Katy Perry recorded “UR SO GAY”, which sounds homophobic, but of course, she’s using the other, fashionable version of the word, meaning anything generally bad. Anyone who thinks that sounds offensive should just Jew off. And stop being so bloody black about it.
(Simon Amstell)
The other day a friend of mine gave me a link and urged me to look at it. It was this:
Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all. (Orwell, 1984)
Hey guys. You know how some nights you’re in the shower, and you’ve already, you know, washed your hair and shaved your face and cried and thrown up dinner and mashed it down the drain with your toes and then you’re bored but you don’t want to get out because it’s cold?? Well here’s my advice: rather than simply stepping out of the shower and saving some water, scan your many products for entertainment! They are goldmines. Marvel at how quickly our English language is degenerating into marketing cant meant to obfuscate, rather than elucidate, meaning! So George Orwell was right after all. Don’t believe me? I guess it’s time for Jesse Reads Products.
Hey guys. Hey, you know I was joking, right, when my review of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians was so unconstructively negative that I ended up just taking the piss out of the author’s baby? Good. I thought so. Actually I loved The Magicians. I loved it so much that I wagged school today because the sequel, which is called The Magician King, “came out” — although I later learned that in fact today is the American release date, and the Australian one is in like two months. When I found this out I was scared, angry, and confused. When you lose a loved one, it’s the little things that get you: realising you’ve set a place for them at the dinner table; picking up the phone to call them only to realise that you can’t. I keep picking up my pen and notebook to write a review of The Magician King, and always I collapse, immediately, into tears, thinking, “I just have to write this review.”
I am, for the first time since The Deathly Hallows, quite excited about a book. In two days, the too-friendly sales assistant at Dymocks will hand me my copy of Lev Grossman’s new novel The Magician King, the sequel to his 2009 fantasy novel The Magicians, which was a bestseller in the U.S. but mostly ignored here in Australia. Many people called The Magicians “Harry Potter for adults”, which was . . . pretty not accurate. Harry Potter is good, while The Magicians is shit. But I still love it. It’s loveable shit. It’s the kind of shit you can rub into your eyes, or squeeze into your mouth, and feel quite sustained.
