“Good Morning Ms. Huffington!”

“Today we’re going to learn a little bit about irony. I know you’ve heard the term, but can anyone tell me what it means?”

*pause*

“Okay, well, say, for example, that we ran a headline saying, umm, something like ‘Hillary Clinton to go defuse tensions in Israel’, but juxtaposed that against a photograph of her looking like she’s training for the featherweight champ– Hey! That’s not half bad!”

She failed to point out the clumsiness of Noonan’s writing, which I find unbefitting of the Wall Street Journal:

It revealed what the president doesn’t want revealed, which is that he doesn’t want to reveal much about his plan. (emphasis mine)

It occurs to me that it might have been a deliberate attempt at rhetoric or cadence. Fail on both fronts. So what’s worse? Writers who can’t write or writers with an overstated impression of their own cleverness (and which category do we fit)?

[via BBC News]

He’s just a man, man.

1. No fucking shit more articles are shared on Facebook over the weekend; most of us have lives, things to do during the day, etc. Doesn’t it follow that not only will one see an increase in article trading by way of FB, but a general increase in site-usage? Particularly if you consider the number of students on there, particularly middle- and high-schoolers, who (if memory serves) tend to live a more regimented life during the week.

2. This sort of data is, or could be, key to emerging forms of ethnography and social science having to do with the internet. This is something of a pipe dream, but it would be better, more accurate, and less onerous for those who study digital culture if Facebook would open itself to the release of these sorts of statistics (taking into account all privacy concerns, of course) to the public. They could probably even sell that data, and I wouldn’t be opposed to that. The bottom line is, they’re sitting on a wealth of juicy sociological and statistical information and being pretty douchy about its use.

[via Mediagazer]

UPDATE: Wow, Business Insider… two years of reporting for that?

Neil Patrick Harris has a TV-heavy resume. Now he’s just landed the lead in Smurfs: The Movie for Sony. Harris won’t have to walk around as a blue-tinted Avatar, either. The Raja Gosnell-directed film is a mix of live action and animation, and Harris is the lead live action character. Filming begins in April, when he’ll be on hiatus from CBS’ How I Met Your Mother.

That article’s headline claims he’ll play the “lead Smurf”, but the text you just read says he’ll be the lead “live action character”, meaning he’ll be either Gargamel or Papa Smurf, depending on how you’re reading it.

[via Deadline, which I just realized is Nikki Finke's new-ish outfit]

Here’s the video. Its pretty clear he says “yet” not “shit”.

Foer leans back and smiles, just a little smug. “That’s the nice thing about being a vegetarian. You don’t have to be neurotic. Selective omnivores” – he points a fork in my direction – “have to be neurotic. Personally, I don’t have time for all that; I don’t want to get into it.”

Then why’d you write a fucking book about it, you self-involved, un-nuanced prick?

[via the Financial Times]