Is it live or is it Memorex?

From: "Tube Tied:  The Comeback and the Radical Notion that Women are Human" by Michelle Dean

http://bitchmagazine.org/post/tube-tied-the-comeback-and-the-radical-notion-that-women-are-human

Re: The Comeback, a 2005 HBO series in which Lisa Kudrow plays a former sitcom star (Valerie) who is trying to stage a comeback with a linked sitcom and reality show.

The “real” show, the one we watch, is a tad meta: it is presented as an extended version of the footage being taped for the reality show. This draws out a fragmented performance from Kudrow, who is usually playing a Valerie aware that she’s performing Valerie for the reality show (someone’s making some noise about performativity in my ear), but occasionally she slips, forgets what she’s doing. And the Valerie that comes through in those moments is less smiley, less calculating—more desperate.

And meta within meta: Lisa Kudrow herself being cast in this role?

Collections of Collections

Sparky, describing a furnished model home with the bookcase decor:

"a collection of those very Reader's Digest Condensed Books collections.  (Yes, a collection of collections.)" 

Thanks, Sparky!

For shame!

On Aug. 21 on the letters page of The Washington Post a reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha Obama was the "youngest" daughter of the president and first lady, rather than their "younger" daughter. In so doing, however, the letter writer called the first couple the "Obama's." This, too, was published, constituting an illiterate proofreading of an illiterate criticism of an illiteracy.

-- Gene Weingarten asserting that the English language "succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself."

 (Obviously Mr. Weingarten doesn't understand that living languages change and only already-dead languages are immutable.)

Now that's just silly ... but..