My latest article—a profile of The Sopranos' Drea de Matteo—from the Fall issue of Black Book magazine:

Fuck the Industry
From mobster's moll to punk rocker, Drea de Matteo cusses like a sailor and hates having to do press. We'd like to protest.
Black Book Magazine - Fall 2003

Drea de Matteo is every publicist's nightmare. She hates doing press, and doesn't rave about her new movie unless asked, neither of which make high-powered Hollywood flacks very happy.

She is, however, acutely aware of how she's perceived by the dreaded members of the Fourth Estate. "Because I am from New York and because I do curse a lot, they always like to say that I'm just like Adriana," she says. "You know, if I say 'fuck,' then I'm 'like Adriana.'"

"I didn't say fahckin (nasally Adriana voice)," she clarifies, laughing. "I said fuckin'!"—an unmistakably Manhattan accent on the fuckin'.

Drea's natural voice is lower, more gravelly than Adriana's. It's the seductive alto you'd imagine a 1950s Hollywood sexpot using to seduce a Rat Packer as she casually removes the cigarette holder from her lips with an immaculately gloved hand. We've been talking for 20 minutes or so, and to be fair, Drea has said "fuck" approximately 12 times. That's about a fuck a minute. But as someone who says "fuck" a lot myself, I'm not inclined to think it's a bad ratio.

Drea's hair is pulled back into a conservative ponytail at the nape of her neck and the glasses on her nose slide down a bit when she laughs. With no makeup and no jewelry, the 30-year-old looks far less imposing than the seemingly Amazonian fashionista she plays on The Sopranos. (Adriana's hair probably adds a couple of inches.)

Then again, she can lay some of the blame for her image problems at her own door. In the early days of The Sopranos, she purposely played on the fact that she came from a blue-collar Queens neighborhood. "It was all bullshit," she laughs. "I was born in Queens, but grew up on the Upper East Side. I went to those fancy all-girls schools. But I kind of hammed it up a little bit for the sake of the character.

Now she says she's ready to be herself, publicity be damned. "Last year I was trying to break away from it and let people know I wasn't like that," she shrugs. "And now I don't really give a fuck (13) what people think."

"I'm really just shy, too," she says. "I don't like walking down a red carpet. It makes me feel self-conscious. I think that whole thing about wearing clothes, and you can't wear the same clothes again, and stylist this—fuck (14) that. Leave me out of it."

In spite of co-owning Filthmart, an East Village vintage clothing store, with her ex-boyfriend, she insists she "hates fashion." "I fucking (15) hate it. I hate clothes. I hate getting dressed." An odd sentiment for someone who runs a clothing store, but Drea says she only started Filthmart to help her ex, who is "still her best friend," although she's now dating Shooter, the son of late country singer Waylon Jennings.

Shooter's a musician "like his daddy," and Drea's a music junkie, so it's a good match. "The Rolling Stones, Rush, the Velvet Underground," she says. "Waylon Jennings." She smiles. "I'm listening to a lot of Waylon Jennings."

Drea's music obsession has recently spilled over into her film career. "If I could have been a rock star, I probably never would have acted," she says. "If I couldn't act, I'd probably either be directing orr doing something in the music business."

In her upcoming film, Prey for Rock 'n' Roll, she plays Tracy, a member of a rock band led by Gina Gershon—a role she initially approached with mixed feelings. "I just wasn't sure if I wanted to do a rock 'n' roll girl movie, because they can be pretty bad," she says. "I've already made a few bad choices, as far as movies go. I'm very proud of The Sopranos and any theater I've done, but as far as films..." Her voice trails off. "Except for Abel Ferrara's movie, ['R Xmas,] because I love him."

The script for Prey for Rock 'n' Roll was developed by Drea's business partner, Robin Whitehouse, and based on a musical that originally played at CBGBs, and was written by tattoo artist and musician Cheri Lovedog. "I am now very proud," Drea says, "because it came out really good, and Alex [Steyermark], the director, made sure it didn't become some cheesy chick flick."

What are her regrets?

"Deuces Wild," she says. "I can't say I really regret it. I learned what I learned from it. But I knew the script was in a bad place and I did it anyway."

