Bing tastes great! and gives you cancer

Am I the only person to look at the sample screens for Microsoft's new search engine and wonder, why do they have a big cigarette on their page?

technorati: bing, advertising, marketing

Today's fake: Ersatz reporter/Catholic "priestess" carried from press area

A woman who said she was a reporter for an obscure Georgia monthly newspaper, and who was wearing a cassock and also identified herself as a Roman Catholic "preistess," was carried out bodily by Secret Service agents from a press corral yesterday as President Obama was about to arrive at LAX to depart for Washington on Air Force One. The woman wanted to give Obama a letter asking him to "take a stand for traditional marriage," she said. The Secret Service asked her to leave when she refused to give the letter to an Obama staffer, and when she refused to leave, they carried her out. (Courtesy MediaBistro's Daily Media News email.

Today's fake: Crazy people make up the best stories

There's this insane person-slash-scam artist on the East Coast who portrayed himself as a Rockefeller family member. He has been exposed, captured like a moth, and is now on trial for various weirdnesses. This paragraph from a Boston Globe story today contains awesomeness:

Clark Rockefeller's meticulous scheme to kidnap his 7-year-old daughter required months of painstaking planning. He bought a home in Baltimore under the fake identity of a Peruvian ship captain, hid his $800,000 divorce settlement in gold coins, lined up three getaway vehicles, and told tall tales to get unwitting accomplices involved in the effort, one of whom thought he was driving Rockefeller that Sunday to Newport, R.I., to go sailing with the son of Senator Chafee.

I love that on the one hand he is capable of forming a "meticulous scheme" and of carrying on his deceptions for years, while at the same time being absolutely fucking nuts. But even better is the creativity and insane imagination. Eight hundred thousand dollars in gold coins! That's like the fantasy of every right-wing paranoid these days, because they all think there is going to by hyperinflation in a few years and the value of their gold -- they all have some -- will go up geometrically.

Best of all -- it had to be a Peruvian ship captain. God, I wish I had an imagination like that.

technorati: THIS, THAT, TOTHER

TV comedian kills them with the truth

In a presentation for companies that sponsor ABC television programming, comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who has a show on the network, decided that the funniest, craziest thing he could say was the truth:

"Everything you're going to hear this week is bullshit. Let's get real here. Let's get Dr. Phil-real here. These new fall shows? We're going to cancel about 90 percent of them. Maybe more."

If ABC is so confident in its new fall shows, he asked, why is it announcing them at the same time it announces the midseason shows that will replace those fall shows? "This show 'Shark Tank' has the word tank right in the title," he said.

More at the NYT coverage of the annual "upfronts" presentations of coming fall television shows. Here's more, more, and more.

technorati: television, Jimmy Kimmel

The new McCarthyism

A Syracuse professor alleges that he was denied tenure after Fox News talker Bill O'Reilly attacked him and dubbed him "the new Ward Churchill."

One no longer has to be called a Communist, one only has to be compared to the latest neocon hobbyhorse. If you're a professor and you disagree with them, you're "the new Ward Churchill." If you're a minister, you might be dubbed "the new Jeremiah Wright" or "the new Al Sharpton." And so on. But compare some flamebot like Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck to McCarthy and you'll either get squawks of outrage or an out-of-right-field screed asking what was so bad about McCarthy in the first place?

technorati: Fox, Bill O'Reilly

Their minds are filled with big ideas, images and distorted facts

Forty years later, in a 2004 interview, Dylan talked about the kind of interaction that keeps him from going out in public if he can avoid it. "People will say, 'Are you who I think you are?'" Dylan said. "And you'll say, Ahh, I don't know. And they'll say, 'You're, you're him,' and you'll say, 'Okay, yes?' And then the next thing is, 'Oh, no. Are you really him? I don't think you're him.' And that can go on and on."

Susan Strasberg used to tell a story about walking around New York with an incognito-in-plain-sight Marilyn Monroe. "Do you want to see me be her?" Monroe would say, and Strasberg describes the star turning on some imperceptible inner switch, then beginning to glow. Within moments the people who had been passing right by were stopping in their tracks, scrambling for pen and paper.

From an essay by Michelle Orange on mistaken identity in The Rumpus.

First thought, best thought

This NYT article about brain-wave research contains this central factoid: Your first 90 minutes of work are the best; don't let yourself be interrupted. After that first period, you can take a break, do other things. But preserve the freshness and sanctity of that initial period.

That fits with the oft-repeated recommendation to writers to wake up and write, first thing. And I've been dong that, more or less, for the last week, and getting a lot done. Sure enough, I can only go about an hour and a half before I lose steam.

technorati: writing, focus, concentrating

Man with strange transit-related name is missing

A man reportedly named Muni Bart Perzov is missing SFist reported. To read the one-paragraph story is to suffer a frisson of cognitive dissonance, at least for San Francisco Bay Area residents. It would be like a Chicagoan being named El Metra, or a New Yorker being named MTA Path.

I was reminded of the RER trains that serve suburban Paris. Even though the official names of the lines are A, B, C, D and E, the trains themselves have human-sounding nicknames that designate which branch of the line they're taking, names like ZEUS, VICK and NELY.

Old ladies making church

My friend Sara, whose religious conversion and consequent founding of a successful Food Pantry was the subject of her book Take This Bread, told me once that the old ladies who gather on the sidewalk for hours before the pantry opens to distribute food are, in their community with one another, fulfilling a spiritual need. "That's church too," she said of their alfresco klatsch.

I remembered Sara's words when I stumbled across this video:

Isn't that church too?

technorati: postmodernism,dancing, church, Sound of Music