Morning

¶ Waste: The story is so depressing that I can barely bring myself to read it, much less post about it; but there’s no getting round its importance: In what I hope will turn out to have been the grossest civic failure of this decade, Seattle has scrapped its pay-toilet system.

Noon

¶ Yeastless: Catch up on all the new slang from Sloane Square.

¶ Rope: Jon Stewart’s montage of Talking Heads denouncing The New Yorker cover (you know which one) as tasteless, offensive, &c &c, ought to be enough, my friends, to convince you that watching any news program other than his own is bad for your brain.

¶ Department of Ahem: Just the other day, Perry Falwell of Booksaga, the Internet’s favorite bookselling blogger, solicited guest entries. It seems that “solicited” was the key word, as the last word in the entry’s first paragraph makes clear.

Night

¶ Tacet: What’s interesting about Rachel Cathcart’s story in the Times, “Donation to Same-Sex Marriage Foes Brings Boycott Calls” — aside from the story itself, which is, in the end, depressingly not-so-interesting — is the newspaper’s colossal discretion: the hotels that would be the object of the boycott are not named. Nor is a link provided. Anyone who wants to act on this story is going to have to do a little Googling.

 Oremus…

Morning, cont’d

§ Waste. Seattle seems to have gotten two things wrong — funding and location — but the fetid air that bubbles up from this story comes, to my mind, from the self-congratulatory Stalinism into which progressive thinking decays when it inspires crusades. The high-minded folks of the Pacific Northwest often seem to share the anti-commercial prejudices that can be found in the epics of courtly love and chivalry, from which all trace of shop-keeping have been expunged.

You’d think that Starbucks — a business that outdoes Mother Nature when it comes to camouflaging itself as a public service — would have had the self-interest to take a plunger to this problem.

Noon, cont’d

§ Yeastless. Fittingly, this new word for “hung over” sounds like a highly emphatic and vaguely regional pronunciation of “useless.”

Noting that today’s Rangers no longer bother with “hobby jobs,” Celia Walden writes,

“Disrevelled” refers to a Sloane’s appearance after a heavy night at Boujis; “dorleybowl” is a bad haircut ( in frequent usage, as you can imagine); “squippy” is the perpetual state of the Sloane (it means “hyperactive”).

Then there’s “jollop” (to go out and enjoy oneself) and “floordrobe”, the place young Sloanes choose to store their clothes – ie, on the floor. Oddly, there don’t seem to be any jolly, japeish terms for “the workplace”, “grocery shopping” and “bill paying”.

§ Rope. The longer I look at Barry Blitt’s cover, the more it resembles a meteor that has crashed into and burned not the Obama campaign but the mirage of television news.

§ Dept of Ahem. It sounds too good to be true to me — if you know what I mean by good. The line about the three johns clients being “close friends” is the horse pill.

Night, cont’d

§ Tacet. It always makes me nervous to assert a negative, but I’ve combed the story four times without finding the names of either of Doug Manchester’s San Diego hotels. I looked closely, because I was just curious to see if one of them might be the famous Hotel del Coronado, where I’ve had some very restful breaks (not recently, alas).

Discretion about public affairs is not what I look for in a newspaper.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Against Television, Faits Divers, Morning News, The Hours. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.