No, really, I’m serious. If Augusta wasn’t enough evidence that golf is morally bankrupt even by the standards of the athletic industry, this surely is. How do you say “fuck golf” in Korean?

You would think that in the middle of Europe I could find someplace that I could get to on a Friday evening and get back from on a Sunday afternoon where I’d actually want to spend the intervening time, but apparently not.

Matt Ruff’s post in response to Gordon’s survey on paying for online fiction is very smart.

I see a lot of muddled thinking out there about money and words. Somewhere in the two or three hundred years since the consumerization of publishing began (mostly in the last hundred, I suspect—maybe mostly in the last twenty or thirty), people have gotten the idea that reading—reading itself, as opposed to things read—might be something you should pay for. This after people had been reading for free for a good five thousand years. (Personally, I blame the movie theater, the phonograph record and Bill Gates.)

I think Matt has the right of it. Reading is free. Books cost money.

So, did Aaron Eckhart, like, refuse to sign on for more than one film, or was there some other reason they crammed a whole sequel into the last forty-five minutes?

A canon needs an established cultural authority, and there is no guiding authority in culture anymore. There are no real gatekeepers. The barbarians aren’t merely at the gates — they long ago passed through the gates and are comfortably strolling around town. They are ordering lattes at the museum café right now. … This is a terribly bothersome situation to some people, usually to the very people who still think they can show a difference between themselves and the barbarians. They don’t want to be barbarians. The most succinct response to such people is: tough shit.

– Morgan Meis, Notes From a Barbarian: Reconsiderations of a Canonless World

(Via 3quarksdaily.)

Really, there are few personal problems that can’t be solved, or at least indefinitely avoided, through liberal application of Dinosaur Comics.

Yes, I know I linked to the one with the boat in the punchline before already. It’s funny. I have no regrets. About that. Anyway: Mr. Tusks T-shirts! I am oversupplied with t-shirts at the moment but nontheless I must admit I am a tiny bit tempted.