Imagine if McDonald’s picked up your bill any time you managed to eat 10 Big Macs in an hour or less. What if Wendy’s replaced its wimpy Baconator with an unstoppable meat-based assassin that could truly make your aorta explode—say, 20 strips of bacon instead of six, enough cheese slices to roof a house, and instead of two measly half-pound patties that look as emaciated as the Olsen twins, five pounds of the finest ground beef, with five pounds of fries on the side? Morgan Spurlock’s liver would seek immediate long-term asylum at the nearest vegan co-op. (READ IT ALL)

***

Writers don’t merely want to be read. They want to make shelves buckle. They want to clutter night-tables. Every act of writing is an attempt at colonization, of making one’s essence a visible part of the landscape. Tom Wolfe, Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace, Danielle Steele—do you think any one of them ever sits down to write the Great American Text File? They sit down to write big books, thick books, books that can concuss a squirrel at 20 paces, books that immediately convey the genuine physical heft of their intellect, the panoramic sweep of their imagination. Every time they complete a manuscript, they have another brick to add to the castle of their magnificence. (READ IT ALL)

***

To keep full-blown sapphic orgies from erupting in the paper-goods aisle, Mr. Whipple waged an endless but ineffective War on Squeezing. The signs he posted were ignored. A mirror he installed to shame brazen tissue-fondlers into more chaste behavior only gave them a new exhibitionistic charge. Even state-of-the-art technology, in the form of a giant robot named Squeezak, could not keep these lusty women from turning Mr. Whipple’s store into a steamy hothouse of distaff eros. (READ IT ALL)

***

The world is filled with live women—many of them as beautiful as any Hollywood star—who are more than willing to perpetrate whatever carnal indecencies the nation’s porn directors can imagine, including, no doubt, having sex with a midget in a Yoda costume. And yet there are people paying $39.95 a month to look at web-based comic-book porn of Maggie Q cartoon-boinking her Live Free or Die Hard co-star Bruce Willis. Such is the overwhelming allure of celebrity! (READ IT ALL)