In LA

Hmmm, Dov Charney, the CEO of American Apprel, is being sued by 3 former employees in 2 separate lawsuits for creating a “wholly intolerable” and “intimidating” work atmosphere. Here are a couple of other articles that mention the lawsuit.

Their nearly-soft-core porn print advertisements are pretty unique, and apparently Dov shot many of the photos himself.

I wonder how this will pan out.

David Denby wrote a New Yorker essay that attempted to knock Ben Stiller down a few notches.

It is rare that a reviewer slams not one film but instead an actor’s entire life’s work. Not that I should the one to throw stones — I’m often a sourpuss and contrarian in regards to pop culture, but it does seem above and beyond to write an entire essay in a publication with a wide audience the sole purpose of which is to criticize a single performer and the people who enjoy his work. The overzealous negativity made the essay an interesting read. The mismatches between the impression the author projected on his subject and my own impression of Stiller’s work felt to me to be revealing of its author. Denby came across as a bit of an elitist crank.

The essay included, among other bizarre notions, a condescending comparison between the intellectual merits and commercial successes of Mr. Stiller and Martin Short. I am not sure when Mr. Short become the incarnation of highbrow comedy, and I have never thought of him as anything but a very commercially successful and funny comic, but in the essay he is praised as a comic genius who has not had his share of commercial recognition while Stiller’s formula for his less deserved commercial success is revealed to be: “he’s willing to aim lower”.

Owen Wilson, a very funny man in his own right, wrote a letter in response to Denby’s essay that is both hilarious and effective. Fun stuff.

The Los Angeles Times has run a story on the Showtime series Sleeper Cell.

There are people who have already begun to criticize the show sight-unseen as unrealistic or “politically correct” based on its plot summary and casting. In the LA Times article, Sleeper Cell’s executive producer defends the fact that this fictional terrorist cell’s members are mostly non-Arab from such criticism:

The recruitment and training of guys like that happens to be quite high on our enemy’s ‘to do’ list

This quote has its origins in a longer rebuttal he posted to the end of a discussion critical of the show on a rabidly anti-islamic online forum. It’s a good thing when show creators engage in a dialogue with the public, and apparently that particular segment of the public is the one that’s the most concerned about the show’s depiction of terrorists.

make your own vector-based ascii art. Neato.

In case you’re looking to listen to some opera, Archive.org has the collected works of Enrico Caruso available as freely downloadable mp3 files. part 1 and part 2.

Links cribbed from Salon.com.

The very existence of this article cracks me up. Apparently, some businesses are requiring employees who are going to date coworkers to sign contracts stating that their relationships are consensual and stipulating expected workplace conduct — all this in an attempt to head-off costly harrassment suits. Hilarity ensues.

So I was browsing the imdb, that’s the Internet Movie Database (a great repository of all films and film-related information), and came across an amusing director biography.

Here are just a few excerpts

…The offspring of investment bankers, Jeff decided to pursue a career breeding miniature collies. After a run in with the SPCA he “moved” to Los Angeles … He now bamboozles major studios out of development money to support his e-bay lladro auction habit …

I hope that director entered the bio himself.

Sorry about the awful title… I plead the 1:30AM defense.

This is just plain weird. The invitation-only social-networking site from which I was kicked out, orkut (think friendster crossed with a bbs), has been used by a Brazilian drug ring as a distribution network.

Another interesting factoid: out of 7 million Orkut users, about half are Brazilian. Must’ve happened after I was ditched, as I don’t remember seeing any Portuguese postings.

In case anyone’s curious, I was never given a reason for why I was denied access to my Orkut account. It did happen to occur just after I created a “Nigerian Opportunities” community (the Orkut equivalent of a discussion board or bbs topic), the description of which consisted of a few choice passages lifted from one of the wonderfully written Nigerian “419″ spams I’d received.

I thought it’d be a fun place to discuss the wonderful opportunities awaiting myself and other Orkut members in the world of political and financial intrigue described in lurid detail in those spam emails, but maybe the person running Orkut thought I was just out to bestow upon people millions of dollars for their help in retrieving the late General Abucha’s funds that are presently locked in a deposit file in the Union Bank of Lagos Nigeria. Or maybe Orkut’s administrator(s) just have no sense of humor. Occam suggests door #2.

A friend of mine back in High School, Phyllis Fletcher, is now apparently a radio reporter/producer/host for NPR. Her bittersweet autobiographical piece about her and the rest of her family’s relationship with her dad, entitled Sweet Phil from Sugar Hill, is a great and emotional listen. What a way to start a career. You can hear the piece via that link.

I’ve been checking out the other pieces available for download from her homepage, it’s all good. In her other pieces, she sports a good NPR-style serious-news voice which is always a funny thing to hear emanating from someone you’ve only heard speaking conversationally.

I think (Linux > Windows) evaluates to true in most respects (gaming being a huge exception), but I also think this flash animation is very funny:

How to turn WINDOWS into LINUX and become more L33T

They skip the part about somehow making your system become stable enough to go for months without a reboot, but it would’ve been tough to pull that off given the method they chose to switch from Windows to Linux.