Urbzen

No jokes, no commentary, just this guy:

Listen up, ladies! We might be in a recession, but everybody’s favorite shrieking loon Elisabeth Hasselbeck has come to our rescue with a new line of “pretty and polished separates” available for purchase via your very own tee vee machine!

Cut from fashionable polyester and starting at just $44, Elisabeth’s roomy tops and quirky capris are perfect for every occasion, from carpooling to Bunco night to restricting access to contraceptives.

Plus, because the line is only available via notorious crap-hawker QVC—shit, they let a drunken Paula Abdul on the air—you will have more adorably vacant Hasselbecky goodness beamed into your living room than ever before.

You’re welcome, America.

A Google News search for the phrase “victory garden” turns up 145 stories over the past month alone. Evidently, America’s intrepid Trend Journalists allege, the economic crisis has hit many families so hard that they are now cultivating their own fruits and veggies, as a way to “cut costs.” How compelling! How heart-warmingly American! I practically just Norman Rockwelled all over myself thinking about it.

Except, of course, that the entire concept of a “recession garden” is totally bogus. In purely economic terms, you could hardly make a worse investment than growing your own food. Even if you are blessed with a reasonably large yard full of rich, fertile soil, the cost of irrigation and basic gardening tools alone vastly outweighs the cost of buying a rutabaga at the supermarket, and that’s to say nothing of the often several-month delay between planting and harvest. Yes, it’s great that you’re expecting a fantastic crop of kale in June, but what are we having for dinner tonight?

Then, of course, there’s the cost of labor. Large-scale farming exists for a reason: It’s more efficient for a few people to devote 100 percent of their time to farming than for everybody to spend a little bit of time on it. That’s why we also don’t make our own soap, sew our own clothes or even change our own oil. It pays to specialize.

And spare me the bourgeois drivel about reconnecting with the earth and the spiritual value of growing your own food. You live on a cul-de-sac, for chrissake, you’re not Alexis de Tocqueville.

Thanks to advances in biotech and economies of scale, food—even fresh food—is cheaper than ever before. If you want to get your hands dirty cultivating your own beets, go right ahead, but save the piety. Any consumer really interested in cutting costs would trade the weekly trip to Whole Foods for one to Wal-Mart, or even 99 Cents Only.

Now THAT would be revolutionary.

Normally I just leave my nightly MSNBC liberal porn on as background noise in the apartment while I attend to more important things, but last night I couldn’t help but get drawn in to this mud-slinging deathmatch between adorably insane pumpkin-head Chris Matthews and GWB acolyte Ari “Under the Bus” Fleischer. I don’t think anybody expected it to be a love-fest, but I swear if they’d been in the same studio it would have come to blows. I haven’t seen hate this deliciously palpable in a while:

Enjoy.

According to our friends over at FishbowlLA, there’s a bit of an internet fracas brewing between Mattel and a coalition of worked-up mommybloggers over the company’s decision to “magically transform” girl-hero Dora the Explorer into, well, something of a slut. 

The mommymob fears that the new, skankified Dora will influence their daughters to develop body image issues, eschew books in favor of makeup and spread their legs for every two-bit SpongeBob on the block, which is probably true since I grew up playing with stuffed animals only to become an unrepentant furry.

Anyhow, the Concerned Women for Chaste Cartoon Characters (CWCCC) is sending around a petition demanding that Mattel suspend Dora in her pre-pubescent glory, forever. Sign up here.

Everyone’s abuzz about the Kindle, Amazon’s handheld reading device that lets users read “what you want, when you want it” by getting books, magazines and newspapers delivered wirelessly in less than 60 seconds. The second incarnation of the Kindle, released today, weights 10.2 ounces and can hold more than 1,500 books. “No longer pick and choose which books fit in your carry-on,” the Amazon site exclaims. “Now you have your entire library with you.”

Not so fast. Leaving aside for a moment that the Kindle’s very name is weirdly evocative of book burning, consider that for everything we gain with a Kindle—convenience, selection, immediacy—we’re losing something too. The printed word—physically printed, on paper, in a book—might be heavy, clumsy or out of date, but it also provides a level of permanence and privacy that no digital device will ever be able to match.

