cowperthwait | lies, evasion, spin, circumspection and cleverly veiled hype

We're coordinating a massive journalistic project to document BARACK OBAMA's inauguration. Observers across the country on JANUARY THE 20TH will track minutiae and seeming trivialities, creating a curious and comprehensive record of the day. We're replicating Mass Observation, a movement of 1930s' British intellectuals who believed the most revealing way to document an event was to report the peripheral activities surrounding it. THE MASS OBSERVERS carried out their greatest project on May 12th, 1937, when they dispatched more than 200 observers throughout London to document the coronation of KING GEORGE VI. To participate in this once-in-a-lifetime endeavor follow us on Twitter and post your observations on Inauguration Day.

1. After a cursory glance at the city's expanding skyline, the couple embraced passionately before moving their 120-metre-high public display of affection to the carriage's wooden bench.
   
   Unaware that Sunday Age photographer Ken Irwin — and no doubt other patrons on the slowly revolving giant wheel — had spied them, the pair gave the bench, and each other, a full workout.
   
   A CCTV camera — each capsule is fitted with one — would also have captured their sexy romp.
   
   The Southern Star's chairman Fred Maybury laughed when told of the incident. "I suppose it had to happen," he said.

   —Young lovers caught out on Melbourne's wheel, Brisbane Times
   
   

2. A six-year-old boy and a five-year-old-girl were detained in Germany, on a train to the airport; they explained to police that they planned to fly to Africa to be married. The couple, disguised in sunglasses, had brought along several suitcases, a pink blow-up doll, swim fins, and the boy's seven-year-old sister, who planned to act as witness. “What struck us was that the little ones were completely on their own,” said a police spokesman, “and that they had lots of swimming gear with them.”

   —Harper's
   
   
3. 
   
   !!!!!

A 7.9-magnitude earthquake centered in China’s Sichuan Province left tens of thousands of people dead and millions homeless. The Summer Olympics were held in Beijing, heralded on television by fake, computer-generated fireworks. Structures built for the 2004 Athens Olympics were falling into ruin. A man in Swansea, Wales, died from eating too much fairycake, and an elderly German woman filed a lawsuit against a hospital in Bavaria after she went in for a leg operation and was instead given a new anus. Paddington Bear turned 50; both the cubicle and the assassination of Martin Luther King turned 40; Viagra turned 10. One in 100 American adults was behind bars....

• John H. likes matching flatware. My flatware matches, but it doesn't match his, which matches. Back to the box.


•    "      "       "    dishes.  "  dish set    "          "     "     "      "       "          "         "    "     "    "   .


• Metal spatulas are a crime against mankind, nonstick cookware; must be banished forever.


• The Aeropress can stay, but can we put it in the bottom drawer? No, the one lower than that. Labeled "miscellaneous".


• I am venturing to Home Depot today, to build a little shelving unit for my bathroom stereo & WiFi unit. Also, a vertical towel-holding thing, as vaguely remembered from a hotel. Space is at a premium here, so life consists of a series of challenges to efficiently organize and densely store without turning the place into a Chinatown camera shop.


• Jesse's mail continues to arrive:
  

If he's coming, I have regulatory veto over his wardrobe. Socks with loafers and shorts says "kidnap me."

My feeling about Jesse Friedman's seder... I think Jesse is the most goyish-seeming Jewish-seeming Jew ever. I mean he is like a goy about whom I'd say, "wow, he seems so Jewish," but not really believe it if you told me his mom's maiden name was Finkelbaum.

do you actually do something useful with those tags? As far as I understand, a tag is meant for adding some semblance of organization, but I strongly doubt that more than 10 or 20% of your tags are actually used more than once or twice. I know that you're in large part using the tags to be funny (kind of like how half the humor in XKCD is in the hovertext), but maybe you could just find a way of putting that humor in the content of the post to avoid having to find a whole new platform?

Why I abuse tags:

( Putting this much thought into how to SEO'ify a LiveJournal is pretty much a defining example of why our generation ought to be forcibly sterilized before the cultural damage of mistaking toilet water for Narcissus' lake becomes any more widespread. Just to be clear... )