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Start your iPods

Random five - Genius edition
1. T-Rex - Jeepster
2. Velvet Underground - Pale blue eyes
3. Bowie - Kooks
4. Modern Lovers - Roadrunner
5. Gang of Four - Damaged Goods

Your turn!

Things Ain't What They Used To Be

Simon Doonan looks around, adopts "an expression of extreme gravitas", and concludes that we've become stupid and shallow and that everything was awesome, way back when. How does he know this? Well, if you make a list of the people that smart people think about when they think about the middle of the last century, it's startlingly light on vapid pseudo-celebrities; smart people were famous back then! A golden age, for sure. But look at today: Kim Kardashian! She is famous ... for being famous. A trivial nothing of a person has captured our attention! Moral decay!

Why, back then...

Even if you loathed opera, you knew and respected Maria Callas and her commitment to her art...

Popular singer was popular for singing. Was she popular for anything else?

...to mention nothing of her commitment to dramatic black eyeliner and swallowing a tapeworm to get thin, allegedly.

Mmm. Gravitas.

Why have we shoved all today’s accomplished people onto the back burner? Yes, we have Adele, but I am looking beyond the popular-music realm to the broad areas of accomplishment alluded to above and asking where, fer chrissakes, are the glamorous neurophysicists? Where are the charismatic, overachieving innovators and inventors? Steve Jobs? A unicorn! A lone example. You are going to have to do better than that if you wish to upend my hypothesis.

Okie dokie...

  • Bill Gates
  • Stephen Hawking
  • Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • Richard Branson
  • James Cameron
  • Mark Zuckerberg
  • Elon Musk
  • Jimmy Wales

Slackers. Slacking in obscurity. Nobody knows who they are.

If only we were as smart and serious-minded as those upstanding citizens of yore, those fine chin-strokers who didn't know anything about gossip, tabloids, sensationalism, shallow reporting or celebrity culture.

If only we were that smart.

Goodnight Sweetheart, Goodnight

Update: A hoax?!? Come on world, entertain me!

Egyptian husbands will soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives - for up to six hours after their death.

The controversial new law is part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament.

It will also see the minimum age of marriage lowered to 14 and the ridding of women's rights of getting education and employment.

The 'farewell intercourse' law is part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament

Hmm.

Egypt's National Council for Women is campaigning against the changes, saying that 'marginalising and undermining the status of women would negatively affect the country's human development'.

Hmm... IMO, the real issue is that it's disgusting. Besides...

The subject of a husband having sex with his dead wife arose in May 2011 when Moroccan cleric Zamzami Abdul Bari said marriage remains valid even after death.

He also said that women have the right to have sex with her dead husband, alarabiya.net reported.

See, equality! If you want it.

Mail Online

The Welcome Wagon

We are a stupid and overly-armed society.

The Newton County Sheriff’s Office is investigating why a couple was confronted at gunpoint by neighbors and then arrested and forced to spend the night in jail when they tried to move into the home they had just purchased, Channel 2 Action News reported.

The Kalonji family had just closed on a foreclosed home and were told by their real estate agent they should go over to the house and change the locks.

But when Jean Kalonji and his wife, Angelica, started working at the home, an armed man and another person who appeared to be the man’s son allegedly confronted them.

“He say to put the hands up and get out from the house, otherwise he would shoot us,” the husband told Channel 2.

Even better, the couple are recent immigrants from The Congo.