Music, to my ears.

Gray Lady meets Gray Man

Check out the hilariously prim correction on the editorial page of the March 3rd edition of The New York Times. The item reads in full:

Correction

An Editorial Observer column in The Times yesterday incorrectly cited lyrics from a Michael Jackson song. The phrase "mamase mamasa mamakosa" ends the song "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," not "Working Day and Night."

Other Jackson lyrics giving fits to copywriters, fact-checkers and decency censors everywhere as his trial gets underway:

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R.I.P., H.S.T.

Hunter S. Thompson is dead -- by his own hand, they say. Unless he was terminally ill, the "Union" has to assume it was an accident.

One of the many classic H.S.T. lines that has stuck with this reader over the years was from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 -- something to the effect that putting Muskie up against Nixon would have been like pitting a three-toed sloth vs. a wolverine.

However he actually said it, it was slicker and harsher than that. Time to dust off those old paperbacks. Or at least check out this photo gallery.

The Ka-Ching Point

BOP's Sterling Newberry demolishes the "Panglossian sophistry" of three "well written bad books": Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and Blink and Jim Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. Ouch:

These books are not then, brilliant, but merely brilliant marketing; they are not theories, but used car salesmen. But who are they selling to? .... [E]veryone in the intellectual middle whose job it is to come up with dead variables and other incentives that willl make ordinary people do the right thing – because they need to be told that they aren’t fleecing idiots, but instead, the decisions will be the confirmation of their own work.

Virtual Camper

Got three minutes to spare? Then check out this 3-D animation of a conceptual update on the classic VW camper.

The only way Verdier could have improved this clip is if a feral CGI bear had appeared toward the end and clawed the hell out of all those screens and folding chairs. But you can't have everything...

Cheese, miraculous cheese

The bidding on this thing is up over $13,000 already.

To this observer, it looks more like Marlene Dietrich. But who are we to argue with a guy who not only won the lottery but also been interviewed on tee-vee about "The Story of the Virgin Mary In The Grilled Cheese"?

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Garbage State

Compared with the movies it is copyin--er, paying tribute to--Garden State feels like a focus-grouped and poll-tested marketing vehicle.

Like Jim Carrey's superior but ultimately empty counterprogramming piece, Eternal Sunshine, one leaves GS thinking: Why should I care about these people?

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Ray Gone

Now here's someone whose death our media really ought to be covering wall-to-wall, instead of Reagan: Singer, songwriter, arranger and piano virtuoso Ray Charles.

While many only know Charles as the "Georgia on my Mind" guy, his catalogue is so broad, deep and influential it's hard to know where to start. The 'Union' will start from the beginning, with early recordings like "Sittin' on Top of the World," and go right through to the end. The man was a true musical giant.

Get thee re-write!

Doesn't anyone still read Strunk and White? Even the most celebrated bloggers break some key rule of The Elements of Style daily. Take this brief-yet-belabored post from Josh Marshall:

In the category of articles you should not miss: Take a look at Wes Clark's new piece in The Washington Monthly on democracy, the Middle East and the how the Bush administration failed to understand how either works.

Strunk would have taken Marshall to the woodshed for that ungainly graf, shortening it nearly by half:

Check out Wes Clark's new Washington Monthly piece on democracy, the Middle East and the Bush administration's failure to understand either.

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Spalding's Last Trip

With the death of monologist Spalding Gray now confirmed, Alex Williams' pre-obituary at New York Magazine is worth revisiting.

Gray's best-known work, Swimming to Cambodia, ends enigmatically with a line about finally understanding "what killed Marilyn Monroe." The unspoken answer, he seemed to imply, was an excess of bliss. In the case of Gray's decision to throw himself off the Staten Island Ferry at night into frigid water, in black corduroy pants, the cause seems just the reverse.