The third entry in the Dead Horse Media stable of sites launches tomorrow. Stay tuned.

I was just reading Christopher Hitchens' essay on "Why Women Aren't Funny" (via Gawker). From the intro graf:

If you yourself are a guy, and you know the man in question, you will often have said to yourself, "Funny? He wouldn't know a joke if it came served on a bed of lettuce with sauce béarnaise.

Yeah, well, we may not be funny, but at least we don't recycle jokes we originally stole from Wodehouse in our Vanity Fair columns and use them again a few years later in the same Vanity Fair columns. From my pre-Gawker blog:

Irony Impairment
In the words of Bertie Wooster (via C. Hitchens), some people wouldn't recognize a joke if it were handed to them on a skewer with bearnaise sauce.
posted by Elizabeth Spiers @ Comments [0] @ Tuesday, January 14, 2003

I mean, it's a great line. But yeesh.

Then there's Hitchens' bending over backwards to articulate a biology-based explanation for alleged inferior female funniness which then meanders into a bizarre sociocultural explanation:

And because fear is the mother of superstition, and because [women] are partly ruled in any case by the moon and the tides, women also fall more heavily for dreams, for supposedly significant dates like birthdays and anniversaries, for romantic love, crystals and stones, lockets and relics, and other things that men know are fit mainly for mockery and limericks.

This is a fine example of why, when you bend over backwards far enough, you eventually find your head up your ass. (This is formally known as the "why is it so dark in here?" epiphany.) Well, Chris, it's obvious that this whole piece is just therapy for a having been assailed at some earlier point by humorless crystal-bearing women with absurd romantic notions. During your Socialist phase, perhaps?

One of the cats, anyway. We're launching a fashion site. It'll be written by Faran Krentcil of Imaginary Socialite fame.

[Side note: That file photo of me looks pretty, uh, dour. Someone rightly suggested that it be captioned, "Where's your homework, asshole?"]

from Jay McInerney: "Dana Vachon writes with rare insight about the American plutocracy at work and at play. He's been to all the right schools, met all the right people and betrayed all of their confidences. If there is any justice he will be blackballed from all the right clubs and have several drinks thrown in his face. Mergers & Acquisitions is a witty and entertaining immorality tale which should earn Vachon many fans, if not necessarily among his friends and family."

Mergers & Acquisitions [Amazon]