the trolls are out

yikes, there was a post in the nytimes podcast club, asking for what annoys people about podcasts. i said many podcasters' pronunciation of qatar as "cutter" drove me crazy. it created a whole lot of discussion and much more outrage and trollishness that i would ever have imagined. one girl got a little bit unhinged and accused me of being pretentious and pseudo intellectual. um, what? i was just answering the question. the internet is awful.

i hadn't encountered such stridency in the nytimes podcast club before this.  i think it's an interesting example of the times in which we live and the increasing absence of it being ok to disagree. and also, of citing a random internet site as authority. i think i'll ask helen zolzmann of the allusionist what she thinks.

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apropos people who disappoint,

advice on how to find joy.

we could all use that.

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sam sifton (the sublime nytimes cooking writer)

recommended this. 

i trust his advice.

helle thorning-schmidt behaves like a teenager at the mandela memorial service

"hey, wait a minute, i recognize you, aren't you barack obama." 

the danish prime minister helle thorning-schmidt must have been deemed pretty expendable to get a seat next to obama at the mandela memorial service. i'm sure no one could have predicted her schoolgirl behavior, flirting and laughing with obama throughout the service

it must have gotten so bad that michelle decided she had to separate them. helle was likely furiously texting her gay husband (who lives in switzerland), "you shoulda been here, stephen, obama is hot!"

i guess this will be the photo that justifies the OED's choice of "selfie" as the word of the year. it's really true, everyone is doing selfies.

these photos are circulating the interwebs, but i found them here (with a little help from my sister).

updated to include this, where obama tries to get michelle's forgiveness for the flirt with helle the star-struck groupie:

* * *

i came across a linguistic turn i'd never seen before:

“The mood where I’m at’s ecstatic,”

at with an apostrophe s

it was in this article in the reno gazette journal.
i can't quite say that i think it's wrong per se, but somehow it is.
or at the very least very colloquial.

what do you make of it?