highlights (for adultescents)

Update the first part ~ The Large Hadron Collider has not yet ended the world.
- Update the second part ~ The free market has yet to provide a badass desk chair.
- Update the third part ~ Mead might be making a comeback.

on the autoethnography of one's own subjectivities

MS: I had a conversation last week about reclassifying all foods into two categories
MS: it was based on the BK ad were he claims to be a meatatarian
MS: but is clearly eating bread and cheese
MS: We decided that dairy was an ambiguous classification for food
MS: and should fall into the meat category
MS: but bread was a vegetable
MS: this lead to the man-conundrum
MS: a manly-man eats meat and drinks beer
MS: but this is clearly a contradiction
MS: he should eat steak and drink milk
mikaydee: ha! wow, that is absolutely correct
mikaydee: now, what about mead?
mikaydee: because mead is made from honey
mikaydee: which comes from animals
mikaydee: is mead manly?
MS: interesting...
MS: I'm going to have to go with yes.
MS: yes it is manly
mikaydee: awesome!
MS: you just saved men from drinking milk*
MS: congrats
mikaydee: yay!

*PM later rightly pointed out that, under this schema, manly-men could also drink fermented horse milk, which gets extra man points for being the default drink of the Mongolian mounted hordes.

meanwhile, on the franco-swiss border

They're turning on the Large Hadron Collider tonight in the hopes of observing the Higgs boson at long last.* There is, apparently, a very small chance that, rather than allow us to observe the building blocks of matter, the Large Hadron Collider will instead DESTROY THE EARTH. Am I alone in thinking that "Large Hadron Collider" is kind of a meh name for something that could create a black hole in the middle of Europe? Maybe it sounds better in French (Grand? Gros?). With the sensibilities of American Anglophones in mind, I propose the following list of alternative names for the LHC (along with the media outlets that would likely use them):

- CBS: Super Hadron Collider 1000
- Spike TV: World's Most Extreme Hadron Collider of Death
- Comedy Central: Best F*cking Hadron Collider Ever
- Adult Swim: The Doomsday Device
- Food Network: The Hadron Juicer
- History Channel: Man's Hubris Made Manifest
- Japanese TV: Super Happy Crasher of Hadrons for Maybe Ending Things

*I have only the barest understanding of the preceding sentence; the following sentence should probably be evaluated accordingly.

killing two birds for no reason

Further adventures in being brutally unhelpful to my friends:
mikaydee: http://www.google.com/products?q=desk+chair
AB: everything looks so bland and corporate
mikaydee: http://www.google.com/products?q=badass+desk+chair
AB: AGGGGHHH!
AB: i was excited til i clicked, i hate you
AB: i resent that that is at once a joke about desk chairs and a mockery of my values

wherein our heroine presents the detritus that is her meta-critical irrelevancy

Usually, I'm fairly excited for the release of extremely bad movies, because it means I get to read reviews of extremely bad movies, which are usually themselves pretty entertaining. Movie reviewers are generally an eloquent bunch, and they show off their skills best when, unencumbered by any sort of merit to which they might have to pay any amount of tedious respect, they are allowed to roundly savage a movie that is nearly universally regarded as awful.

So you can imagine how excited I was for the release of DISASTER MOVIE, a movie whose trailer failed to elicit from the audience even a knowing groan, moving well into the territory of "huh?" Sadly, it appears as though DISASTER MOVIE is so bad that critics can't even write a good bad review of it. A cursory survey of Rotten Tomatoes reveals a group of skilled writers so paralyzed with disgust, so resolutely defeated by having to take this movie seriously enough waste the calories required to put pen to paper, that they just gave up. Imagine a movie so qualitatively uninspiring that it fails to even inspire quality derision from people paid, largely, to deride?

And then I found this. Apparently, the lack of anything resembling a narrative left most critics with no jumping off point, no discernable skeleton on which to hang their well-deserved scorn. It would be like asking extraterrestrial, interdimensional beings made entirely of energy how the cake tastes. What makes this a bad movie? Who can tell, given how little resemblance it bears to the proverbial movie in the mind of God? Peter Sobczynski neatly gets around this problem by grafting the movie onto his own narrative of hope and despair, weaving together a tale in which a sense of historic purpose and childlike hope is nearly crushed under the weight of a supposed millenial self-awareness gone horribly, horribly wrong. He then bravely and thoroughly dissects the pure suckitude of this movie, like Edward Norton's pathologist in THE PAINTED VEIL, wading around in the crap on the dim hope that the rest of us won't have to suffer in the future. In the process, he reminds us that good writing can lift us up, that good satire does so under the guise of tearing us down, and why we all liked JUNO so much in the first place.