This isn't funny either.

From the Post (which has really been publishing winners lately), via The Ditmas Park Blog

Every "letter" line but the L will forever run slower on weekends - because of repair work NYC Transit says will never end.

Transit officials said A, D, F, G, J, M, N, Q and R trains will be spaced every 10 minutes instead of every eight.

The E line, the most crowded, will run every 7½ to 10 minutes, depending on the time of day.

The slowdowns are the result of construction and repairs needed to "keep a state of good repair," NYCT spokesman Paul Fleuranges said yesterday.

Agency President Howard Roberts said the slowdown will be "permanent."

"Construction," right. Because the MTA is staffed by mega-quick pixies who jump on the tracks and do work when every train passes, and the mega-quick pixie union has demanded an extra three minutes per shift for lunch.

And here is something that will absolutely totally completely improve your quality of life in ten minutes.

This isn't funny or even just amusing, but the hummus I made was so freaking good that I have to share it with you, oh wide internet.

Allison's Really Fantastic Hummus
An Epic in Two Parts

Part One: In Which the Epic Heroine Substitutes Most of the Ingredients
(Ingredients.)

1 (15ozish) can of chick peas, drained.
2 huge cloves of garlic.
1 normal sized clove of garlic.
2 tablespoons lemon juice, doesn't have to be fresh unless money grows on trees and you like juicing the things.
2 tablespoons nonfat Greek yogurt--yes, yogurt! Trust me.
1.5 tablespoons sesame oil. I know you're supposed to put tahini in this shit, but my local Associated Market does not carry it, and chances are yours doesn't either. You may not even have an Associated Market! Even if you do and it does, I recommend using plain old sesame oil, because what the fuck else do you use tahini for? Right, nothing.
1 teaspoon cumin.
1 pinch salt.
Several uncounted dashes of cayenne pepper.

Part Two: In Which the Ingredients are Turned into Mush

Drop all of your ingredients into a blender or food processor. I don't actually own a food processor, but I suspect that the use of one would make your hummus-making life a great deal easier. I don't even have a GOOD blender, so this was a lot more irritating than it needed to be. I had to scrape the bowl down about eight times, and it STILL never got silky silky. In the end I got lazy, and the hummus had the texture of chopped liver, with some chickpeas still intact, but it wasn't unpleasant. And it tasted really fucking good. Best mush I've had in weeks.

In which Smartmom proves herself to be worse than...

So it's a Tuesday night. We should be at the gym, but it's snowing. Obviously treadmills don't work in the snow. To Dan's defense, it's a thirteen block walk. To Allison's defense--well, Allison doesn't need a defense. She's just lazy.

So it's a Tuesday night, and instead of burning calories, we're consuming them.

We feel the need to follow up on our last post, the one about that (word that rhymes with BUNDT--that's the pan, not the sports term) Smartmom. There have been two more posts from dear Louise as well as an actual (if we can really call it that) article from the glorious Brooklyn Paper since that Saturday of yore.

You can find them here, here and here.

We don't even know what to SAY. This is,of course, a lie.

Because that's Smartmom's point. See, she finally read, or at least admitted to reading, the comments for her columns. We suspect that she may have created her own fake account and posted one or two of the few positive responses. And she has come up with a defense.

Smartmom's defense:

"How would people feel if there was a gag order on all kidtalk? What if there was a huge flashing sign on every corner: “No Kidtalk Allowed”?"

Our response:

A pile o' poo. Seriously, type "pile o' poo" without the quotation marks into a google image search, and that is exactly what you'll find. Poo.

See, we are annoyed because we are not CALLING for a ban on "kidtalk." But this is how Smartmom interprets it. She first starts to come to this conclusion here:

"Where is all this hate coming from, she thought? In Park Slope, EVERYBODY talks about his or her children. Incessantly. You can’t have face time with anyone without the conversation veering into stories about college applications, SAT scores, dirty bedrooms."

This is offensive to us on so many levels.

1) Not everyone in Park Slope are parents.
2) NOT EVERYONE IN PARK SLOPE ARE PARENTS.
3) NOT EVERYBODY IN PARK SLOPE THAT IS A PARENT IS A LAME PIECE OF SHIT LIKE YOU!!!
4) And Bill O'Reilly
5) Most Park Slope parents, for better or worse, and we have plenty of distaste towards most of them for fairly selfish reasons--don't even get us STARTED on the nanny brigades that take up the whole goddamn sidewalk, or that family that brought their eight year old into Mezcals at ten o'fucking clock on a Friday night, and Mezcals is basically a bar anyway--but we digress--the point is, collectively, they seem to be pretty intelligent, and some of them are even cool, so,
6) NOT ALL PARK SLOPE PARENTS ARE SO GODDAMN BORING THAT THEY CAN ONLY TALK ABOUT THEIR CHILDREN.

