Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Year: 2005
Pages: 272

My first experience with David Sedaris was unimpressive, largely because I was not reading David Sedaris’ work but rather a compendium of his favorite short stories. I was finally able to get Dress Your Family from the library and I can now say that I enjoyed it very much.

The book focuses on Sedaris’ family life, a collection of short essays or stories compiled semichronologically and illustrating very roughly the wacky hijinx of his childhood, his turbulent middle years, and his surviving relationships with his sometimes-estranged siblings. Sedaris isn’t laugh-out-loud funny in the vein of Dave Barry, but he has a very quiet, charming wit about him that seems almost appropriate once he paints himself as something of a queer stereotype.

What I enjoy most is Sedaris ability to create the literal story (remember, funny and charming) and then introduce some other peripheral anecdote or even literal object that ties the story to some larger metaphor about life, love, or happiness. It’s the sort of technique that Chuck Palahniuk likes to use, except for the “life, love, and happiness” part, and Sedaris manages to use it so subtley that I’m impressed when I catch on to such subtext.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim isn’t going to top my chart of favorite books, but it is good enough that I will start looking for some other stuff by Sedaris, and that’s no small compliment.

§905 · December 27, 2005 · (No comments) · Tags:

Christopher Hitchens on Christmas

Everybody’s favorite curmudgeon—Christopher Hitchens—blasts the recent “War on Christmas.” Conservatives seemed to love him when he used scatological adjectives to describe Fahrenheit 9/11 (my mother forwarded me his editorial on it, apparently blithely unaware that she would hate the man in any other context), but something tells me that they won’t be trumpeting this article about.

No believer in the First Amendment could go that far [banning Christmas]. But there are millions of well-appointed buildings all across the United States, most of them tax-exempt and some of them receiving state subventions, where anyone can go at any time and celebrate miraculous births and pregnant virgins all day and all night if they so desire. These places are known as “churches,” and they can also force passersby to look at the displays and billboards they erect and to give ear to the bells that they ring. In addition, they can count on numberless radio and TV stations to beam their stuff all through the ether. If this is not sufficient, then god damn them. God damn them everyone.

§893 · December 22, 2005 · 4 comments · Tags: , , , ,

There is mischief afoot!

I was looking through my site logs today and happened to notice that, by gosh, I was getting a lot of referrals from MySpace pages, as well as some forums I’ve never visited. Turns out that some of my images are getting hotlinked pretty badly. There are a couple of them, like

Guybrush Threepwood

which is used on a forum. The worst, however (and I’m sure this will offend Rusty and S4R), is all the little MySpace twits (and I say twits not because they’re on MySpace, but because their creations would scare small children) who are hotlinking HUH.gif:

Pelvic Thrust!

I need to, of course, rewrite my .htaccess rules to disallow image hotlinking (for some reason, I thought it was already taken care of), but having so many people do it has irritated me so much that I’m very much considering the possibility of getting a Goatse or Tubgirl picture, scrawling “Don’t hotlink, asshat!” on it in red, and replacing the offending picture. Then, of course, taking screenshots of their MySpaces.

It’s mean, I know, but dammit, hotlinking was verboten years ago; haven’t people learned yet?

Update

I’ve decided to be nice and merely use an insulting text graphic instead.

Don't hotlink, kids

[see the MySpaces (not all of them will have it, but if they do, it’s mostly in the comments): 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11

§889 · December 20, 2005 · 5 comments ·

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Music (but were afraid to ask)

Or, the Top Ten Albums of 2005

2005 didn’t impress me as much as I thought it would: the Ephel Duath album was a flop, the Opeth and Nine Inch Nails albums were both disappointments; Tool has yet to give us any new regarding a new release. Still, there were a lot of good things about 2005, and so without further ado, I present the best releases of 2005 in no particular order (and some runners-up). Afterwards, check out ffanatic’s list, which is not only more thorough, but probably better researched, as well. Read more…

§872 · December 18, 2005 · 2 comments · Tags:

Alphabet Soup

Most of you are probably aware that the RIAA (Recording Industry Artists of America) and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) have been flicking legal boogers at internet users for several years now. Although their methods are medieval and (let’s face it) counterproductive, I understand their concern: if people can download high quality versions of music or movies through a P2P service for free, they have no incentive to buy these corporations’ (admittedly overpriced and usually lousy) products.

That is another topic in an of itself. But recently, the trend of litigious IP holders got worse. Now, the MPA (Music Publishers’ Association) is trying to sue (or worse) the proprietors of lyrics sites. Two things of note.

[MPA President Lauren] Keiser said he did not just want to shut websites and impose fines, saying if authorities can “throw in some jail time I think we’ll be a little more effective”.

Not even the RIAA was that harebrained. Oh, it gets better, though.

David Israelite, president of the National Music Publishers’ Association, added his concerns.

“Unauthorised use of lyrics and tablature deprives the songwriter of the ability to make a living, and is no different than stealing,” he said.

Well, sure, because if people can just go online and see the lyrics for a song, they have no reason to go out and buy the album.

No, wait….

§885 · December 17, 2005 · (No comments) · Tags: ,

← Older entries
Newer entries →