piece on 2nd graders having fun with spooky Shakespeare. I dare you not to smile.

The brush will retail from $25-50 in stores (ridiculously extravagant, which made it even more appealing) and comes with a fancy (read: not plastic) display stand. Frankly, I'm a little scared to try it out-- Not only is there a big warning label on the packaging telling you to STOP USING IT at the FIRST SIGN of the bristles coming loose, there's even a sticker on the brush itself, just in case you missed the packaging. I'm assuming swallowing titanium filaments could be a slight health issue...

Anyway, I'll try it out and let you know how it goes. It certainly looks spiffy sitting on my sink. After the jump is a pic and a link to the blurb on Gizmodo.

Gizmodo coverage

"Unfortunately, Ellie, we don't live in that world."

I completely understand all the anger and hysteria surrounding the failed Wall Street bailout plan. Why should we have to pay for the mistakes of a reckless and greedy few, especially when the worst they'll have to deal with is an early retirement or a somewhat smaller severance package. I completely root for those calling for their heads, preferably staked, and most of all I applaud the country for standing up to Bush-- FINALLY-- when he tries yet again to scare us into writing him another blank check. You really really can't fault people for opting not to be fooled thrice.

But here's the thing--

Sticking it to Bush in this case will only make things worse, and he's not far off in SOME of his armageddon talk. By not fixing the problem, it will snowball and will really do a number on employment, mortgages (not that I care much about those) and small business credit (which I care DEEPLY about). So we find ourselves in a national catch-22:

1. Tell Wall Street to go fuck itself, stand up to Bush and say no way to stupid, expensive and rash decisions perpetuated by fear. Then, lose job or house or business and start watching Survivor for cooking advice while the bankers, smote, kick it on their second house's back deck (they had to sell the third house to keep the mistress in whale tails).

2. Bail them out. Restore some semblance of order so we can continue to work, play and spend, and then do everything possible to make their lives hell.

I think the conventional wisdom in D.C. is to go with #2, and everyone thought they would, but the problem is one of timing-- with all those pussies up for re-election, they did what they don't do the rest of the year and listened to their constituents-- short-sighted dumbasses.

I'm all for revenge, and I think it may be the great uniter, but in this case, it might be better to be the bigger person. And that, in a nutshell, is why life sucks donkey balls.

I see these situations all the time at work, and am constantly irritated that I so often don't have a leg to stand on. Because to say "sorry, you fucked up and I'm not going to help you," doesn't fly in any situation, but especially when your opponent can make the case that "if you don't do it, you're harming the business." So the morons never learn. Unless you're willing to do something illegal to get that immediate satisfaction, revenge is something you have to work at for a long time. And that "civilized" notion doesn't really jive with the laws of nature. But what can you do?

It's too bad Jesus isn't real or all this would be a lot easier.

In a presidential campaign, the surest sign that a candidate is playing politics on an issue is when he claims not to be playing politics on an issue. The only way for McCain to convince everyone that his intentions are 100 percent pure is for him to drop out of the race completely. A campaign doesn't end—and its distracting affects don't disappear—just because one candidate says so.

Amen!

p.s. Did you see Bush's address last night? Me either, but I heard the highlights and you have to hand it to the guy-- he sticks to his playbook. According to him, unless we do his bidding, the country will explode and we'll all die. Classic.

DFW was one of my favorite writers. His prose was achingly brilliant, far above anything I could ever hope to write. His wit and insight were unmatched. His work was unpretentious and ambitious (I'm STILL working on Infinite Jest, and he will be sorely missed.

Most mainstream readers have never heard of the guy, and that's fine. I have no doubt, though, that historians will brand him as one of the most important voices of this age (or any other) and his work will endure.

Apparently, the city has devised a cheap and reliable way to remove weeds and brush from the steep hillside.

We shall see.

A remembrance, after the jump.

A huge bulk of this flotsam turns out to be old papers, scripts and stories from college. To be fair, I've chucked a lot of the stuff I'd kept over the years, but there are still many dense piles lying around. Most of these papers were written on an ancient computer, using an early Apple program called ClarisWorks. Meaning, I can't access the files anymore without a lot of hacking. So I've kept hard copy versions of most of these documents, mainly the ones my professors graded and scribbled upon.

Poring through these papers is definitely a blast from the past. In many cases, I remembered writing them but more often than not, I don't. Which makes it a hoot to explore the pile and wonder at my impressive creative writing (occasionally) and my crappy prose (plenty of these).

In the midst of one pile, I came across papers from one of my absolutely favorite difficult classes in college: Film Criticism, taught by New York Times critic Manohla Dhargis. This is one of the few classes Simbo and I took together, and Dhargis proved to be a wonderful complement to our own snitty attitudes toward film.

A couple of the exercises that I did for the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High made me giggle when I re-read them (and Dhargis's notes) that I had to share them...

I'm sure when Hillary Clinton spoke of an entire village to raise this country's children, she wasn't even factoring Southern California into the equation. SoCal, after all, is a village-- a planet-- unto its own. All you need to do is look at Fast Times at Ridgemont High to realize just how important Southern California is to America's cultural importance. It is a film of geeks and jocks, winners and nobodies, surfers and valley girls-- in short, it's high school on the West Coast. And that is an important distinction to make, because this village is perhaps the most important in the country when it comes to what soda to drink to what to wear, even how to talk. In this village, known as Ridgemont High, you have a motley and eclectic crew of young people all over the social barometer: you have Linda (real name here [Phoebe Cates -md]), the "experienced" girl who teaches young and uncertain Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) the ways of taming that most ominous of beasts: the high school boy. You have the leader of the tribe, Bradley (Judge Reinhold), who ends up getting lost in his own self-importance, like the lion too busy cleaning himself to notice the hunter. And, of course, you have Spiccoli (Sean Penn), an icon of surf culture who haunts surfers to this day with this version of the extreme slacker. In a way, Spiccoli is the alpha male of the village in that he doesn't allow school or an irritation bug of a history professor (what's his real name [my favorite martian! - md]) to get in the way of bodacious dreams of "rad waves" and fast, voluptuous women. Village of the damned? Perhaps, but you'll be too busy thinking of your own high school days to bother yourself with such illusions.

Okay, that's a bear of a paragraph, but I was clearly on a roll.

The next piece of the assignment was to develop a list of character metaphors. Here are a few of my faves:

Spiccoli 1. More than a beach bum, Jeff Spiccoli is like a pile of seaweed washed up onshore-- he looks out of place everywhere except within a hundred yards of the ocean.

Stacy
1. Stacy is a flower just after the first petal falls.
2. Stacy is like an alcoholic, only without the booze, hooked instead on male bodily fluids. (Okay, I'm reaching here)
3. Unlike her friend Linda, Stacy comes off like a pet guppy-- small and fragile, but able to conceive magnificently nonetheless.

Bradley
1. Bradley is, in a way, a sheet of fabric softener in a load of high school underwear-- he removes all electricity from the film. [! -md]