Your Amusing Image From Matthew Phelan For The Day

Looking for used painting/portrait frames on craigslist, and came across this dumpy little hero. Has any man ever more looked the part of the WWI-era "doughboy"? Sedentary trench warfare will pork you out.

Work Music.

Thinking of a way to celebrate the mediocre passage of our half-assed health care bill, one of the things I've decided on is listening to the 2008 Election day live set that Killdozer did on WFMU. And thanks to the internet, you can too. Home grown left-wing radicalism and proto-grunge to express our collectively ambivalent feelings.

NYT: Jet Plot Shows Growing Ability of Qaeda Affiliates

When I think about what the Birther movement and the Teabaggers would do with news of a successful terror attack committed on the U.S. by a skinny, African, Al Qaeda operative from Yemen, I get the sads real bad. [Link]

Happy New Year!!
2010!!

Unicorn chaser: The plane was bound for Detroit, so let's all enjoy some very political proto-punk from Death via the Evan "Funk" Davies Show [song | whole playlist ]

Crash Into Me, Former Presidential Hopeful and Ongoing Trainwreck John Edwards

There's a piece in the Times today about recent developments in the John Edwards secret affair and paternity scandal. I don't think you have to be a music snob to find this part amusing:

The notion that Mr. Edwards is the father has been reinforced by the account of Andrew Young, once a close aide to Mr. Edwards, who had signed an affidavit asserting that he was the father of Ms. Hunter’s child.

Mr. Young, who has since renounced that statement, has told publishers in a book proposal that Mr. Edwards knew all along that he was the child’s father. He said Mr. Edwards pleaded with him to accept responsibility falsely, saying that would reduce the story to one of an aide’s infidelity.

In the proposal, which The New York Times examined, Mr. Young says that he assisted the affair by setting up private meetings between Mr. Edwards and Ms. Hunter. He wrote that Mr. Edwards once calmed an anxious Ms. Hunter by promising her that after his wife died, he would marry her in a rooftop ceremony in New York with an appearance by the Dave Matthews Band.

[Via NYT]

Aw.

Great Moments In Manufactured Youth Culture

Also: I strongly consider looking at my friend's piece on the last Polaroid film in existence being sold at Urban Outfitters.

Invitation To Derisive Laughter

The backstory: This guy used to teach one of my brother's math in high school. According to my brother, this "toolbag [...] was a turd bucket."

"Huh, Collateral Damage"

George Clooney has made a defecation out of one of my all-time-favorite nonfiction books. (Thanks, jerk. Really: Thanks. Thanks especially for the ham-fisted, Big Lebowski stunt casting.)

Beep Boop* seems enthusiastic about this turkey; though Videogum is more in my camp—but: Why trust us? Why not view the trailer and a clip or two from the actual Jon Ronson documentary and decide for yourself?

[Note: This last clip is of Jim Channon, the man Jeff Bridges is playing in the Clooney adaptation. Do you not notice how much more amazing and wildly implausible and frankly more compelling the real guy is?! Ahhhhhhhhrrrrrrrggggggghhhhh!!!1!!]

*My 2003-era blog idols are in their twilight.

[UPDATE] Horror Stories From SNL in 1995

A choice excerpt, because I don't feel like I have sold this piece well yet. Skip to the end, if you don't like Roseanne, but do like stories about Norm MacDonald punching people:

Lately, the extracurricular action in the writers’ room has been more colorful than a lot of the writing.

The show hosted by Sarah Jessica Parker, in November, included a song contrasting love’s higher and lower impulses. Michael McKean sang chastely to Parker, plunking an acoustic guitar; then Sandler cranked up his electric guitar to underscore sophomoric lines like “I’m gonna give ya the wood!”

During rewrites of the piece, Kightlinger jokingly suggested to the group that the song be made even more explicit—and found herself the target of a crude barrage. “A couple of them turned on her,” says a close friend of Kightlinger’s, “with these really vicious, mean sexual things. . . . She’s one of the strongest people I know. Very tough to faze. And it made her cry.”

Kightlinger, who wrote for Roseanne last year, has been reciprocally shocked by the thin skin of her new colleagues. “I’ve had to pare down my sarcasm big-time,” she says, adding that she now feels “really positive” about SNL. “In the writers’ room at Roseanne, you could shit on each other and everybody would laugh. But here, it’s like, ‘Wait a second—that’s a piece I’ve worked on, dah, dah, dah.’ It gets personal in a hurry.”

