Yet The Exile was too vitriolic to romanticize for long or to consult just its fans. And listening to the critics is too fun. They call Ames and Taibbi, singly or in combination, children, louts, misogynists, madmen, pigs, hypocrites, anarchists, fascists, racists, and fiends. According to Carol Williams, of the Los Angeles Times, “It seemed like a bunch of kids who’d somehow gotten funding for their own little newspaper.” A former New York Times Moscow-bureau chief, Michael Wines, offered a no-comment comment. “I think I’ll pass, thank you,” he e-mailed, “except to repeat what I said at the time, and what Shaw said a lot earlier: Never wrestle with a pig. You just get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.”Of course, a pig is probably not the farm animal that comes to Wines’s mind first when he’s reminded of The Exile. It was Wines, then the Times’s Moscow-bureau chief, who, having won The Exile’s coveted Worst Journalist in Russia March Madness contest in 2001, was typing in his office when Ames and Taibbi rushed in unannounced and, by way of congratulations, slammed a pie in his face. The pie was made with fresh vanilla cream, hand-puréed strawberry, and five ounces of horse semen.‘That’s what he said?,” Ames asks when I relay Wines’s comment. “He said the same thing back then, the poor bastard.”

via Lost Exile | Culture | Vanity Fair.

I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it’s there, and there’s nothing you can do about it. OK, OK: I know other operating systems are available. But their advocates seem even creepier, snootier and more insistent than Mac owners. The harder they try to convince me, the more I’m repelled. To them, I’m a sheep. And they’re right. I’m a helpless, stupid, lazy sheep. I’m also a masochist. And that’s why I continue to use Windows – horrible Windows – even though I hate every second of it. It’s grim, it’s slow, everything’s badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I’m an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.

That’s why Windows works for me. But I’d never recommend it to anybody else, ever. This puts me in line with roughly everybody else in the world. No one has ever earnestly turned to a fellow human being and said, “Hey, have you considered Windows?” Not in the real world at any rate.

via Microsoft’s grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse? | Charlie Brooker | Comment is free | The Guardian.

LIFE: Vietnam – Hosted by Google.

“I love to have a glass of wine now and again, but going out and downing sugary cocktails isn’t fun for me. And drinking is so much more expensive,” says Debbie Schwartz, a 28-year-old reality-show production manager who recently moved to New York from Los Angeles. Her job is relentless—15-hour days spent coordinating a million moving pieces, managing expenses, setting production schedules, and mollifying gimme-gimme talent. Her company just slashed her budget in half, which has left Schwartz scrambling to cut costs so that she won’t have to lay off employees. After work, she can’t think of anything she’d rather not do than throw on a pair of heels and some makeup to hit the local bars. “I’ll go to the gym for an hour, then come back home and smoke a joint while I listen to jazz and read a book—I just finished The Fountainhead. It’s my moment for myself before I have to get up and do it all over again tomorrow. It’s my bubble bath,” Schwartz explains. She doesn’t keep her illicit habit under wraps, either. There’s no need, since several people in her office use the same “dealer”—a colleague who takes orders for their department.

via Female Stoners – Women Pot Smokers – Marie Claire.