The Apology
You'll go down there and apologize. You'll go and apologize now. It's ridiculous not to, ridiculous even to wait as long as you have to do it. Stupid and petulant and a waste of time to wait here. It was a stupid thing to say in the first place, too, as long as we're listing what ought to and what ought not to be done.
It was a stupid and a terrible thing to say and you knew that as you said it. You wanted to see what it would draw out, what the words would feel like in your mouth as you said them. Fine; now you know, and now you've hurt all of them, which is exactly what you didn't want and what you knew would happen. You've had the fight, you've argued it to exhaustion and turned on your heels; now apologize to them. Apologize. Just apologize. Just move your body – right now, this minute, now – and leave this room and go find them and apologize.
It will be so easy, once you start moving, to keep moving, and once you start apologizing, to finish. They want to make it easy for you, you know. They want you to apologize. They didn't ask you to disappear like this. This isn't any fun for them either, you know that. You're ruining things for everybody else, not just yourself now. You're the problem and you know it.
There's no point in not getting up now if you now that it's inevitable that you will get up, if you're just putting it off. Look at it this way.
1. You want to.
2. They want you to.
3. "I'm sorry" is a very short and easy phrase to say.
4. It'll be so easy to do it, once you do it.
5. Everyone will be so happy and then it will be over. READ MORE
The latest issue of the Awl's Weekend Companion has shipped! It is a rollicking good time, if we do say so ourselves, and apparently we do, because who else is writing this? In any event, have you subscribed yet? WHAT? You haven't? WELL. You should know that, up until now, we've offered a free month to all subscribers and an additional free month for those who share their email address with us. As of January 17, 2013, that promotion changes from months to weeks—so subscribe now! If you aren't happy, you will have a full month (or two) to cancel your subscription before you 're charged. DO IT.
New York City, January 10, 2013
★★★★ Blinding morning light flashed into the apartment as a glass balcony door swung open across the way, like an immense camera. The cold wind from the river, coming along 7oth Street, made a surprise push across West End and nearly up to Amsterdam, but it wasn't quite cold enough to hurt. And the light was all over the place. At Columbus Circle, the sun was being preceded over the buildings by a blurry greater circle of the sun's influence, while sharp rays came zigzagging in sideways from below. On Broadway, starlings and the multidirectional shadows of starlings hopped and fluttered.
The Lost Roles Interview with Tom Lennon
Lost Roles is a weekly column exploring "what might have been" in movie and TV comedy as we take a different actor, writer, or comedian each week and examine the parts they turned down, wanted but didn’t get, and the projects that fell apart altogether. This week, I interviewed Tom Lennon, star and writer of beloved comedy shows like Reno 911! and The State and an accomplished screenwriter and author (with Ben Garant) of the hilarious, no-bullshit screenwriting how-to book Writing Movies for Fun and Profit. Every actor has their fair share of close casting calls, and Tom Lennon is no exception. He was nice enough to chat about some of the movies and shows he's missed out on acting in, including Step Brothers, Parks and Recreation, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
I Love You Man (2009)
It's interesting – the last one of these I read was Rob Huebel – because I actually was always auditioning for Rob Huebel's roles. I read for [the role of] Tevin at least twice for [director John] Hamburg… in I Love You Man, which ended up being played by Rob Huebel. It was super annoying because it was such an incredible, juicy part. But ultimately, you feel like those roles ended up being played probably exactly by whom they should have been played by. Weirdly, a lot of people quote "You're a whore, Peter" to me [from my role in the movie] as the guy who goes on a date with Paul Rudd. And I actually ended up getting nominated for an award, the only award I've ever been nominated for was for that movie. As much as I was really, really pissed off at the time, I've learned to embrace how that one went down. READ MORE
Grenadian Sorrel Drink
A series on actually good nonalcoholic drinks to serve abstaining friends or make for yourself.
I'm really boring in January. Oh, sure, in the Fall I can invent fun drinks, but come Drynuary, I hibernate with club soda and lime and my Bible. That all changed when I discovered sorrel. No, the other one. If you recall, last year, I discovered Sorel, a delicious hibiscus liqueur. Little did I know that there’s also a native Caribbean concoction known as sorrel drink, popular in places like Jamaica and Grenada.
