Genuine email from a reader:

I laughed out loud today and so it was a $10 donation.

I’d take my chances in an LOL-based economy…

Over at the Great Orange Satan.

Mike Daisey’s unravelling story is one of those tragic self-inflicted wounds. But I can’t help but wonder how many of the too-perfect stories you hear on TAL would stand up under similar scrutiny.

I am a longtime fan of “This American Life,” but I have never assumed that every story I heard was literally true. The writer and monologist David Sedaris frequently tells wonderful personal yarns on the show that may not be precisely true in every detail, but this was not a story about a family car trip gone bad.

Like David Carr, I have always assumed there is some amount of fictionalization in the stories on TAL. Unlike Carr, I’m somewhat more bothered by this, because a story presented as fact resonates differently than a story presented as fiction, and to present fiction as fact — even in the instance of a story about a family car trip — strikes me as cheating somehow. The story somehow becomes more absurd, more meaningful, because it is presented as something that actually happened. It gains currency it did not earn through the art of storytelling alone.

But I could be wrong. Perhaps this is the very first time anyone ever embellished a story on TAL.

Click to embiggen.

March 14, 2012
The sensible perspective

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Ugg click! Make big!

March 7, 2012
The parallel primary

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Interesting “apology”.

A couple months ago, the Advocate chain of altweeklies in New Haven, Hartford and Fairfield County (unfortunately owned by the extremely troubled Tribune company) dropped TMW from their three papers. A lot of you wrote in, and they had a change of heart — which apparently lasted until a few weeks ago, when TMW was once again dropped from the chain. If you’re a local who reads one of those papers, your feedback is again needed and encouraged. (I should have updated my contract with them at that point, but it just didn’t occur to me that they’d backtrack on their word within three months. Who does that?)

Click to achieve fulfillment

February 29, 2012
A controversy erupts

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This is the thing about Rush Limbaugh — he literally cannot be shamed. The alleged sex tourist, the confirmed former junkie, a man who’s been through three divorces and rehab — you’d think he would have developed some basic compassion for other people after all the lessons life has thrown at him. But when your multimillion dollar paycheck requires you to be an unrepentant asshole, then an asshole you apparently remain.

LIMBAUGH: What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.

She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps.

(Apparently Rush Limbaugh is under the impression that the amount of birth control a woman needs to take is proportionate to the amount of sex she has.)

The next day Limbaugh doubled down:

LIMBAUGH: So Miss Fluke, and the rest of you Feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex. We want something for it. We want you post the videos online so we can all watch.

I suppose it would be too much to hope that the wives of men like this are familiar with Lysistrata.

…adding: Limbaugh and his fellow travellers are always one step ahead of liberals who naively persist in believing that at some point, rationality has to win the day. Are we really debating birth control, in 2012? Really?

Yes, yes we are. And there will be even stupider debates, about — god, I don’t even know, breathing air or drinking water — as long as we continue to believe that these are actual “debates” about actual “differences of opinion” rather than just the verbal equivalent of monkey shit flying through the air.

… fast moving story today, as it turns out. Limbaugh has lost a number of longtime advertisers; you can a petition urging others to do the right thing, here.

This one sure went viral. Clearly, I need to write more cartoons about orgasms.