Bruner Blog

Spooky seasons greetings from New Yorkled.

Mean and scary pumpkins on ExtremePumpkin.com. And yet, for reasons only she can understand, Adi hates Halloween.

(Via Archismo)

Man, I should really stop blogging about dirty things. Why do I come up #1 for this search on Google rather than the guy I was linking to when I was blogging about that? (Yes, I’m being deliberately cryptic, because I don’t want to reinforce those phrases.)

Or, how about this search?? (An extremely popular search, as it turns out; one of my top traffic drivers lately, in fact. I’m #3 on Google for that, for God sake!) I never wrote about that, I swear! Lord knows I can’t do it, and wouldn’t even if I could.

Or this. Also on Google. (Okay, I see that one is because I’m a terrible speller.)

Or this.

Or this.

Or, simply and elegently, this.

Or, for whatever insane reason, this.

Or, remarkably, this (which isn’t dirty at all, it’s just strange I come up so high for a search of that).

The good news is that my traffic is up lately, but I just get the idea I’m not really connecting with my target audience.

UPDATE:

Also, this (I come up high on searches with “trivial,” like this).

And this.

And this (this whole topic is generally big for my traffic lately)

And this (eat your heart out, Eurotrash)

I forgot to blog this earlier. Some of the gang at a reading of Prague by Arthur Phillips, a function of the Manhattan Hungarian Network and the Magyar Consulate (which I can’t find a link for), a week and a half ago.

Interesting (?) tidbit: they managed to misspell my name in the caption, despite my having given the photographer a business card.

Perhaps it’s a trend — the next trucker hat — or perhaps it’s an elaborate joke, I don’t know, but I can’t help noticing that when you search Friendster for “open marriages” in the NY area, there are tons of them, particularly in Brooklyn among people in their 20s. What’s up with that? Is it for real? If so, how could that be, as open marriages really go against the grain in this country (trust me)? I sort of think that most of the people who list themselves thusly are doing so only because they think it’s funny in an absurdist way. Or maybe, it really is hip these days. Anyone have any idea?

I’m so damn clever. I was out Friday night with a group of — brace yourself — Hungarians. I think I was the only non-Hungarian in the group, aside from someone’s Afghan fiance. One of the guys in the group is gay and, needless to say, very handsome. At some point in the evening, an American girl came up to him and was shamelessly flirting with him for a long time. Oddly he played along for quite a while.

(To interrupt myself for a moment, how of often does that happen to the rest of you straight guys? As for myself, I don’t know that a good looking woman (and that might be generous in this case, but she wasn’t a hound, anyway) has ever come up to me and initiated the come on. It always seems like it was the other way around. But if you’re gay… Oh, the irony of the gods.)

Later outside, we were eager to hear of how things played out with her. Apparently, he finally broke the news her that he doesn’t go for the ladies, to which she inquired, “Are you bi at least? Because my friend over there, he’s bi, and so maybe the three of us could…”

At which point in the retelling I interjected, “Oh, a sandwich. A meleg szendvics.”

If you are Hungarian, by now you would agree that I am terribly damn clever. For the rest of you, explaining the joke will ruin it, but I’m so pleased with myself about it, I can’t resist. In case it’s not obvious, “szendvics” is “sandwich,” Hungarians just spell it funny. And “meleg” means “warm,” and Hungarians are partial to eating their sandwiches that way (think tuna melt, but with ham instead of tuna). But — and here’s the really damn clever part — meleg is also slang for gay.

Quite the double entendre for a guy who really doesn’t speak Hungarian particularly well.

Ananova reports:

A South Yorkshire family have moved home because they are fed up with their address - Butt Hole Road.

Paul and Lisa Allot, who lived in the ?150,000 bungalow with their two children for 15 months, got sick of people pulling their leg.

They say people posed for pictures outside their house in Conisbrough, many of them with their trousers dropped, reports The Sun.

I wonder about all the other families that don’t seem to mind that address. For some reason, my favorite part of this story is that they lived in a “bungalow.”

