My latest post at ProTwit looks at Sponsored Tweets latest contest.

She was Playboy's Miss March 1966.

That's when Playboy's women really did look the "the girl next door" -- whose clothes had accidentally fallen off.

I say we make Priscilla Wright the new Bettie Page. (The rest of the pictorial is obviously not safe for work.)

See.

Told ya.

Heh. (Includes video of the surprisingly engaging author at a recent Tea Party.)

Related.

PS: this just in -- the (other) Freakonomics guy writes:

A few weeks back, I was a guest on Glenn Beck’s radio show. Something interesting happened before we went on the air.

This was the only time I’d ever done an interview and even had someone ask about the book I happened to have with me at the time, much less want to read it, and then read some others. I was pretty impressed. Beck has an awful lot of fans, but he has a lot of detractors too — and my sense is that those detractors have miscast him as a know-nothing villain.

***
They talked in Beck's new Mercedes after the show, Levitt taped it, and you can here their conversation here--at the New York Times.

I can just imagine what this comments thread will look like in an hour or two...

Jay Currie:

Of course the Times could not be bothered doing the digging itself…instead it reports stories from the Telegraph and the London times…

Perhaps the New York Times has become a blog.

Related:

Finally— I’ve been asked a bunch of times whether I’m worried Gothamist won’t have anything left to curate once the Times goes out of business. But I’m not— first of all, new billionaires seem to roll up every year with their vanity media products, dumping tons of new content at our doorstep. Rupert’s new retread of the New York Sun has got to be worth a couple of dozen stories a day at least.

Between those billionaire rubes, the dozens of mainstream media outlets that survive (radio, tv, local papers), and the hundreds of hyperlocal neighborhood blogs that spring up like mushrooms every year, I don’t think we’ll ever run out of local content to pass through our curation machine.

Your Tax Dollars At Work Radio discovers the "Miss Me Yet" phenom.

Does story about billboard. On the radio. Yep.

Otherwise? I got nuthin'

Took longer than I thought...

As of 8AM today:

Meet Ken's neighbours!

Imagine a collection of adults who live under the roof in a kind of rotating schedule; two women and one man seem to be the core group, but at least two other guys seem to swap on and out of the place. (One of them seems to have made it his mission in life to park in our spot every chance he gets.)

There’s at least a couple of kids in the mix, as well; they get dropped off and picked up by a taxi at irregular intervals.

They have two cars…

Now, repairing a car is not exactly a cheap proposition. This, I get. However, I figure at least one of those cars could be repaired to decent working order — if not replaced entirely (K-car, remember) — for less than the price of the massive flatscreen that dominates their front window, which they purchased upon moving in (I know: I heard one of the women boasting about it to the kids).

And if you add in what it must cost to smoke as much marijuana as they do…well, you get the idea, good reader.

And I’m paying for this all. And you are too, if you happen to be a Canadian taxpayer.

Not safe for work if you were stupid enough to actually listen to your guidance counsellor (sucka!)

PS: Jay is gloating!

and wanders into the bedroom to pack her bag: lingerie, bikinis, hand sanitizer, toothbrush, mouthwash, magazines, deodorant, lube, condoms, dildos, handcuffs, gag, and a knife. Last to go in is a small satchel, filled with good-luck charms.

Her phone begins to ring: a trickle at first, becoming a torrent by 11pm.

“What are your restrictions?”, ”Do you do anything bareback?”, “Do you like what you do?” they ask.

“Depends what you look like,” she replies, her frankness causing some of them to hang up.

Mark Steyn writes:

As they say over there, it’s Health & Safety gone mad, innit? Or as a lady put it after the funeral, as we were discussing the fracas, “There’s only one thing that annoys me more than Health & Safety gone mad, and that’s when people say, ‘Ooo, it’s Health & Safety gone mad.’” I know what she means. In Britain, the distillation of any daily grievance into a handy catchphrase seems to absolve one of the need to do anything about it. As long as they can grumble the agreed slogan, they’ll put up with ever more absurd incursions on individual liberty.

***
People have been bitching and moaning about "political correctness" for twenty five years -- but those same people never DO anything to challenge it. They just mutter into their coffee.

You are part of the problem. Do something or shut up.

