Dave Fucking Eggers is doing celebrity interviews.
Three decades after the Monty Python team made the silliest film ever, it’s been reborn as a hit musical. And it’s even got the killer rabbit! As Spamalot prepares to open in London, Eric Idle tells Dave Eggers why this was something he had to get right.
But why was it something Dave had to do at all?
I think we can abolish CSIS, MI6 and the CIA now. We have the Liquor Freedom Indicator to take and transmit the temperature of any geopolitical hotspots.
Imagine the savings: total cost = the bar tab for a double Johnny Walker Black on the rocks in a bar in the capital of each nation. Compare that to an estimated $30 billion for the CIA alone, $200 million for CSIS, and £776 million for MI6. Hmmm…
I shall get to work on the travel grant application immediately.
Americans need to know who their friends are and now. That’s been a tall order since long before Archie Bunker wondered what trick Nixon had up his sleeve pretending to make peace with the ChiComs. Our own State Department is standing proof that you can spend seven years at Georgetown, ace the Foreign Service Exam, and still not know your Assyrians from your asshole.
Today, the world’s a ball of confusion, right? War
in Iraq, Lebanon, Uzbekistan, Timor, Somalia, Gaza, Backwaterstan, and Toledo. The quickly shifting sands of foreign relations have increased the complexity of the U.S.’s ties, alliances, and uneasy truces from “merely knotty” to “what the hell are we doing?” If war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography, are asymmetrical, urban, guerrilla conflicts with non-state actors God’s way of making geography irrelevant?
Average Americans consistently demonstrate no understanding of expected return, octane ratings, and what the hell their legislators voted for last session. They’re never going to get ahead of the foreign policy learning curve unless someone can simplify the process. That’s why I try to distill all analysis of a foreign country’s structure, culture, and prospects for success down to booze.
So without further ado, I give you the liquor freedom indicator.
There follows an dryly exhaustive analysis of Pakistan, Gaza, Saudi Arabia, Beirut, Northern Lebanon, Southern Lebanon, and Iraq. So to speak.
Still no word on Salt Lake City.
Every love story is better with a little Nine Inch Nails, right?
Or is that just mine…? Don’t answer that.
From Defamer.
Crikey! Steve Irwin is taking revenge from beyond the grave!
Okay, I’m lying. But somebody is killing stingrays in apparent payback for what they did to Steve. While I’m naturally against indiscriminate slaughter of innocents, they are
Toss a couple on theh bahbie and I’ll be roit oveh, maite!
from the Times:
At least ten stingrays have been found dead and mutilated on Australia’s eastern coast in the last week in what conservationists believe could be revenge attacks for the death of Steve Irwin, the popular naturalist and television personality…
But now it is feared that fans’ mourning has taken a new focus: stingray rage…
Michael Hornby, a friend of Mr Irwin and executive director of his conservation group Wildlife Warriors, said he was concerned that the rays, which are usually docile creatures, were being hunted and killed in retaliation for Irwin‘s death, which he said, would go against everything that the television star had stood for.
“It may be some sort of retribution, or it may be fear from certain individuals, or it just may be yet another callous act toward wildlife,” he said.
“We are disgusted and disappointed that people would take this sort of action to hurt wildlife. We just want to make it very clear that we will not accept and not stand for anyone who has taken a form of retribution. That’s the last thing Steve would want.”
Maybe you’ve heard of the rather edgy marketing that Johnny Walker is doing in Beirut; mind you, marketing whiskey in Beirut is always an edgy business, and I speak as the progeny of a woman who lived with a guy who made a moderate fortune importing Johnny Walker Black into Saudi Arabia. And taking blackmail photos of the Saudis in his casino for the CIA, but that’s neither here nor there.
Although it’s not as edgy as marketing it in Salt Lake City, come to think of it.
Their actual sign:
And the suggested new, rather more specific design, from Animal New York, via Gawker:
raincoaster 