BBC reports:

Red-faced officials at General Motors in Canada have been forced to think of a new name for their latest model after discovering it was a slang word for masturbation.

GM officials said they had been unaware that LaCrosse was a term for self-gratification among teenagers in French-speaking Quebec.

D’oh!

Last night on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, a yellow cab is stopped in the street while its passenger pays and disembarks. Behind, in a black Jaguar, a man leans out of his window up to his shoulders and shouts, in classic regional guido/metrosexual accent, “Yo! Fuckface! Move your fucking car!” This he repeats after waiting patiently another 10 seconds.

Needless to say: NJ license plates.

After seeing “Lost in Translation” for a second time, sober the latter, Maccers recalls her experience arriving to Japan without a visa or place to stay and spending the next several hours in a dingy cell being groped by Japanese guards until they sent her on to the Philippines without her passport, credit cards or shoes. So much for blonds having more fun.

For the last two days I’ve noticed that the best known (and biggest?) wiki, the Wikipedia, has 404. Anyone know whether this is temporary or whether it has run out of gas (or at least, out of server funds)? I loved that resource.

UPDATE:
Hmm. I can access it via Mozilla, but not via IE.

Listening to a “best-of” installment of This American Life, I heard this two-year-old segment “Invisible Man vs. Hawkman” (forward to 6:00 minutes into the Real Audio file) in which commentator John Hodgman describes how for recent years his favorite small-talk starter at parties is to ask people whether, if they could have a super power, would the chose the ability to fly or invisibility. Thoughts?

UPDATE:
I know I don’t normally use comments, but I’ve switched to using HaloScan, which seems to work better than Enetation, which, in addition to having a stupid name, is very flaky in my experience. So, anyway, I’m back to trying to use comments selectively.

But here’s the main reason I am reluctant to use comments: this post has been up for several days and no comments so far. What’s up, people? Would you prefer flight or invisibility as a superpower? That’s a perfectly valid question!

Old Hag has pointed out that NPR’s Ombudsman Jeffrey A. Dvorkin has given Terry Gross (host of the popular Fresh Air program) a spanking over her interview with rightwing dickhead Bill O’Reilly. I happen to have heard Gross’s interview with O’Reilly, as well as her related interview with liberal humorist and author Al Franken a couple of weeks earlier, and I have to agree with Dvorkin that Gross was not even-handed in her harrassment of O’Reilly.

In her prior interview with Franken, she was possitively fawning, while she spent the whole time challenging O’Reilly with accounts from Franken’s book about what an asshole O’Reilly is. The best part of the interview, right before O’Reilly stormed out of the studio (giving a 50-minute interview, first), was him demanding of Gross, “Were you this hard on Al Franken? Well, were you? Were you??” to which she could only meekly reply, “Well, no, but…” (or words to that effect) before he cut her off to rant a bit more.

All of which makes me think I agree with Curtis White’s essay “The Middle Mind” (which I read a couple of years ago in Harper’s) to the effect that what passes for intellectual thinking in America, as embodied by Gross and Charlie Rose, is pretty lame. I mean, what percentage of those two’s interviews are celebrities, for starters?

Everyone’s favorite blog these days seems to be TMFTML (aka, The Minor Fall, The Major Lift), and not without good reason. I knew the title of the blog sounded familiar, but I just placed it now: it’s a line from the song “Hallelujah.” I know the song best from the frighteningly beautiful version by the late, great Jeff Buckley, but now I notice the song is actually by Leonard Cohen, and I even have it on CD as well, although I don’t listen to that album as often as Buckley’s. Anyway, all just goes to show our blogger boy has taste.

Al Barger calls Tommy Chong a political prisoner. I’d have to agree. As I reported last month, pothead commedian Tommy Chong was sentenced to nine months in federal prison for selling bongs on the Internet, while Limbaugh, as far as I have seen, hasn’t faced any kind of legal problem for admitting to illegally buying large quantities of narcotics. Sure, because Chong made a career out of satirizing the pointlessness of anti-pot legislation, while Limbaugh made his with quotes like these
:

“If people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.”

“Too many whites are getting away with drug use The answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river too.”