Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant

Goodbye Amazon

Like Mark and Maud, we've completely obliterated Amazon as a purchasing option. No gifts or random packages sent from there anymore, thank you very much. You won't even find our wishlist. Those kind and remarkable people lurking behind the scenes will have to stay the course until we get our obscure objects of literary desire tranposed and listed onto safer pastures. Rest assured, we don't take Amazon's PAC funding lightly and, as previous actions have demonstrated, we're adamantly sociopathic in our boycotts. This week's dartboard cutout? Why, Jeff Bezos, of course!

We do, however, think that the inestimable Mark Sarvas is overdoing it with his Time subscription legerdemain. The magazine is, without a doubt, useless. When you factor in their neurologically inert coverage of current events (witness such prima facie pronouncements as "The poisoning has already given him martyrlike status among his supporters, but it also raises questions about whether his health will allow him to serve with sustained vigor," and the moronic machinations become apparent) and the fact that a mere four (four!) of their Persons of the Year have been women, it's really a no-brainer. The magazine was established by Briton Hadden and Henry Luce to reduce the information of our times to jejune gardyloo processed by dullards. Or to cite Luce directly, "Of necessity, we made the discovery that it is easier to turn poets into business journalists than to turn bookkeepers into writers."

Birnbaum might drop-kick our asses for riding the adjective with two Js, but in Time's case, it's readily apparent that no other modifier cuts the mustard in quite the same way.

(Furthermore, it would be criminal for us not to reveal how much we loved the Man of the Year moment in The Big Lebowski, whereby slacker Jeff L glimpses himself in a mirror styled along the Time yearly hard line. It's one of the film's most overlooked gags.)

We now return you to our regularly scheduled hiatus.