Boston magazine has a great monthly item called Fashion Masochist, and I took one for the team in the latest issue by walking around for two days in this disaster of an outfit. The leggings weren’t as uncomfortable as I thought they’d be – they are by far the tightest thing I’ve ever worn (in public) – and you’d be amazed how quickly you get used to walking around town in silhouetted nakedness. I even went to see the Transformers movie in them, which was only terrible because the leggings kept slipping down and exposing my bare bottom on the nasty theater seat. But for the far more embarassing parts, though, you’ll have to read the story. Does this officially make me a slave to fashion?

While driving on the Mass Pike tonight, I saw a Fung Wah bus being towed away…

…and thought, “Well, that’s a good sign: At least it hasn’t burst into flames.” (Or flip over, I suppose.) But then, that probably isn’t the standard to which a bus company should be held to, eh?

If two people walked down the street with a bag full of burgers and yelled, “Free burgers!”, I’d assume they were laced with polonium-210. But here’s what I learned at work today: When faced with free food, people are surprisingly alarmingly trusting.

A stop sign I saw in Hveragerði, Iceland:

Pretty amazing. And also from the Echos of Old School Rap Department, check out what AARP members will be doing between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m. at the organization’s annual Life@50+ event: It’s “Morning Fitness with L.L. Cool J.” Grandmamma said knock you out!

This Icelandic chocolate bar was everywhere, and although I’m not much of a candy lover, I tried (and enjoyed) two: one with little candy crunchies in it, and the other with balls of licorice. But it was the name that tickled me most. Just imagine Icelanders — a mostly blonde, beautiful bunch — advertising their candy to the outside world: “Where my Nizza at?” “That’s my Nizza!” “Don’t mess with my Nizza.”

I was making jokes to this effect the entire time we were in Iceland (which got old to everyone but me), but a little Google action shows Nizza isn’t as randomly unfortunate as I thought: There’s a notable city in France called Nizza, which in English is translated to “Nice,” and apparently that translation holds in Italian. Perhaps that also explains the hotel and pizza shop.

My friend Sara got engaged over the weekend, after her (now) fiancé, George, raised the bar on creative proposals to astronomical, intimidating levels. Here’s the video he made, which as of this writing is the sixth-most-viewed video on YouTube today:

Amazing, right? Congrats to them both; they’re wonderful people and a wonderful couple (and make wonderful T-shirts!), and things couldn’t have worked out better.

Breaking news: Elvis is alive, and he’s playing radio station festivals in Reykjavik.

I took that video on Saturday, during a weekend trip to Iceland. (Didn’t know you could take a weekend trip to Iceland? Neither did I, until someone mentioned it to us recently and, like lemmings, we said “Wow!” and then plunked down a small fortune on plane tickets. Turns out it’s only a four-hour flight from Boston.) The country’s really unique — alien landscape, nice people, interesting history, a coma-inducing amount of partying (by the country, not us, although more on that in a future post), etc. But there was one problem: Elvis.

Well, not just Elvis. Elvis and Madonna and Star Trek and the theme song to “Baywatch” that I had never heard but a packed bar crowd in Reykjavik was singing along to with zeal. I feel bad about this every time I travel abroad and inevidably discover that, instead of enjoying their own culture, other countries are stuck with our crap. I always want to apologize for it; it’s like discovering that when you throw out your trash, it ends up on your neighbor’s lawn.

America’s cultural export is a bullhorn to the ear — quality doesn’t matter, because it’s so loud that it drowns everything else out. I mean, hey, nothing against Elvis. If you’re making music or movies and can find an international audience, that’s an exciting sign of success. And when I talked about this with a local girl in a Reykjavik bar — while the Beastie Boys were playing on the stereo, and she was wearing a Bon Jovi shirt — she didn’t seem too bothered. “People just like whatever’s cool,” she said. So maybe I’m being selfish: I wanted to see something new, and instead found something familiar. But I can’t help but think we’ve done these people wrong.

Last night, we were walking down Newbury Street in Boston and saw a guy in a brown shirt, probably in his late teens or early 20s, bolt out of Newbury Comics. An employee quickly followed, running into the street and screaming, “Hey!” The guy kept running, and she gave up after about 30 feet, stared at him as he continued to flee, and then turned around and went inside.

It took me a few seconds to process what was happening, but then it was obvious: The guy had stolen something. Had my first instinct been to bolt after him, I might have caught him. He wasn’t running all that fast, and there aren’t many places to hide. But instead, like everyone else on the street, I just watched. Watched the guy turn the corner. Watched the employee walk back into the store. And then it was over.

