that was probably awkward

The Quirk Gone Horribly Awry

Or maybe this bit on (ARGH) Sarah Palin is just my issue with The Quirk brought to its logical extreme. 

Anyone know a nice European fella who'd like to marry me?  I make a pretty decent fish curry, and know a lot about ruins.  For the love of God, please someone whisk me away to another country. 

[Related: Manic Pixie Dream Girl]

Old Spice, Know Thyself

As a young man in New York, I decided it was time to pick a signature (deodorant) scent. As a skinny 160lb weakling (I have big bones) I wanted something manly. I thought about the manliest person I knew and the gift my sister and I got him every year for Christmas: Just like my grandpa, I was going to wear Old Spice.

This lasted for maybe a year, at which point the mix of ridicule, intense smelling pits, and weird male attention convinced me to switch to Speedstick.

I still have a weird attachment to the scent and the brand. Apparently, I'm not the only gay who feels this way. Because no straight man would have created the last four ad campaigns to come out for Old Spice

First up came the 12 inch hot dog. To be fair, in the same campaign there was also an image of a woman licking a melting vanilla ice cream cone, but that's hardly the point.

Next  they appealed to the bears: A new take on the old "magnetic moustache" toys of yore, this web app allowed users to draw their own hair on a male paper doll and discover their Hair/Body Metric.

 

 

[TMI alert: I was the "Blossoming Truncheon."]

A guest appearance by America's favorite out male gay was next, as NPH flounced onto the scene.

But the coup de gras was still yet to come. The centaur ad could simply mean virility... being a stallion for your filly as suggested by the tv spot. But the remainder of the images at Double Entendre.com... I mean It's Two Things leave little room for interpretation. Check out the cannon or the tank and ask yourself what red-blooded heterosexual man wants to see another man's gunsmoke headed straight for his face.

An aside: After creating something clearly meant as a viral campaign, Old Spice seems to be taking down YouTube posting of the commercial and site animations. I can understand missing the mark in attempting to be the next Axe, but misunderstanding and misusing social media is a pretty unforgiveable mistake.

To kiss and tell OR trying to recall if I signed an NDA

Dear ProbablyAwkward:

MD here. I've been even more absentee than usual as I've recently switched from working from home to working in an office.  I've never spoken about my old job here because I've never been sure how much I could ethically say. For the purposes of this post all you need to know is that I worked for the online branch of a print magazine and it made me very unhappy. My new job, so far, is stressful but fulfilling and also in the media. Expect me to not talk about it here either.

So, I received an envelope in the mail last week with my Old Employer(OE)'s letterhead. I opened it, wondering if it related to the errors with my last check or the way the company couldn't be bothered to tell me how to ship my company computer back to them. But no: I open the envelope and it's a Very Special Subscription Offer. If I order now, I not only get a full year of issues for 75% off the cover price, but ALSO an NFL starter jacket from my favorite team! Act now!

Really OE? Really? It just seemed a little tacky, like an ex-lover offering to keep sleeping with you for cash. I ended this, OE -- do you think I want to pay for the privilege of getting painful reminders of our time together mailed to my home address?

Now that we've split, it's time for you to know the truth: I never liked sports. When I said that article was a homerun, I was faking.

[HT addds: As a non-disclosure-agreement-signer at both my previous and present jobs, I'm also sworn to secrecy.  I will say this, however: the labor movement needs to refocus, and no, as I currently am unable to buy/sell publicly-traded stocks, I can't give you any insider tips.  I now have access to my ex-boyfriend's father 's mobile phone number in Beijing, however.  Corporate America is kooky that way.]

Friday Afternoon Tutorial: Misdeeds Galore

Ever wanted to get a visual aid re: the sheer breadth of the Bush 43 administration's miscarriage of justice, and how intertwined its various constitutive elements?  Slate's got a handy dandy interactive guide, plus some nice analysis, over here.  Something to read while having that first Friday afternoon nip from the whiskey flask. 

I'm off to New Hampshire this weekend.  Enjoy the first big of August!  Hope it's less muggy where you are!

[via 3 quarks daily.]

New Time Suck Alert: The Swedish Furniture Name Generator

Check it out here.

I find it amusing, by the way, that typing in "probably awkward" generated a fairly minimalist, austere looking bed, with uncomfortable pillows and no sheets or covers.  Just a sterile slab atop which cold comfort unfolds, nakedly and forlornly. 

We're Not a Political Blog But: Things Younger Than John McCain

No, really: it's a blog.  Get your laugh/incredulity on. 

And yes, the Golden Gate Bridge is YTJMcC.  Er ... yikes.

Friday Afternoon ... Metallic: Brother Cesare

He's a heavy metal monk, people. Inspired, he says, by going to a Metallica show twelve years ago. No joke.  This is tremendous.

The full BBC story here. Good Friday indeed!

North By Northwest, aka Cary Grant's Suit's Crazy Adventures

Via 3 Quarks Daily, here's a great, hilarious piece by Todd McEwen in this month's the Summer 2006 issue of Granta about the impeccable, unmussable wonder that is Cary Grant's suit in Hitchcock's 1959 classic North by Northwest.  I'm never going to see that film in the same way, and I think I'm a better moviegoer (and suit admirer) for it.  Guys, you really ought to step up your sartorial game and consider wearing Grant-esque suits more often.  You have no idea what a turn-on it is.  Oh yes.

