Sunday, November 25, 2007

Three Thoughts

1. Middlesex is a terrible book. It's a lifeless puree of Roth, Rushdie, and Marquez, and this is especially unfortunate since Eugenides' first book, The Virgin Suicides, was singularly brilliant. Middlesex takes up a challenging subject only to dispatch it in the most frivolous way possible. In my opinion, the really monstrous thing about Calliope Stephanides is not the wasteland of her insufficiently-developed genitalia, but the wasteland of her insufficiently-developed inner life.

2. Sweet potatoes are healthier and tastier than regular potatoes. Why, then, do we eat regular potatoes at all? I submit that we should make a total switch in our national diet.

3. The new advertising scheme for Herbal Essence boasts that it's, "so good it will put clean thoughts in your head." But does anyone remember the old advertising campaign with the beautiful woman in the shower washing her hair and making "orgasmic" sounds? That campaign was so good. Why on earth would they change it? It was the kind of thing for which people in the ad industry won awards and exchanged spontaneous back-slaps. The new campaign is, by contrast, reminiscent of some 19th century admonition against masturbation.

3 comments:

  1. i thought "virgin suicides" was one of the worst books i've ever read, serious or frivolous, fiction or nonfiction. shame, though; you had me going on the other two. i spent most of break thinking about the inferiority of the non-sweet potato.

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  2. Mitch Hedberg, on Herbal Essences:

    You ever see a commercial where a girl's washing her hair under a waterfall? That's some bullshit; that shit would knock you on your ass.

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  3. Sweet potatoes and potatoes are so dissimlar as to be wholly pointless to compare.

    And who would eat sweet potatoes with a steak and gravy?

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