So Bono calls me and he’s all proud of himself because he’s going to guest-edit an edition of Vanity Fair. (See here.) He’s like, “Yeah, first I was gonna try and edit an edition of Forbes, seeing that I own the fookin place and all, but you know what? I tried to read some of their stories and I fookin fell asleep! No shite, Steve. I mean I really tried. No matter what, I’d fall asleep. Coffee, electrodes, toothpicks to hold up my eyelids — fookin asleep in like five minutes. Fookin articles about taxes, and all these fookin columns about what you should do with yer money or where to invest and half the shite I’ve never even heard of. Like what the fook is a muni, do you have any fookin idea? I told dose guys you need more fookin celebrities or sumfin. Spark it up a bit. Guy tells me, Oh, no, we actually go out of our way to make it less exciting. Our average reader is like seventy-eight years old and we don’t want to scare them. So then I thought maybe I’d guest-edit an edition of the online version but all they want to do is slideshows on like ten celebrities with the best tits and world’s fastest cars. I’m like, okay, but how about one day we just do nothing but really depressing stories about Africa? Yeah. Didn’t go over too well. Luckily the nice folks at Vanity Fair were happy to go along with any crackpot idea I threw at them. Like, I told Graydon Carter, mate, if I’m gonna do this edition then you’re gonna have to do something about that fookin hair. He’s like, What do you mean? I’m like, You’re kidding right? But he wasn’t. No lie. He thinks it’s cool. Man oh man.”

I told Bono, Look, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you really want to get the Nobel Prize you can’t be so transparently ambitious about it. Okay? You have to be more subtle. He told me to fook off. I also pointed out to him that if he’s going to edit a magazine he’s going to have to actually read stuff. Like, whole articles. He’s like, “Fook off, ya eejit, I know that, I’ve already hired someone to do that. So there.”