Inexplicable Bondage Picture du Jour.

Probably work safe in that hardly anyone would be able to figure out what the point of all this was.

nickjb told me this evening that everyone at his library job received business cards. Apparently the City decided that they would get cards for all employees in all divisions simultaneously, so the order came down that library employees were to receive these also.

Since Nick is at the bottom layer of the Library hierarchy and shelves books, he is neither an august Librarian nor an honorable Clerk but merely a loyal Page. People in the first two categories received the usual box of 500 personalized cards, which only the Librarians will actually put to use.

The pages received a rubber-banded deck of about 20 cards, on which the name is blank.

After deep and lengthy consideration I can find no actual purpose for such a card. Nick cannot identify himself to customers with it unless he writes his name on it. Even so he has no reason to do this. He is a page; he shelves books and occasionally tells people where the fiction section or the bathroom is. In no situation will he hand a card to a Library customer and say “give me a call”. Unlike say a car rental agency or a medical clinic, a library has no customers who will need a card to remember the address or phone number of the place, either. It’s just not that kind of organization.

The nameless business card therefore represents a totally useless object in the pure Dada sense, like one of Man Ray’s objets inutiles. It exists and has the structure of a useful object but cannot be used for anything that it might represent.

This means that there is only one meaning of the card. It is to humiliate the pages and remind them of their lowly status. Like other Library employees, they are called upon to represent the organization, but they are not entitled to any identity of their own and must demonstrate this by displaying blank calling cards.

The card says: I am of no consequence. I think we all need one!

eyeteeth pointed out to me today that the I Love the 90s television show was reminiscing about 1997, which is only seven years ago. A highlight of long-ago 1997 was South Park. We agreed that it was in fact impossible to be nostalgic about South Park because it was still going on and hadn’t stopped yet.

My immediate thought was this: I demand from now on to experience nostalgia for events synchronously, exactly as they happen in a one to one ratio. I am therefore fondly remembering the old livejournal days as I type this and submit it via that great Internet experience we all shared back in ‘04.

Give me that real time rock ‘n’ roll!

..about the coverage of the gay NJ governor and his resignation is that he uses the word “consensual”, as if he had to make it clear that there wasn’t any Big Gay Rape Action going on in the governor’s mansion, or in order to admit that he consented to it, and it’s not clear which, and it’s not clear which anyone would think is worse.

“Yeah so I was sitting in my office minding my own business when this really really homosexual man came in and insisted that we have sex! I mean he was really INSISTENT!”

versus

“I admit it. Not only did I have the Wrong Sex, but I totally CONSENTED to it. It wasn’t a prison thing, or anything”.

Avast, me baconeers.

Bacon selection / Bacon t-shirt / Bacon air freshener / Bacon of the month club (one or two packages per month, June-September all delivered in June) / Bacon candles / Bacon soap

And if you don’t like bacon, how about some guns?

1. ”A group known as the League of Human Dignity helped arrange for Deuel to be driven to a local livestock scale, where he could be weighed.” Phew! Glad we preserved his Human Dignity!
2. While rescue crews came up with a back-door rescue plan, detectives secured the crime scene and questioned family members on how it got this bad.” Maybe it was the eating and not moving?

Bonus for the league themselves, with this fly graphic showing their phat moves.

Ad just seen for Farmer John bacon (a two for one)

“For those who like to wash down their bacon with more bacon.”

I was talking to Laura K. about philosophy humor (haw!) and I got a UCLA flashback.

A philosophy professor I had there had a cartoon on his door where one mechanic is saying to another “So if what you’re saying is valid, then a priori we must accept that a Mr. Evilwrench also exists.”

1. Satan’s Corner Office Shoes:

   

2. $78 Ugg boots for children.

   

3. Metatarsal protection boots with static dissipation and protection against 600 volts of open current for FIGHTING EVIL SPACE INSECTS ON YOUR DEATH STAR.

   

So there’s this guy, and he’s from a poor rural part of a poor country. And the country has been at war at lot over the years. He and all his friends are flat broke and constantly in danger, most likely. And then he comes to the U.S. and visits Los Angeles to work on a translation project, which I bet is pretty cool stuff.

Unfortunately he falls into the hands of a self-important digerati netizen bOING bOING person who uses him for the equivalent of a Junior High School photo essay and poses him in front of Versace in Beverly Hills for the big meaningful contrast. And of course she gets the quote from him about the Gucci mink-lined doggie carrier.

She also takes pains to mention the brand of her digital camera. And to use the word “skillz”. She does say that “there is a long story behind this image for another time”, but I bet you a dime she never gets to it.

I sure hope she bought him a nice lunch. Having to pose for the Photo Opportunity of Contrasts so that the local lady bountiful can feel in touch with your indigenous-people poverty-victim coolness must be a real pain in the ass.