In December, Ian Maxtone-Graham, a self-described anti-smoking zealot, complained about Norm MacDonald’s lighting up in the writers’ room. MacDonald shrugged it off. So Maxtone-Graham extinguished the cigarette by squirting MacDonald in the face with a water pistol. MacDonald punched Maxtone-Graham in the head, knocking him to the floor.

Horror Stories From SNL in 1995

There are a lot of great bleak vignettes in this article—from Chris Farley's sycophantic display at a memorial for deceased SNL-writer Michael O’Donoghue, to Julia Sweeney's personal annoyance with Lorne Michaels' phalanx of high-strung young blonde assistants (widely mocked as "the Lornettes").

I left the article with a sense of the heroic awesomeness that is Jim Downey; pitty for the "too hip for the room" new hires like Laura Kightlinger, Chris Elliot and Janeane Garofalo; a reaffirmation of my love for Bill Murray; and a potentially productive chunk of my day gone.

[Link via a 1995 New York magazine]

Haim Saban: Ay Yi-Yi-Yi Yi !!!

I have been waiting over three years for a scandal involving the Israeli-American neoconservative billionaire Haim Saban, the man who made a fortune single-handedly bringing Japan's Super Sentai craze to the U.S. (re-dubbed Power Rangers). I am also thankful this scandal is funny.

On The Plastic Jesus Scene From Cool Hand Luke

There was a period when the two middle brothers in my family would sing this around the house a lot. Then my dad would sing it to himself while doing dishes. The Newman performance that inspired this fad in my immediate family is pretty cathartic and suitably ambiguous.

I, for one, can't tell if Newman's weepy banjo playing is actually meant to transform the Jesus statue's glow-in-the-dark plasticity and the Madonna's rhinestones from the mild parody songwriters Ed Rush and George Cromarty had intended into a poignant contemporary analog for the cheap poverty and humility Christianity is notorious for.

Ultimately, I know I'll have to rewatch the whole movie (which I haven't done maybe since high school) to know for sure. However, what I want to think is that this is just a perfect encapsulation of how useful even empty rituals and religious trinkets can be when you are down in the dumps.

Tote Bag Of My Self-Deprecating Dreams

[Via Very Small Array]

Ok, I'm Going To This ...

... whether or not I am still coughing up new characters for "The Mucinex Expanded Universe."

I have no idea which one of my friends would also want to go, and I'm frankly enthusiastic about doing something by myself, but I'm just gonna throw this out here anyway:

SUN, MAR 15: Lizzie “Elizabeth” Skurnick reads from Check-in — which [Lauren Cerand] once bought a dozen copies of, and then resold them in ten minutes, it’s that good — on Sunday evening at KGB, along with John Reed and Amy Koppelman. 7PM, FREE.

[Event via Maud Newton. Video below via Caketrain.]

God, Richard Thompson Is Good.

Few people do both whimsical daily strips about childhood and political cartoons well.

I guess it helps when the president speaks like a child. Zing!

Ugh, me. :-/

[Links: Cul De Sac | "Make The Pie Higher!"]

"The Disease Was Life Itself"

Fiction author and Rolling Stone contributing editor David Lipsky chronicles David Foster Wallace's life-long battle with depression in this harrowing feature for the aforementioned publication.

CNN's holograms not really holograms

[Via CBC]

The CNN anchors were not really speaking to three-dimensional projected images, but rather empty space, [Hans Jürgen Kreuzer, a professor of theoretical physics at Dalhousie University and an expert on holography] said. The images were simply added to what viewers saw on their screens at home, in much the same way computer-generated special effects are added to movies.

Kreuzer said the images were tomograms, which are images that are captured from all sides, reconstructed by computers, then displayed on screen.

Holograms, on the other hand, are projected into space.

CNN officials could not be reached for comment.

The Most Important Question About Full House

Full House was a show that was done for ten-year-olds. The critics hated it. They said terrible, terrible things about it. But it should have been reviewed by ten-year-olds. That’s who it was made for. They loved it. And if they loved it, great. Why the hell does a fifty-year-old guy working at a big newspaper have to tell me I’m a piece of crap?—Bob Saget via Shut Up Internet, which provides literally zero support on when, where or in what context Saget said this. Thanks for nothing, guys.

[Update: It's from this article in Esquire. Rahul figured it out, because "He genius."]

Some Kind Of Monster

I know maybe this isn't James Hetfield, but isn't it? In spirit?

I Won't Buy This Vodka, But I Love Its Pitch

Dan Aykroyd intentionally conveying total bullshit with (false) conviction is always hilarious.


[Uh, maybe he does believe what he's talking about.]