Category Archives: Work

Linkie of the Day: Just Fucking Google It!

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Just Fucking Google It

And just today I was having an interesting conversation with a 13-year-old friend about how the names of certain companies are becoming bywords and catchphrases. McGyver, Google, Kleenex, Kitty Litter. The list goes on. I told her about the article Spy ran years ago, where they used the words "Kitty litter" without the trademark and got a polite "I know you're going to make fun of me, but I get paid to do this" note from the woman who tracks Kitty Litter mentions that don't include trademark notations and chastizes them. So they ran her letter, followed by "we were gonna make fun of you, but since you were so polite we're cutting you a break. And here's a head-start on next month's quota: KITTY LITTER, KITTY LITTER, KITTY LITTER, KITTY LITTER, KITTY LITTER!"

Then I showed my friend the Cthulhu blog, and took her out for dinner: we started with four kinds of ice cream and ended late at night in a divey Chinatown hole in the wall inhabited by security guards, sinister gambling addicts and artists, chowing down on organ meats. Everything was heavily laced with cornstarch and sodium.

Her vegetarian, pure-living mother would be thrilled, I'm sure. I love being the "Bad Auntie."

Tips on Tips

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Pimpin' fo tips! 

And then things took a turn for the worse when a Ben & Jerry's employee made the horrible mistake of panhandling for tips during this sacred day of frugality…

While we all thought his loud beggary was both annoying and tacky, a certain Mad Black Woman would have none of it, and thus began serving up a big chocolate-covered sundae of vulgarity and obnoxious protest, repeatedly telling the employee that he should be ashamed of himself for asking us for tips, and that this was precisely why he would be "workin' up at Ben & Jerry's for the rest of yo' life!"

Okay, this is an example of what not to do. As a former Starbuckian who's worked her share of charity days, I can say with complete confidence that any tips this man made that day should be saved, because anyone that psycopathic is gonna need bail money on a fairly regular basis. Not only that, but the worker inside who is also looking for tips is probably gonna rip his intestines out and use them for packing tape because she got skunked.

So, do you tip at fast food chains? McDonalds doesn't have tip jars, it has donation boxes, and that's a very good thing. OTOH it must be said that I leave larger tips than donations generally speaking; perhaps I'm just evil that way.

Do you tip when you order off the regular menu? No. If it's bog-standard, the standard is you don't tip.

You do tip, however, when you order something like the following:

Grande 4-shot hazelnut mocha, half-caf, half sweet on both, 2%, easy whip. Which is what I order, when I can afford it. The general rule is a nickle for every customizer, which still keeps it affordable. If they fuck up, which they can do from time to time, you don't tip the next time and you explain why. If you do it politely, they'll actually really want to get it right, just to prove they are better than the obvious day-release, community-time-serving creep who fucked up your mocha before. Then, when you have confirmed the drink has turned out exactly the way you like it, you walk over to the tip jar and put some money in. Triple impact, and pennies clink just as loud as toonies.

On a day when the stuff is free, such as Ben & Jerry's free cone day, you don't pimp the tips. About 20% of people are gonna give you the full price of the free thing anyway. You'll do well. Pimping the tips is just plain greedy, and everyone and their cousin Jethro knows you're being paid minimum wage by the hour anyway; it's not as if you're volunteering the time.

And remember, when you pimp the tips and score big because of the guilt/pressure factor, it comes out of your Karma account, double.

Fake Writer Day, Junior Edition

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Courtesy of Gawker, that heartbreaking bitch. Well, what can you expect from a New Yorker, eh?

Brief recap of the Fake Writer Roundup.

Exhibit A:

JT LeRoy, Fake Writer A

JT LeRoy, the young, mixed-up transexual addict who used to be a lot lizard (truck stop child hooker).

Not so much, on all counts.

Middle-aged, crafty, straight, married mundane with a perfectly respectable past and a nice, clean apartment in a good part of town. Which was part of the problem. So, whachagonnado? Ya hire your sister-in-law for appearances, put her in a fright wig and CNIB shades, and have her sleep with Asia Argento: bingo, instant wunderkind.

