stanley fish
Stanley Fish—public intellectual,
Times blogger, and
man of secret ethics—has been
doing a lot of thinking about rental car ads, and their relation to cheating on your wife and/ or gay lover. "The genius of the commercials is that they foreground the sexuality that informs the relationship between the car owner and the object of his/her affection," Fish wrote. That's what I'm saying! Because many rental car ads play on the theme of leaving your old car for a new one, Fish believes they are deserving of deep deconstruction. About his favorite Avis ad, he concludes "Lust is lust and betrayal is betrayal, whether the relationship is gay or straight." Others might just like the part with the car, and the guy, and the joke. The ad, and his deep, sexy analysis of its genre, below.
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People Feel Bad When Cheated On
A partner's affair is a terrible betrayal, but did you know that it is your own personal terrorist attack? "'9/11 always reminds me of how it felt — one floor collapsing into another,' said a woman in her 40s who lives near Seattle. Another woman, writing in an Internet chat room, compared her husband's affair to the Asian tsunami of 2004, which killed a quarter of a million people." Is it possible for an entire
country to have Narcissistic Personality Disorder? [
NYT]
god don't make no junk
Today's
Page Six leads with what looks like your
average "I'm a friend of Richard Johnson's" book plug item, the heartwarming story of one
Robert Schimmel, a comic, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2000. Schimmel wrote a book called "Cancer on $5 a Day" and it seems mostly concerned with how to get laid whilst coping with cancer. Whatever, kind of heartwarming right? Not
really! The item veers between life-affirming and creepy, like a drunk driver caroming down the moral highway in a blizzard. (The blizzard is cancer, the driver is Schimmel, and on one side of the road is the sweet release of death and on the other is the married Schimmel's banging of his daughter's best friend.)
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