39 posts tagged “pop culture”

Natasha sent me an email earlier saying she wanted to post a video on the site and could I think of anything "ironically awesome"? This came to mind immediately:

Seriously y'all, this video was considered totally dope when I was 8 years old.

p.s. I always thought it was weird that a band named "Asia"'s biggest hit was a song called "Africa".

...nah, probably not.

Rich from FourFour has done the world the incomparable service of watching the entire terrible Anna Nicole Smith basic-cable biopic and distilling it into one 7-minute capsule of awesomeness. Watch out for Karl Fucking Malden playing her ancient billionare husband.

If I ever watch this whole movie, it will only be to take part in a drinking game in which you do a shot every time someone says "titties", "Marilyn Monroe", or "TrimSpa".

This army of Guy Fawkes clones was breastfed.

Via Gawker comes this clip of Scientology mom Leah Remini and her bratty hellspawn Sophia on Rachael Ray's show. Apparently pweshush lil' pain in the ass Sophia is still bottle-feeding, in spite of being three-and-a-half years old. (It's obviously an affectation, as she's seen eating solid food at one point.) Suri Cruise is also still on the bottle, even though she's more than two. Speculations are rampant that they're being fed "Hubbard's Formula".

Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard, advised against breastfeeding, saying that most modern women didn't have a good enough diet to form nutritious breastmilk. Instead he advised his adherents to feed their infants a noxious sludge--which he claimed to have gotten the recipe for in Ancient Rome--of barley water, milk, and honey. Honey is, as any first-year medical student or someone who's watched a couple of seasons of ER can tell you, not recommended for children under two, as it's an excellent way to kill your baby with infant botulism. Some modern practitioners have replaced the honey with corn syrup, leading to rotted baby teeth and scurvy. Scurvy. A disease that illiterate, cannibal sailors don't even get anymore.

What makes this all the more amusing is that a recent study found that children who were breastfed have, on average, IQs 5% higher than children who weren't. (Thanks, Mom!) So maybe Hubbard was crazy like a fox?

1. Instruct your followers to raise their children to be too dimwitted to realize they belong to a cult that exists soley to siphon their money away.
2. Make sure they grow up dumb enough to think statements like "Mental illnesses are caused by the 'essences' of followers of a galactic dictator who were brought to Earth billions of years ago and blown up with hydrogen bombs!" make perfect sense.
3. Sit back and watch generations of progressively obtuse morons bulk up church membership.
4. PROFIT$$$.

P.S. If you'd like to contribute to the legal defense fund that will no doubt be needed when I'm sued by the Church of Scientology, leave your contact info in the comments.

be the coolest dressed kid in 2002

Hooray, the biggest douchebag on the internets is now selling T-shirts at the lamest store in the mall! It looks like Perez Hilton came up with the designs by Googling "Scene" and cramming all the resultant visuals onto one shirt.

Scene, really? Are the kids still into that? That’s so Bush’s first term.

Well, I guess I shouldn’t hold him to the same exacting standards as Gareth Pugh; Perez thinks Photoshopping a coke moustache onto a photo of Britney Spears is still as screamingly hilarious today as it was the first 27,000 times he did it. Clearly, originality is not his strong suit.

I just hope he doesn't fashion future designs by using the wikiHow for How To Be A Scene Kid as a guide, as wikiVandals have obviously been having fun with the page:

...really?

she who smelt it, dealt it, ladies

In the wake of the Miley Cyrus bared-shoulder scandal, a member of ONTD took it upon themselves to compile 14 years' worth of Annie Leibowitz's Vanity Fair covers for the annual "Holywood Issue". That's a whole lot of powdered skin, awkward poses, and facial expressions that bespeak either ennui or a powerful need to fart. You be the judge.

The covers are fold-outs, meaning the left third of each image is actually what a potential buyer sees on the cover. Jezebel sees a racial bias in the covers, because a majority of the actors of color are pushed off to the right two-thirds. I'm sure that's not an accident, any more than the fact that when men and women are both in the shot, the women have on average about 96% less clothing than the men.

