THE CRUDDIEST MOMENT OF THE CRAPPIEST DAY OF MY LIFE ON EARTH happened as I found myself watching five televisions simultaneously, each containing a different political pundit opining on the same subject. When I looked down toward my computer screen to see what the bloggers were saying about it, I noticed that a button on my shirt had come undone.

There I was, literally contemplating my own navel. But I didn’t even crack a smile because, in the relentless drone of insipid opinion, irony no longer held any meaning.

I knew then that this whole thing had been a very poor idea, one from which I would not return undamaged. Because the clock on the wall said I still had 14 hours to go.

So begins a phenomenal feature, Cruel and Usual Punishment, by the Washington Post’s humor writer Gene Weingarten, who locked himself in a room with just TV news, blogs and talk radio for company for 24 hours. Here’s a little more:

During the last years of his life, when my father’s eyesight began to go, he started hallucinating. He was seeing colorful little people in military uniforms dancing into his fuzzy line of sight; of all the images he could still make out, only these little people were completely and consistently clear. Diagnosis: He was not going mad. He was going blind, and when the brain finds itself starving for imagery, it sometimes creates its own.

Something of the opposite was happening to me: Overwhelmed with words and imagery, harangued with opinion, beset by twaddle, my brain hungered for simplicity and found it. What happens is that you focus on small things. For example, you suddenly become aware that sometime in the last few years, as if in a heinous conspiracy of the dimwitted, Americans have decided that the second month of the year is pronounced Feb-ooh-ery. Not Feb-RU-ery, which is correct, or Feb-YOU-ery, which is ignorant but tragically legitimized by the dictionary, but Feb-OOH-ery, which is a national disgrace far greater, in my opinion, than dissing the Marines. Or so it seems at the moment.

I am still seething over this when I notice an interesting two-pronged phenomenon. Prong one is that there is often an amusing disconnect between the subject of a broadcast and the subject of the news crawl beneath it. Prong two is that if you have five TVs on at the same time, and each features a talking head with the sound muted, and you also have a radio playing, it is very often possible to find one muted talking head whose lips happen to synch uncannily with the radio. And so, with only a little mental effort, one can watch a TV screen upon which George W. Bush strides purposefully down a path beside the White House, looking solemn and concerned, stands at a lectern and begins to speak in Laura Ingraham’s voice, whining about condoms, while below him runs a crawl reading, “Man Carrying Adult Diapers Kills Woman With Meat Cleaver.”

(Via Sacred Facts)

Related:
Curel and Usual Punishment (WaPo)
Short video of Weingarten experiment.\ (WaPo)
Transcript of Online Chat with Weingarten (WaPo)

Pavement Films hit the streets of my neighborhood Prospect Heights a couple of weeks ago for Anorak.co.uk. You can’t move around here for Obama stickers, so we thought it would interesting to ask local residents why they were so excited by the Senator from Illinois. It was the Saturday before Obama’s now famous speech, but unsurprisingly the issue of race was never far from the surface.

By the way, our first video has been viewed over 4,700 times in the past month. Hardly an internet phenomenon, but not bad for a pair of Brits in New York. (And no small tribute to the filming and editing skills of A Brooklyn Lad.)

Related:
Race in the White House (YouTube)
Pavement Films Premier (EiNY)

Welcome to Beijing airport’s new terminal three. As William Langewiesche reports for Vanity Fair, the floors are not the only area that the Chinese government is intent on having squeaky clean in time for the Olympic Games.

At the forefront stand the 15 million residents of Greater Beijing. In preparation for the Games, a municipal agency called the Capital Ethics Development Office is trying to whip them into shape, with campaigns against spitting on the street, using foul language (even though in Chinese), or getting rowdy while watching, for instance, Ping-Pong matches on TV. A survey conducted by Renmin University in 2007 showed that progress was being made (naturally), and that over the previous year public spitting had been reduced by 2.41 percent. According to the Chinese state news service, the survey was based on observations from 300,000 people at 320 public places and in 200,000 cars. Littering was down 2.44 percent. Meanwhile, the Civic Index was up by 4.32 percent. The Civic Index scores the Beijing population on its compliance with rules regarding public health and public order, attitudes toward strangers, etiquette at sporting events, and demonstrable enthusiasm for the Olympic Games. I myself have conducted a survey, based on 457.5 observations, and have concluded that 98 percent of the Chinese lack any measurable sense of irony. This is a preliminary finding only, and further funding is required, but there is no doubt that the Chinese Earnestness Index is extremely high. The 11th of every month is now officially Queuing Day, when people are expected to give up their traditional scrums and practice standing in orderly lines. The date was chosen as a variation of pictographic script, because the two digits 1 and 1, when placed together to form 11, represent the expected behavior during the upcoming world championship in delays. And, sure enough, on the 11th of every month Beijing residents earnestly go about the assigned practice, temporarily transforming the city into a variation of a Germanic ideal. Individualism then re-asserts itself on every 12th, but the Queuing Days help, and the Capital Ethics Development Office expects that the coming months will continue to show improvements.

Related:
Beijing’s Olympic Nightmare (Vanity Fair)

Did anyone lose a pair of Prada glasses this weekend? (Via Kottke.)

Our former housemate’s brother, Mark, has made a couple of appearances on this blog over the years, most recently with his plea to borrow thirty or more flights of stairs so that he could train for the annual Empire State Building Run-Up. (I never did find out how that went.) Anyway, he’s back. And this time he’s cooking chili con carne. Very strange to see our old kitchen at 31st street in Brooklyn, my first home in New York.

Related:
Brother Mark’s chili con carne recipe (Moose Productions)
Has Anyone Got Any Stairs? (EiNY)