Exhibit B:

James Frey, Fake Writer B

James Frey, ex-con, hardened, hard-living addict who found salvation in a sometimes-brutal honesty and acceptance of personal responsibility.

Not. So. Much.

James Frey, coddled, middle-class boy who has been pulled over for drunk driving a coupla times and may once have prank called an ex-girlfriend.

So now we come to Exhibit C:

Kaavya Viswanathan

Kaavya Viswanathan, wholesome, overachieving valedictorian and current Ivy Leaguer and literary wunderkind, every Indian parents' dream daughter.

Not. So. Fast.

Kaavya Viswanathan, not the first young woman to be used by older, wiser publishers looking for a marketing hook. Now, she probably didn't write all of her new book; that much is clear. If she did, she stole, either deliberately or under the influence of the ghost of George Harrison, a dozen or so significant sections. And it's a given that big publishers sometimes pick, almost at random, somebody to give a huge career to simply because they need personalities to market, and if their outstanding characteristic is nothing more than their marketability, surely much the same can be said of half of Manhattan. But I encourage you to read the whole of this analysis by Gawker Intern Neel Shah, both because it's a thoughtful overview with particular reflection on the cultural pressures shared by both Shah and Viswanathan, and also because Shah is really, really hot.

Neel Shah, Gawker Intern, Hearthrob

And going to the transcripts:

Whatever dubious subcontinental wunderkind Kaavya Viswanathan did write, didn’t write, had ghost-written, cribbed, subconsciously borrowed, telepathically stole, or else was brainwashed into doing by a bunch of Pakistanis hell-bent on subverting India’s credibility in the burgeoning Southeast Asian chick-lit genre, at least one thing is clear: shit like this is the reason brown kids should stick to quantitative math and organic chemistry. Ms. Viswanathan, after all, had all the hallmarks of future i-banker or doctor.

etc, etc.

Obituary: Jane Jacobs

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Jane Jacobs

NEW YORK (AP) – Jane Jacobs, an author and The Death and Life of Great American Citiescommunity activist of singular influence whose classic “The Death and Life of Great American Cities'' transformed ideas about urban planning, died Tuesday, her publisher said. She was 89.

Jacobs died at a Toronto hospital, which she entered a few days ago, according to Random House publicist Sally Marvin. The author, who would have turned 90 on May 4, had been in poor health.

A native of Scranton, Pa., Jacobs lived for many years in New York before moving to Toronto in the late 1960s. She and her husband, architect Robert Jacobs Jr., were unhappy that their taxes supported the Vietnam War and moved to Canada. Robert Jacobs died in 1996.

Jacobs, who based her findings on deep, eclectic reading and firsthand observation, challenged assumptions she believed damaged modern cities – that neighborhoods should be isolated from each other, that an empty street was safer than a crowded one, that the car represented progress over the pedestrian.

Her priorities were for integrated, manageable communities, for diversity of people, transportation, architecture and commerce. She also believed that economies need to be self-sustaining and self-renewing, relying on local initiative instead of centralized bureaucracies.

Jacobs received a number of prizes, including a lifetime achievement award in 2000 from the National Building Foundation in Washington, D.C.

Hacked. Someone soon to be whacked.

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Fine, hack my site. Change my immortal prose; anything you could do would be inferior. It wouldn't bother me, and might be good for a laugh.

But do not take the post below this and change "Stephen Harper" into "Paul Martin" while I am out at dinner.

Not if you value the only testicle you possess.

I will take my born-and-raised-on-military-bases fist and I will put my father's medals in it and I will go proctological and evisceratory on your sad, sorry and pox-ridden ass.

And I will hunt you down and post your name, address, phone number, tween-baiting Myspace site, LavaLife profile, and dick size to this website (it can measure down to electron microscope levels), and then I will go down to the police station and I will hook this up to the cyberstalker of several years ago, and they will hunt you down and they will spay and neuter what's left of you once I'm done, and we will ship it to your mother in eight separate Tupperware containers.

In the meantime, sodium fluoroacetate solution brings weight loss & penis growth. Try it!!

Save me some time, Loserboy.

FYI:

CIA Surrender Manual. Think About It. You'll Love PMITA Prison