The Airship — The Airship
Gervais, Turing & Follow-Through Remorse
Gervais, Turing & Follow-Through Remorse
By Mikael Awake
December 15, 2011

Ricky Gervais has a post up on the Daily Beast about the biggest regret of his career:

I was on holiday with my girlfriend Jane in about 1999 in Hungary (yeah, I know, odd choice, but money was tight). We visited this huge Victorian museum one day, and as I was walking round I had an idea for a movie in which all the exhibits came to life and started running amok ... Huge effects, an amazing spectacle. When we got back to our hotel room, I started writing the screenplay.

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Did David Foster Wallace Lie on His Syllabi?
Did David Foster Wallace Lie on His Syllabi?
By Mikael Awake
December 05, 2011

"[Y]ou hire a fiction writer to do nonfiction, there's going to be the occasional bit of embellishment.” David Foster Wallace

Last week, Katie Roiphe gushed in Slate about the "rigorous" and "honorable" syllabi from David Foster Wallace's teaching days, currently housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Of his 1994 course in Literary Analysis at Illinois State University (which Wallace taught when he was in his early 30s), Roiphe writes, "There is in his syllabus...nothing but rigorous honesty and tireless interrogation."

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Like Ludacris and Lethem
Like Ludacris and Lethem
By Mikael Awake
November 30, 2011

When Notorious B.I.G. posed one of the most famous rhetorical questions in hip-hop history—"What's Beef?"—I wonder if he had any idea that the answer would one day be "syntax and intellectual property." But syntax and intellectual property were certainly at the heart of Ludacris's beefy new diss record aimed at younger rappers Drake and Big Sean. 

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Full Court Room Press
Full Court Room Press
By Mikael Awake
November 24, 2011

In a better world, a lot of things would be true: I'd have a fleet of Dodge Vipers (like my 7th grade history teacher said I'd have because of my test scores), my tweets would get turned into searing movies starring Forrest Whitaker as a dyspeptic writer, and we would be eight games into the NBA regular season. 

What a sad, cruel world it is.

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In Which Mikael Discusses Working at the Smorgasburg
In Which Mikael Discusses Working at the Smorgasburg
By Mikael Awake
October 25, 2011

Every weekend of the summer, I pitched a tent along the East River to sell pasta at the Smorgasburg.

The pasta I sell is organic, comes in over 70 flavor varieties. “Do you make the pasta?” is the question I get asked the most. “I don’t,” is the answer. It’s made near Rochester by a bearded man named Jon who makes the 6-hour drive to Brooklyn once a month to deliver a few hundred pounds of dowel-dried noodles.

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Viral Science
Viral Science
By Mikael Awake
October 21, 2011

 “Someone had a Grade A lungfish decorate their home for a merry fool’s function.”

This line came from a Rick Perry endorsement ad audio-doctored by the brilliant dub artists at Bad Lip Reading. Remember Audio-Tune the News? Bad Lip Reading is like that, except they graft absurd voiceovers onto video clips of everyone from pop singers (Bruno Mars) to politicians (Obama)—none of them as hysterical as Perry’s sabotaged campaign ad, which went viral and gathered almost two million views.

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