What happens when you combine these two books?
You get this...
Monday, July 26, 2010
Sunday, July 25, 2010
The World is Fat
Today the Demon shifts his attention from the world of fiction to nonfiction in order to lampoon a popular book by Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat...
This book, which has been a popular business read, begins well enough with a first chapter entitled, “While I Was Snacking.” The author, Mr. Freedme, discusses his experience sitting on a couch, his coffee table littered with debris from McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Starbucks, Taco Bell and Baskin-Robbins. At that particular moment, he happens to be watching the world championships of Sumo wrestling when, lo and behemoth, Torsten Scheibler, a 440-pound wrestler from Germany captures a gold medal.
Initially Mr. Feedme’s observations are lucid, acute and scintillating. He asks provocative questions about globalization, the retail economy and vividly paints parallel trends in international sports and the fast food industry as a metaphor for more broad-reaching sea changes. He astutely explores how a sport such as Sumo, whose very essence is Japanese, has become become embraced internationally, attracting both fans and athletes from around the world.
From there, the book’s promising beginning is utterly obliterated as Feedme launches into a bloated and turgid premise that gives rises to a series of distended chapters entitled, “Ten Forces that Fattened the World.” The author have may begun with the belief that the Sumo wrestlers he saw on the TV screen that day, alongside with fast food debris on his coffee table, could be woven into a coherent set of ideas. Alas, Feedme's intellectual drawbacks become abundantly evident as one peruses the chapter titles for each of the Fatteners:
- Fattener #1. 4/19/75 – Double-Stuff Oreo’s introduced
- Fattener #2. 11/8/87 – First online menu appears
- Fattener #3. The blueprint is drawn for a Starbucks within a Starbucks
- Fattener #4: Weird Al releases his music video, Fat.
- Fattener #5. The Jenny Craig Heresy
- Fattener #6. The Global Calorie
- Fattener #7. The Cooking Channel in High Definition
- Fattener #8. Ingesting, inhaling, insourcing and indigestion
- Fattener #9. Boink: Eating without thinking
- Fattener #10. Atlas bulks up on steroids so he can shrug more easily
This is a book filled with cute inanities and readers are more likely to find intellectual substance in an assortment of Twinkies and Devil Dogs.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Gulf oil spill spreads to Amazon.com
The catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf continues to spread. I just visited Amazon.com and was horrified to see crude oil washing over their website. This is truly a disaster!
Okay, this was created by visiting Instant Oil Spill, a project of A Cleaner Future. Instant Oil Spill brings the Gulf crisis right to any computer screen. Go to Instantoilspill.com, enter in the URL of any website, hit the "Spill Now" button, and watch the page fill with swirling crude (digital, of course).
Disclaimer: No books or websites were harmed in the making of this post.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Monday, July 5, 2010
Classic books for young readers, revisited
I grew up reading Mad Magazine, so it's easy for me to imagine the following "classics" for young readers.
The Black Scallion by Wally Fearley:
A rare Arabian legume helps a talented but traumatized teenage girl win an international cooking competition.
James and the Giant Leech by Raul Dahli Lama:
A gigantic but compassionate leech starts growing in the yard by a house on a hill. Occupying the house is James, a little boy whose parents died in a tragic incident involving a vacuum cleaner and a blood transfusion.
Bored of the Flies by Willy Leading:
A group of 21st Century boys wash up on a deserted island. Without their Wii, Playstations and Xboxes, all they can do watch the flies that inhabit the island. Boring!
Thursday, July 1, 2010
The Poet Laureate and Stephen Colbert
First, congratulations to the next U.S. Poet Laureate. The Library of Congress announced Thursday that William S. Merwin will become the 17th U.S. Poet Laureate this fall.
While we're on the subject, let's revisit a former laureate, Robert Pinksy, and his notable appearance on the Stephen Colbert show where he moderated a " Meta-Free-Phor-All" contest between Colbert and actor, Sean Pean.
While we're on the subject, let's revisit a former laureate, Robert Pinksy, and his notable appearance on the Stephen Colbert show where he moderated a " Meta-Free-Phor-All" contest between Colbert and actor, Sean Pean.
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Meta-Free-Phor-All: Shall I Nail Thee to a Summer's Day? | ||||
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