Right on Writers!

I'm with the writers. Why should they not get one red cent from all that new media exposure their work is going to get? Writers are like illegal Mexicans: without them the show does not exist. Period. They are like Rodney Dangerfield, they get no respect.
I hope they tough it out and I hope they come to a fair agreement. And maybe with all this downtime, they will come up with better stuff.

Rocket Science of Sleep

I swear. Sometimes it takes actual scientists to convince people of stuff that nobody needs to be a neurosurgeon to figure out. If I tell it to you, you will tell me it's old wives tales, but if the scientists in the Mogo in the Gogogo Journal of Medicine tell you, I bet you listen to them.
So here it is, what I do every night in order to be able to sleep, (I am easily overstimulated) from exhaustive scientific studies in at least two journals:

The behavioral strategies for better sleep are deceptively simple, and that’s one reason why many people don’t believe they can make a difference. One of the most effective methods is stimulus control. This means not watching television, eating or reading in bed. Don’t go to bed until you are sleepy. Get up at the same time every day, and don’t nap during the day. If you are unable to sleep, get out of bed after 15 minutes and do something relaxing, but avoid stimulating activity and thoughts.

So-called sleep hygiene is also part of sleep therapy. This includes regular exercise, adding light-proof blinds to your bedroom to keep it dark and making sure the bed and room temperatures are comfortable. Eat regular meals, don’t go to bed hungry and limit beverages, particularly alcohol and caffeinated drinks, around bedtime.

I deserve a Nobel prize.

Facebook can kiss my ass

I open the NY Times to find out that Facebook is planning to use me as a product endorser.

Facebook now will give advertisers the ability to create their own profile pages on its system that will let users identify themselves as fans of a product. Each user’s news feed will contain items like “Bobby Smith is now a fan of Toyota Prius.”

News feeds can be linked to outside Web sites as well, so users can tell friends about what they rented at Blockbuster or are auctioning on eBay.

Facebook will offer all of those features to advertisers free.

How disgusting. Well, they should certainly pay me to endorse anything. I have always felt that Facebook is sinister and it is getting more and more so by the minute. However, the minute the IPO comes out, I'm buying stock.
Facebook users should boycott this hideous shit and not fall into the trap of hawking stuff for companies. I'm not a living ad for some fucking product. The gall.
But I seem to be the only person I know that when confronted with the wet dreams of marketers and advertisers about new brand paradigms, such as this one, wants to basically run for cover and hide in a hole on the ground. It's all way too Orwellian for my taste. It is actually creepy and scary in ways I don't think people understand.
Marketers want the world to be a humongous ad that never ends. The world is bad enough as it is, and now we can't even recognize the difference between life and marketing. I think it is horrifying, but I find people looking at me funny when I fail to share their unbridled joy about it.

Nazis are more popular than Britney

...and than Futalognkosaurus and much more than poor King Tut. At least on the internets. I know because plenty of my darling readers seem to have a keen interest on them, which I hope is fueled by antipathy and hatred. Otherwise, we are in trouble.
In any case, what's with the dictators acting up recently? Pervez basically dissolving the constitution and behaving quite perversely. I wouldn't be surprised if he was acting on the friendly advice of our very own VEEP, (aka Satan), who may want somebody to do somewhere else what he has not been able to do here, and not for lack of trying. And Hugo, who wants to change the constitution to reelect himself over and over and over. And then Fidel, who just won't die.
Isn't dictatorship really old fashioned? Doesn't it seem utterly anachronistic for our virtual, globalized times?

Tut your own horn

That's Young Tut as he supposedly looked like (pretty, pretty good, eyeliner and all) and that's him today. He looks rather well for his age, no? Doesn't look a day over 3000.

Photos courtesy of the BBC.

Two very different swamps

It is interesting that the main news story in the BBC today are the floods that have put 70% of the Mexican state of Tabasco underwater, while the main story in the New York Times is about overdevelopment in the Everglades in Florida. They even have a beautiful spread with pictures.


Meanwhile, 300,000 people are trapped by the floods south of the border, in the worst natural catastrophe that has befallen Mexico in years. One would think this is big enough news, no?
I had to find two tiny items posted by press agencies to learn about the news in the New York Times.
WTF?

Prostrate problems

Rudy Giuliani is such a transparent asshole, it's hard to see whether anybody, even those who have been living in a cave since 9/11, could possibly vote for him. Only a complete moron would not be aware of the cheap, self-interested way in which he exploits that date. And then it's impossible to overlook his pathetic pandering to the extreme right, his dramatic changes of mind in terms of guns, his utterly stupid and false comparison between healthcare in Britain and here, and the fact that his two children loathe him, among other things. If you still vote for him after all that, you are a turd.
Given that he is the "best" the Republican party can offer, I'm hoping that people will see the dire consequences of voting for such a ruthless hypocrite, and such a belligerent bully, and choose the more moderate ruthless hypocrite that is Hillary Clinton.

Torre goes to LA

And I hope there is a world series where the Dodgers beat the crap out of the Yankees.

Ouch!

Blog backlog

Dahlings! I have been trying to blog this past couple of days, but since I have to make a living, I was stuck at a couple of advertising conferences, where people pay money to get the shit scared out of them and to exchange business cards with one another. But this is not a topic that interests you (it barely interests me). So yesterday was Halloween in New York City and unfortunately the weather was the balmiest in 70 years, which meant hordes of murgatroids congregating on the corner of ma maison, screaming like banshees all night. I put on the air conditioning to muffle their drunken screeching. It almost worked.
I was going to dress up like Marilyn Monroe, and not like Anna Nicole, who was a popular choice this year. But after all day listening about future trends in advertising, my head was exploding with a combo of interesting info and utter bullshit so I didn't even make it to the party. Plus, I saw a homeless woman on the subway in the morning who apparently got the Halloween memo and she was truly the scariest living thing I've seen on a New York Subway, probably ever. Why she decided to venture out pinkt yesterday is just poetic license.
I am so addled that I don't even know what to write about, y'all. I'm about to say the world is a cruel place, echoing that bard of ours, Britney, who doesn't even understand the meaning of the word "overwhelming", according to the very august New York Times, which does report on such momentous matters.

(Ryan) Seacrest (our new Edward Murrow -- parenthesis mine) apparently woke Spears up when he called her for the interview, and at times she didn't seem to understand his questions. When Seacrest asked Spears whether the intense coverage of her recent troubles has been ''overwhelming,'' she said, ''Wait, what?''

However, she then said: ''People talk and they say what they want at the end of the day, you know in the tabloids and in the magazines,'' she said. ''But you just try to keep on doing what you do, like, you know, and as long as you know what's up and you know what's true, that's all that really matters, you know?''

In a knowing flurry of articulation and eloquence.