"I don't regret doing Swordfish," she adds, "but it wasn't my kind of movie. Originally they hired me to do it with a Texas accent. I'm really good at accents, so I said yes. And they took the accent away from me, or they weren't going to let me do it, because I guess it was [John] Travolta who didn't believe that I could do another accent. I was kind of annoyed about that."

Perhaps Drea's been acting a little too well. "I think I've been on maybe 15 auditions since I've been on The Sopranos," she says. "People don't even want to see me anymore, because they really think I'm Adriana."

But Drea is not worried about being permanently typecast. "I could bitch about it and be bitter and be annoyed, and start hating the fact that I'm on The Sopranos. Or I could say 'fuck this business,' I don't like these movies anyway. Why do I even want to be in them? And half of them, I don't. So the only way to really deal with myself now is to do my own projects—I don't need the industry anymore."

© 2003, Elizabeth Spiers

A ranty little essay I wrote for the New York Post on Stephen King's new career as an entertainment columnist:

He's Still the King
What's truly scary about America's top horror writer
New York Post - 08.04.03

Stephen King has been acting strange lately.

In the most recent issue of Book magazine—which is partially owned by Barnes & Noble—the horror novelist wrote a fictional essay about the publishing industry rewarding serious literature monitarily. (That's why it's fictional.)

For example: King writes that he read Jonathan Franzen's bestseller, The Corrections, and hated it because of "that maddening New York 'tude that seems to whisper, 'I'm smarter than you, more sophisticated than you, better-read than you—just better than you' at least once on every single page."

He then proceeds to mock Franzen's "constant taking of his creative temperature." ("How is Jonathan feeling today?")

Given the majority of King's work ("The Shining," "Carrie," "Cujo," "Misery," to name but a few) one half expects the essay to end with Franzen in pieces—literally. Killed, perhaps, in a tragic body snatching incident or a good clean axe murder—a bloody ending rather than a snarky punchline.

What's happening to Stephen King?

Has he lost his instinct for violence and gore? And why is the Prolific Master of Sublime Horror masquerading as The Guy Who's Randomly Freelancing for Pseudo-Literary Publications That Go Unread by the Masses?

Actually, King is soon to reach a more mainstream audience in a widely-read magazine—Entertainment Weekly.

This week, the Post's Keith Kelly broke the news that the legendary thriller writer will write a weekly pop culture column (for a reported $60,000—or $5,000 a column).

It will run on the back page—once occupied by the recently fired humorist Joel Stein. When asked to comment, Stein quipped that "every column should end in a gory death."

Maybe Stein has a point. Why not have every column end in a gory death? They are, after all, King's specialty and they happen all too infrequently in popular culture.

Think of how much better "Glitter" would have performed at the box office if Mariah Carey made her final exit screaming hysterically as some netherworldly villain ensured that she'd never abuse another personal assistant again.

Then again, gory deaths are so passé. So 1987. So Nightmare on Elm Street Part III.

Mere "blood and guts" is easy. King's forte is psychological manipulation—the tension he masterfully builds up, the affinity for the outsider, his willingness to shock with unadulterated (but rarely gratuitous) violence.

It would be refreshing to learn in King's new Entertainment Weekly column, for example, that Hollywood celebrities are really humanoid zombies. Many of us have long suspected this anyway. Who hasn't, when watching the cast of "Friends" make their requisite appearances on "Access Hollywood," thought that Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer could quite conceivably be sharing the same brain?

Let's assume, however, that King decides to completely abandon the horror genre and write sincere—albeit humorous analyses of Hollywood culture. The Book magazine piece was admittedly funny, and it's easy to see why that kind of sharp humor would be more difficult to work into, say, a particularly graphic description of a chainsaw massacre.

The questions remain: Is Stephen King making a concerted effort to demonstrate his versatility? Does he feel like he's not taken seriously as a writer? Or is this new career move simply indicative of his inability or unwillingness to continue to churn out mass market thrillers?

After all, he seems to have undergone quite a transformation since he was nearly killed in a car accident a few years ago. He's been bravely writing, for example, about his struggle with alcoholism, admitting that he wrote many of his bestsellers while drinking.

But King seems to have trouble abandoning the horror genre altogether—much to the delight, of course, of his fiercely loyal fans. They don't seem to want to accept their master's declaration that the next installment in his long-running "Dark Tower" series, due out next year, will be his last.

