New design, new username (to fit with my twitter)! It's like we've all got a second chance here. It's like Lost.
The new car smell is great, but what's with not being able to see all previous comments when you post your own?
Zooey has a lot of pre-existing jerk conditions: cute, vegan, married to a popular bandleader, benefactor of Hollywood nepotism. What I'm saying is that she is looking a little GOOPy these days.
I have trust issues. I began to notice this sometime after I lost my parents and brother, and I found myself very alone. I didn't want to get close to anyone because I thought they would die too. My trust issues are so bad that I have to hide in ventilation ducts and sleep in garbage, because I think anyone--anything--could hurt me. So you can imagine how hard it was for me when a social worker named Ripley showed up one day at my home with a dozen soldiers. The soldiers have chunky guns and lots of tattoos, and there was a girl soldier who had spikey hair that I thought was cool to see on a girl and not on a boy! They want me to come with them because they say it is safer. They say they can help me. But what do they know? Do you think I should learn to trust in others like in Jesus? How do I believe in a just God when so many bad things have happened, for instance, the slimy thing that came out of my mom's chest? That looked like a boney hand? I have to go because Ripley wants to give me a sponge bath (I haven't bathed in a few months), which sounds a little weird and uncomfortable! Love, Newt
"It's just show business," says Jay Leno. What did he draw from Conan's last show? "Don't be cynical." The Oprah interview with Leno is great TV. We get to watch Leno make all these rhetorical side-steps to justify his return to the Tonight Show. But doesn't Leno see the contradiction here? Leno's appropriation of Tonight Showgate as a matter of "show business" is rooted in cynicism. Deep cynicism. The kind of roots that bend and crack sidewalk squares reaching for water. Leno, grayed in the hair, arms resting in sovereign pose on his plush Oprah chair, is a contemporary Lear, comprehending the mess spiraling out from him. "Nothing will come of nothing," Lear says in the play. I can hear Leno saying it too. Overanalysisgum out.
I remember when they introduced the iPhone and I got CHILLS (chills! To be 22 again.) because it replaced something we all used: the poorly designed, almost not-functional cellphone. But what does the iPad replace? What does it introduce? How many people use eReaders? Who loves watching movies on a very small screen? I'm surprised that I haven't heard Apple address these questions. It's a more "intimate" computer? I'm not convinced! I might buy one, all the same!
I think my uncle is good at heart. He adopted me and my two brothers when dad joined the Navy. He provides for us, feeds us, clothes us (I like to wear green). But maybe I have forgotten to mention that he is also very wealthy. He is in fact the wealthiest man in the world. Sometimes I worry that he cares too much about money. He spends whole days, sometimes, at his vault. He bought a gold dollar-sign to put on the outside, which must have cost him a lot and makes the rest of the people in our city feel poor. I think this is why people always try to steal from him, and why he keeps sending them to jail. Sometimes he takes us on trips around the world, but the trips are always about getting richer and are sometimes dangerous! Does my uncle follow the spirit of the Bible? I know the Bible says it is harder for a rich man to get into Heaven than a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, so I sometimes worry about my uncle, but then I have also seen him swim through pennies, so maybe he will be OK? Thank you, Louie.
Harry Knowles deserves a special jury prize for defending Christian Bale with the best* sentence of the year.
*the worst sentence sentence of the year, but the BEST sentence of the year
I think the pumpkin head mask is like the jeans in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. It imbues the wearer with magical dancing abilities, and then he loses his virginity. Probably.
Sometimes my boyfriend gets really upset when I don't do his laundry. He says, "How am I supposed to be an attractive, fashionable person if I can't match my neon socks to my neon shirts? HOW?" We can all try harder for our boyfriends.
Maybe if we all stop believing Carrie Prejean is a person worth spending our already limited energies on, her orange skill will turn translucent, her neon white teeth clear, her dead eyes limpid, her outsized entitlement vapory, and then we will realize that there is no such thing as Carrie Prejean on Larry King Live's set, only a black wall with brite lite dots shaped like continents, and the faint ssss noise of microphoned air. Better.
Matthew, don't interrupt! Terminators DO have endoskeletons made of future metal that is really strong, but they ALSO have an external layer of living tissue/epidermis so that they resemble humans. Ipso facto, terminator earlobes would be made of cartilage and presumably piercible.
Unless Gabe's story is about sending back to camp the standard terminator models in the Cyberdyne-controlled future, which have the terminator endoskeleton without the external layer of tissue, in which case it would be impossible to pierce their ears because they wouldn't have ears. Unless these were T-1000 models (liquid metal)...
I think we could all have a healthy discussion about Glenn Beck the TV Personality vs. Glenn Beck the Real Personality (GBTVP v. GBRP), because it's honestly difficult calling the man on TV a plausible human being. I think what we're watching is an almost-smart man (GBRP) discovering a lucrative, swimming-in-his-vault-of-pennies-with-a-giant-dollar-sign-on-the-outside televisual role (GBTVP) that says and does things he doesn't actually believe, but because he's almost-smart and not actual-smart, he loses control of the GBTVP so that it overwhelms him (GBRP), until the two personalities bleed into and infect one another, so now you have this awful siamese twin scenario where GBTVP and GBRP share the same heart and separating them would be a mortal, terrible thing. Metaphors. That said, no, it's not OK to wish Glenn Beck dead, because the monster and the human are conjoined, and killing the monster would endanger the human, and, anyway, we as monsters ourselves should know better.
I'd like to think that Jay Leno shudders existentially (in his soul) whenever he comes across the old bard's line, "Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." But then I remember it's Jay Leno and that the only shuddering he does is when he pilots one of his Edwardian motorcars over a very modern, very cruel speed bump.
