Shorter Carpetbagger:
I said a flip flop
the flippie the flippie
to the flip flip flop, and you dont stop the flop…
Blogs
Manners Maketh The Mutt
Some days I really miss The News Blog. This is one of those inane blog problem column letters that Steve Gilliard and the News Blog commenters would have really gotten their teeth into (if you’ll excuse the lame pun):
From Chowhound’s Table Manners blog:
Is Fido Invited?
When it’s not OK to bring your dog to a partyBy Helena Echlin
Dear Helena,
Why are some people so weird about dogs? Ours gets lonely at home, so sometimes we take him out with us. He is a pit bull but has a sweet personality. Recently we took him to a drinks party. He got a little hyper with all the attention he received and was jumping up and begging for cheese straws. Anyway, the hostess got in a snit and told her husband to ask us to take the dog home. I was a little annoyed. He wasn’t making a mess. He was being cute. In fact, his antics were making people let down their guard at kind of a stuffy party. Were we wrong to assume he’d be welcome? —It’s Not a Party Without Dog Drool
No, no way. That has to be a fictitious email. They take their pit bull to parties and they still get invited places? Helena’s reply boggles the mind too:
An uninvited dog could do worse than monopolize the conversation. It might frighten the children, send someone into a sneezing fit, chew on the draperies, or defile the shrubbery. Says Magee: “Sometimes if we go somewhere with a back garden and the other person has a male dog, the dogs tend to get into pissing contests, and Baker may piss on a plant that might be one [the hosts] like.”
Or something even worse could happen.
The Incredible Shrinking Attribution Ray
As has become depressingly usual in UK media, here’s yet another lazy British media hack blatantly ripping off a US blog thinking no-one will notice. Do they not think we can use the internet?
From the Guardian’s Money Blog, 18 August:
The incredible grocery shrink ray – why what you buy is getting smaller
US blog The Consumerist has been covering this for weeks, a quick google for ‘grocery shrink ray‘ would have immediately revealed. The pages and pages of posts, all tagged ‘grocery shrink ray’ for the ease and convenience of researchers and readers.
Is it just too much effort for Guardian bloggers even to type a phrase or a word or two into a search engine and check it out before claiming it as their own?
I don’t know what it is; does being a proper paid writer – with qualifications and everything – on a proper newspaper (The Guardian! Woohoo!) magically elevate Sandra Haurant above such plebeian tools as Google?
Granted there is an acknowledgement of sorts but it’s to the wrong person.
Jeff Allder, policy expert at the National Consumer Council, says:
“In America it is known as the grocery shrink ray and this is one trend from the US that we definitely don’t want too much of over here.”
For someone with so much paid writing on consumer issues under her belt you’d think Haurant would know all about this trend in product sizing anyway, and know the blog too, with no need to google. After all The Consumerist is one of the big consumer issues blogs out there and any competent consumer journalist worth their salt would know that. To my mind this makes her lack of attribution or a link quite difficult to understand.
But then what do I know? I’m not a proper paid writer – editor even – on a proper newspaper and above such petty concerns as boring old plagiarism. I’m just another blogging oik, and things like that bother me.
Yeah, And Why Don’t All Blokes Shave Their Buttcracks? Slobs.
One the more asinine posts I’ve ever read on HuffPo (and there’ve been quite a few) is this from expat Brit, former VH1 Wardrobe Assistant, social climber, PR man and media wannabe Tony Alcindor (see above), chastising women for their unkemptness.
He thinks women should be hypergroomed and hyperconscious of appearance all the time; any woman who’s not is a filthy, lazy slattern. Most Unlike our own dear Queen of the expat arch-social climbers, Arianna herself (and all the shiny Hollywood pals of hers Alcindor would love to be introduced to as a result of being invited to blog at HuffPo.). All are shined, waxed botoxed and coiffed to a pitch beyond even a dog’s ability to hear, much like Tony himself.
I have to quote a bit to give the true flavour of just how asinine it is:
One of my all time favorite pastimes is people-watching, and ever since I moved to New York I couldn’t be happier. It’s like being part of a giant fashion show and the sidewalk is the runway. Every street, every block, every neighborhood has another real life model strutting her stuff in this great metropolis.
Then I started to look a little closer…
To my dismay, not all was what it seemed. Not all of you were paying attention! Not all were taking the time to pull it together! When I looked a little closer, things were good from afar, but far from good. My rose-colored glasses are cracked and some of you are skipping whole steps — things you forgot to do. You think no one notices or you simply couldn’t be bothered.
THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE, LADIES!
[…]
Undergarments: A HUGE DETAIL. Stained bras, panties, slips, cami’s, stockings with holes, things with broken elastic and anything held together with a safety pin must be thrown away – immediately! Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Once it is discovered (by accident or by circumstance) you’ll thank me for the lack of embarrassment you won’t have to suffer through. Didn’t your mom always say make sure you had on clean undies in case you got into an accident? So PLEASE make sure all of your underpinnings FIT CORRECTLY! Most women are wearing the wrong size bra. If you have back fat, you may not be fat! You just might have on the wrong bra. Lastly, SPANX under everything! This is the equivalent of liposuction without the surgery.
Yeah, right. If I went out in the street right now and made every man in it drop their pants (and who hasn’t sometimes wanted to do that), I suspect not one would be found unafflicted by crotch rot, saggy elastic, pee stained Y-front or a well-aged collection of superimposed skidmarks.
I know this. I do laundry.
Alcindor goes on to damn all of us who can’t afford the upkeep of even a basic style, let alone a monthly colour and cut or a weekly salon blowdry (those who don’t go to the hairdresser at all don’t even register on his radar):
Hair: This is a very sensitive subject so I’ll make it short and sweet. Whatever your hairstyle, make sure it is maintained — we’re talking color and cut. You know those crazy commercials where people are swinging their hair and loving it — it could be you. It’s no joke. I have a few beautiful friends in LA with that kind of hair. They didn’t always have that hair, but a great hairdresser is worth a million bucks!
“I have a few beautiful friends in LA”. Get you, Mr Big Shot. No, of course they didn’t always have that hair – not until they moved to somewhere you can buy it by the yard.
All it takes is money, and hey, haven’t we all got plenty?
I thought of posting an incandescently eloquent response to this arrant nonsense at the HuffPo, pointing out the socio-politico-economic context of the constant ‘beauty’ busywork that’s expressly designed and promoted by commerce to keep women too paranoid or neurotic to actually protest their subjugation to pointless routines and expenditure. Then I thought nah, fuck it.
Alcindor’s foray into blogging is another attention seeking stunt from a career attention seeker, so this is the first and last attention he’ll get from me. Not that it will or even should bother him any, up there in the rarefied air of minor celebrity HuffPo bloggerdom. I’m sure he has many more important people to toady up to and PR junkets to attend to notice some NL blogger calling him a wanker.
But dammit, he pissed me off. And I bet he has skidmarks and hair on