Check it out on the Granta website here. 

Quirk Overload/Overlord: The New Devendra Banhart Video

I recall being a little bit confused when I first read that Natalie Portman and freak folkie Devendra Banhart were dating.  Now they've taken their love to the next level: appearing together in his new Bollywood-inspired video, Carmensita. 

I'm not entirely sure what to do with this, intellectually-speaking. The Quirk has always taken a shine to India (cf The Darjeeling Limited), so this video is at once completely in keeping with one of the basic tenets of quirkdom (reappropriate the exotic by critiquing the notion of exotic while embracing its visual cues anyway), and yet, knowing this full well, I can't stop banging my head against my computer anyway. I'm not sure if it's the fact that I still can't wrap my head around the Portman-Banhart coupling, or if it's the "let's do a Bollywood video!" thing, or if it's just that at this point the Quirk, thanks in part to Natalie Portman, has become so mainstream so as to simply be ... the Norm.

[Addendum: Can someone please confirm/deny that that is Chloe Sevigny, in blue face paint, as Kali?]

Random (and Probably Questionable): The Bizarro Ruinista

OH GOD.  HELP ME.

( (c) Miru Kim)

More photographs here.  (Click on thumbnails to enlarge.)

My first post back, and I'm too irritated to even blog properly. 

Housekeeping: We're Still, Like, Totally Here

We're just on a mini-hiatus.  We promise we'll return shortly.  I'll explain my love for Coldplay, show you all some lovely pictures of my Los Angeles foodfest, and might have a word or two about the supposed impossibility of blogging while happy.  It'll be great.  Just hold on a tiny bit longer, dear reader....

Finding Earth [Battlestar Galactica Finale Review]

 

I just finished the summer finale of Battlestar Galactica. I just returned from a week-long trip back to New York.

[spoilers and livejournal-style self reflection after jump]

Somebody Please Tell Me That This is a Joke: Season Shot

Going bird hunting?  Tired of fishing out pieces of metal from your (slain) bird, and then having to do all of that seasoning before you can roast it?  Shoot it with a seasoning bullet instead!

Season Shot is made of tightly packed seasoning bound by a fully biodegradable food product. The seasoning is actually injected into the bird on impact seasoning the meat from the inside out. When the bird is cooked the seasoning pellets melt into the meat spreading the flavor to the entire bird. Forget worrying about shot breaking your teeth and start wondering about which flavor shot to use!

Its tagline is Shoots. Kills. Seasons.  I love too how it's being marketed to the green-minded hunters among us:  Watch as your bird is seasoned on impact leaving no harmful waste behind in the environment. It's sort of majestically brilliant and fucked up, all at once.  God help us all.  God help those poor, unsuspecting wild turkeys.   

[Thanks to AT for the link.]

My Doppleganger

MD's got a doppleganger in every town he's ever lived in.  It's weird, especially since the doubles really are dead ringers for him, and because he's actually friends with them.  He once told me, ages ago, when he lived in NYC and I was still in Ithaca, that he saw my doppleganger on a Manhattan street.  I told him that I didn't believe him, that in his drunken haze he was mistaken; until I actually saw my doppleganger for myself, I wouldn't believe that I had one.  It just seemed too improbable that an HT lookalike could be roaming the streets of New York, or any town. 

Well, my friends, I've now seen my double, and let me tell you: it's fucking weird.  This is totally not me:

Even with the striped shirt and the whiskey glass, it's totally not me.  I am sufficiently creeped out. 

Coldplay soon, I promise.

[Thanks to AFN for emailing me the album pic and asking if I had painted my nails recently.  He was pretty creeped out too.  I don't know how MD surrounds himself with ... himselves.]

Friday Afternoon Rhapsodic: I Am Trying to Break Your Heart

I am a huge fan of Wilco's 2002 masterwork Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.  Huge.  I remember being at an undergrad house party in Ithaca that year, hiding out in one of the bedrooms with my pal RL, who couldn't stop raving about how good the album was.  I hadn't heard it yet -- and in fact, I wouldn't get around to hearing it for another year or so -- but I have a distinct memory of how completely enraptured RL was just talking about it.  And so when I finally got around to listening to it, I recall thinking that RL's raves didn't do it justice.  It was that good.  It's one of the few times I think Pitchfork has been spot on in their high-minded, completely laudatory reviews.  (And they do a much better job than I ever could, waxing poetic about the tracks -- there's not a single bad song on there, and I'm notorious for generally hating at least 3 songs off any given record.)

Sam Jones' documentary of the making of the album, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, was also pretty spectacular in its depiction of the band's trials, tribulations, and just general insanity during the recording process.  The movie shares a title with my favourite track off YHF, a song I love on so many levels: the slightly loopy, but subdued, instrumentation that serves as backdrop to a crazy-quilt-lyrical foreground; Jeff Tweedy's vocal delivery (I love that man's voice, seriously); the wailing at the song's end.  Tweedy does a beautiful acoustic rendition of it during the gorgeous opening credits of the film, which you can see above, but I figured I'd also throw in a fuller live version from a couple of years ago, too.  Enjoy!

I mean, I just really, really love the image of a bible-black pre-dawn.  [Sigh.]  Happy Friday, everyone.  Part two of the Death Cab / Coldplay / Celine extravaganza tomorrow.