The incredible (?) thing about the old "What would your [insert dead relative] think of this?" question is that it can be endlessly involuted, and endlessly meaningless, as it recalls to mind all the grief and awfulness and permanence of losing a loved one.
"OK, sure, but what would your dead mom's dead father think about this? How about your dead grandmother? Her dead sister? Their dead mother? Her dead husband (your great grandfather, dead, on your dead mother's side)?"
I'm glad that Kanye didn't really respond to Jay's dumb (and depressingly provocative/invasive) question, but chose to speak for himself. Boo Jay, boo.
Not to be all Adjunct Professor of Metacomedy here, but I thought I'd point out that the meta-ness of Norm's humor didn't go "unspoken," per se, but actually was explicitly signaled when he introduced the moth joke as a retelling of a joke his driver had told him. So we're listening to this joke as a secondhand joke, a copy, and us meta-heads (crankheads-->seinfeldheads-->metaheads) are already aware of the jokiness of the joke, all the strategies, rhetoric, timing, delivery, etc. that go into a joke (and what makes it funny), and we're laughing because Norm is mimicking the driver's delivery, rhetoric, strategies, etc. but also, because he's Norm, not mimicking very convincingly and really just doing what he usually does, intentionally bombing/killing a joke, and Conan is inserting himself into all of this and pointing out that the joke is bombing (and going on and on, like this sentence), and Conan's criticism of the joke is just another layer that makes it funnier, because we're now all complicit with Conan in wondering when the joke is going to end, and then when he (Norm) does finish the joke, and we see that it's really just a cutesy punchline of a joke that your 7 year old brother would breathlessly tell you after hearing it out on the playground, it's the meta cherry (sorry) on top of it all because the joke never required such a buildup, and the buildup is really incongruous and out of place to it (the punchline), and so we have a failure of a stupid playground joke nested inside the failure (bombing) of an overly long and overwrought telling of the joke, nested inside a failure at repeating/mimicking the telling of the joke, which, if it (the original, driver-told joke) was anything like the joke Norm made it to be, was a bad joke anyway. I need a nap.
Remember when PC walked over to Taylor and Kelli after the Operation Smile fashion show (Really? Fashion show? That's how you raise support for cleft palate issues, through an industry renown for its humanitarian [and not self-] interests?) and looked into Taylor's dulled eyeballs and asked, "Are we still friends?" The correct answer (i.e., the one Taylor does not give) is "No, we're not still friends."
Don't be so sure. I heard sack of russet potatoes went on the scavenger hunt without Paula (she was busy getting robbed, while unconscious, on the tilt-a-whirl carnival ride).
I dunno, Gabe. I think it's questionable to call something "inconsequential activism" and suggest that there's such a thing as "consequential activism," as if either thing was measurable.
Isn't there something to be said for bearing witness? The green avatars are an easy sort of activism, done by "1-click" as the program advertises, but they add up, right? If one person lazily considers Iran for just a moment, evaluates that the life he/she has right now, driving in an air-conditioned and sound-proofed vehicle to Starbucks (take your pick of cliches of the outrageous luxuries Americans enjoy), is at all privileged in comparison to other people's hardships in other countries unidentifiable on a world map, isn't that something beyond the alternative--nothing? Is the alternative of "nothing" better, if it is seems more "honest" and consistent with the ignorant reality of this hypothetical American person's life? Dostoevsky used to say something to the effect of morality springing from the idea of making yourself a minor character in someone else's story. I think when people consider the lives beyond themselves, even briefly and lazily as you describe it, it's a good thing.
A novel I liked, "Cloud Atlas," ends with one of the most moral statements I've ever encountered. The narrator says that people will regard your life as meaningless, that "your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean! Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?" It's all drops, and drops are something. There's my contribution to literarygum.
Rather than respond to the awful and dated prejudices boiling behind this comment, I thought I'd just point out that you contract viruses, not diseases. Fucker.
I think it says something about how far gays still have to fight for civil rights when they are portrayed as the evil races--the Horde--of World of Warcraft.
It also says that I know too much about a certain online RPG. Arcane Get Me Out of Here.
Helena Bonham Carter as this movie's version of Colonel "The Architect" Sanders from the Matrix: Reloaded is just more proof that Hollywood needs to give up on AI as compelling villains. A talky, over-explaining evil robot at the climax of the story is exactly what we want out of our action movies (it is not exactly what we want out of our action movies).
I dunno. What else was horrible? The unexplained preggers wife? Sam Worthington swimming, or something, to San Francisco in a day? Ninja eyepaint Blair telling someone she has just met, for the first time in her life, that he is a "good man" even if he doesn't know it? ANOTHER mute post-apocalyptic spunky kid? White-haired old lady with a hilarious cane? Post-apocalyptic uggs, all around.
Can we preemptively declare Harry Knowles as 1-10 on your list of The Worst People of 2009 (There's a fat joke somewhere here. Like, Harry Knowles weighs about as much as 10 people. That fat joke.)? Between calling for the firing of Roger Friedman last week, because he "illegally" watched an unreleased film and reviewed it (Ain't It LEGAL News, apparently), and his repeated abortions of writing (abortion-horny?) and film criticism, he is the worst people of 2009 (so far).
Chet studied art at the collegiate level. You know, Intro to Cardboard Standups of Yourself 201.
He's right. The entire scenario of him buying a cardboard standup of himself, placing it high on a wall because it gets a lot of good light, and having his roommates deface it IS art. Impressionists, dadaists, LOLists.
I agree that this is an extremely implausible projection of future architecture 300 years from now. Much more implausible than aliens looking and behaving identical to us but with pointy ears, and instantaneous matter transportation. Give me back every dollar I have ever spent on this franchise (I have spent no dollars ever on this franchise).
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