I felt bad, like I enabled the crime, as if this kind of thing can happen because we let it happen. I wondered if anyone else would have acted if the employee was more dramatic — yelling “Stop, thief!” or something like that. But then, what would I have done if I ran after the guy? Tackled him? I’m void of tackling experience. And even if I did, then what? Pin him until cops come? I have no idea.

During my freshman year of college, a few friends and I were at a coffee shop when something similar happened: A guy parked a van outside the shop, went inside, grabbed something (although I can’t remember what), and then ran back in the van and took off. We didn’t notice this until the van started screeching and an employee screamed. Two of my friends immediately ran out the door and bolted down the street after the van, which was pretty futile. I mean, not only were they not faster than a van, what exactly were they going to do if they actually did catch up with the van? Tackle it?

They came back a few minutes later, huffing and puffing, and we told them they were idiots. “What if those guys had a gun?” someone said. But the employees were thankful, and my two friends got free coffee. At least, I suppose, they tried.

It’s true: There’s now another blog in my life.

We at Boston magazine just recently joined the bloggin’ world with Boston Daily, your source for, you know, daily Boston stuff. I’ll be contributing as regularly as I can, and my first post, about what happened when a local rag collided with porn star Ron Jeremy, went up today. Should be fun: Now you can see what HappyScrappy would be like if I always had to act (at least somewhat) intelligent.

Underage drinking: According to this image from the Advertising Council, it’s apparently either the quickest way to a one-on-one with the Holy Spirit, or what kids do when something really scary is dangling above their heads.

There are, as I see it, two types of law: The ones designed to keep society functional and docile (no murder, no stealing, etc.); and those crafted in fits of populism, whitewashing problems whose real solutions are too nuanced to be politically popular. The second category makes for fascinating reading. It’s Malcolm Gladwell explaining why our approach to managing homelessness is wrongheaded, and elsewhere it’s just about anyone showing how abstinence-only education does more harm than good. On Sunday, Parade took up a rather old standby of this field: The debate over whether the U.S. drinking age is keeping kids from harm, or (as I see it) an overrun, head-in-the-sand law that inadvertently encourages alcohol abuse.

Parade, as is its duty, doesn’t rise to any particularly contemplative occasion here, but instead just lays out some facts, asks a few tired and cliché questions (“If a man is mature enough to serve on a jury or risk his life in a war halfway around the world, isn’t he also mature enough to drink a beer?”), and then makes way for Howard Huge. But the comments left on its website tell a more interesting tale: Together, they’re a profile of the support behind this kind of law. Here’s a particularly insightful comment from someone calling themselves jlg17:

Here, in my opinion is a list of the people who want to promote youth drinking: Kids who want to get high, hopefully increase their chances of having sex, and who just want to do something that’s forbidden because forbidden things are more fun; … Parents who wish that their children would die so that they could go back to being irresponsible children themselves, living their lives without having to worry about supporting anyone else; Adult pedophiles and statutory rapists who just love the idea of providing alcohol to young people in the hope that they might get lucky sexually, and People who unscrupulously make big money off of pretending to treat alcoholism, and who wouldn’t want to see a source of revenue dry up.

It’s tough to decide which is more telling: The accusation that parents who let their kids drink before the age of 21 secretly want them to die, or that alcoholism is some sort of hocus pocus whipped up by treatment centers. Either way, you get the point: Here’s someone not especially interested in recognizing the distinction between a law’s intent and its actual effect. For jlg17, you either make a law based on how you think the world should work, or you’re endorsing “adult pedophiles and statutory rapists.” (By the way, are there any pedophiles that aren’t adults? Wouldn’t that just be, uh, kids who are sexually attracted to people their own age?) And thus, Plato gets it wrong.

Isaac Mizrahi has gone from designing ultra-chic to cranking out cheap junk for Target, and his philosophy on this change seems like a healthy one:

“I think in the end, all art is, is being a big, fat fool. And a big flop. Because somebody’s not gonna like what you do. Or somebody’s gonna love what you do, no matter how bad or good it is. So, if you can continue getting out of bed in the morning, and functioning, and creating what you think is good, and what you think is good art, then that’s all that matters. That’s all that matters.”

