The Apple Store in Costa Mesa had a sign outside the store advertising a “Ladies’ Night.” It appears to be some kind of “outreach to women” thing. It isn’t clear whether the event itself is going to be useful, but they really could have chosen a better name for it. Really they could.
And on the left side of the plane if you’ll look out you can see a sick man, a beggar, and a corpse…
I shouldn’t expect too much from the free weekly paper in a rich flat right-wing suburb fifty miles south of Los Angeles, but I’m very disappointed in the Orange County Weekly’s “Best of O.C.” issue. It’s an unreadable mess of office in-jokes, arch post-ironic snark, inaccuracies, logrolling, and delusions of grandeur. It is, in short, the Waiting for Guffman issue.
It begins with a bizarrely academic leader which is precious as hell but probably the best-written thing in the issue. It belongs in a painfully literary college humor magazine.
Almost all of the rest of the issue is devoted to an in-group of 25ish partyers. This leads to “My Favorite Things” spreads for a fundraiser party organizer who like Lhasa Apsos and those old 90s records, some random community college student with one of the new-fangled “blogs” who is therefore a social critic, an activist stereotype straight from the pages of The Onion, and a Chapman prof who is claimed to be a novelist but appears to be Adam Sandler playing one in a bad movie. Oh, and an apparently very nice guy who is a computer dude and DJ and stuff but is oddly described as a Renaissance man. Maybe he buys drinks for them a lot. He does seem pretty cool.
About a third of the items are in Long Beach, which is not in Orange County. However the 25ish partyers all live and hang out there and this issue is for and about them, not about their readers.
Clearly the ad salesmen did way too good a job. The issue is big and fat, and even with the high ad-to-editorial ratio they run, that was a lot of inches to fill. But they do have two or three good writers. Arellano and Moxley are of national quality, and Nick Schou is capable and talented. But instead of letting some people with skill work on this thing they just dumped in a load of garbage they could giggle to each other over. They compound the problem by adding on a few “I beg to differ!” items to the end of each “best of” item. This gives you the charming sensation of being next to their group as they pass in-jokes back and forth. I fail to understand why anyone would care which El Pollo Loco these people prefer, much less be present at a cute little fake argument about the choices available.
I suppose it doesn’t matter that my local weekly paper blows so hard. People read it for the listings and the ads, the same way they read the L.A. Weekly. The good writing goes as unnoticed as the bad by almost everyone, and this particular crowd of drunk scenesters is fooling themselves about their importance as much as I did 20 years ago at a free weekly paper, myself. But it could be good, and I wish it was. There are a lot of great things to write about here, enough to fill a Best Of issue with, some Worst Of, and with a lot more cultural and political substance and way more actual fun.
I sincerely wish these people saw their opportunity and took it.
As they say in their own post-everything bad-is-good ode to cosmetic surgery, truly it is another nail in the rational coffin.
P.S. No one thinks you’re badass for hanging out in Santa Ana at night except your mom. They’re all going to laugh at you! They’re all going to laugh at you!
L.A. Boy Scouts new merit badge: ‘Respect Copyrights’
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A Boy Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, etc., etc. He is also respectful of copyrights.
Boy Scouts in the Los Angeles area will now be able to earn a merit patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies and music.
The patch shows a film reel, a music CD and the international copyright symbol, a “C” enclosed in a circle.
The movie industry has developed the curriculum.
“Working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles, we have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why they are valuable, and hopefully change attitudes about intellectual property theft,” Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, said Friday.
Scouts will be instructed in the basics of copyright law and learn how to identify five types of copyrighted works and three ways copyrighted materials may be stolen.
Scouts also must choose one activity from a list that includes visiting a movie studio to see how many people can be harmed by film piracy. They also can create public service announcements urging others not to steal movies or music.
Car accident: dumb. Car accident in parking lot at 3 mph: super dumb. Car accident at 3 mph in psychotherapist’s parking lot, partlally due to side effects of therapy: dumb enough to be funny. Said accident being with therapist’s own parked car: COMEDY GOLD.
Price to fix just her car: $1200. And then I get to fix mine. Hey, this shit ain’t funny now.
FOLKS I’M SHOWING MY SUPPORT FOR THE OCEAN AND THE BEACH AND THE FISH AND THE WHALES AND THE SEA ANEMONES AND THE SURFERS AND THE LAUGHING, RUNNING CHILDREN IN THE WAVES AND OUR FUTURE ON THE PLANET BY PUTTING THIS ORNAMENTAL LICENSE PLATE ON MY PIECE OF SHIT TRUCK THAT GETS 14 MILES PER GALLON AND IS ENTIRELY EMPTY BUT EXTREMELY SHINY BECAUSE THAT’S HOW I ROLL!!!
Their “friends” setup is bizarrely broken. You can’t see anything but photo and their chosen “display name,” so you don’t know who some people are after a few months when they change their pic to Woody Woodpecker and start calling themselves Antonin Artaud.
I find myself thinking “Who is Potatoes O’Brien?” or “Not only is this woman not Audrey Hepburn, but I don’t know anyone who lives in Macon, Georgia. WTF?”
Then it gets funnier with email. Today I forwarded something and saw how that works; you get the list of display names from which to choose. Two of my friends chose the same one, it being their first name. So I didn’t know whether I was forwarding to turnip or salome_st_john. Fortunately they have similar senses of humor so I just sent it to both.
It’s strange how many recently-built human artifacts are like ancient fucked-up things that Just Somehow Happened.
War! Death! Fear! And sex at the circus.
I hear the slants are doing a moon shot, lol?
Via The Null Device, a wonderful set of suggested improvement for cheating from a professor at SUNY Buffalo. I hadn’t realized this, but cut and paste is one of the new hazards for the cheater. Watch that formatting!
Payroll company faxes 121 pages of confidential stuff to wrong person
Wrong number faxes are a huge risk. It’s obviously possible to typo an email address, but since so many of them are names or words the sender is doing a visual checksum as the email is written and sent. Punching in a string of numbers is different, and with so very many faxes out there the chance of getting a friendly “okay!” from the wrong number is pretty good.
When I was at the hospital we paid a lot of attention to this because we were frequently faxing medical records to physicians. We had a rule that we would fax nothing to any insurance company, only to the attending physician or a specialist for whom we had written permission from the attending to share records. People always wanted us to fax stuff RIGHT NOW! but it was very important that we refuse.
One day I got an incoming fax that made no sense. The clerk had just dumped it on my desk. It was from one of the big accounting firms, and was about 20 pages of detailed financial information. It had nothing to do with the hospital. On close inspection this was a detailed financial analysis for one of the parties in an impending merger of two large companies.
I called the guy and told him I had it, and that it was okay, I worked at a hospital and I was going to shred it. He nearly cried. “Good thing I didn’t call the recipient, eh?” I said jovially.
Faxes are dumb.
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