Bacon Nation

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

I wonder why my ass is getting so huge....

Seriously, if I eat this one more time, I am going to need my own zip code. Bacon popcorn -- merely reading the words will make your pants feel tight. Well, friends, my pants are tight indeed. And this despite the fact that I've added two spin classes a week to my regimen to try to put out the (grease) fire. I should mention that, not content with merely bacon and bacon fat, I add two other forms of fat to this recipe: parmesan cheese and some melted butter. Of course, the butter is there mostly to help the cheese stick, so it doesn't really count. The ground black pepper is crucial. However, this provides me with the opportunity to direct you to Adrienne's site; she is the genius behind bacon popcorn, and if I give her a reader or two on her fabulous food site, then the radical expansion of my ass will all have been worth it. Sigh.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

You Mean There's More Than One Guy Named "Heywood J. Blowme"?

Tom Friedman is such a fucking idiot. I know you knew this, but it just can't be said enough. Clearly, the best takedown of Friedman ever was Matt Taibbi's, which is sheer genius --- and I encourage you to read it. In that piece, which was a review of Friedman's "The World is Flat," Taibbi takes on every stupid aspect of Friedman's method -- beginning with the most basic: the notion that, if the world were flat, people would be more equidistant. They wouldn't, of course, a point that Taibbi makes beautifully:
The significance of Columbus's discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the "flat world" into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world.



Ok, so today Friedman was on Talk of the Nation, talking to the nation about the flat earth. I have to say, whenever I hear Friedman interviewed (he's been on Fresh Air with truly shocking frequency), he exudes a kind of glib confidence that strikes the darkest kind of terror into my heart. He is a soundbite man, a clever shtick man, a purveyor of advertising slogans dressed up as divine revelation. And so today, he spoke at great length about the grave flat earth effects of the Google (sorry, I seem to have gotten a little Bush in amongst my Friedman. How, I wonder, could such a thing have occurred?) -- in other words, according to Friedman, when you apply for a job, your potential employer may glance at your resume, but probably not, and if so only for the purpose of obtaining an accurate spelling of your name for insertion into the Google.

There, according to Friedman, your employer will learn about your whole life. Not just your MySpace page, which everyone knows to tidy in advance of a job search, but -- and I shit you not, he said this -- your college papers, your high school papers, even your sixth grade papers (actually, I don't know if he went as far back as the sixth grade, but definitely high school, and he implied the sixth grade). So, if you wrote a paper in the 6th grade about your love for porn, it's so known.

The problem with this is, as you would expect, that it just doesn't work. It used to, maybe even around the time TF wrote the book -- but not anymore, and he should stop saying it. Perhaps someone should tell him that things on the Internet change, you know, kind of quickly. I know all about this because recently a friend who shares a name with an unfortunately prominent wingnut wrote to ask what she should do; she was worried that people would confuse her with this neo-fascist nutbag, leading to professional problems. Curious about my own status, I googled my name. The last time I did this was, as best I can recall, a year or two ago. This time, I was disappointed to see that the tranny performance artist/sex therapist (seriously) who had previously come up well before any pages pertaining to the actual me had mysteriously vanished (implying it may be possible to seriously wipe the slate clean), or had at least dropped so low in the pages that I never got to him/her, Instead, a very serious and previously unnoticed gardener has risen to great prominence under my exact name. And this despite the fact that I don't have a single houseplant -- I hate plants; they all die so quickly.

My point is that, unless you have a highly unusual name (I have one friend whose name produced hits only relating directly to her -- her parents were hippies, and obviously high when they named her) (Reader K, I speak of you), your potential employers are not going to be sure whether any given site is really about you, and the more extreme the site, the less sure they can reasonably be. And while I would actually be psyched to find my college papers on the Internet -- I'd love to read them again -- the fact is, no one is posting student papers on unprotected websites, mostly because who the hell would bother, and no one could ever know for sure that you wrote that damn paper anyway. As the Internets grow, and more and more lives are archived on the net, the LESS possible it will be to track people's history through the casual use of Google (note the qualifiers there). So, this example proves the opposite of what Friedman thinks -- the world isn't getting flat; or, it's not getting flat the way Friedman means. It is getting flat in the Columbus sense -- in the sense that Friedman is totally fucking ignorant.

So Google your name with impunity. I pronounce it safe to re-enter the water.

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

It Helps If You Know My Name When You Read This Post

On occasion, it may occur to my one surviving parent to think to himself, "Damn, that daughter of mine is a loser. She is a loser, and a lush, and so very lazy. She's limited, that's for sure, and also literal-minded, lackluster, and a lard-ass." But now we know -- my parent can blame himself for giving me the wrong name. Thanks for nothing, Dad! Of course, my dad's name is Dennis, and he is no dentist. Or anything else that starts with D.