Gessel On…

Yesterday a “special edition” of the New York Times was handed out around New York. It is absolutely hilarious and I think one of the better pranks I’ve heard of.

Most of the satire is spot on. Of many examples that I found really amazing, the fake “Friedman” piece is one of my favorites. He was on The Daily show recently promoting his book and I couldn’t contain my disdain for his relentless errors and misinformation. Is there any penalty for being completely wrong? About everything? Yes! Perhaps only in satire, but yes.

The Satire is mostly about Friedman’s errors on Iraq, but he’s been wrong about just about everything: economics, social reality, the role of trade, and, of course, the war in Iraq.

I got a note about it from the Yes Men mailing list, the NYT article (real) about the Times (fake) has some details.

The New York Times had an article about the trials of the survivors of Ike in Texas. Pretty dramatic, but nothing highlights the malevolence of a storm than an allusion to tossed salad:

“Outside, the peninsula was under siege. Flooding and winds moved beach houses onto the highway, tore off awnings and walls, and rushed straight through houses and businesses, leaving their roofs intact but their insides tossed into a salad of clothing, furniture and debris.”

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“The best new restaurant” in Toronto.
And, indeed, very good.

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Happy Canada day!

The Eat Vulva meme continues at the SFO RCC.

One of the great irritations of many “healthy” hippie communities is an obsession with “hydration.” People who wander around with bottles of water “hydrating” for one psudoscientific neo-mystical reason or another with absolutely no evidentiary basis for doing so are emblematic of the sort of self-righteous received knowledge that characterizes fundamentalism and cults.

It is a practice that has always bugged me. I am a runner and I’ve run for hours on hot days without drinking anything to no ill effect. When I was young, waaay back in the prehistoric days before Polyethylene Terephthalate and running high school cross country, we’d take a sip or too from the fountain on a hot day and nobody died. It always struck me as incongruous with my experience that all of a sudden people needed so much more water than they used to just to make it through the day, even in an air conditioned office.

I soon learned that the water craze was not only a bunch of crap, but dangerous, even to runners. I ran the Boston Marathon a few times way back then and one tended to drink a bit here and there along the course, and more and more as the years went by. As people started to obsess about “staying hydrated” (as opposed to not being thirsty) they started suffering from Hyponatremia; so much so that a couple of people have died of it. Apparently nobody has ever died from dehydration along the marathon. Yes, not drinking enough just slows you down; drinking too much will kill you.

“But,” the water fanatics say, “water detoxifies, beautifies, mysticifies, and is an all over tonic for everything that ails you!” As it turns out, not so much. A recent study published in the American Journal of Nephrology found no such benefits. Yes, if you’re wandering around with water bottles you’re merely paying a lot of money for water that’s worse than from the tap and contributing to a problematic waste stream. If you’re thirsty have a sip from the tap.

We went to a strip club in Zagreb on Andreje Hebranga Street at Ulica Gajeva. The club was stylish and upscale with very attractive women. Carolyn and I asked one of the very polite attendants what the process was and he helpfully explained:
A group of one or more men come in, and are charged an entry fee of 100 Kuna each (about $20 US at the moment). About two girls per guy sit around them and chit chat and smile and flirt (they don’t for a couple - they’re not quite that progressive yet). Eventually they ask you’d buy them a drink. The girls “drink only champagne” and while the rest of the drinks are very reasonable for a strip club (about 40 Kuna, but fairly light on the alcohol) Champagne is expensive: the menu lists 12 liters of champagne for 60,000 Kuna. Clearly the drink is a small part of the deal - the Champagne is not for the guest. If you want champagne, a strip club is not the place to go. They also list table dances (about 350 Kuna) and lap dances (about 500).

We had a few regular drinks, watched the girls go through their routines for a bit and then left. The wiki travel page seems a bit timid about strip clubs in the balkans, but the whole process was straight-forward enough and while not a bargain compared to US standards, not a rip off either.

The sex shop with the funny icons was close to another restaurant we went to. The strip club was minimally marked on the outside and we just happened to walk by the first night we were there.

It seems small to me but I suppose it is just for emergencies.

Totally randomly Hertz gave me a Lincoln Town Car instead of the Taurus I rented. Why? I do not know, but as I was wearing a long black coat and leather gloves for the weather, everyone assumed I was Carolyn’s driver. The car is really set up for a driver - the back has more room than the front, the door release button locks and unlocks on the back doors and there are no cup holders. And the engine sounds like Bender wheezing in that episode where Farnsworth made him human…