These same fans were also strangely unfazed by the news that King planned to collaborate on a Broadway musical with John Cougar Mellencamp. Talk about scary.

At any rate, Hollywood is sure to provide King with more horror stories than he could fit into another lifetime of books. Reality TV alone frightens both small children and adults with moderately discriminating tastes.

There is, of course, one possibility we haven't explored. Perhaps this Stephen King—the one who's writing pop-culture columns for EW and gearing up to be the next Billy Joel of Broadway—isn't really Stephen King at all. Maybe it's an imposter. An imposter with evil intentions.

Or maybe we've all been reading too many Stephen King books.

© 2003, Elizabeth Spiers

I'm looking at the September issue of Vanity Fair (the enormous 20th Anniversary issue with Prince William on the front) and I just came to the old SPY ripoff Venn-diagram page titled "Common Grounds"—two overlapping circles, one titled "Threats" and the other titled "Belgians" with the overlapping area labelled "Jean Claude Van Damme." (Threats/Belgians is, incidentally, the only one on the page that's actually funny.)

One of the diagrams has two circles labelled "out-of-work journalists" and another labelled "computer owners." The overlapping area? Guess. Just guess.

It might have been funny if VF hadn't done an in-and-out list a couple of issues ago where "out" was "out-of-work journalist" and "in" was "blogger." The joke only works once. And big media making fun of bloggers is, like, sooo January 2002.

The irony, of course, is that I don't know a single out-of-work journalist who's a blogger.

I sat on a panel today for the FOX News channel's 5PM show, "The Big Story with John Gibson." (The panel consisted of me, Douglas Rushkoff and a charming guy named Eduardo whose last name I don't remember.) We were discussing the California gubernatorial campaigns, celebrity and otherwise, and John Gibson (the anchor) actually lamented the fact that there were no good career politicians left in the Republican Party.

He knowingly and willingly used the phrase "career politicians." So I pointed out that a long line of Republican career politicians were likely reponsible for the exact set of conditions under which people like Ah-nold and Ah-rianna are viable candidates.

But I didn't get to finish my sentence because he cut me off. Bill O'Reilly style.

I feel like I've officially earned my liberal stripes.

with some friends and spotted an acquaintance with whom I was supposed to have lunch next week at one of the outdoor tables. I stopped to say hi and he smirked and nodded toward the door. There sat Graydon Carter. I suppose that wouldn't be too unusual, except for the fact that I'd never actually seen him in the flesh before.

I'm going to continue to blissfully assume that he has no idea who I am, or I think he would have thrown food at me. A spray balsamic bottle or something. A t-shirt, perhaps.

If I see James Truman on the subway, my life is complete.

Suicidegirl Neal Pollack.

I interviewed Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk for the Post on Thursday. (Read the article here.)

Palahniuk reponds to fan mail himself and typically sends little packages to readers. (Or anyone, really. He sent a letter to the Believer magazine requesting a correction that was printed in the last issue. At the bottom, there was a note that read "Enclosed: 1 box Brown & Haley Belgian cremes, 1 'Jesus Light': 'incandescent night light with on/off switch,' 1 Chuck Palahniuk t-shirt.")

An anecdote that got cut from the story: I was asking Palahniuk about his promise on his audioblog to send people who ask the best questions handmade packages ("some piece of crap you can sell on eBay") and what those questions tended to be:

"A lot of people ask me which character in my books most resembles me," he said, "And I always say Denny from Choke, and I end up telling this long story…"

"It was like the reverse of the shower scene in [the Stephen King thriller] Carrie," he said. "When I first inadvertently learned to masturbate—and I didn’t know what it was—I thought I'd invented it. And my first thought was, 'I'm going to make so much money off of this!' I actually saw myself giving seminars!"

Palahniuk is, incidentally, a member of the Portland Chapter of the National Cacophony Society—a group of pranksters, who were responsible for, among other things, the spontaneous appearance of a few hundred people in Santa suits last year. (The pranks in Fight Club were partially influenced by the society's activities.) I asked him if he'd heard of flash mobs, and he said no, so I ended up sending him the Gawker anthology of flash mob articles.

The Maccers report.
The Eurotrash report.
The ElizabethSpiers.com report... uh, forthcoming.

