MySweetLife.Net

Chanel, the legendary fashion brand run by Mugatu-esque overlord/enemy to Heidi Klums everywhere, Karl Lagerfeld, is pissed. They let everyone know how much they cringe when you use their name to refer to anything but Chanel. Dare speaketh Chanel?!

Don’t try it. Because their lawyers will find you and stab you with a wire hanger, or something. Via Pursuitist, Chanel ran an ad in the back of yesterday’s Women’s Wear Daily letting the world know specifically what IS and IS NOT Chanel, and how it absolutely chaps their exquisitely powdered asses when you get it all wrong. Neit more with this bullschizah! Get it right, you Well Intentioned Mis-Users:

That’s right: it’s not a Chanel Jacket, even though the look in question is patently Chanel’s, which, you know, would be a pretty decent thing for anyone else. Like when people call all brown soda a “Coke,” there are probably worse things in the world than being ubiquitous, unless you’re Lagerfeld or Chanel’s lawyers. In which case, any commoner taking the name of Chanel in vain will be positively destroyed. Or made to kill the prime minister of Malaysia. Either way: I’m going to take my Chanel tattoo and get it erased, cancel the service on my Chanel Cellphone, and take my Chanel Condom off (while holding the reservoir tip, of course), while taking a stand for appropriated brands everywhere, and against Chanel. Because, honestly, as “important” as Chanel may be, anybody snobby enough to try and dictate the way people speak or write is pompous, stupid, and probably giving fashion at large a terrible name (pronounced “Chah-nehl,” in case you were wondering). As for the “extraordinary woman’s timeless contributions” to fashion, I don’t think Chanel’s lawyers will disagree with anyone when they bring up her homophobic Nazi past. But then again, they’ve got more important things to keep in mind, right? Footage of Evil Chanel overlord, Karl Lagerfeld, trying to change minds on child labor policy, below:

What is Chanel? Well, let’s find out… [Pursuitist]

Worth noting: one commenter pointed out that this ad’s run by Chanel quite often. Whoops! In any case: DO NOT KILL THE PRIME MINISTER OF MALAYSIA.

Instead of taking a present from her Dad, she got him the resignation of Sarah Palin. Not bad. But seriously: this Chicago Tribune profile of where the Obama girls have spent their last few birthdays is ridiculous-cute. Enjoy. [Chicago Tribune]

Today in the Washington Post editorial page: former UN Ambassador and unpleasant mustachioed asshole John Bolton says it is time for Israel to start a war with Iran.

Sanctions have failed, Iran will nuke us all within days, and we (sorry, they! Only Israel has the balls to do what that commie fag Obama won’t, because he loves the terrorists) will be greeted as liberators. No, seriously, John Bolton thinks the people of Iran would welcome a military invasion by Israel.

Significantly, the uprising in Iran also makes it more likely that an effective public diplomacy campaign could be waged in the country to explain to Iranians that such an attack is directed against the regime, not against the Iranian people. This was always true, but it has become even more important to make this case emphatically, when the gulf between the Islamic revolution of 1979 and the citizens of Iran has never been clearer or wider. Military action against Iran’s nuclear program and the ultimate goal of regime change can be worked together consistently.

Hah. Ha ha ha.

Elsewhere, Dana Milbank reports on dumb messages on Obama’s Facebook wall, David Broder wonders if there is maybe still racism anywhere (conclusion: probably!), and David Ignatius reports that those wacky Russians have loved strongmen for many years.

But how are these guys all doing traffic-wise? (Maybe we should stop linking to them!)

July 2 @ 4:15am At Ray’s Pizza. Trademark black boot and scruffy beard with his hood up. He had an older camera hanging around his neck.[Submit your own Gawker Stalker sightings to stalker@gawker.com]

Canadian tween ‘Pruane2Forever‘ is best known for calling out 50 Cent for having no street cred, in a YouTube video, filmed in Pruane’s South Park poster-bedecked room. Now 50 got him, for real. Click to watch and learn (PR).

Jeff Jarvis tweets: “WaPo access program sounds like a Dan Abrams production.”

Gwyneth Paltrow, while mostly annoying with her faux Britishness and William Joel-ing, has made at least one good and simple point. Especially as we leave work behind and try to enjoy a holiday weekend. The constant BlackBerrying? Getting really annoying.

