New Real America column up at The Awl. Read it.
“But that’s the way it is for America’s young. You get the car that you can pay for. Most likely? It’s a hand-me-down SUV, as the secondary market lags behind their rise and now fall. Thanks to nearly two decades of booming SUV sales and a one-two punch of a recession and high fuel prices, cheap SUVs are now flooding the used market—even as their primary market dies…”
Left: Vanity Fair “dueling” covers
Right: In Touch
Besides being a fun read there are at least two noteworthy things about this piece that set it apart from other “Oh Shi! Are We Fucking Fat or What?!” essays:
1) Kolbert does one of the best subtle, one-sentence (parenthesied) take-downs of the American public I’ve ever read (emphasis, mine):
“Consider the movie-matinée experiment…. The popcorn had been prepared almost a week earlier, and then allowed to become hopelessly, squeakily stale. Some patrons got medium-sized buckets of stale popcorn and some got large ones. (A few, forgetting that the snack had been free, demanded their money back.) After the film, Wansink weighed the remaining kernels. He found…”
2) I can’t imagine being a researcher of anything but my own brain. But then I read this about trick refill tubes and stuff (!), and I’m tempted:
“In yet another experiment, Wansink rigged up bowls that could be refilled, via a hidden tube. When he served soup out of the trick bowls, people, he writes, “ate and ate and ate.” On average, they consumed…”
Left: Obama poster that has been seen recently in Los Angeles.
Right: Bush paitning from July 2008 Vanity Fair
Just in case you have a run-in with the date rapist Gawker emboldened, just scroll one post down and clickity on the NYC SAFE center.
I wonder why Gawker linked the non-Gawker Janka date rape charge and not the Jezebel non-date rape date rape charge?
Brandchannel is going a new direction with the Brandcameo Product Placement Awards this year. All survey. Go vote.
Apple finally, in the fifth year of the awards, wins the title with a stunning 24 appearances in U.S. box office #1 films between Aug. 2008 and Aug. 2009. There were 42 total #1 films during this period which means Apple is appearing, prominently, in well more than half of all blockbuster films. (This does not include this weekend’s #1 Funny People, which is loaded with Apple, making Apple’s 12-month count 25 appearances in 43 films, or 58 percent of all hit films. Ford, a brand that one would expect to find much more often, if only because every film needs cars, appeared in only 20 of these films. Budweiser, the third most-noted brand, made it into 12 films.) And yet nobody seems to point Apple out as the largest product placement offender.
I have a longer analysis of Apple’s product placement dominance, including why it might actually be one of the few product placements that works (including a stunning slide show) that is looking for a home. Let me know if you have one abe @ yahoo.com. Below: A sampling of Apple showings from the last 12 months of #1 films (does not include numerous non-#1 film appearances).
For the year so far in Apple product placement, see my Apple PP archive.
I will try and post some of my observations later, including such traditional awards as Career Achievement and Impact.
Previous Product Placement Awards:
Sampling of Apple Product Placement in Box-Office #1s Aug 2008 - Aug 2009
Twilight
The Proposal
Taken
He’s Just Not That Into You
Knowing
Burn After Reading
Tropic Thunder
17 Again
Lakeview Terrace
High School Musical 3
Funny People
I know it is only because years and years of iconography and propaganda have conditioned me to see it, but the designs behind Conan on the new Tonight Show set could not look more like the ghostly Twin Towers.
Unfortunate coincidence. Though the Tonight Show’s design crew has done some wild stuff.
Gawker tests its authors’ back-end admin linking capabilities in a post about The Awl’s one-millionth visitor, passive-aggressively noting the subscriber-only email from Awl editor Choire Sicha while also pointing out that Choire once said he doesn’t watch his own traffic. Choice awkwardly written highlight of the article: “who count plenty of Gawker Media past and present writers as among their numbers.”
Also!: Writer Foster Kamer notes, “they recently called [Gawker] the “Goldman Sachs of the Internet,” (which is funny, because I’m still broke)….” But Foster, that’s just it: Gawker is like GSachs; the top-enders get huge cocaine-on-hookers’-asses-level bonuses for performance while the peon admins doing a lot of the work are “still broke” despite the mainstream biz media parroting stats like the “average payout of $226,000 per employee.”
“…and Denton’s busy minting his own currency or something, and unlike Sicha, doesn’t own any pets…” But Foster, yes he does:
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