(By the way, was that really three members of the larger-than-life Dungeons and Dragons heavy metal band GWAR in the Pride Parade this year? I was glad to see their enormous fake phalluses and such, but what were they doing here?)
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The age-old personality test "Who's Your Favorite Beatle?" (popularized, if memory serves, by a Tom Robbins novel) is now officially useless. (A Robbins' character posited that you could tell more about a person from their answer to that one question than any other question you could ask.) For starters, the Beatles have been broken up for almost 30 years. More significantly, almost everybody answers "John," removing the question's efficacy as a personality gauge.
Furthermore, that answer is incorrect--and yes, there are right answers to such questions. The correct answer to the question is Paul, for two reasons: He's the cutest, and he wrote the best songs. John does win for best Beatle wife, however. Yoko vs. Linda vs. Patti vs. Catherine Bach? No contest.
Fortunately, a slew of alternatives present themselves to the culturally glutted American. Here are my ideas for replacement questions; please, do send in your own suggestions.
Who's your favorite friend on Friends?
Who's your favorite extra on The Simpsons?
What's your favorite cheese?
Who's your favorite Spice Girl?
Who's your favorite Keynesian economist?
And finally,
Who's your least favorite supermodel?
(My answers, incidentally, are Phoebe; Willy the groundskeeper; Stilton; Ginger; the economist question was a joke, but I guess John Kenneth Galbraith; and Kirsty Hume.)
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In another depressing example of how it always takes visual artists a couple of years to catch up with the rest of the world, an artists' group has begun copying web-based art and reposting it on their own site, according to The New York Times. The point, as you may have guessed if you were alive in 1995, is that information wants to be--what was it? Oh yes--free. It's beyond me why bands like Negativland [see article this issue], computer age visionaries, and anarchists in general hurl such vitriol at copyright law, which mainly protects the interests of fragile creative artists against corporate exploitation and appropriation--unless, like the Who or the Rolling Stones, the artists want to be exploited. Information wants to be free, and artists want to starve, I suppose.
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