Ok, whose idea were these creepy “We Know Why You Fly” ads for American Airlines? In this post-CAPPS era, does anyone find these scenes of airline personnel rattling off details of your motives for travelling particularly appealing?

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It’s hard work being Dubya, as we learned in the first presidential debate. Harry Shearer (of Simpsons/Chris Guest mockumentary fame) has a song up composed of clips from the debate reminding us how hard it is.

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As long as I’m getting all comic geeky on this page: I have a longstanding desire to acquire the original art of Transmetropolitan, issue 18, page 4 (the one with “Initiate Discovery!” in the upper-left corner). Darick Robertson, the artist, sells his originals, and this one was presumably sold off long ago. If anyone out […]

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P.J. Doland passes along this hilarious instructional video. Once you’re properly emofied, channel your bubbling inner turmoil into one of these games.

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Flipping through a New York Times style piece on the proliferation of satirical news sources (The Onion, The Daily Show) this weekend, I found myself thinking about a mid-’90s trend my friend and erstwhile prof Doug Rushkoff wrote about extensively at the time. “Wink Marketing,” which seems to have faded somewhat, though not entirely, was […]

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So Halloween’s coming up, and I’m mulling over what to do. Samhain’s one of my favorite holidays, and I typically insist on making a costume rather than just buying one. Last year I was Number 6 from the great mindbending BBC series The Prisoner, and the year before that, I was Batman’s nemesis The Joker. […]

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I came across two short passages this week that struck me as well suited to the current political climate. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose, I guess: For years past I have been an industrious collector of pamphlets, and a fairly steady reader of political literature of all kinds. The thing that strikes […]

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It’s proof of Lileks’ much lauded prose gifts that he manages to pull this off. The main section is lampooning the snobbery of urbanites (New York elites in particular)… but, of course, what could possibly be snobbier or a stronger implicit claim of intellectual superiority than to purport to have seen through a whole class […]

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Duncan “Atrios” Black and Peter Sarsgaard. Is this just me? Maybe it’s just that they both do the same eye-narrowing thing in intense-mode. I think the resemblance is more pronounced in some scenes from Shattered Glass.

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Matt Yglesias has a post up on the recent New York Times Magazine cover story on political bloggers, in which he makes a slight variant of a point he’s made before about distinguishing between blogs and other media. I more or less agree with the version he’s advanced elsewhere: that it can be confusing to […]

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