Jane Saturday, Apr 7 2007

I have to say that Jane kind of sucks these days, especially after the departure of Jane Pratt.  It is starting to look like Mademoiselle magazine did right before it went under — kind of a desperate cross between Glamour and some kind of tawdry celebrity magazine.  The cover features Avril Lavigne.  Ew.  Jane still has some good writers on staff, but they seem increasingly bitter.

Worst articles of the month: the f#+@* Avril Lavigne profile (“Part of me is tough, like I’m really opinionated, outspoken, a bit of a tomboy — but I’m also a yong lady, very girly, and I can be really quiet” –gag!); and an article on how to make French toast with an accompanying beverage called “classy ho.”  They just hit all the wrong notes these days: too girly with the cooking and decorating ideas and then when they try to be funny, like with the “classy ho” drink, it just comes off sounding gross.  The fashion spread on “beige” was pretty bad and boring, but for some reason everyone is doing that right now.  They say brown and navy is the new black and navy, or something.

However: I liked the article on the trip to New Orleans.  I keep trying to convince the chief we should take a mini-vacation there, maybe volunteer a little but also eat the rad food and have a Sazerac at a haunted bar and listen to some music.  Also, while I just ragged on them for having home decor articles, I sort of liked the idea of staining a bunch of wine crates and super gluing them to the wall as storage.  The chief was condescending about this, however.  Also, the music reviews are always better than in other ladies’ magazines.  Also, it sounds really fun to be the Kings of Leon: “We bought a big farm – about 50 acres — and we’re gonna get some horses.  It’s good to just sit on the front porch and play music.”  Maybe I will have that lifestyle after I get rich by reviewing issues of fashion magazines.

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Domino Saturday, Apr 7 2007

This is Lucky’s home decor magazine and it applies the same bizarre aesthetic that Lucky has for fashion (last month’s Lucky featured outfits combining sweat pants and high heels; you have to at least give them credit for not being boring — derelicte, yes, but not boring).  I have been reading these design magazines sometimes for remedial tips on how to deal with my home.

This month had a whole article about making your house hospitable for guests.  My normal tactic is to ensure that anyone who spends the night at my house is too drunk to notice they are sleeping on the floor with a scratchy uncomfortable afghan made by a relative.  But, armed with the new knowledge that this is impolite, we bought a real blanket.  I think Jake enjoyed sleeping on the vertiginous windowseat with his new fluffy blanket, peeping on our neighbors from ten stories up.  Thanks, Lucky.

There is a good little spread on someone with a small apartment.  I like how he has replaced dining room chairs with a banquette thing that takes up less room and has built-in storage.  Also, he had made these paintings and placed them sort of in front of big storage shelves in order to hide the unsightly storage.  I think the canvases were on some kind of slidey thing so he could easily access the stuff behind them.  Will the chief be mad if I create some kind of lovely art to slide in front of the music gear in the living room?  I feel this would really pull the room together, as they say.

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The Economist Saturday, Apr 7 2007

OK, nothing competes with the quote from the Brazilian president in last week’s issue (“We haven’t managed it yet, but I know if we keep trying George Bush and I will find the g-spot of fair trade agreements.” Dear God! I will never be able to think of the FTAA without imagining those two great leaders fumbling around in the dark to please poor, unsatisfied fair trade.) Highlights from this week include coverage of San Francisco’s plastic bag ban, which the Economist actually supports with only the requisite snarkiness (“Karma is with us,” one of our supervisors declares at the beginning of the article).

Lexington discusses the Colbert Report and the Onion and gets in a dig at U.S. media (the Onion’s headlines “would not be so funny if those in the New York Times were not so ponderous” and “Mr. Colbert’s show would make no sense if cable-news blowhards such as Mr. O’Reilly did not exist.”) Ok, now I want to write a news magazine satirizing the Economist because they are just a little too smug about American media. I was just telling the chief and Jake about one time the beginning of the magazine mentioned a Simpsons episode where Homer Simpson was reading a copy of the Economist with the headline “Indonesia: at a crossroads.” Then, 40 pages into the magazine, the Economist had an article called “Indonesia: at a crossroads.” Ah, the wacky English.

This week’s jauntiest pair of headlines: “Funky monkeys” and “double trouble” about some weird s*#& scientists’ve discovered about human and monkey twins who wind up swapping stem cells in utero so that they have two different kinds of DNA in their bodies. The chief is obsessed with this, possibly because of the potential for a new kind of comic book superhero. I don’t knew enough science to really get excited about these sorts of things.

When you read the Economist, are there entire sections you skip out of bigotry? I, for example, always read the United States section and Latin America and the Middle East and some of Asia and Europe, but I routinely skip 1. Canada and Australia, 2. most of England and 3. the loathsome tech quarterly, which I suspect is too technical for muffinheads like me and too muffinheaded for people who actually know about technology. But does this mean I am a big racist against Canada? For some reason, I can’t bring myself to even approach that section even though some of their politics are admittedly entertaining and, you know, they are nearby and everything. Maybe if they elect someone really colorful with a toupee and mob connections who yells “beam me up scotty”from the floor of their parliament or whatever they have, like the erstwhile congressman Traficant, I can get excited about them.

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