Sayeth Moxie about this:
Lovely, I'm glad this chick had such an open mind about our fair city.
I'm embarrassed for her and Gawker.

It's funny because it's reciprocal: I'm embarrassed for people who don't get the joke.

I was checking Technorati referrals for Gawker just now, and was briefly under the impression that I'd been nominated for SEXIST Female Blogger. ("What the?!... Ah. Now that's a whole different kind of weird.")

An article in today's NYT titled "Wall Street's New Harsh Reality" details the increasing downsides to being a sell-side research analyst at an investment bank—among them, the usual suspects: Reg FD, Big Brother-like scrutiny, lower pay, etc.

Last year, when I was still doing buy-side analysis for hedge funds, I wrote two little pieces on the same subject. The first, was a snarky banker-bashing rant (pre-Gawker Gawker) and the second was a fairly straight "sell-side analysis is dead" post. Parts of them still seem relevant and I'm lazy, so I thought I'd reprint them instead of repeating myself.

First, the snarky snarky (edited somewhat for length):

Rambling Commentary on B.S.D.s, Bad-Asses, and Vile Junior Analysts

It is a proved fact that most if not all brokers and traders lead emotionally empty lives, shot through with brittle posturing before others as well as themselves. Often their children don't respect them. - from Spy, circa 1987.

Nick has decided to engage in one of my favorite spectator sports--banker bashing. (Substitute "investment banker" for "brokers and traders" in the quote above, and you have, caeteris paribus, Nick's article.)

First, the obligatory and utterly transparent display of sympathy:

Personally, I take less pleasure in the humbling of the investment bankers. I have too many friends among them.

[I understand the impulse. I, too, have plenty of banker friends--don't we all?

We also have those various friends who may or may not have sold heroin to blind orphans in Tecate as well as those currently under indictment on charges of so-called "egregious" violations of federal statutes regarding the sale of small arms to well-meaning diamond smugglers in Sub-Saharan Africa. (After all, what's a little jail time if not the cost of doing business?) And deep in the cavernous recessess of our Rolodexes, we all certainly have a third-world dictator or two.

Investment bankers are par for the course, really. Can't live *with* 'em; can't sue 'em into oblivion.]

In the interest of full-disclosure, I do have a few i-banker friends who are charming people that I love dearly. I fear, however, that as my friends are fairly normal and well-adjusted, their respective employers will shortly expel them for not fitting the "banker mold."

He continues,

But it was always a mystery to me why they were paid quite so much more than people of equal ability, if not the appetite for such a soul-destroying environment.

Oh, I know all the arguments. The securities industry is a winner-takes-all market, like the movie industry, in which it is worthwhile for companies to reward lavishly their best talent, because the best talent wins all the business. And there were the crumbs, an explanation borrowed from Bonfire of the Vanities, in which the hero explains to his daughter how brokers take discreet crumbs, but of gargantuan loaves.

It's appropriate that Nick reference Wolfe's Bonfire, as many of the bankers I know perceive it less as social satire than a how-to book. Junior analysts aspire to be Big Swinging Dicks ("BSDs") and Masters of their respective Universes.

Some, amusingly, think themselves already there. Of those, some have had the audacity and the idiocy to refer to themselves quite seriously as "bad-asses." Within earshot of me.

Note to those people:

Let's put things into perspective. These guys are bad-asses. They speak several languages, can run for days carrying heavy loads without sleep, freefall out of planes, blow things up, chase terrorists, and can probably build small vacation houses out of toothpicks, a few alkaline batteries, and dental floss. You, by comparison, punch numbers into spreadsheets. On a really exciting day you get to use an aggressive discount rate. You are not a bad-ass.

If, for the sake of argument, we agree that the real life BSDs--the guys that actually get the deals--are bad-asses, *you* are still not the bad-ass. You're the guy that carries the pitchbook for the bad-ass.

But perhaps I'm being unfair. The junior analysts can't help it. The culture reinforces the arrogance. Bulge bracket banks spend all day abusing their junior analysts then reward them with gargantuan paychecks, dinners at chic restaurants, car services, and a variety of other desirable perqs. This allows the junior analyst to less-painfully weather the abuse from his superiors by affording him the luxury of being equally condescending and abusive to less well-paid peers.

