Daily Archives: August 26, 2007

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It’s not just our vestigial tails

List of human evolutionary leftovers.

Hey Rolling Stone Magazine

I know you’re ultra liberal and in touch with the youth and irreverent and everything, but make up your mind whether you want to try for a serious piece of journalism, or use blow job metaphors and the word “fuck” in your political articles. Rolling Stone writing is the equivalent of your precocious 12-year-old cousin’s conversation – the cousin that peppers all his sentences with swear words so you’ll think he’s cool and give him one of your Heinekens. The first (web) page of this piece, The Great Iraq Swindle: How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury, is almost comically “Rolling Stone“/Hunter S. Thompson. It’s written in the second person and contains the following editorial:

This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profitĀ­eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure — American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.

But eventually the writer settles down and produces a decent, if sickening, piece on military capitalism and profiteering. Read at your own risk.

Rolling Stone writer: I have this terrific story that’s going to blow the lid off Iraqi War spending. This piece is important. It’ll put your magazine in the atlas of serious journalism again.

Rolling Stone editor: Okay, but can you spice it up a bit by dropping in a couple hooker and BJ metaphors? And remember I pay triple for the word “fuck-up,” both as a noun and a verb.

Signs of a Small Town

You have seen all the local vanity license plates three or four times.