And hey, all the more power to you. Except, uh, Isaac? Don’t completely give up on avoiding becoming a big, fat fool, because I suspect that’s what’s caused you to design The Most Annoying Dog Toy Ever (Or At Least, The Most Annoying One That’s Entered My Home). It’s a fake cell phone for a dog, purchased today by She Who Pampers Our Dog More Than I Do. It says “555-WOOF” on its fake, fabric screen, and it makes a sound like… well, here’s it in action:

But I suppose it is a minor breakthrough that it took our dog, Stella, only about half a day to recognize the source of this noise. She normally isn’t winning any intelligence contests. Still hasn’t learned to sit on command, in fact. But when Isaac Mizrahi calls, she comes running. Maybe she wants to be fondled.

Remember this?

Seven years ago, it was the header at the top of this site. Between it and the one used now, I think I tried out one other graphic. HappyScrappy doesn’t change often, which is testament to my active, lifelong disinterest in change for the sake of change. I ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch every day during middle school. When I lived with some friends in a dorm suite in college, I got irritated when a few of them decided to move the couches in the living room around for fun. “But it was fine the way it was before,” I said, harrumphing. So that’s what you’re dealing with here.

But for reasons too technical for me to follow – although, yes, it had something to do with the inability to leave comments on this blog for the past week or two – HappyScrappy had to be switched from Movable Type to WordPress. Thanks kindly to my host, Ian of Ubikorp, who made it as painless as possible for me. He did his best to approximate the design of the previous site, and I’m willing to live with the slight differences. Truth be told, I think this version looks a little more professional anyway.

Let me know if you run into any bugs. I’ll be tweaking here and there over the next few days, but for the most part, what you see here is what you get. And the best part: Finally, you’re able to leave comments again. I’m very pleased about this. Post away. I’ve missed all the insults. (Although, also for reasons too technical for me to follow, comments will be permanently closed on any posts predating this month. But the archives will be preserved in its original layout, for what that’s worth.)

Thanks, and here’s to the years of completely stagnant blog layout to come. I can’t wait.

Hagar the Horrible, 8/7/07

That’s right, women: Not getting that promotion your male co-workers got? Got fired when you complained about sexual harassment from your boss? Suck it up, because clearly you just haven’t figured out how to use your equal rights! Shit, you women have had equal rights since the Vikings! You never saw Attila the Hun get all weepy over some sexually loaded commentary at work, did you?

Oh, Attila was a man’s name back then? Well, uh. Whatever, you get the point.

So, hey, why not just go to the kitchen, pick up the nearest kitchen tool — nothing sharp, of course — and wave it around a bit. See? Doesn’t that make everything better? And while you’re there, can you please make Hagar the Horrible writer Chris Browne a sandwich? The man works hard all day; that’s really the least you can do.

And meanwhile, down the street at the Bumstead residence, a young boy is pointing at a grown woman’s ass and saying he “wants that stuff in (his) room.”

Blondie, 8/7/07

Sure you were talking about the dirt, Elmo. She is a dirty, dirty woman.

From a New York Times story yesterday about Rudy Giuliani and his wife, Judith:

But he described her as an effective fund-raiser and trusted sounding board for his policies, particularly on health care, because she holds a two-year nursing degree and once sold pharmaceuticals.

In a grave affront to basic intelligence, Mindset (a.k.a. Phil, my friend Kathryn’s brother, and the Official Reality TV Star of HappyScrappy.com) was canned this week from SciFi Channel’s “Who Wants to be a Superhero?” The contestants on the show had been captured by a villain called Bee Sting, who, in a move that would make Dr. Evil cringe, challenged them to a spelling bee — except all words must be spelled with an extra e (bee-serker, say). Mindset doesn’t play along, and spells his word correctly.

As an editor, I consider that admirable dedication to our language. But it also made sense for the show: Its challenges are often distractions from more noble pursuits, like when the contestants are told to fix their car but instead are rewarded for helping a nearby old lady pick up her groceries, so this spelling bee should have also been more than it appeared. As Phil says during his exit interview, he figured it was more heroic for a captured hero to stick by what’s right, rather than kowtow to a captor’s wacky demands. But Stan Lee doesn’t see it that way, and kicked off Phil for being prideful.

It’s especially curious because Stan, of all people, should know the power of words. The man’s fortune has come from (or at least, was initiated in) the publishing industry. Come on, man. One letter means big changes in words. It makes Fantastic Four into fantastic flour. The X-Men are disposed-of boyfriends. Marvel is an ice cream company. Tell us, Stan: If you were kidnapped by Potato Man and forced to cater to his spelling whims, would this have been your largest claim to fame?:

I think not. Mindset, you’re an inspiration to us all.