On a less elevated level, no one is shedding tears, because investment bankers can still be insufferable. "Those still in employment are so used to bigging themselves up to colleagues and superiors, that they're unable to switch this off over dinner," says a friend who momentarily forgot her rule about dining with bankers. "They still suffer badly from busy-itis: I'm so busy, blah, blah, blah. Which is just dull."

Nick asked me this morning if I had ever dated an i-banker. Once, I replied. A long time ago. "By mistake," I should have added.

It's not even the arrogance that kills me. (That would be hypocritical.) It's the fact that it's absolutely impossible to have a conversation about anything but banking (how exhilarating it is) or money (how much they're making.) If they had any other interests before, the bank has effectively lobotomized them--poor bastards. Spending time with anything besides the interests of the bank is considered both adulterous and blasphemous.

Having worked on a few mergers and acquisitions as an independent analyst, I know first-hand that M&A transactions are about as exhilarating as a trip to the dentist for a root canal. Only the truly masochistic or delusional would enjoy the bureaucratic blizzard of redundant paperwork that is a corporate merger.

And the guys that tell you it's all about the thrill of the deal? The tough negotiations? If they're junior analysts, I doubt it. They don't get within a 100 miles of the negotiations, and the extent of their real deal exposure consists of fetching coffee for the attorneys that are frantically hammering together the trainwreck of a term sheet. Unless they're referring to voyeuristic pleasures, they're the boasts of those struggling to maintain necessary illusions.

Allison Pearson's new book, I Don't Know How She Does It, was recently slammed by a Salon reviewer because it was completely unrealistic. The lead character, a hedge fund manager, claims that she loves her job because "I love the blood rush when the stocks I took a punt on deliver the goods. I get a kick out of being one of the handful of women in the Club Lounge at the airport ... Most of all I love the work: the synapse-snapping satisfaction of being good at it, of being in control when the rest of life seems such an awful mess." This in an industry where, as the reviewer points out, most people readily admit they're in it for the money.

If the lead character were a junior analyst, however, that quote wouldn't be out of place. There's a bit of reluctance at that level to admit that the job basically sucks, and that if one weren't paid small fortunes to do it, one would likely be somewhere else, doing something different.

Now that the small fortunes are diminishing, it would presumably make sense to assume that not only are these delusions crumbling, but the egos are shrinking as well. Not necessarily the case. Even with the pay cuts and ever-smaller bonuses, the junior analysts are still at the top of the financial food chain relative to peers their age, and that tends to be the standard by which they measure themselves. When that changes--and it may, as the market gets worse--the junior banker crowd will have to face the not-so-sexy reality of what they actually do 70 or 80-plus hours a week.

The second, more boring, but perhaps more useful post:

Why Sell-Side Analysis Is Dead

Largely because I'm a buy-side analyst and I rather enjoy looking snobbily down my nose at the sell-side people and making grandiose proclamations about why they're all going to be jobless in a few years.

Kidding, kidding.

Sort of.

I *do* think that sell-side analysis (as we know it now) will eventually be made obsolete by recent securities regulations, the commoditization of basic security analysis, and the expanding array of widely available financial tools and data. :

In December of 1999, the S.E.C. proposed the implementation of Regulation Fair Disclosure, ("Reg FD" - implemented in 2000) which, in plain English, prohibits selective disclosure of insider information. In plainer English, this means that the CEO of a public company can no longer give a sell-side analyst any material information about the company that hasn't been publicly disclosed. (A bit oversimplified, but that's the gist of it.) Prior to the implementation of Reg FD, part of the value of sell-side analysis was that the analyst had more information about the company than the average investor. The analyst had this information largely because he or she typically had better and more frequent access to management. Management, in return, had a fairly significant incentive to talk to analysts because their reports generated awareness about the company, and functioned as a de facto marketing channel even when the analyst's recommendations were unfavorable.

Today, management isn't allowed to tell a sell-side analyst anything they haven't already told the public. *You* theoretically have access to the same information as the analyst. A sell-side analyst can't give me any material information about the company that I can't, with a little effort, get myself. If sell-side analysis was considered "marketing" before, it's even more the case now.