We the readers are not calling for an end to Kidtalk! Though we ourselves do not find Kidtalk to be that interesting, we realize that it is only natural for this topic to come up in conversation. But what we DO have a beef with is the UNWANTED PUBLICATION of kidtalk. There should be a waiver she has to get signed, or something. And obviously her kids should throw such waivers into a toaster oven of their choice. 'Cause surely the children of Smartmom have at least two, to complete all of their toasting needs. And baking. You can also bake with toaster ovens.See?

We've forgotten what we were talking about. Darn.

Right. Unwanted publication.

We're not asking everyone to stop yappin' about their kids, we just want YOU to do so, at least on the internet. (Does the Brooklyn Paper appear in print? I think it might be one of those free papers you can find at Chase. The bank. Next to the toilet. Next to the toilet for emergency toilet paper use. Sorry Brooklyn Paper. We don't really have anything against you, we're just immature. We're dicks! Actually, no. We do have something against you--you continue to publish this fucking woman, and that means you kind of sort of maybe condone what she does! Damn you!!)

I told you we use parenthetical phrases.

Anyway, Smartmom kind of gets this eventually:

"OK, OK. Writing a column, a book, or a magazine article about one’s kid is different from talking about them to friends, acquaintances, teachers, psychologists, learning specialists, doctors, lawyers or anyone else you come into contact with."

We do want to note that it is particularly different with psychologists, doctors, lawyers and the like, because of client-patient confidentiality laws, but Smartmom goes on to shoot herself in the foot again anyway:

"It’s not all that different from what goes on at Sweet Melissa, Bar Reis, the backyard at PS 321, on the screens of list-serves like Park Slope Parents, and blogs like Hip Slope Mama, A Child Grows in Brooklyn, and Brooklynometry."

Wait, what? Didn't you just say it was different?


There is a huge difference between a bar and a column that at least sixteen people read!

"In other words, the oral history of childhood would be lost to silence."
Well how could we ever argue with that? Well what the fuck?

What the fuck.

"Smartmom"--more like DUMBMOM.

For those of you who don't know, which is probably all of you, because who the hell reads the Brooklyn Paper, "Smartmom" is a column... in the Brooklyn Paper. Not even I read the Brooklyn Paper, and I read lots of useless shit. I do get the Smartmom column weekly though--it is delivered to me in my Google reader from Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn.

"Smartmom" is a parenting column, written by a woman who is obviously insecure enough to call herself Smartmom. This isn't an advice column, a la Dear Abby for kids or anything, actually, I'm not really sure what the point of it is. Smartmom writes about her family, friends and kids, who she disguises with "smart" pseudonyms like Teen Spirit, the Oh So Feisty One, and Hepcat. What does Hepcat even mean? Is she saying that her husband is a cat with hepatitis C? Anyway, using these insulting nicknames, Smartmom relates her life to the Brooklyn Paper, probably to provide amusement or at least scenarios that other parents can relate to, as if they don't have enough of their own misery.

Smartmom has been writing this column for a long time--certainly longer than I've been reading it, which has only been a few months, but I have already begun to object to certain aspects of it. Obviously I have a beef with the pseudonyms. As it turns out, the kids themselves have a much more valid one. But before I give something valid, I have to point out the image that these names evoke:

Teen spirit: So you're a "Caribbean cool" scented deodorant from the nineties. You're also lime green. I bet that's what EVERY teenager wants to be! Oh, and you're also obviously a Nirvana reference. I bet that started to wear thin once you grew out of the flannel and All Stars and started to smoke. That's right--Teen Spirit SMOKES. He didn't want the whole world to know about that, but Smartmom had to fuck everything up for her son. So now we think of Teen Spirit as a smoking deodorant.



Now, I can't put in a picture of the Oh So Feisty One, because when I entered that into a Google image search, I came up with actual photographs from the paper, which may have showed the actual girl. And unlike OSFO's bitch mom, I will not violate the girl's privacy by showing her face on this blog. Instead, I will show a Google image result for "feisty."

There. You see what happens? You see what happens Smartmom? When you talk about your children in print, you turn them into two asshole bloggers, I mean, smoking, gun-toting, bandana-wearing feisty fawns. It's got fucking ammunition around it's fucking chest, too. You know what that means, Smartmom? It means that you're throwing fuel on the fire, you are making your bed now lay in it, you are walking like a duck. Your fucking feisty daughter is about to kill a shit ton of stuff.

