Forget Your Platitudes

Have you ever noticed that most of the upper echelon of heavily-trafficked blogs are simply a flamboyantly represented digest of links to other authors' rigorously-generated content? Of course you have; what am I talking about? (Side note: have you ever noticed how bad english can sound if you just keep piling on the adverbs?)

These editors must get some euphoric feeling after posting a few links, a couple of cleverly-photoshopped pictures of themselves with Jared Leto, a recap of how much they drank last night and, if they can't keep their ego at bay, a scan of their most recent monthly $68,000 Google AdSense paycheck (someone actually did this, although five minutes of searching for it has already taken up enough of my time). Let's give it a shot.

Book Soup posted a recording of the John Hodgman performance from last week. It's about an hour long, and I'm quite certain that none of you have "better things to do."

Latvian researchers have pushed the bootlegging business to wildly new frontiers. The mere idea that a bootlegging industry still exists in some nations will make me sleep well tonight.

Any fans of the Kirby's Dream Land series on NES/SNES (or just GameBoy, if you had mean parents) should probably check out the new version.

Gawker editor Jess Coen quit last week to a sea of "who cares?" from the greater internet public (other than from the people that saw her go on the air on CNN to staunchly defend the social relevance of Gawker Stalker). I wouldn't even mention this except for the fact that the current guest editor is actually quite good.

Since I doubt I'll find a more appropriate space to mention this, I'd just like you to point your various trendy Mozilla-based browsers to animalshirts.net for a moment to observe the stiff competition Paul Frank, Ed Hardy, etc. will be facing in the upcoming years.

The new Jeremy Enigk record came out yesterday on some label I've never heard of. People seem to like it.

A friend of mine pointed me in the direction of a vacation spot in Italy that allows you to rent an "entire village." Apparently he never learned that there's a fundamental difference between the words village and villa. I'm pretty sure the only entire village I'd ever want to rent is Colonial Williamsburg, anyway.

How exhausting.