Of course, the funniest thing about going back over a decade and a half of so-called "It" actors and actresses is the schadenfreude that comes with realizing how many of them totally fizzled out. Wait, so people really thought Monica Potter was going to be the Next Big Thing? Wow, people were stupid in the '90s.

i lost a bet with the make-up person

So I guess I should say something about this. All the other bloggers are doing it.

Up to now I have sort of aggressively ignored the whole Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana phenom. Partly because it's a tween thing, so why should I give a fuck; but also because since I had to suffer through her father's craptastic one-hit wonder soiling the airwaves during my high school years, I sort of hate the whole family. In fact, I wish the Cyrus kids would get sterilized so I don't have to listen to her daughter clutter up pop culture with more banal crap when I'm in my 50s.

I guess I can see both sides. It is tawdry to photograph a 15-year-old with tussled hair, clad only in a rumpled sheet, implying that she just lost her virginity. But it's also hypocritial to get our panties in a bunch over it, because of course we hypersexualize girls even younger than 15 all the damn time. Americans need to pick one neurosis and go with it: Are we going to be puritanically protective of young girls? If so, then don't shoot photos like this. If we're going to fetishize them as seductive Lolitas, then fucking go with it and stop beating yourself up over it. Easy!

What mostly concerns me in this photo is how gray-faced and corpsey she looks. Jesus, does she always look like that?

I do think it's pure Grade A bullshit for Disney to make Miley Cyrus "apologize" for the "shocking" photos. Rest assured, no one involved in this shoot, from Disney and Vanity Fair, to Annie Leibowitz to Miley Cyrus' handlers and agents and parents, and probably Miley herself (she's 15, not 5, and she grew up in the industry), was unaware of the furor this was going to cause, and it was all carefully orchestrated. Along with the "racy" MySpace photos of last week, this is the first step in transitoning her from "fresh-faced Mousketeer" to "ultra slutty teen sensation". It's the next logical step, if she wants to keep the momentum going.

Sadly, we all know how this is going to end: In 10 years we'll be seeing Miley Cyrus flash her hooha at the paps, shave her head, and lose custody of her children, and wondering why it all seems so familiar.

Zooey Deschanel has released an album! She and M. Ward are a band called "She & Him", and if the song they performed on last night's Conan is representative of the album, I think I should buy it.

Oh, Tina Fey. No.

My friend, SNL writer Seth Meyers, coined the term clapter, which is when you do a political joke and people go, "Woo-hoo." It means they sort of approve but didn't really like it that much. You hear a lot of that on [whispers] The Daily Show.

That's because TDS isn't comedy, like 30 Rock. It's satire, which is defined as "the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc." Satire aims not just to amuse, but to anger. The audience's reaction is almost never going to unfettered glee, because it's always going to be tempered with rage at how fucked up our country is.

That being said, I laugh more during one half-hour episode of TDS than I do for a month's worth of 90-minute SNL episodes.

Also, Seth Meyers is as funny as a punch in the teeth.

X-files 2

More!

I keep hearing snarky comments to the effect of "Why now?". Why not? There are plenty of people interested in another X-Files movie, believe me. It ain't going to lose money.

Interestingly, the news is that the movie is is not going to involve the alien conspiracy mytharc, and possibly won't have aliens at all, but will instead be more like one of the "Monster of the Week" episodes. This is good news to me, I always enjoyed the MofW eps the most. The mytharc was kind of boring and totally baffling; even after watching the old episodes over and over again in sydication I still don't really understand it.

In semi-related fangirl news, I found a recipe for Lost fish biscuits!

YAAAAAY!

The creators of MST3K have a new endeavour, Cinematic Titanic. They're going to be releasing DVDs and they've already started shipping the first one, The Oozing Skull. Hilariously, there may be delays of future efforts, because the copyright holders of the intended films claim to be worried about piracy. Uh, guys? The whole point is that these movies are so monstrously terrible that no one would want to watch them unless someone was mocking it the entire time. These movies would (rightly) be lost forever in the cinematic dungheap if Joel and Co. hadn't dragged them out for our amusement, you should be grateful.