Things that are not graduate applications

The Britney Spears Rolling Stone cover. How sad is this? I don't know what smacks of more desperation: the magazine turning whatever residual Obama excitement that exists into an endorsement of the most manufactured comeback since Coke the first triumphed over Coke II, or the fact that nobody is even pretending any more that "Britney's back!" means anything other than "Britney's skinny again!" Even the way they rolled her shirt up looks so haphazard but direct, like a madam's hasty attempt to prove that a hooker still has it. In this Jezebel post, the author notes that she saw Spears on television for the first time when she was 16, that Britney replaced Shirley Manson as the arbiter of hot. I was fourteen when I saw a weird infomercial for the first Spears album, and although I was a Garbage fan in the late Nineties I can't remember a time when Shirley Manson - or anyone like her - was considered mainstream hot. The high-porn standard of beauty has been the norm for almost as long as I can remember, and for just as long almost everyone has been complaining about it. The revolt against the Britney idea of beauty and music is as old as unambiguous appreciation of these things. I guess I'm supposed to ironically appreciate a song like "Womanizer," but like this cover it just bores me.

Law and Order alternate universe approximations. Unfortunately I don't have screenshots for any of this, but I sure love the almost-real stuff L&O comes up with for their ripped-from-the-headlines stories. Especially "b-friendz.com," a stand-in for both MySpace and Facebook that is somehow also a real website. Somehow every attempt they make at approximating an element of the real world comes off as both a parody and a clueless imitation. I especially like it when the detectives rough up the nerdy head of b-friendz.com. He's no Nate Silver, that's for sure.