Product Crossovers

And now, the Martha Stewart Oxyacetylene Torch, brought to you by Sears/Kmart. Breaks through those pesky prison bars, then caramelizes your creme brulee.

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Offline for a couple of days because my firewall had a nervous breakdown. I don't know what possessed me to install ZoneAlarm Pro in the first place, but it's been nothing but cranky, and I'm back to the freeware version. Anybody have firewall recommendations, just in case?

Unspeakable Bodies of Water; Invisible Porcupines

This made me laugh out loud over breakfast. It's on the front page of today's Times, and I knew that while I was looking at the picture, but I still thought it had to be a gag. And typos, no less. Whee.

Around lunchtime, my SO said that he'd heard someone on the radio (probably Jonathan Schwartz) say that Nancy Franklin (someone we used to work with at The New Yorker) said that George W. Bush "carries himself as though he were holding an invisible porcupine under each armpit." By god, he does! I've been laughing at the image ever since. The piece in which she said it is "On Television: Blue Blood" (TNY, November 15th issue). Here's the bit, since the article has gone into archiveland:

The day after the election, the most widely cited exit poll was the one showing that "moral values" were the most important concern for twenty-two per cent of voters. Within no time, this news became the Statistic Most Likely to Be Repeated Constantly in the next four years, and, just as quickly, the news pundits began flagellating themselves for not getting it (though the news that sixty-one per cent of regular churchgoers favored Bush was known, and had been cited, before the election), and wringing their hands over what was seen as a "wake-up call" and a "spiritual crisis" for the Democratic Party, which would force some "soul-searching." Only a few people, such as Andrew Kohut, the director of the Pew Research Center, who appeared on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," pointed out that you could conclude just as much from the way the moral-values question had been asked as you could from the response; many people, when presented with that answer on a list of choices, are likely to choose it, because it has a "social desirability factor," but he noted that during the campaign, when people were asked open-ended questions about their concerns, moral values were not at the top of their list. Once again, TV viewers were pounded with the notion, as Tim Russert put it on Wednesday, that, "particularly in those so-called red states," people identify with Bush’s "jeans," his "belt buckle," and his "swagger." (Jeans, O.K. Belt buckle, maybe. What remains a mystery is the magnetism of a person who carries himself as though he were holding an invisible porcupine under each armpit.)