gastropoda

Panchito also earns the gold medal in logrolling for his online ode to a book by the friend of a too-good friend. I had taken to calling her the Drivelist, but then I started getting emails wondering if something more un-Timesian was afoot. This, for instance, arrived in all caps and boldfaced in my subject line: “Is (she) coming right out and saying her trips are free?” Funny, though, that the best solution might be what my consort has been advocating for years, since he used to shoot for British publications with writers perfectly comfortable with their system: Take the handouts, acknowledge them and just tell the truth. But that would require a collection of thoughts not easily evident in an extended headnote that your batty aunt might have written after a junket. Then again, if life gives you only wine ads, make wine copy.

I shouldn’t expect much from a paper that actually printed the phrase “he road on his motorway,” but describing absinthe as a cocktail is a little like saying bourbon is a highball. Good thing they had the inevitable ad to set readers straight. And I guess it would have been a downer for the liquor store to give it the usual side-by-side play, so they moved it a section away from the bogus trend story. (Anyone who thinks bingeing-and-purging with booze is new has never spent a night in a girls’ dorm.) Still, expect to be reading a lot more about the green “cocktail.” I recently got an email wanting me to write a “paid review” of one brand, which may be a sign that blogola is the next hot trend. A friend emailed me the other day and mentioned he made all of $2.97 off his blog last month, which is almost $3 more than I ever have. I can see why “kids” with no background in journalism before it became more about buying than thinking would happily take a little under the table when ads are not all they’re inflated to be. Personally, I have no faith in the afterlife, let alone the possibility that there might be shopping malls in hell.