Another factor in the devaluation of sell-side analysis is increased public awareness about the relationship between sales/trading and banking at bulge bracket firms, and saturation media coverage on the penetrability of the supposed Chinese Wall between the two. Even when the analysis is fundamentally sound, its credibility is undermined by the conflict of interest (both real and perceived) between banking and retail. Throw in a few widely circulated Henry Blodget emails about Buy-rated stock being essentially worthless and you have a very cynical retail client base that isn't likely to take your rating system or your analysis seriously.

To be fair, I use sell-side reports to get historical data points on companies I'm screening. The quant side of basic security analysis is fairly unambiguous, and when an analyst calculates a liquidity ratio from historical data, it's not like they can really get it wrong. (Technically, they can, but they'd be out of a job.) I do believe, however, that sell-side reports have little or no predictive value, except for the fact that a widely publicized and aggressive upgrade or downgrade can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I heard a high-yield guy mention a New York statute against fortune telling a few weeks ago, and I can't find it, but I'd imagine it has some implications for setting price-targets based on pro forma models for which the variable assumptions are largely subjective.

The availability of free analytical tools and financial data on the Internet is a catalyst for the democratization of security analysis, and as traditional consumers of sell-side analysis learn how to do it themselves, the demand for commercially produced research decreases. The basics aren't rocket science. Most people are reasonably capable of learning them. In this respect, sell-side analysis adds value for lazy people, but there are no real barriers to entry for people that want to learn how to do it. That's not to say that all of finance is like that, but if you want to know when to buy or sell your stock on a fundamental basis, you can easily learn to do it yourself.

To address the obvious question, buy-side analysis is also affected by many of these things. I *do* expect the industry to shrink on my side of the fence as well, but because buy-side analysts are responsible for allocation decisions and frequently have to go beyond the usual Graham-and-Dodd types of analysis, I think they'll have a little more immunity to these kinds of systemic changes. If you're evaluating fairly sophisticated hedging strategies, for example, it's not likely that your job can be performed by a guy with access to Yahoo Finance, EDGAR, and some free time.

All of this said, I don't think that sell-side analysis will cease to exist completely; only that it will be more overtly recognized as The Marketing Department for retail firms.

The Face asked me to do a little piece on the rise and fall of the trucker hat. It's in the September fashion issue:

Eulogy for the Trucker Hat (The Face)
September 2003.

It's hard to say precisely when the trucker hat made its first appearance in the realm of American indie coolness, or to determine its exact origins. One can only imagine that on a seemingly normal spring day approximately a year ago, an anonymous hipster in some urban mecca of disaffected irony—Austin, Williamsburg, take your pick—raided his grandfather's closet and found a foam hat with a mesh backing. The anonymous hipster then scratched his purposely scruffy chin, and thought, "I bet I can get away with wearing this in public."

And so the trucker hat trend was born, and an icon of blue-collar life in rural hamlets with limited fashion options went from chic to shit almost overnight. Celebrity stylists ruthlessly affixed them to the craniums of various clients, like Pharrell, Kelly Osbourne and Christina.

Now they shamefully sit in display windows of assorted international chain stores where any jerk from Ohio can purchase them and pretend that he, too, is an urban warrior with a flair for style and a subtle appreciation of working-class values.

How did this happen? Two words: Ashton Kutcher. Ashton began wearing the trucker hat as Punk'd debuted on MTV and climbed the ratings charts. Having escaped the confines of sitcom oblivion, Ashton's face and his hat were plastered all over every teen bedroom in America. The trucker hat was officially mainstreamed.

By mid-May, the trucker hat had become so ubiquitous that the New York Times ran a style section story declaring the trucker hat phenomenon "over." That its style section, not traditionally the arbiter of cutting-edge fashion, was even aware of its existence indicated that it had probably been "over" six months earlier.

By mid-July, even Ashton had abandoned his signature accessory for something far sexier—freshly botoxed arm candy in the form of 40-year-old Demi Moore. (Can you blame him?)

And where is the anonymous hipster who started it all? Trying on capri pants after getting his rat tail haircut trimmed in some dark corner of indie America, and thinking, "I bet I can get away with wearing this in public."

Christopher Hitchens, dissecting the Atkins diet: "I follow medical advice in only one respect, which is to make sure that I swallow the two shots of alcoholic medicine that doctors now agree is essential for the heart and the arteries.

(And remember - no cheating. The New England Journal Of Medicine is very clear on this. At least two drinks, and every day. No skipping. No skimping, please.)"

