Laila Lalami

If you read Maxim, and the word “read” is being used loosely here, you sort of deserve to be lied to, don’t you think?

North American readers of Maxim’s April issue, those who peer past Blade II’s topless “Chilean stunner” Leonor Varela on the cover and don’t get bogged down in the complex “Chill Your Chick” feature (a primer on turning “any girl into a beer-swilling, Super Bowl-watching strip joint junkie”), will notice the mag’s city-of-the-year item. This year, Maxim picked New York City as the continent’s top town. And Philadelphia. And Toronto. And Dallas. And nine other cities, hoping to boost sales by boosting the egos of its hometown-proud readers with 13 city-specific versions of the April issue.
Except Maxim made a boo-boo. Copies of the edition praising New York were shipped to Philly newsstands by mistake. Philadelphians were supposed to read about how “cool” the Liberty Bell is and why anyone disputing Philly’s title as “The Greatest City on Earth” should “have a bite of this cheese-dipped knuckle sandwich.” Instead, the typical resident of the City of Brotherly Love saw himself described as “a lard-ass with arteries packed as tight as a Colombian airline passenger’s G.I. tract” living in “a glorified piss break between New York and D.C.”

Maxim Overdrive

Just received the April issue of National Geographic in the mail. The cover story is about Sharbat Gula, the girl whose haunting green eyes have captivated millions of people since photographer Steve McCurry took a snapshot of her in an Afghan refugee camp seventeen years ago. The photographer was able to locate her and the magazine did a story on his search and on her life since that famous picture was shot. Take a look.

Although I didn’t vote for Bush II (and would not, should he run again) I have to give him one thing over his predecessors: his cabinet is the most diverse we’ve had. Today, the president announced his nominees for Surgeon General and Head of the National Institutes of Health. As is customary, the president selected people who share his views on the state of medical research, but what’s interesting is the background of the nominees. The SG candidate is Richard Carmona, a hispanic trauma surgeon. Some cynics have argued that this appointment is yet another way to pander to the hispanic vote ahead of the November elections. But Bush also nominated as NIH candidate Elias Zerhouni, an Arab-American whose last position was at Johns Hopkins University. And I haven’t heard anyone claim that Bush was after the Arab-American vote. Ha. These two appointments are obviously crucial for the future of stem-cell research, policy on biological threats, cloning, etc.

Read more about Carmona here and about Zerhouni here.

There are times when it seems like there is no end to the misery that a people have to endure. A series of earthquakes have hit the Baghlan province of Afghanistan, and between 2,000 and 5,000 people are feared dead:Afghan Quake ‘Kills 2000′.

To help, visit the Red Cross/Red Crescent or the UN Refugee Agency. You can also donate to Unicef.

Big brother is here. An American company has developed a chip that can be implanted in human beings and can keep track of their location. Chips to Fight Kidnapping. Can you imagine the realm of possibilities? Put one on Bush II and we’ll finally know how many hours he spends at the office.

Alex and I hosted our usual get-together tonight for the Oscars. It was more interesting than years past, with at least a couple of upsets (Jim Broadbent? Who saw that one coming?) I suppose the big deal this year is that two black performers have won for leading roles. Denzel Washington’s win was long overdue, after five nominations. Halle Berry’s was more of an upset, because so many people expected Sissy Spacek to win, but Berry did win the SAG a couple of weeks ago and that probably won her last-minute voters. I wish she wouldn’t have made as big of a deal in her acceptance speech about the fact that she’s the first black actress to win. That stuff would have been better suited for the post-awards press conference. She did a good job, and she deserved to win on her merits–that’s what the speech should be about, and the last thing she would want is to lessen her achievement by making it look as though it was a political move on the Academy’s part to vote for her.

He must not be tuned to the same station as the rest of the Arab world. Cheney: No Arab Leaders Opposed U.S.Action in Iraq. He should try a different translator, perhaps.

From the Washington Post:

Amazon.com will pull a listing that says a new J.D. Salinger book is due in November. No publication date has been set for “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a novella that appeared in The New Yorker in 1965 and was originally expected in book form five years ago.
Several Web sites had repeated the information posted on Amazon, and even included links to the online retailer, raising hopes that a “new” Salinger work would be coming for the first time in 40 years. But both Salinger’s agent, Phyllis Westberg, and his publisher, Orchises Press, told The Associated Press that Amazon was wrong. (…) The novella is an episode from Salinger’s famous Glass family saga, a purported letter from camp written by precocious, 7-year-old Seymour Glass. Anticipation was so high that New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani didn’t wait for a review copy, but tracked down the old New Yorker text and panned it as a “sour, implausible, and, sad to say, completely charmless story.

Ouch. Amazon Pulls False Salinger Listing

Hell hath no fury like that of a cat whose hair had to be trimmed. My allergies were kicking in, so my poor cat had to go under the scissors. A long bath followed, with his howls increasing in intensity. I felt like a torturer in a Stalin gulag. I’m exhausted.

I am sitting on the couch, under a blanket, typing with one hand, the other hand in a glove, holding an ice pack to my jaw, which earlier today was the site of missile testing, er, I meant oral surgery. Root canal, blah, bad crown, more blah, and now, look, no more tooth. Thank God for Vicodin.