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David Foster Wallace has a tremendous command of footnotes. He's also a hell of a writer, and his essay "Authority and American Usage" is causing me to rebalance my view on the whole Prescriptivism vs. Descriptivism debate. (My current thinking is that above all I want to be a Utilitarian, that the best use of language is what takes the least amount of mental energy to construct and the audience to parse. This might be hopelessly subjective.)

Anyways, I enjoy the footnotes, some of which go for pages, very much. In fact, I'm realizing that, really, the beauty of life is in the footnotes*. The small asides are what make it all worth while.

*I realize that there's a possible tension here with my other "overarching philosophy of life", that the goal is to have content expressed as economically as possible, that nuance and detail just isn't that important. But footnotes aren't details in this worldview, but rather novel ideas themselves, and so tend to increase the interestingness-density of whatever I'm reading.

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Video of the Moment

--Making the rounds. Miss Teen South Carolina. Just... jawdropping. Nerves? Or just so pretty and so so dumb... (more at boingboing)

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Products of the Moment

PepsiCo is snug in bed with Microsoft, promoting its exciting new Mountain Dew flavor, "Game Fuel," with a Halo 3 tie-in. The flavor is described on the bottle as "an invigorating blast of citrus cherry flavor," but it could also have reasonably been called "Unbelievably Vileberry," "Piña Colonic" or "Kool-Aid Man's Embalming Fluid."