New Maddox

Today Maddox finally posted a new essay:

Fashion tips for women from a guy who knows dick about fashion.

New Maddox essays have gotten more noteworthy over the years since they've become so infrequent. There used to be a couple new ones a month, but now there's only a new one every few months. In fact, this is only the 5th one of 2007, and I just noticed that there were only 4 updates in all of 2006. On the bright side, I think the quality of his essays has improved, as he used to be pretty hit and miss, but every single essay from the last 2 years has been great. This one continues the streak, as he makes a lot of hilarious comments and valid points, although I did disagree with 2 things.

Writing about how ugly and disgusting "Crocs" women's shoes are, Maddox writes:

"People who wear Crocs go on and on about how comfortable they are, and how it's supposedly odor resistant because it's made out of some kind of anti-bacterial foam. Great point, dipshits! You know what else it's resistant to? You getting laid."

I'm sure Maddox is like the Soup Nazi with impossibly high standards when it comes to deciding who to sleep with, but for 99% of men (and that's a conservative estimate) what shoes a woman wears does not figure into deciding on whether or not she's worth pursuing for sex.

Then a little bit later he's talking about the ridiciulousness of nearly identical lipstick colors. To prove this he has a picture showing 2 "different" shades of lipstick sold by Revlon, "Red Reinvented" and "Cherry Delicious." The two shades of red cropped from Maddox's comparison image:



While it is ridiculous that Revlon makes both colors, on my monitor the 2 shades are clearly different, even though they are very similar. "Red Reinvented" (left) is redder, while "Cherry Delicious" (right) is duller, and looks like it has a very slight pinkish hue. I looked at the samples one after the other a bunch of times and I correctly identified which is which every time. I wouldn't be able to identify them I could only look at 1 without reference to the other, and I doubt the actual lipsticks are as easy to tell apart, especially when someone's wearing them, but that doesn't change the fact that telling them apart from the sample colors on my monitor is easy.

Except for those two minor things I thought the essay was right on. I especially liked the part about the curtain dresses, which reminded me of a blog Mindy Kaling wrote a while back with some pictures of dresses like that that she said were really comfortable or something, which in turn reminded me that I still haven't tried the Kookaburra Liquorice that I've wanted to try ever since she wrote about it several months ago. Tonight I looked online a little bit for it and it's super expensive, about $5 for a 10-ounce bag. As if that isn't bad enough, with shipping it's usually more than twice that. You can get a much better deal buying it in bulk, but I don't want to be stuck with a case (12 10-ounce bags) if it turns out I don't like it. And even if I do like it, it would probably take me at least 6 months to eat that much licorice, and by the time I got to the last few bags the candy would probably be stale.

John Cusack conversation with Naomi Klein about The Shock Doctrine

Over the past few weeks several segments of a conversation John Cusack recently had with Naomi Klein about her new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism have been posted on The Huffington Post. The conversation has covered several different topics, and it's been fascinating and more than a little terrifying. Here are links to the 4 parts released so far:

Part 1: HuffPost Exclusive: My Interview with Naomi Klein (Video)

Part 2: Calling Things What They Are: More From My Conversation with Naomi Klein (Transcript)

Part 3: The Real Blackwater Scandal: Build a Frontier, You Get Cowboys (Transcript)

Part 4: The Real Blackwater Scandal: Build a Frontier, You Get Cowboys, Part II (Transcript)

I haven't yet got my hands on The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism or seen Cusack's new movie War, Inc., but I'm look forward to them both.

Chuck - S01E02

So despite my mixed thoughts on the first episode, I decided to give Chuck another chance and I was not disappointed. The second episode was funnier, the plot was more interesting (even though it seemed like just something they had to get out of the way, kind of like the episode of Futurama where Fry checks his old bank account and finds out that he's a billionaire), and the question of which, if either, agent could be trusted made things pretty interesting. One thing I didn't like was that the whole computer secrets stuck in his head thing is even more ridiculous than I thought it would be.

I liked that LOST was referenced when in the middle of reciting some of the secrets he knew he said, "Oceanic flight 815 was shot down...," but I have to wonder if the writers actually watch LOST each week since we learned in the Season 2 finale that Desmond not entering the code in time was apparently what brought the plane down. It would have been better if he had said "Oceanic flight 815 crashed on an island located..." or something like that that alludes to something we don't know.