THOU SHALT HEREFORTH BE KNOWN AS NOODLES JEFFERSON

Sandow Birk, Heart Attack from Leading Causes of Death in America, etching, 2005. More here.

Interview with Maria Schnieder, who you know as The Onion's Herbert Kornfeld and Jean Teasdale.

One of the Jean Teasdale's columns, "With Friends Like These" stood apart from the rest for me, simply because she came the closest to identifying herself as the object of satire. She befriends these pop-culture savvy and sarcastic college students and then she's mortified when she realizes that they are documenting her life in order to make fun of her. Was that a moment of guilt or self-parody?
I came up with these two columns about how Jean meets these really sarcastic college students with a postmodern sensibility, completely mocking Jean behind her back, getting kitschy pleasure out of her columns, and she completely misinterprets that. I guess I wrote it because even though I stick it to Jean a lot, I'm a little bit protective of her. I wanted to make fun of the people who make of fun of Jean. I know that's a bit schizophrenic. Directed toward the type of audience that is attracted to her column, I wanted to point out, "Hey, they're kind of jerks, too."

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In other news, picnic a success!