Oh no.

The internet is a magical, wonderful place.

Joel Engel has a devastating little nugget from Sacramento. Go read it. Brilliant.

Seriously. From the press release:

Are you a business owner who is interested in retaining your employees? Are you interested in learning more about the current available housing programs that your employees can benefit from through home ownership or rental options? Join us in this relaxed atmosphere as experts in the Arlington County Housing and the Virginia Housing and Development Authority (VHDA) provide great information on the latest housing options.

Options include buying your first home with little as 1% down! There will be door prizes and complimentary refreshments.

Soooo0 . . . the labor market in Washington is so tight–for young workers, even–that businesses are trying to help their employees buy real estate. With 1 percent down. In order to keep them from wandering off to greener pastures? This doesn’t comport with any reality I’ve seen in Washington–either statistical or anecdotal–on either the labor, real estate, or lending sides of the equation. But hey, the Arlington Economic Development group is springing for food and door prizes.

Instant classic:

James Cameron is mostly famous of course for writing and directing terrific looking movies with awful dialogue, but he’s also a brilliant engineer and accomplished inventor who has spent over 3000 hours in deep water dive sites, and now he’ll attempt to become just the third person to ever dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the lowest point in the Pacific Ocean and the deepest point on earth.

As a training simulator to prepare himself for life inside the cold, bleak, and potentially deadly gash, he’ll fuck Madonna.

If only for the headline gold.

“Whatcha Gonna Do When Hulkamania Spurts Wild All Over You?”

“Sayin’ Your Prayers, Eatin’ Your Vitamins, F@#$in’ Your Ass”

And admit it: You’re dying to know if he does that exaggerated ear-cup-to-the-crowd-for-applause before and/or after love-making.

He thinks that his problem is that mean people who are stupid followers of Andrew Breitbart’s cult are giving his Kindle book bad reviews.

But in reality, his problem is that he constructs sentences like this:

For example, it’s a book largely dedicated to making the case for less regulation of urban and suburban land. The kind of thing that conservatives might be open to, were they need just in a fury of rage.

“were they need just in a fury of rage”

Don’t get fixated on the “need,” which is probably just a typo. It’s the “fury of rage” construct that’s the real prize.

Remember: He’s not doing this as a hobbyist. Someone at the Washington Post Company paid him to write this self-serving, sub-literate, word tangle.

Update: Yglesias leaves a comment below. That’s embarrassing enough. But having read his comment three or four times, best as I can tell it’s a non sequitur. Then again, I suppose the Washington Post Company isn’t paying him for reading comprehension. (Or reporting. Or prose style. Or knowing stuff.) They pay him for his “passion.”

That’s their business. I’d just say that passion is a pretty cheap commodity in writing. You can find buckets of it in every comments section from Free Republic to Democratic Underground. Over the years Slate has had lots of really dynamite writers: Seth Stevenson, John Dickerson, Anne Applebaum, Tim Noah, Will Saletan, Jodi Kantor–just to pick a few. They’re all stone-cold studs and none of them got graded on the curve for how passionate they are.

Now that Apple has rolled out the iPad they should have had when they launched the device, I’m finally going to take the tablet plunge.

Advice sought: Do I really need the 3G/4LTE capability, or will I be just fine with the wifi-only model? Insights appreciated.

Galley Friend Joel Engel has finally put up his own blog shingle over at JoelEngel.com and I highly, highly recommend you adding him to your regular rotation. Sample awesome:

You’re a lawyer.  A guy in his early 20s walks into your office and says he wants to file a lawsuit.  You say, Okay, tell me.  And what he tells you is how pissed off he is about having to shell out so much for refreshments at the movie theater.

You of course agree with him that candy and soda can be had a lot cheaper at Wal-Mart.  But instead of thinking, Geez, get this whack job out of here before he wants me to change his diaper, or even politely suggesting that he might be better off not going to that theater if he doesn’t like its prices–or, for that matter, not buying food from the refreshment stand– you say, Huh, I think that’s a class action suit.  So you file it.

“He got tired of being taken advantage of,” said [Joshua] Thompson’s lawyer, Kerry Morgan of Wyandotte. “It’s hard to justify prices that are three- and four-times higher than anywhere else.”  Yeah, some things are hard to justify.

Milk Duds: a civil rights issue.

In addition to being a wit, Joel is a great writer and an amazing reporter and his next book–the true-crime L.A. ’56–is the book I’m most looking forward to this year.