And then there's Hepcat, but we don't care so much about him because he's a grown man and can take care of himself, or something. But we do think this image speaks for itself:

So Smartmom--I should probably have mentioned already that we have been recently outraged by Smartmom's most recent column, which can be found here--is worried about losing her job, because she only has the ability and (lack of) creativity to write about her children. In these tough economic times we can understand her concern for her employment, especially since her husband is apparently an airport bag man from 1976.

Hepcat, we may loathe your wife, but we sure salute your 'stache. That airport kind of looks like the Sydney opera house. Where is that?


Anyway, let's get back to something valid. The kids are getting older--Teen Spirit is in high school, OSFO has outgrown Build-a-Bear, and they no longer want to be in the paper. Smartmom even revealed this week that they have requested her to stop writing about them. In the paper!!! Clearly Smartmom is not complying with this request.

Now, we think that Teen Spirit and the OSFO's desire to not be in the Brooklyn Paper is entirely reasonable. Smartmom's column, which is read by several, if not DOZENS of people, is a form of public humiliation, which for a teenager would be completely unbearable. Can you imagine if Teen Spirit's FRIENDS saw it? That kid would be on heroin in minutes. Dan says he would be sucking COCK for heroin in minutes. Smartmom has expressed her concern that Teen Spirit may be doing drugs several times, but does she not consider the effect that her own writing may be having on her children?

Also, her decision to ignore her children's request to be left out of her column is selfish and, dare we (and accurately) say, childish. This side of her (does she have another side? Is she a circle?) really came out this week. Instead of explaining this in my own words, I'll let Smartmom speak for herself:

"Dang. There she goes writing about her kids again. How can you be a writer when you have a gag order from your kids about what you can write about?" Hmm. I don't know. I know plenty of writers who don't have to talk about their kids. It's called, um, creativity? Originality? Imagination?

"And yet, as a parent Smartmom must respect their wishes and not compromise their privacy in any way. It’s a tough place for a writer to be." HOW IS THAT A TOUGH PLACE. Seriously, this woman irks Dan and I so much we can't even use question marks. Really, all you have to do is write about something else!

"So what is Smartmom going to write about now? The snow on her window ledge?" Well, it's a start, baby!

"If she can’t write about her kids, she’s a goner."
Selfish.

"She’ll get fired from The Brooklyn Paper."
It's not like it's the Times.

"Her agent won’t want to represent her."
Selfish.

"Nobody will read her blog anymore. She’ll be done for. Finished."
Selfish.

"So what’s a Smartmom to do?"

We'll tell you what to do, Smartmom.
1) Quit exploiting your children.
2) Quit exploiting your children.
3) If you do get fired, you find another way to provide for your family, because that's what a real Smart Parent does, they find a way to provide. It's not fair for your children to be humiliated every week because you're afraid to be taken out of your (one-dimensional) comfort zone.

But apparently Smartmom does not heed us and our wise words of wisdom.

"It her story — and she’s sticking to it."
Hopefully no one else will.

Smartmom, you disgust us. For this, you get this week's Brandon Flowers Award for Douchiness.

Is Brandon Flowers a douche? An Experiment.

Is Brandon Flowers a douche? Well, the answer to that question sure seems obvious. But if there's one thing that the past four years in academia have taught me, it's that the obvious answer is in fact most often the correct one. However, as an academic, it is my sacred academic duty to waste my valuable (who am I kidding) time in examining this question in a thorough, quasi-scientific manner. It is difficult for Dan to even discuss this topic, as he has hated Brandon Flowers since before he even was anyone. (Clearly, Dan has hated him since the embryonic stage.)

But I will force him to. And we will answer this following the Scientific Method.

The Scientific Method!

Question: Is Brandon Flowers a douche?

Background research: Lots of research went into this. We checked Wikipedia AND Dan's brain AND Allison's brain AND this week's interview with Brandon in Time Out New York. Apparently we owe a lot of our creativity to this mediocre magazine.

Anyway, here is what we have discovered:
1) Brandon Flowers is the lead singer for the Killers. Dan says cough The Fucksticks, cough. I don't know what that means, exactly, but the Killers sure do suck. I should know. I used to like them.

2) Brandon Flowers covered Joy Division's epic Shadowplay. They even made a video for it. You can Youtube it if you like, but Dan would advise against it, unless you want Hep. (that's Hepatitis) B on your face.

