The New York Times on fat camps: “‘Maybe they’re not losing the weight specifically, but instead they’re learning something that they can use 20 years down the road and put into use when they’re ready,’ said Marla Coleman, a former president of the American Camping Association.”
Author / DrMabuse
Leading Alt-Weekly Exploits Workers
All is not well in the New York alt-weekly world. Gawker reports that the Village Voice has proposed a contract for its writers that not only almost completely cuts out benefits, but offers a wage increase of $15/week. $15 may not get you health care, but it might just get you a movie and a few slices of pizza! Or perhaps a mousetrap to buy for the rat-infested warrens that the Voice overlords hope their staff can inhabit.
Now perhaps this has something to do with strategic alliances between the two behemoths have worked in the past. And labor and antitrust laws haven’t been a concern for these two bastions of progressive and “independent” media.
Fortunately, Voice workers aren’t taking this lying down and are planning a strike. One would hope that Norman Mailer, one of the original founders of the Voice, might channel his rage and energies towards these developments, rather than some book critic whose words he could easily ignore. But then that would involve Mailer living up to his self-projected image as an elder statesman, when we all know that he’s really a hollow shell.
(via Booksquare)
Hot Chicks + Ten-Sided Die = Laughs
Geek Fantasies: an absolutely absurd take on fetishistic sites. Take Preview #2, where we see a camera crane up a blonde’s bikini-clad body. The end of the clip has this blonde uttering, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.” Or Preview #3, where a girl fondles a Transformer and then replies, “Mint condition.”
Proposed Titles for Terry McMillan’s Next Book
- The Litigation of Everything
- A Few Years Late and a Sexual Orientation Short
- Disappearing Cash
- How Stella Got Her Groove Jacked
- Waiting for Ex in Jail
[in relation to this]
Speedy Gonzales Roundup
- Salon revisits John Cheever’s first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle. (Also at Salon: the first of a four-part expose on the Church of Scientology.)
- Norman Mailer calls Michiko a “one-woman kamikaze.” Presumably, because he hopes to demonstrate that he was spouting forth incoherent comments just before kicking the bucket.
- Books are apparently making a comeback in Iraq.
- The Chronicle‘s Edward Guthmann talks with David McCullough.
- Ismail Kadare will be picking up his World Booker today.
- A 2,600 year old lesbian love poem written by Sappho has been found and published. It was written on papyrus and used as wrapping around an Egyptian mummy.