#link dumps

Completely unrelated, and directly in violation of my policy to avoid regurgitating links for the reader to sniff, but both of these are worth a mention. James Lileks has added another installment of the soul-crushing terror known as Knudsen's Dairy Products. Read it and you'll wish you were lactose-intolerant.

Over at the Morning News, aspiring rockah Gary Benchley moves to Williamsburg and goes to a blogger party. Benchley describes a blog party happening exactly as I have imagined they do, and it cements my anti-blog-party position. So don't bother sending those invites, because I won't even read them! I won't! I was particularly struck by how Benchley's escort, a designer, naturally obsessed about the design of various people's blogs. (Also disappointed that Benchley apparently gave a fake name for her blog, because I wanted to see if she wrote about taking him to the party, for compare-n-contrast fun.) I'm defensive about this, since I have no design sense and would have it surgically removed if any started to develop. I don't want to learn CSS or anything that requires programming or coding or learning or hugging. Yes, I'm a poseur, and doubly so for using TypePad, the dummy front-end for Movable Type, and not even customizing my templates beyond the options available via nice easy menus. Fortunately for you, the lucky reader, I compensate with my compelling subject matter and scintillating prose.

The big blog-dork news is the advent of Defamer, the latest protoplasmic expansion of Nick Denton's Gawker Media. It's an LA-based entertainment industry gossip blog. The writing seems of a piece with other GM offerings, though not as inspired as Wonkette, which has led the pack since her debut. Defamer's good enough to pick at for a while, just like a good, crispy scab. Though Hollywood dish may be an oversaturated subject, especially online.

Regardless, I will swipe one link from Defamer: I've been watching HBO's Deadwood, due roughly equally to its place after The Sopranos and my weakness for Westerns. It's not great, but it's not bad. Certainly it should cement Brad Dourif's place as one of the most eccentric and watchable character actors around. But the show's main buzz has come from the near omnipresence of the word "fuck" in all its grammatical and syntactical forms. Which in turn has led the West Virginia Surf Report to kindly compile "The Number of Fucks in Deadwood." Current episode high: 77, for an FPM (Fucks Per Minute) of 1.51.

Putting out fires today at the workplace ... a sea change from our usual somnambulant pace. So nothing but recyclables today for you. Eat it!

The Grand Comics Database is supra-geeky of course, but it does serve up one invaluable resource. They have hundreds if not thousands of fringe and vintage comic book covers that will make one gasp, cringe, and shudder with pleasure and revulsion all at once, in both good and bad ways. Just a simple search for the word "weird" turns up a banquet of full-color pulp that should provide all kinds of fodder for ironic hipsters everywhere.

Via Defamer, a collection of Japanese TV commercials starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. A tired meme to be sure, but something about Arnold's crazed beverage-shilling alter-ego makes this worth a look.

If you're not already a fan of Ruben Bolling's Tom the Dancing Bug, you should be ashamed of yourself and/or horsewhipped. It's one of the few strips that manages to be both topical and absurd. Worth consuming.

The Morning News's 2004 Editor's Awards for Online Excellence brings to our attention The Dullest Blog in the World. I highly recommend "Sitting on the settee."

Also from that TMN feature and likely no news to anyone but me, since I'm always the last to know and how dare you keep me out of the loop so I look like a fool to all your friends, you inconsiderate jerk: Cockeyed.com, which is nothing more than a lovely assortment of time-wasting photographic effluvia. Excellent fuel for procrastinating on the man's dime.

From the Black Table, some utterly repulsive photos of a disgusting apartment. Reminds me of the night my downstairs neighbor at a dilapidated college apartment building came to my door, shirtless and covered in blood from a slashed hand, asking to use the phone. He claimed he fell asleep and put his arm through the glass of his own door when trying to catch himself from falling. He saw my typewriter collection and "Naked Lunch" poster and loaned me a CD of William S. Burroughs reading poetry while Kurt Cobain accompanied on guitar. A week later he was gone, and two anonymous men smashed all his belongings--clothes, furniture, appliances, silverware, everything--into a pile in the center of his apartment (I heard the racket and came down to investigate). The men saw me peeking in but did not react or speak. After they smashed everything, they started hurling armfuls of debris out the window to the bed of a dumptruck on the street below. I sold the CD for $4 in store credit, and Kurt Cobain committed suicide seven months later. I was afraid until I moved that the guy was going to return and demand his CD back.