In the past, restrictive governments had to ban whole books whose content was deemed too controversial, inflammatory or seditious for the masses. But then at least you knew which books were being banned, and, if you could get your hands on them, see why. Censorship in the age of the Kindle will be more subtle, and much more dangerous.

Consider what might happen if a scholar releases a book on radical Islam exclusively in a digital format. The US government, after reviewing the work, determines that certain passages amount to national security threat, and sends Amazon and the publisher national security letters demanding the offending passages be removed. Now not only will anyone who purchases the book get the new, censored copy, but anyone who had bought the book previously and then syncs their Kindle with Amazon—to buy another book, pay a bill, whatever—will, probably unknowingly, have the old version replaced by the new, “cleaned up” version on their device. The original version was never printed, and now it’s like it didn’t even exist. What’s more, the government now has a list of everyone who downloaded both the old and new versions of the book.

Of course, just because a book is printed doesn’t mean it’s safe from government scrutiny. But I know for certain that the copy of Lolita I have on my bookshelf contains exactly the same text now as it did when I bought it from a used book store five years ago, and I’m the only one who knows I have it. Well, and now the entire internet. But you see my point.

I hope this comes off as a crazy conspiracy theory spun by a troubled mind with an overactive imagination. But in an age of no-knock warrants, warrantless wiretaps and national security letters, it’s not too much of a leap to believe that the sanctity of the written word doesn’t matter as much to our leaders as we’d like, and that to move toward exclusively  digital distribution of ideas puts the core of that freedom at unnecessary and unacceptable risk.

As a card-carrying, lily-livered, bleeding-heart, bed-wetting liberal, both reproductive choice and social welfare programs are at the core of what I believe in. So I feel like I should be a lot more comfortable with the recent birth of octuplets in Bellflower, CA.

But I’m not. Choosing to carry eight babies to term is tantamount to neglect. Even if the mother, who has not been identified, did have the resources to provide for her brood of 14—estimates for absolute basics for the octuplets alone range from about $2.5 to $3 million—it is simply not possible for one person (or two people, it’s not clear if the mother is married or has a partner) to simultaneously nurture eight infants to the extent they need to develop normally.

That’s the thing about “choice”—Your right to chose ends when it starts taking choices away from somebody else. In this case, the mother’s choice to have eight viable embryos implanted invariably limits the choices of her friends and neighbors, her extended family, social services providers, her six older children who will inevitably be the ones caring for these babies, and of course the octuplets themselves.

No one, in the primate family at least, has octuplets by accident. This is not a matter of a young woman who makes some poor choices and ends up needing food stamps to get by. Instead, it is the case of a person who, for whatever reason, has insisted on having her way, regardless of the consequences and at everyone else’s expense. Her children have my sympathy.

Tim: Finishing a condo bust feature, getting ready for Gitmo.

me: Maybe you should do a piece on the impending Gitmo real estate bust?

Tim: Actually, I’ve got this GREAT condo in Gitmo if you’re interested …

me: Does it have a pool? I’m thinking of taking up waterboarding.

Tim: Oh yeah. And a temperature-control chamber. I mean, a sauna.

me: Sounds lovely. Are the neighbors nice?

Tim: Very quiet. You’ll never hear from them. In fact, you can’t legally have a conversation with them.

me: Perfect. I’ve always wanted to live in a gated community. I hope my illegal Peruvian houseboy won’t raise any eyebrows, though.

Tim: Just make sure he’s never seen with a Koran and he’s probably OK.

me: He’s not allowed to read.

Was on my Dr.’s web site looking for a fax number for a prescription refill when I ran across this little treasure:

God damn you, Los Angeles.

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Still looking for the perfect gift for the piece of meat on your Christmas list? Consider “Flame,” Burger King’s newest, uh, fragrance that promises an alluring eau de Whopper, which is known to drive the ladies wild, according to some dude in Boston, named Salami.

Just please don’t wear it to the dog park.