Brought to my attention by a close family friend from Grenada—the Spice Island!—sorrel drink is traditionally served during the holidays, with a similar flavor profile to the Sorel liqueur (no coincidence there!): cinnamon and spice and everything nice. It’s made from sorrel flowers, which I didn’t realize was just another name for hibiscus in the Caribbean, steeped with a variety of spices. The sorrel drink is non-alcoholic, can be served hot or cold, and can be tarted up with ginger ale or rum to make it even more festive. Its versatility seems to know no bounds: our friend's mother enjoys adding wine to it.
I was lucky enough to have our friend bring me fresh sorrel leaves from Grenada recently, so I decided to make some sorrel drink for Drynuary. Using an amalgam of recipes I found online and the guidance of my sorrel source, here’s what I came up with. READ MORE
Unreleased Celebrity Fragrances
27th Precinct by Jerry Orbach: Notes of pepperoni and shoe polish on an instant coffee base. Leathery, minimal, and cost-effective, this fragrance feels like a big, crusty hug, and is perfect for those stressful mornings when you don’t want to get out of bed.
Wool of the King by Lana Del Rey: Imitation gold is overwhelmed by corrosive notes of Mountain Dew, gas station bathroom hand sanitizer, and chlorine. Spritz it on your angora sweaters, your dogeared copy of Lolita, or your money! READ MORE
Scorpion-Eating Mouse Monster Is America's Scariest Tiny Rodent
Is this carnivorous scorpion-eating mouse the only American rodent who howls at the moon? Sure, why the hell not.
The 17 Best Failed TV Shows Of The 80s (As Judged By Their Openings)
Sarah Marshall: I'm not especially proud of any of the hobbies I used to waste my free time, but perhaps the most inexplicable is my fondness for watching compilations of old TV themes on YouTube. As a general rule, I love all sludgy runoff of pop culture past and present, and the themes to failed 80s TV shows provide its most potent concentration: the montages, the glittery synth music, the streetwise detectives running on the beach in tiny shorts. I vacillate between feeling ashamed of how many no-name actors I routinely recognize, and feeling that I'm spending my leisure time in exactly the right way.
Michael Magnes: It's oddly thrilling to watch, say, Bryan Cranston, as a twenty-something playing a thug on "The Flash," or Anna Gunn, face showing the barest hint of the Skyler White rictus, going down to the Jersey Shore on the imaginatively named "Down to the Shore," and then to watch them on a critically-acclaimed prestige drama. It's like finding porn in your father's closet. Or finding out that he was a porn star. Or finding out that he was human. If celebrities are our gods then these are their humble beginnings.
So, in that spirit, here are seventeen of our favorite TV themes from the 80s—the ones that led us to feel the most confusion, amusement, and fear (ideally all at once). READ MORE
IBM Supercomputer "Watson" Learns Filthy Words From Illiterate Kids
Remember "Watson," the fancy IBM computer that appeared on Jeopardy as Alex Trebek a contestant? A scientist at IBM tried to teach it the slang used by the kids, probably so the supercomputer can write the next Twilight series or maybe churn out a three-volume slash-fiction series loosely based on Twilight or À la recherche du temps perdu. In order to make the genius computer speak in a way modern idiots would understand, researcher Eric Brown forced Watson to digest the entirety of UrbanDictionary.com—the whole filthy thing, with its Boston Steamers and Donkey Punches and King James Versions.
Brown attempted to teach Watson the Urban Dictionary. The popular website contains definitions for terms ranging from Internet abbreviations like OMG, short for "Oh, my God," to slang such as "hot mess." But Watson couldn't distinguish between polite language and profanity—which the Urban Dictionary is full of. Watson picked up some bad habits from reading Wikipedia as well. In tests it even used the word "bullshit" in an answer to a researcher's query.
The once brilliant supercomputer was so dumb after its immersion in the world of Urban Dictionary that researchers had to wipe the whole episode out of its memory.
Gigantic Spiral Galaxy Another Reminder Of Our Measly Existence
We live on a small-ish planet orbiting a standard G-type main-sequence star floating through the inner rim of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way, which is itself a standard barred-spiral galaxy among so many others in the Virgo Supercluster. But it's a nice planet, even if there are probably 17 billion just like it, just within our own minor galaxy. And NASA has just announced that another galaxy has been confirmed as the biggest measured so far, at five times' the size of our own puny galaxy.
