Friday, May 22, 2009

Friday Links

Our American readers can hasten their long weekend by checking out the best links of the day. Fellow Pakistanis who have to work tomorrow should save them to while away the minutes in their depressing offices.

The new-look Newsweek (reboots seems to be all the fashion with Star Trek and Terminator: Salvation just released) is eviscerated by Michael Kinsley in The New Republic. I don't get what Newsweek is trying to go. It can never compete with quality up-market weeklies like The New Yorker and The Economist yet is wants to do just that. These are dark days for those who love print magazines.

Speaking of Terminator and The New Yorker, Anthony Lane hands it a new one in his review of McG's (whose name and previous work on Charlies Angels should be warning enough) resuscitation of a franchise that was finally starting to work on TV before it was cruelly cancelled. Just his opening is enough reason to fill me with dread:

If you arrived late for “Terminator Salvation” and missed the name of the director, at what moment would you realize that you were not watching a Mike Leigh film? I would nominate the scene in which a rusty tow truck, armed with a wrecking ball, is pursued by a riderless robot motorbike, armed with automatic machine guns. A wrecked car falls into the bike’s path, at which point we are given privileged access to the display screen inside the robot’s brain.


These season's 30 Rock was uneven at best and never reached the heights of its Thursday-night counterpart The Office. But an enterprising website has transcribed every word uttered by Tracy Jordan this season, reminding us that his non-sequiters never fail to amuse.

More on the comedy front. Read this seven-page NYT story on Conan and Jay Leno and be thankful that one of the funniest men on the planet is replacing a no-talent hack.

If I could frequent only one site on the internets, it would be The Atlantic's food section. Ideally, you would spend hours reading every article on the site, but if you only have time for one, make it this one on American cheeses.

Since I don't want to be the one dragging Five Rupees out of the gutter, Siasat has all the inside info on the shenanigans of Pakistani ministers on their Washington trip.

And finally, a YouTube video (courtesy reader JE) that makes genital warts seems positvely old-fashioned. Surfer dudes with fake orange tans make a play for a pree-ten boy. Sample lyric: If you get down on me, I'll get down on you.

3 comments:

Ahsan said...

Something about Jay Leno has always rubbed me the wrong way, and the NYT piece did nothing to dispel that impression. He always seemed the seedy type to me.

Nadir Hassan said...

Bill Carter wrote a book called The Late Shift about how Leno stole The Tonight Show from Letterman. It offers hundreds of pages of evidence showing Leno to be a complete jerk. Letterman only comes out looking slightly better.

JK said...

Dissing Jay Leno now might seem OK but i don't think there's any denying that the man was a genius for a very very long time.

I completely agree that Jay Leno is not funny anymore but he was definitely definitely funny for years. He should definitely get credit for that.