As long as they keep making those frites...

The whole Shia-Sunni thing has overshadowed another, arguably more pressing ethnic conflict--Flemish and Walloon. As it happens, Belgium, an adorable little country that you never hear about except in connection with beer and sometimes the EU, is in the middle of a major existential crisis because the Dutch-speaking Flems (ha) and the French-speaking Walloons really don't get along. It is unclear why they don't like each other, especially since you'd think that they'd be united in an overall inferiority complex about being Belgian. Seriously--it must be rough living in a country that the Economist dismisses as a "freak of nature."

Amazingly enough, the country is currently functioning without a government. Even more amazing, nobody in the rest of the world seems to care, so much so that a Belgian guy recently tried to sell Belgium on Ebay in a desperate attempt to draw some international attention to the issue. As Wonkette pointed out, the unintentionally hilarious AP headline--"Someone tries to sell Belgium on Ebay"--kind of captures the spirit of the thing.

The Real Emmys

The Creative Arts Emmys are clearly superior to the regular Emmys. Not only did they give an Emmy to Andy Samberg et al for, erm, "A Special Christmas Box", they also gave rise to possibly the greatest awards speech of all time, in which Kathy Griffin (winning for "My Life on the D-List") doesn't thank Jesus:

Can you believe this shit? I guess hell froze over… A lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. So, all I can say is, "Suck it, Jesus." This award is my God now.

However, the joke's on her. According to Fox News Religion Correspondent Lauren Green, Jesus had everything to do with her winning that award. Read her reasoning here.

Next are hidden pictures of the wedding night

Today's NYT has a bonafide trend piece (i.e., not "Girls dress slutty for Halloween!" or "Young people really like to take pictures of themselves and post them online!") about creepy guys who hire photographers to surreptitiously (read: stalkingly) photograph them as they propose to their girlfriends. One of the profiled men nervously dropped to his knees and proposed to his girlfriend near the Astor Place subway stop (WTF? Did they celebrate with 50% off sushi or a trip to KMart?) while the photographer "circled them and snapped away." If someone did that to me the answer would be "hell, no." And, in fact, Slate is sponsoring a contest for pictures of exactly that happening.

According to the Times, "The idea dovetails with the current trend toward photojournalistic realism in wedding photography. In recent years the intimacies of a wedding day — a glimpse of the bride as she dons her underpinnings, the stolen mash session between the newlyweds when the guests aren’t looking — have become increasingly fair game." I wonder if wedding photographers have whole archives of the candid moments no one wants to remember: the bride sobbing hysterically before the ceremony because she knows she's settling; the bridesmaids talking smack about how much they had to spend to be there; the groom pounding an entire bottle of champagne before he walks into the church (one of my friends did this). Those would actually be worth putting on Facebook.

Is the World Flat?

Speaking of both chicks and the world being flat, this is baffling.

Mr. Sulzberger, Tear Down This Wall

I'm really enjoying the New York Times's "reporting" on its reasons for eliminating worst-idea-ever TimesSelect. Surely it must have been the possibility that the online ad revenue generated by page views by readers coming from other sites would outstrip revenue from TimesSelect subscriptions, and not the losses of the hordes of readers whose intelligence was insulted by being asked to pay to read David Brooks. Really, who could have foreseen this happening?

I am also pleased to note that his imprisonment behind the TimesSelect wall hasn't affected Thomas Friedman's wide-eyed wonderment about the world at all. It turns out there are two cities called Doha and Dalian, which you have probably never of because you are an idiot, and that these cities are just like America! The world is still flat, and getting flatter every day!

The existence of TimesSelect trained me out of instinctively reading everything on the NYT site, and I think that was a good thing.

Chicks

It's really great to be female in the year 2007, because we dominate the Interweb. Dominate! Several hours of web research reveals that women really, really like writing about how crazy it is to be a woman in, well, a woman's world. According to Rebecca Traister, this season's network TV fall line-up reflects a newfound collective social angst about women not only competing with men as equals in the workplace, but actually kicking their asses such that men have become useless, whiny, servile wrecks. Or, you know, the new women. The article is a mildly disturbing insight into the lemming-like mentality of TV execs--how else to explain that there are at least ELEVEN new shows centered around the theme of emasculation? Who on earth wants to watch this?? (Though the new Farrelly Brothers show, which features a grossly stereotyped Indian doctor and a very troubling incident involving a monkey, sounds promising.)

Meanwhile, (awesome) ex-Washingtonienne Jessica Cutler gives a self-deprecating interview that begs the question: Do strippers and prostitutes understand men better than the rest of us?

And, in honor of the Sex and the City movie which entered its first day of totally pointless production today somewhere up on 5th Avenue, here's Samantha Bee not helping but wondering: Is America ready for a female president?