CenterRight:

...when British people get jittery and shy away from Christmas and want to use meaningless language such as "Winterval", we compromise what is best about Britain - a multi-faith country and culture informed by a Christian ethos and history.

I am proud Britain never became a godless, communist land. We fought two world wars to protect the history, culture and people, not to see what makes it British eroded because of spineless politicians too scared to say "Christmas" in public.

Like the "fasting girls" and fake tuberculars of less "enlightened" times gone by. Most food "allergies" are bourgeois affectations -- as I keep telling you:

Up to 20 per cent of us now believe we have a food intolerance, she says, with the real figure lying somewhere between 1 and 2 per cent.

The War of the Poses!

But that's not racist or anything. Nope.

I've got the story at my new post at David Horowitz's NewsReal blog.

Too little, too late?

America's angriest columnist is angry:

I’m pretty sure Palin wrote those words herself, and didn’t get some longhaired hippie terrorist to “ghostwrite” them, either!

If Obama can win a bunch of awards for books he didn’t even write, and Al Gore can get a Nobel Prize for a slide show, I’m pretty sure Sarah Palin deserves at least a Pulitzer for those scribbles on her hand!

Damn, wish I'd thought of that!

The Boyz praise Palin's ****-u-fu!

“Hi Mom” can also be loosely translated as “F-U, Lefties”.

Here’s what Sarah Palin did today, and why it’s not only brilliant, but it’s the chief reason this woman will be our 45th President.

She hit the Left back, in a subtle way that drives them crazy.  THAT, friends, is quite an art form.  We respect everyone alive who practices this sort of Fu.

***
PS:

As of 10AM ET, still no "Redneck Teleprompter," "Talk to the hand" or "Palm Reading" elated items up at Zazzle.

Give it a few more hours...

Last night witnessed the ugly eruption of no-nothingism among conservative Tweeters.

While we've established that the Super Bowl does not in fact cause an upsurge in wife beating, it does seem to make some people not just stupid, but proudly so.

According to these sages, The Who are too old/not "relevant"/not "American enough to provide appropriate half time entertainment.

One wag tweeted, "What? Was the Glenn Miller Band unavailable?"

So... were it possible by some miracle to have the Glenn Miller Band play the Super Bowl, you would have objected because they were... "old and irrelevant"?

Seriously?

It is particularly disturbing to read such eruptions from Americans who call themselves "conservatives."

There is nothing particularly "conservative" about having not only a disdain for the "old" and the "foreign," but bragging about one's disdain, and ignorance, in public.

These tweeters sounded awfully much like those untalented would-be contestants on American Idol who huff off mumbling, "What do those judges know, anyhow?"

Well, they are music industry professionals, and you are a talentless dimwit.

But alas, it seems that even conservatives of a certain age have been infected with that very -- I hate to say it -- American "self-esteem gone wild" disease that presents with a particularly unattractive combination of arrogance and ignorance, people who seem rather put out when faced with any reminder that history didn't begin the year they were born.

America is the greatest country in the world. But when stupid people say that, they are too stupid to even realize that they are undermining their own assertions.

They are like those white supremacists who prattle on about "white culture" but couldn't spell "Beethoven" if you held a gun to their head -- or figure it was that movie about a big dog.

There used to be an equally American tradition of wanting to better oneself, since doing so in class-driven England was frowned upon, if not almost impossible.

(Note the bit at the very bottom of this story, in which even in 2010, the Brit in question was slagged -- behind his back, naturally-- for having dared to "rise above his station...")

Also this week, this dreadful no-nothing mental habit -- a sort of cultural halitosis -- was on display in this comments thread, in which a number of "conservatives" seemed rather proud of the fact that they had never heard of Werner Herzog. (A thread which I seem to have brought to an abrupt conclusion.)

I can absolutely guaran-****ing-tee you that Mark Steyn and Tom Wolfe and Jonah Goldberg and PJ O'Rourke know who Werner Herzog is.

My family is working class. I didn't go to college. And I know who Werner Herzog is.

I'm not saying you have to like him. But yes, you should know who he is, or at the very least, not brag about the fact that you don't.

If you haven't seen a film older than Star Wars, you are a dimwit. And your aversion to subtitles is the adult equivalent of a child turning up his nose at an olive.

You are the reason people write articles like this one.

Please carry on being an uncultured slug.

However, if you could keep it to yourself, we'd all be a lot better off.