Dong Resin adds: "The Atkins thing sets off my alarm bell because it's too extreme, and the body doesn't like extremes. This is why Lou Ferrigno has a vagina or something, now. If Atkins told you to cut back on carbs and stick with lean protein, I'd be cool with it. It swings too far in the other direction, fucking running away from carbs like a skulless man in hailstorm. It tells you to eat no carbs, and lots of fatty meat. It has the feel of a mugging victim who suddenly wants not merely a handgun, but the Dirty Harry Callahan hand cannon model."

Perhaps, in response to Jonathan Abrams' threats to delete "fakesters" last week:
Pretendster: a service that generates fake profiles.

There's an article in today's Birmingham News on my Alabama affiliations. (A couple of the funny quotes, however, are incorrectly attributed to me. They were swiped from last week's Gawker, which was written by Choire Sicha.)

A lot of people I talk to seem a little gobsmacked that my family doesn't read Gawker. The technical explanation is that my dad has never, to my knowledge, used the Internet. My mom uses it for email only (and that's a fairly recent development.)

But even if they were Internet junkies, I don't think they'd read it because it wouldn't make any sense to them. The media industry exists in Alabama, of course, but not in an incarnation that would be remotely recognizable to Manhattan media people.

When I was working in venture capital and picking stocks for hedge funds, my parents didn't know what I did either. Those industries just don't exist there.

There could be an Alabama version of Gawker, but the topics would be:
· College football and sports gossip
· NASCAR
· Political gossip
· Winton Blount (Jr. & Sr.)
· Why is it so fucking goshdarn humid all the time?

Or there could be a Spiers Family version of Gawker:
· Deer (pronounced "dar") huntin' season
· I was in church on Sunday and Miss Smith (names changed to protect the innocent) told me that the Wilson boy done got little Missy Anderson knocked up and they're gonna have to get married.
· College football and sports gossip
· Aunt Adele (names changed to protect the innocent) said she was gonna bring a squash casserole to the buffet on Saturday, bless her heart.
· Mah back has been hurtin' me for two months now and Dr. Jackson (names changed to protect the innocent) says he ain't sure what it is, but I'm gonna have to have some more tests. Also--Aunt Adele seems to be doing a bit better since her last treatment and says thank you for your prayers--and the squash casserole. She said it was de-licious. And did you hear about Mary Lou Wilson's brother? He's been having headaches, and you know cancer runs in their family. I wouldn't be surprised if it wat'n a tumor. [Ed.—Medical gossip is especially popular in my family.]
· So I get to the church picnic and what do I see sittin' on the table, but the same squash casserole I brought over to Adele's after her last treatment! I mean, I'm not one to say nothin' bad about other people, but...

Hitchens apparently shares my opinion on the Kennedys: "...The political-matrimonial alliance between Andrew Cuomo and Kerry Kennedy was discovered to be in the process of acrimonious dissolution. Representative Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, whose ability to find his way to the House unaided has long been a source of intermittent wonder, became inflamed while making a speech at a liberal fund-raising event and yelled: 'I don't need Bush’s tax cut! I have never worked a fucking day in my life'. The electoral career of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, which had never achieved escape velocity from local Maryland politics, seemed to undergo a final eclipse in the last mid-term vote. Robert F. Kennedy Jr failed to convince anyone of the innocence of his cousin Michael Skakel, convicted of beating a teenage girlfriend to death with a golf club. Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts still retains a certain grandeur, on the grounds of longevity and persistence alone, but his solidity on the landscape derives in part from his resemblance, pitilessly identified by his distant kinsman Gore Vidal, to 'three hundred pounds of condemned veal'. And even Vidal, who first broke a lance against the Kennedy clan with his 1967 essay 'The Holy Family', might be open-mouthed at the possibility of Arnold Schwarzenegger winning the upcoming race for the Governorship of California and thereby making Maria Shriver, a collateral Kennedy descendant, the first lady of the nation’s richest and most populous state. Such a macho Republican triumph would be a bizarre way for the family charisma to mutate...Otherwise, one can reasonably look forward to a future where the entire meretricious Kennedy cult has staled."
Kennedy the invalid [TLS via The Antic Muse]

The 10 Commandments Alabama music video. Dear. God.

Drool.....