From Gawker.com, because Alex Balk loves Canada
Rachel Sklar |
Posted Thursday April 5, 2007 at 06:04 PM
It's official: Alex Balk loves Canada: Yesterday we praised Gawker's Alex Balk for his impressive mastery of Canadiana; today we're blown away by his near-Talmudic scholarship. But, anyone who can toss off a paragraph like this — "Whatever 'the Canadian message' is--and it's probably something involving curling, good manners, grown men in bright red clothing astride horses, French fries with cheese curds on them for some unfathomable reason, surly Francophones who souviens and won't shut up about it, eight million Alice Munro stories about rural life in Ontario, and Power Windows by Rush--we're not interested in hearing it, nor should we be" — was clearly pretty interested in hearing it at one point. Alex Balk, we're calling your bluff: You. Love. Canada. Yay! [Gawker]
- Brian Williams — Hustler, screw-up, big tipper: Sounds like Brian Williams was his usual pithy self at NYU's "Brown Bag" lecture yesterday, sharing details of flying into Iraq (he was sure the runway was lit by glow-sticks), why starving writers made great waiters ("Anything worth wanting is worth fighting for," he said. "This is why we have the best waiters and waitresses in the world") and why underneath the hair and the tan he's secretly a screw-up (like Peter Jennings, he never graduated from college, and says of his rise that he couldn't have "screw[ed] up more"). We're also pretty sure he wore the tie he wore on the SNL season opener. Purple is pretty. Needless to say, Peter Jennings was Canadian. [Washington Square News]
- Victory for RedEye! Hooray for Greg Gutfeld and his acolytes! Fox News' highly selective late-night talk show has won it's battle to totally rip off the Chicago Tribune's RedEye offshoot paper for the hip young set. FunFact: I believe I am the ONLY person to have both appeared on RedEye AND written for RedEye. Hooray! [Gawker]
- I remember when being valedictorian meant something, man: Topping MEL today is the story of how top-tier applicants aren't making it into top-tier colleges. Canada doesn't have SATs, by the way, but Alex Balk knew that already. [NYT]
- How Tina Brown's New Yorker became David Remnick's New Yorker, with vestiges: Let's play a fun game! This is for all the failed valedictorians in the crowd: This blog post is to other blog posts as David Remnick's article about Bill Clinton is to other magazine articles, i.e. really really really really really really long. Key difference: It's online, and hence, will be read. Also: Anyone else notice that Gawker is becoming a hotbed of longform journalism? Prediction: In 10 or somesuch years, upstart young bloggers will be analyzing Choire Sicha in the exact same way. Except they'll do it while flying with jetpacks! Whee! The future! [Gawker]
- Bora Bora: So nice, they named it twice! Not unlike mahi mahi, cous cous, and New York, New York. Also, apparently Conrad Black went there and Hollinger helped pay. Well, if you believe the Sun-Times; I'm sure Maclean's can find a perfectly good reason for it, right Ken Whyte? If you don't get that, ask Alex Balk. [Chicago Sun-Times]