3) Brandon had the audacity to criticize Thom Yorke's ability to write pop songs. I suppose normally I would shrug this off (lies) and take it with a grain of salt (lies again), but when you criticize someone who wrote little things like Kid A and OK Computer and In Rainbows and The Bends and Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief and I Think You See What We're Saying, and YOUR claim to fame is Mr. Brightside, Jesus.

4) Brandon Flowers was born on June 21, 1981. This means he was born in the Year of the Rooster. This means that he is a Gemini--THE TWINS. Astrology-online.com has this to say about Geminis:

Nervous and tense
Superficial and inconsistent
Cunning and inquisitive

DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS???? HE IS A FLACID ROOSTER. HE IS A COCK THAT CAN'T GET HARD. OMG.

5) Brandon Flowers is a mormon. Not a Real Mormon, Mormon with a capital M, but a mormon--he doesn't have the special underwear. Time Out New York proves it. I have yet to meet a mormon who wasn't a total douche.

6) Brandon Flowers won't shut up.

7) Brandon Flowers is a member of the Killers.

Seven facts is enough scientific research, right?

Hypothesis: Brandon Flowers is a douche.

Test hypothesis with an experiment:

Experiment. Observe:

Hmm. Let us compare.

Conclusion: Not a douche.

Now we must return to step three.

New hypothesis: Brandon Flowers is a flaccid penis.

Experiment:

Conclusion: Brandon Flowers is a flaccid penis.

Williamsburg condos have turned the world's most misogynistic woman (and her Bacon Provider) into feminists.

Allison is a shitty feminist, as was made abundantly clear by the title. Allison is referring to herself in the third person because this post is being co-written, as was made abundantly clear by this sentence. Anyway, Allison is a shitty feminist, not because she hates women and loves spending her afternoons not working but in the kitchen, but because she lives in a fantasy world where men and women really are seen as equals. She is an idiot. But sometimes the media drags her out of her little lollipop and rainbow filled universe and fills her with feminist-like rage. One instance of this occurred on New Years Day, when Dan and Allison and some of their friends watched eight hours of the Twilight Zone. Have you ever seen the episode where a couple wake up in a strange, fake, empty town that (not so surprisingly) is a girl's doll house? Well, essentially the moral of the story is that if a man gets so drunk that his woman has to drive, you will get abducted by aliens. Who will put you into doll houses. If you think this sounds like fun, let your wife drive.

But we digress. Digressimus. That's Latin for "we digress." The point of this post is to show you this image:

Now, we first saw this image advertising the Northside Piers luxury condo building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the January 8-14 issue of Time Out New York. In the actual ad (I was too lazy to find the actual ad, but here is the image) text across the top reads "Willaimsburg's Most Inviting Condominium." 'Inviting' is in orange, a color perhaps chosen to match the woman's bathing suit.

The text at the bottom of the ad highlights some of the features of the building: a relaxing sun deck, rooftop cabanas (who the fuck needs a rooftop cabana in Brooklyn?), fully equipped fitness centers (plural) with yoga room and saunas, etcetera etcetera. Except for your rooftop cabanas (I mean what the fuck?) this is your standard luxury condominium shit.

The image seems to suggest, and not so subtly, that there are some hidden bonuses here. Clearly, if you purchase a condominium in the Northside Piers--studios start at 349,990) You're probably a man. Not only a man but a GIANT man--look at the size of his shoes--and a giant man in a suit. With a briefcase. You are a giant man with a suit and a briefcase, which probably means you are rich. How many hobos/middlemen/deli workers do you see in suits that nice with briefcases? Dan wants to add "Or women that hot," but I have seen some really hot women who made poor dating choices. (See? I told you I was a bad feminist.) Dan wants to add again, "Yeah, but look at her. That type of woman always goes for the rich man. It's in her eyes." Dan is an even worse feminist. That's how we know this advertisement is really that terrible. If it angers us, how will the real feminists react to this crap?

We're digressing again. The point is that this woman is standing in a pool, clutching the ankles of the (headless) giant suit man, who towers over her. The woman's face is practically shouting "Cum on me!" She is looking at his dick. Dan points out that may not be intentional, as this man is so tall that if she were to try to look at his face, she would suffer some serious neck damage. It'd be like watching one of those Imax movies that are on the ceiling from the front row. You also can't help but get the feeling that this woman has been waiting for this man to come home for a while. She probably doesn't work. She probably just put dinner in the oven and is now going to give him his back-from-work blowjob/facial fiesta. I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with blowjobs or facials, but this ad is really fucking sexist.

We're gonna go feed the cats now. By the way, we're getting married.