There was a This American Life marathon on television today, I guess to get everyone in the sappy patriotic mood. Now I don’t believe everything Ira touches is gold, but this is… well, just watch it.

Whoa. I’m really hoping this person compiled this info from many unnamed sources and didn’t just make it up…

Circuit City closing 155 stores
Ann Taylor closing 117 stores nationwide
Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug, and Catherine’s to close 150 store nationwide
Eddie Bauer to close stores 27 stores, more after January
Cache will close all stores
Talbots closing all stores
J. Jill closing all stores
GAP closing 85 stores
Footlocker closing 140 stores, more to close after January
Wickes Furniture closing all stores
Levitz closing remaining stores
Bombay closing remaining stores
Zales closing down 82 stores and 105 after January.
Whitehall closing all stores
Piercing Pagoda closing all stores
Disney closing 98 stores, more after January
Home Depot closing 15 stores, 1 in NJ (New Brunswick)
Macys closing 9 stores after January
Linens and Things closing all stores
Movie Galley closing all stores
Pacific Sunwear closing all stores
Pep Boys closing 33 stores
Sprint/Nextel closing 133 stores
JC Penney closing a number of stores after January
Ethan Allen closing 12 stores
Wilson Leather closing all stores
Sharper Image closing all stores
K B Toys closing 356 stores
Loews to close some stores
Dillard’s to close some stores

Tiny Tim says “Fuck yeah!”

[via Kim]

Consider this another reminder to subscribe to Harper’s Weekly Review as soon as Webly possible (or you can just read them all at the archives). They have real sweet kickers. e.g.

“Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of the destruction of parts of an ancient Muslim cemetery, where some of Saladin’s warriors are buried, to make way for a new Frank Gehry-designed $250 million Museum of Tolerance.”

This looks like fun, but it costs $42,997. The plans alone are $995. Wonder how much it costs to build… (Permits not required, composting toilet not included.)

I don’t read Jezebel, but I do subscribe to their Joan Didion tag. This is what Sadie Stein had to report back from Didion’s “cold, detached” presence at last week’s New York Review of Books panel.

She started by describing the “unexpressable uneasiness” she and some others had felt early on in the campaign. Why? “We were getting what we wanted,” she continued, meaning, a smart, qualified, decent candidate the Eastern elite could get behind. And yet the frenzy surrounding Obama made her uneasy — both the sense that he was a young person’s candidate, “a generational thing we couldn’t understand” and the unthinking embrace of “naivete transformed to hope, partisanism as consumerism.” Didion bridled at the wanton use of “transformational” and said she couldn’t count the number of times she heard the 60’s evoked “by people who apparently had no memory that the 60s” didn’t involve decking babies out in political onesies.

Didion was at pains to say that she did not think any of this was Obama’s doing, nor to his tastes. He would, she speculated “welcome healthy realism” and achievable expectations. In our frenzy, we are doing him a disservice, expecting miracles “at a time when the nation can least afford easy answers.” She recalled, the day after the election, an overexcited newscaster declaring that we now possess “the congratulations of all the nations.” She likened this to the naivete of thinking we’d be regarded as beloved saviors in Iraq. But, she ended, “in the irony-free zone that our country has become, this is not what people wanted to hear.”

Sorry, you can go back to worshiping your Hope posters now, kids.

Honestly, I had no idea the economy was so bad as to drive the Mountain Goats and the Weakerthans into the cruise industry. Et tu, Kids in the Hall? Et tu?

“The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.” –Bloomberg

Things have been relatively bustling in my living room at TIWCM HQ lately. For APE last weekend, I made a lil’ quarter-sized, 24 page self-obsessed mini-comic about my favorite shoes (pictured: page one) and, in typical TIWCM fashion, table-squatted with the thing rather successfully. I swear that one of these days I will pay to play. Stumptown, perchance? Good news: that leaves nearly six months for a couple other stories, including the long FNB situation. Oh, plus my return to regular civilization.

Bad news: the entire miniscule “lit” comics industry may very well have collapsed in upon itself in a small, self-contained haze of inflated egos and semi-toxic inks by that point. Tom Spurgeon shares his cynical old-man wisdom on the subject.

For every new exhibitor at SPX putting their creativity on paper in order to share it with a couple of hundred fellow travelers, two young Hollywood functionaries descend on San Diego for the first time looking for idiosyncratic projects with a hook by which they get to justify their place on payroll.

Me, I’m just happy to get some really sweet deals on my print runs from my friend Henry down the street. Because print shops, those are definitely depression recession-proof…