The spectacular barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872 has ranked among the biggest stellar systems for decades. Now a team of astronomers from the United States, Chile and Brazil has crowned it the largest-known spiral, based on archival data from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) mission. GALEX has since been loaned to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. Measuring tip-to-tip across its two outsized spiral arms, NGC 6872 spans more than 522,000 light-years, making it more than five times the size of our Milky Way galaxy.
Experts say the enormous spiral galaxy likely has better stars and solar systems and planets and restaurants than our own humble galaxy, which is probably known as the "MySpace" of galaxies in the Virgo Supercluster.
Places I've Lived: "Living Alone Encourages Bad Habits and Interrogations"
Chung’s Dorm, Groton, Mass., (Room and board)
I was the last resident to move into this slim triple at the end of the downstairs hall, so I got the top bunk and the awkward desk. The phone was right outside our room. I tried to avoid it, as there was not much good news to report. I overheard something the other day that reminded me of this entire year: "Happy people don't take long showers." Once spring rolled around, we propped open the emergency exit and moved our ratty couches to the stoop and played fruit golf with oranges and pears pocketed from the dining hall.
New Orleans, La.,(Room and board)
This freshman dorm in the leafy Garden District had cold floors and windows that didn’t open. Once I woke up in bed and thought I’d been beaten to a pulp but it turned out I had just passed out while cuddling a pizza. My first roommate got booted for sexual assault and my second semester roommate moved back to his dad’s house across the Mississippi after an unfortunate sleepwalking episode. There were fire alarms several nights a week. Everyone had guns and owed each other money and smoked terrible pot. READ MORE
When I saw the headline "Every Tech Journalist's Worst Nightmare" at least three different things jumped immediately to mind, but none of them were this.
Lay Off The Sleeping Pills, Ladies!
Modern women, are you constantly feeling "drunk" even when you've had a break from drinking—perhaps during the six-hour break from alcohol known as bedtime? The latest problem you have may be more than a recycling bin full of wine bottles. The quack doctor who always writes those no-questions-asked 'scrips (recommended by the quack psychiatrist who keeps your amphetamine jar filled) may be double-dosing you with Ambien, the wildly popular sleeping pill that suffocates your nightly mental battle with the bug-eyed entities grandma called "demons" and your parents called "aliens" and your college friends called "machine elves" and your dog just barks at insanely, night after night. Why do you have a dog in such a little apartment, anyway? Would you keep a pet rabbit in a coffee pot?
The government agency will now require the recommended dose for women to be cut in half, from ten milligrams to five milligrams, and suggests that doctors consider doing the same for men. New studies indicate that women metabolize the drug differently and the drug stays in their system longer. Patients can face a higher risk of injury due to morning drowsiness. An estimated 40 million Americans regularly use prescription sleep aids.
Dr. Carol Ash, the Medical Director of Sleep Medicine at Meridian Health in New Jersey, warned that routine activities, like driving to work, can be seriously impaired the morning after taking a sleep aid at the previously recommended dose. "It's essentially like driving drunk," she said Friday on "CBS This Morning."
Essentially! Good thing you live in the city and don't drive a car very often. What with the dangerous boozebag activity and the crippling addiction to Rx pills, experts say the safest choice for most gals today is habitual smoking of medical marijuana. As long as you're wearing your office clothes, people will just assume it's the copy-machine repairman who reeks of dope every morning.
Cat Loud
Is this the loudest cat in the world? Sure, why the hell not. I should warn you to be careful with this one: this purr gets weirdly hypnotic toward the end, so if you haven't had your coffee yet you might find yourself drifting off. Also, good lord, has this been the longest week ever or what? [Via]
The Mystery Of The 1969 Naked 'Esquire' Photo Shoot
It sounds preposterous, and it is. But the story of Esquire's grand plan to shoot a bevy of distinguished men and women in the altogether is, so far as I know, true. Here's the first paragraph of the unbylined, unheadlined story from the February 1970 edition of The Los Angeles Advocate:
Amazing! But how is it possible there is no record of these scandalous plans, save for a microfilm'd squib in a West Coast gay rag? (Go ahead and look. You will find nothing.) Before consigning this to the realm of the urban legend—albeit a legend that no one seems to know—I ran it by Gerald Clarke, Capote's biographer. Alas: "Sorry, Elon," said he, "but I know nothing about it." READ MORE
New York City, January 9, 2013
★ The morning looked clear, but the sun never appeared. Instead, the sky went from an ambiguous, featureless blue-gray to a featureless gray, then on to the mottled gray of indisputable cloud cover. Dampness hovered at sidewalk level, a clammy invisible fog. The CNN sign over Columbus Circle said it was 47 degrees, but no one seemed to be enjoying it. In the office, it was time to turn the desk lamp back on again, against the gloom. Only after dark, when hopes were lowered and the floating moisture softened the lights all around, did it become anything like pleasant.