Yes, Gwyneth is downright awful when she speaks about how great it is to be pretty and have tons of money and live in Spain, but can we all admit that this line — the one that has strangely evoked the most web-hate — is actually kind of true:

Also, the way people live over there. They seem to enjoy life a little bit more. They aren’t running around as much as in New York. They enjoy time with the family. They don’t always have their Blackberries on.’

Yes! The BlackBerrys and iPhones and Pres or whatever they’re called. Enough! We know we sound like Dave Barry or something—some leathery old “comedy” writer making out of date arguments—but just because it’s old doesn’t make it any less true. It’s a holiday weekend in about two hours, so please leave the work machine at home, locked in a drawer, and go embrace the one lone aspect of Gwyneth Paltrow’s charmed life that you can. Then on Monday, we can all return to resenting the fact that we don’t tour expensive European destinations while pretending to eat food that we would never actually eat because we’re crazed macrobiotic diet freaks who think shampoo will kill people.

Image: Splash

The Way We Live Now: Playin’ hooky. Schoooooool’s outttt forrrrrrrr summer! Yea! School’s out forever! Really. They can’t afford summer school any more. Too bad that happened right when unemployment hit double digits. No job. No school. Nada.

“Thousands of districts” have canceled summer school this year. No money! 150,000 kids in LA who should be in summer school are instead wandering around joining gangs and etc. Half the school districts in Florida have forced their worst students out on the streets this summer—your streets.

And you’ll know they’re out there if you’re one of the nearly half-million Americans who lost their job last month—many, many more than expert economists (who should be fired) expected! “The number of people who have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks has more than tripled since the recession began, to 4.4 million. The median time people go without a job has increased to more than four months, from slightly more than two months at the outset of the recession in December 2007.” The “official” jobless rate is 9.5%, but factor in everyone who slips through the cracks and we’ll go ahead and call it certifiably double-digits. Sad party time!

It’s not just sad. It’s criminal. We should really do something about it. Call someone. Call the cops. No—call a lawyer. Oh no: a lawyer has $400,000 in student loan debt and now they won’t let him be a lawyer. What are we to do?

You should stop smoking, doctors say. Here, we have medications to help you stop, doctors say. But oh—these medications could make you kill yourself. What the hell is science good for?

Chantix and Zyban can help you stop smoking, by ending your life:

Federal drug regulators warned Wednesday that patients taking two popular drugs to stop smoking should be watched closely for signs of serious mental illness, as reports mount of suicides among the drugs’ users.

And you’ll get a nice hearty chuckle out of this: Zyban is also sold as Wellbutrin as an antidepressant, with one small flaw: “suicidal thoughts by patients who use it for depression.” Uh huh.

Science: totally worthless.
[Pic via]

J.D. Salinger invented blogs, according to a federal judge who granted a temporary injunction yesterday against John David California’s planned “parody” of Catcher in the Rye.

California, whose real name is Fredrik Colting and who lives improbably in Sweden, wrote a book called 60 Years Later as an unauthorized sequel to Catcher in the Rye, featuring a very Caufield-esque 76-year-old who escapes from a nursing home and wanders the streets of Manhattan. Salinger sued to prevent its publication, claiming copyright, and a federal judge ruled yesterday that it’s suffiently similar to Catcher that California/Colting can’t publish it until the suit is finished, which could take years. The ruling will likely effectively kill the book.

But one of the reasons the judge cited for siding with Salinger sent a chill down our spine:

Both narratives are told from the first-person point of view of a sarcastic, often uncouth protagonist who relies heavily on slang, euphemisms and colloquialisms, makes constant digression and asides, refers to readers in the second person, constantly assures the reader that he is being honest and that he is giving them the truth.

Uh oh! Look you guys, this judge sounds like a real dope to us. A goddam dope. We’ve seen lots of blogs, some really swell ones, and they’re alright. Don’t go around listening to judges, cause they’ll just mess your head up. It’s just not fair. Now this writer fellow is going to come around waving some phony injunction at us. Don’t ever blog about anything to anybody. If you do, some crazy agorophobic obsessive-compulsive old man with a taste for teenaged girls might come after you.