after three rounds with the Blaster.Worm virus we are (hopefully) operational again.

guilty pleasure: the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times. it’s like sunday morning yoga for the face, as my jaw hangs open at the sheer frivolousness of the people and triviality of the news. i mean, this section actually makes Cosmo’s “How to tell if he’s a keeper” and “10 quick ways to move up the career ladder” sort of articles seem to have significant gravity.

a piece that rankled in particular last week:

Banshees Howl on Oregon’s Dunes

…

For certain people, summer is a Tolstoy idyll on a lake in Vermont at some 21st century version of a dacha. For some, summer is a series of parties on the East End of Long Island, drinks at the house of Russell Simmons, amid nesting swans and friends that one vaguely feels one has met, probably on prime-time television. For some, summer is a group house with weekend mattress shares calculated by meticulous fractions, or the ritual of tugging red Radio Flyers from ferry landings to houses stocked with Humboldt Fog cheese and designer drugs.

But for the people here (Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area), who never considered trucker hats an ironic accessory, summer is a family camping holiday whose central activity involves screaming up the flank of a sand dune on an all-terrain vehicle.

…

(Guy Trebay)

can you believe it? trucker hats without irony?

the writer goes on to peer down his nose at the hefty $4500 price tag of a typical ATV, scoff at the idea that recreating together qualifies as a healthy family activity, and posit that none of these people are capable of appreciating the beauty of the natural world simply because they didn’t mention it when he asked them questions about their ATVs.

granted, i find ATVing a distastefully noisy and moronic method of enjoying the great outdoors just as this hamptons’ poolside reporter does, but at least i recognize that the irony that hip new yorkers enjoy while wearing trucker hats comes from somewhere: it’s only ironic if someone else does or did it seriously once. god, given the choice of summer activities, i’d rather camp in the oregon dunes, even if i did have to ride an ATV, than bump elbows with the “certain people” of Trebay’s world, sporting the latest $4500 gucci hoo-ha and doing designer drugs in some sort of modern architecture monstrosity in the hamptons.