The New SF Bay Waterfront: Now With Birds, Bikes, Parks, Humans
San Francisco's once-barren industrial waterfront between the Giants ballpark and Candlestick Point is rapidly becoming a 13-mile-long green patchwork of restored wetlands, parks and a maritime museum connected by bicycle paths, walking trails and the nearby Third Street MUNI light rail. It's part of the greening and peopling of Port District waterfronts that includes an accidental bird wonderland where a cargo pier was never completed, the open space around Candlestick Park (which will be demolished this year and replaced with 6,000 homes) and lots of little pieces along the shore being put together by the Port of San Francisco and the city's parks department.
The long-neglected Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood is still a "food desert," although restaurants and a Tesco "Fresh & Easy" grocery have opened. The area still has the most crime in the city, but really not much beyond what happens in the Mission with its million-dollar apartments. Until the Third Street light rail was completed in 2007, the area got by for a half-century with bus service. And with the greening of the dingy old waterfront, the last relatively affordable neighborhood in San Francisco is being "discovered." That is usually bad news for the less well-off people who have darker skin than those doing the discovering, like when the entire thriving Fillmore District was flattened in the 1950s and replaced with what is still the city's ugliest stretch of mid-20th Century garbatecture. Anyway, there's a new-ish stretch of green space and bike trails and parks on the southeast waterfront, along with a lot of existing parks that the Outdoor People are discovering for the first time—the sunny weather, sea birds and remarkable views of the bay and downtown will likely be winning many new day-users and weekenders this year.
Photo by Daniel Ramirez.
NFL Playoff Sonnet Picks
Saturday, January 12
At Denver -9.5 Baltimore
We all know that Ray Lewis can still dance.
But catch a sure interception? Fat chance.
He looks like RoboCop with that arm brace.
And half a season out has slowed his pace.
Can the Ravens win? It’s up to Flacco.
Picking them here might seem kinda wacko.
Mile High Stadium air is pretty thin
And old guys tend to get tired therein.
Peyton Manning leads a vicious attack.
He gets five touchdowns from flat on his back.
Knowshon Moreno can carry the ball
Will the Purple Guys stand up like dry wall?
Against the Ravens defense I won’t bet.
And with all these points I wouldn’t fret yet. PICK: RAVENS READ MORE
Why You Should Shop at Ethnic Grocery Stores
I’m here to convince you to shop at your local ethnic grocery stores.
I live in Philadelphia. The map above of where people of different ethnicities live in Philadelphia has red dots for whites, blue dots for blacks, and yellow dots for Hispanics. In the middle of the map, there's a place in North Philadelphia where the north-south swath of Hispanic neighborhoods tapers down to a point and mixes with the black and white neighborhoods to the west and east. And right there, there's a locally-owned grocery store called Cousin's. Not surprisingly, it's a fantastic place to shop for food.
It's made even better by the fact that there's a fairly strong Muslim community in North Philadelphia. So: Take a full service American supermarket, add two big aisles of Mexican/Spanish produce, meats and groceries (including all manner of hot peppers, salsas, queso fresco, chorizos, octopus, salt cod, all of those different kinds of beans and cornmeal, etc.), and then add a halal meat counter, Lebanese yogurt, and a whole aisle of Middle Eastern specialties (halva, tahini, sardines in spicy oil, etc.). It's a dream to shop there. The prices are rock bottom, the selection is amazing, and the food quality is equal to or higher than any other major, regular-priced supermarket I’ve tried.
It’s become my favorite place to grocery shop, but I’ve had a tough time convincing any of my friends to give it a shot. READ MORE
If you were buying CDs from Amazon back in 1998, today's the day you look at who you were 15 years ago and shake your head in disgust. Apparently 1998 me really needed Teisco del Rey Plays Music for Lovers two years after its release. What'd you get?
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