That's just how it is.
or
When Obama wins Chinese Democracy will finally come out!

I can't imagine it's any good, but that's not really what this is about. This is about wondering where Izzy Stradlin is and whatever happened to Steven Adler? I found out Duff McKagan has an Official Fanclub and an unofficial one (incidentally called LAMF, 10 points in the comments if you know what it means and what its significance was. I also cared what Matt Sorum was up to, because of Use Your Illusion I and II, but not so much Gilby Clarke.

My two best Guns n' Roses stories...
Use Your Illusion I and II came out on either Rosh Hashan or Yom Kipper and my dad drove me down Route 9 to get them in between services at the Strawberries that's now the Legal Seafood. Remember how CDs used to come in long boxes?

Chanukah 1991. I was a pretty big Guns N' Roses fan in 7th Grade. Listening to Use Your Illusion II ALL the time. My brother got me the best present anyone has ever given me - tickets for us to see Gn'R. If someone gave me Gn'R tickets now, well, that'd be nice, but it wouldn't be the best present ever. It was a perfect combination of the right gift at the right time. Imagine the biggest thing in your life and someone gives you a gift that enhances that, that was these tickets in 1991. He's lucky that Chanukah came early that year (December 2nd) otherwise he would have had to just give me tickets. The show was that Friday, December 6, 1991 at the Worcester Centrum with Soundgarden opening up. I remember buzzing the whole week. I remember Soundgarden playing louder than anything I'd ever heard. I remember a LONG time in between Soundgarden and Guns n' Roses during which time the camera men scanned the crowd, focusing on women, who would then be jeered by the crowd into lifting their shirts. Then Axl finally finished some temper tantrum or other and they start playing my head exploded. I remember them playing Wild Horses, which I had heard on another bootleg, and Duff (who was my favorite anyway) signing lead on a Misfits cover and swearing a TON.

Woo. Good times. Thanks for letting me share.

M. Night Shyamalan's movies have been going steadily downhill (with the exception of Signs), since, well, his first movie, so Hollywood rewards him with a potentially lucrative deal to make more movies.

Actually, no. Tilt-shift photography from Flickr user B Tal.

Surely I must be mistaken. There's no way Salon published a feature article on Michelle Obama's ass, right?

Class act, Salon.

"Wipe those tears away, for Jeffrey Tambor—quite possibly the most wonderful Bluth of all!—says the movie. Is. Back. ON!"

Sorry, Portfolio.

This post has changed in the 3 weeks since I started it. Right now, the way I'm blogging is writing posts in bulk a couple times per week and then roboposting them one post a day. This makes it easier for me to blog and makes the blog better, I think. I imagine that most of you don't care about any of this, but I feel an explanation is in order. So anyway, I started this post after it seemed like I was about to post a lot of stuff that had appeared on Kottke. Since then, 2 more things I would have posted were posted by him and, well, we got linked by him, somehow (which was about all I hoped to achieve on the internet in an ZOMG!!11!! kind of way). So although the title of this post is Unabashed Kottke Linking, as you can tell, I'm feeling quite bashed. I don't want Unlikelywords to be a sort of delayed version of the Kottke RSS, but that's how it's gonna have to go sometimes. Below is the original post.

Look, here's the thing. I read kottke.org and I assume most of you do, too. It's full of good stuff. Lately, though pretty much everything on the internet I have ready to post shows up on his site. If I'm lucky, I haven't gotten to it on my RSS feed yet and I don't feel guilty or derivative. If I'm unlucky, I agonize over whether I should still post it. Usually I do. I can't help it if I like Gladwell and Lewis and lists and Fenway Park and Manny (well, I don't like him, but you know what I mean) and Pollan. These are things I liked before I started reading Kottke (and boingboing, for that matter), and I'm going to have to link to them.

Anyway, here are the explanations for a few that will be showing up in the next couple weeks/days. Hopefully, "I saw it somewhere else first" is a good enough defense.

100 skills (I saw it somewhere else first).
Brad Pitt in Money Ball (My admiration for Michael Lewis is on record, and I would have blogged this after hearing about it anyway).
Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker (My admiration for Malcolm Gladwell is noted in the fact that I work for a company partly based on The Tipping Point, and I would have blogged this after hearing about it anyway).
Michael Pollan in the NYTimes (I write about him and Orleans, Gladwell, Pollan, Schlosser, Krakauer, etc)
Manny (Come on.)
Tiny picture of Fenway Park. (No excuses, this is just awesome and people send their awesome stuff to him first).

So those are the excuses for a while, I hope they suffice. And if in the future you notice a higher than acceptable proportion of Kottke-biting posts, know I am suffering internal turmoil.

I've been sick, so maybe this only amuses me, and if so, well, sorry. But this weekend, I came across news that spam was up, spam was down, spam was lucrative (enough), and divine intervention as evidenced by a seemingly unironic collocation of sentences from the AP.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said Wednesday she would consider serving in the Senate if God gave her the opportunity and Alaskans wanted her to take the job. The state's senior senator, Republican Ted Stevens, fell behind as the count resumed in his re-election bid.

3 spam posts in one weekend? Why not?! I've often wondered abut the economics of email spam. Clearly it was making someone money, otherwise we wouldn't get nearly so much. So how much does spam make? Via Schneier, the answer is not much, but enough.

Spam is all about economics. When sending junk mail costs a dollar in paper, list rental, and postage, a marketer needs a reasonable conversion rate to make the campaign worthwhile. When sending junk mail is almost free, a one in ten million conversion rate is acceptable.

Via Erika, not only does this tuxedo look like bacon, it smells like bacon, too. It says dry clean only, but, uh, doesn't that get rid of the bacon smell?