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I was sad because I had no job until I met a dilettante who was forced to sit on a couch and stare at a laptop while typing continually wrong stuff about everything for A WHOLE WEEKEND.
This is worse than working in the Himalayan pink salt mines.
Much much worse…
(Added) In comments, MBouffant mentions a gasbagfest appearance by McMegan hosted by James Poulos, which immediately reminded me of the biggest honking musical wankjob ever written on the internets which Poluos penned while at AFF Doublethink.
Sample blather:
The decade since 1997 has been filled with strangeness, foreboding, and qualified disappointment. Something that seems inexpressible intertwines contemporary IMAX-scale anxieties — war, politics, terror, globalization, the environment, the economy — with the individual uncertainties of our personal stories. For the generations that came of age as Radiohead got huge, patterns of life seem to have emerged that mutually reinforce and confirm a downward revision of expectations. The band’s catalog tracks the increasing acceptance of a newly fundamental degree of contingency, incompleteness, and transience. It extends across careers and love lives, shaping attitudes reaching from domestic politics to cosmic fate. Many now seem happy just to find or help create the passages of experience that permit momentary and communal escapes. Immanent and transcendent, such fugitive moments of therapeutic authenticity ameliorate the painful costs of being comprehensively compromised.
Deep.
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The world would be a much better place if McMegan were forced to extend this hiatus for say, forever.
Speaking of Megatron, know your enemies:
Probably for Megan masochists only.
“The decade since 1997 has been filled with strangeness, foreboding, and qualified disappointment. Something that seems inexpressible intertwines…”
The Onion: High-School Senior Marvels At What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been
I apparently have never heard of “James Poulos,” so when I saw the name my first reaction was to think of the guy that who wrote the “Innumeracy” book (John Allen Paulos, as it happens) which seemed like an odd pairing with McMegan (unless someone had hired him to to lead a calculator intervention).
Immanent and transcendent, such fugitive moments of therapeutic authenticity ameliorate the painful costs of being comprehensively compromised.
Gaia strike me dead, people make a living crapping this out?
BARF
I agree. That sentence is a Class A writing felony.
Question: How long did Mr Poluos have to wait before his pet monkey typed out this shit? A decade? Radiohead shrugs.
Would it be worth the laughs to start a mass mailing of copies of “Innumeracy” to McArdle?
It’s only 8:25 AM, but I’m going to need a drink to ameliorate the painful cost of having read that crap.
A little late for this year’s competition, but maybe next?
http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2011.htm
What?! You dare to mock writing of such splendiferous and pompositional splendidiosityness?? Why, although I am a great fan of our own, home-grown Educationamal Master of the Turgid Letter, a man (a Man among Men!) gifted with the salubrious appelation of Dr. Samuel M. Banks, this puts him to shame. I have rarely seen such a sparkling example of the “never use one short word where two long words will do” syndrome, and the use of such impressive words (why ‘immanent’ alone gets him a Gold Star of Accomplishment, even without the use of Radiohead as a vehicle for his Nyan-cat-like cosmic double rainbow of philosophical aria-singing) is the Creme Frosting on the Sara Lee frozen Carrot Cake of what must be his masterpiece. (James Paulos? Not the guy who cut up apples with a butcher’s cleaver to mathematically motivate a bunch of Lesser Slackers, surely?) I can only hope that my poor comment, in some small way, serves to support and defend his glorious effort from the mockery of the Little People.
Anyway, every time I read anything associated with her, I get the strongest urge to end all my comments “McArdle delenda est!”
PROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIX PROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIX PROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIX PROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIX PROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIX PROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIX PROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIX PROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIX PROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIXPROLIX
I love the PJTV qualifier ‘warning’ at the top of the video.
Thank you for watching PJTV. As a “visitor” you have 9 more videos you can watch. After that you will need to register (free) and login to see more videos.
That’s some business model.
PJTV: filled with strangeness, foreboding, and unqualified dissapointment.
Ah, James Poulos — the guy who thought the moral fiber of our youth was being destroyed by “decadent fonts” and deliberate misspellings on menus for “kidz” (yes, that’s what he wrote).
I’m just sorry you posted such a long excerpt. I read the whole thing, and can’t get that minute back. Ugh.
She works on the weekend?
I suppose it’s like her marathon all-day research on the history of kitchen technology:
1)Flip through kitchen product catalogues and the New York Times Style section. Spend rest of day shopping on-line and watching Hoarders and QVC.
2)Write an article based on half-remembered anecdotes and facts that turn out to be incorrect when people do a little cursory googling.
3)Profit!!
Uh-oh! Looks like someone got hold of a thesaurus.
I hate to be a doomsayer but if Megan’s not “working” [cough sputter choke] she’s probably making another 12th century baking video.
Our thoughts and prayers go out to Megan in her desperate hour of need.
Word salad – now with verbarugula!
Word. That thing would have landed in PFC Wintergreen’s wastebasket so fast.
I didn’t think anybody could write worse than KLo, but Poulos makes KLo look like Susan Sontag.
She really is going off the rails.
Holy Christ. That’s some grade-A bullshit right there. The fact she gets paid raises my blood pressure.
The ghost of Molly Ivins is sitting back with an ethereal mint julep and mocking her. McMegan keeps throwing yolk strainers and Himalayan salt at the ghost, but that just makes Molly shake her head and point to a forlorn, unread copy of The Elements of Style sitting in the bookcase.
Has she ever been invited to appear on Colbert?
A huge raging thesaurus with dangling participles!
Polous must be getting paid by the word with an incentive clause that pays extra for unneeded verbosity. If that paragraph was a human, it would be on life support for terminal obesity.
I Went to read the Poulos review as best I could and was reminded of why I dislike Radiohead. It’s the stupid things people say about them. I find it astounding that anyone could get so excited about ‘beige’, but I guess it’s a suitable neutral background for whatever one wants to paint.
Indeed, if one must write something like that, it should contain every letter of the alphabet one time, or at least read the same backwards as forwards.