Was this week a peek at a terrible future? A dreadful harbinger of things to come? Will all the weeks be like this from now on? Yeah, news-wise, it was slow, which is deadly for a blog like this, but it shouldn't have been slow. Two gubernatorial sex scandals! A heated election! A collapsing economy! Shouldn't it be crazy here? Maybe we're all too depressed to write about it! Look at Drudge. The image above has been on top of his site all day. He's talking about the presidential race, but everyone feels like that crying smiley face this week. Right? Let's take a look at the tape:
- The economy is collapsing. The markets surged on the news that Eliot Spitzer contributed rather too much to the black market economy, but then things miserably continued on their unmerry way. Bear Stearns just collapsed, pathetically, and now the feds are bailing out the banks. Not usually a good sign! Plus the housing market thing, and the plummeting dollar, and all sorts of other stuff we can't for the life of us understand.
- The politics! Man, the politics. Have you seen these politics? They're a mess! A crazy and angry old man toured Iraq, where he wants us to remain for 100 years, and he's mixing up Sunnis and Shiites, still, on the week of the fifth anniversary of our massive fuck-up there. And everyone is too exhausted to be outraged about it anymore! Barack Obama talked about the war this week, but it didn't receive anywhere near as much attention as when he talked about how the blacks and whites still can't get along. The speech was a total inspiring downer, basically. The response to it was pure downer. Even though most people liked it! But his poll numbers are suddenly not looking so hot against the confused old man. He was tortured, so you gotta like him!
- "An elderly man has killed himself by programming a robot to shoot him in the head after building the machine from plans downloaded from the internet."
- Oh, and media. Media's always bad news, right? If we're hearing media news, it's layoffs and revenue shortfalls. Not even awesome old man Sam Zell can reverse Tribune's downward spiral. Also, the internet! If the internet ad boom busts (which it will, Nick Denton keeps insisting), we're fucked. PageSix.com folded this week. After three months! Rupert Murdoch didn't give it a chance—he's not too excited about this internet thing, apparently. He should know! He bought MySpace!
- Stuff White People Like!
- That shit in China? Ugh.
- denton: first time I've really contemplated the horrors of recession
denton: last autumn it seemed, intellectually, a possibility
denton: now I'm starting to hear stuff from friends
denton: paintings taking longer to sell
denton: (from a dealer friend of mine)
denton: buyers disappear
denton: pagesix.com going under
denton: layoffs where a friend's wife works
- Choire Sicha is terribly lonely.
- It's Easter, the holiday where we celebrate the brutal murder of an innocent man by a tyrannical government. They humiliated him first, see, and also when all the Gawker sites were down the other day (yesterday, right?) we made the mistake of reading the amazing Errol Morris/Philip Gourevitch piece in the New Yorker about the woman who took the photos at Abu Ghraib. It involves a mummified kitten head! We wish we didn't like Errol Morris, then we would have an excuse to skip his Important Movie on the subject.
- A fucking baby moved in across the hall. This is Bed-Stuy! Not Park Slope! The baby is apparently as miserable about the state of the world as the rest of us, and considerably more vocal.
Send an email to Alex Pareene, the author of this post, at alexp@gawker.com.
Mar 21, 2008 05:25 PM
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