I ask for your forgiveness in advance

Just reading an article about the killings in Norway today. And I want to be clear that I'm as horrified by the thought of them as I hope every reasonable person would be. So I don't mean to make light, rather to take some solace in dark humor, when I say that this sentence from the story jumped out at me.

See if you can tell why.

"I saw many dead people," said Elise, whose father, Vidar Myhre, didn't want her to disclose her last name.

Sigh. Laugh, clown, laugh...

A choice of replies

Paris Hilton storms off TV interview after being called a has-been

1. Don't you have to have once been something in order to be a has-been?

Or...

2. To be fair, Paris still can wear clothes, help cause the failure of movies (some of which should've done better) and be at least two different kinds of whore. That's not a has-been at all, that's all she's ever been.

Thank you.

They couldn't have just turned on a TV, I suppose. (Edited w/addition)

I'm not saying journalism all over the world has other problems than the Murdochs...but I did just notice something. If you read news items of the father and son testimony today, you'll see that in some of them, Murdoch, Sr, tells the committee, "This is the most humble day of my life."

But in others, it was "...the most humble day of my career." Well really, how hard is that? We're talking about testimony which is being televised (live) on a multiplicity of stations around the world. And they can't get right words he spoke less than two hours before?

ETA: On the other hand, Murdoch later claimed that he wasn't sure whether or not he'd said the arrested ex-employee Rebekah Brooks was his "priority." (He's been so quoted by low-profile outlets like the BBC. )

Why isn't he sure, he says? Because there were "about 20 microphones stuck in my mouth" at the time. As if the number of devices that convert sound into electronic signal in front of one's mouth at any given time have any effect on what comes out of that mouth, or memory of same.

Even granting that might be true of you or I, or any so-called "regular people," it doesn't fly when we're talking about someone who has been an influential media mogul for more than 30 years.

You're telling me he doesn't know exactly what he's saying to that self-same media at any given time, no matter how many microphones are in front of him? Well. This is another one of those problems.

Either he knows perfectly well and is lying about it, which doesn't say much for his ethics, or he truly doesn't remember something he said less than two weeks ago, which doesn't say much for his faculties.

See, this is how you know you've crossed some sort of a line.

If You Offer To Masturbate For Her, Sophie Monk WILL Get In Touch With You.

Appeals to the public? I wouldn't be so sure of that...

There's an old saying. I've seen it attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, and I've seen it attributed to a "French radical." It may even be apocryphal. But it goes like this:

"There they go. I must run, and catch up with them--for I am their leader!"

For some reason, that old saying popped into my head just now when I saw this headline on the Yahoo! main page:

Obama appeals to public to help influence debt-ceiling deal

Oh. Really. Now Obama appeals to the public. The public that has been screaming into the wilderness (for months, at least) that they don't want anything to happen to Social Security, and they do want the wealthy people of this country to pay their share.

(Seriously, the numbers are pretty overwhelming for both).

Now Obama appeals to the public, after wasting so much time trying to make deals with people who are actively working for his defeat, and clearly don't care if everybody from the middle class on down goes with him.

Great.

How many times will the republicans have to keep pissing in his mouth before he'll stop calling it lemonade?

Gracious. Don't tell me I offend.

Got a nice note from a fella screennamed "joe_h," who informs me that

You have suckass taste in women.

This is in reaction to an old post here in which I responded to Esquire's naming Kate Beckinsale "The sexiest woman alive."

My correspondent further goes on to say that:

None of the women you named should even be mentioned in the same breath with Kate Beckinsale.

For the record, the other women I named in that old post: Anna Faris, Lauren Graham; Rosamund Pike, Megan Mullally, Bebe Neuwirth, Megan Aniston and Jennifer Fox (or sumthin), Amanda Seyfried and Amy Sedaris.

Now, this was almost two years ago. It is a fact of life that sexy does not always age well.

I'm not sure I'd name them all again now, except maybe Aniston, and I'd probably add Rosario Dawson.

But to say that none of them should be mentioned in the same breath? Is he serious? I'll say he's serious:

The fact that Kate doesn't ring your bell means you are either blind or a fag.

Oh, like there's no chance I could be both?

Sorry. I freely admit Beckinsale does have a certain something (although that something isn't picking good movie roles), but I still don't think she's all that.

...you had to be slapped down for your awful and wrong post.

Consider me slapped!

Oh, no no no no no no no no no...

Mars Needs Moms didn't fall flat soon enough to stop this future eyesore from being made.

Spielberg doesn't understand animation much better than his friend Zemeckis does--he made a movie out of The Flintstones, for crying out loud. To say nothing of An American Tail (and believe me, I'd rather say nothing of An American Tail).

But then motion capture, as we've discussed but as I am going to keep repeating until I've wrung the nausea that it causes from my body, is not animation. Any more than moving corpses around on sticks is acting.

To coin a phrase: This is obviously some new usage of the word "responsibility" I wasn't previously aware of

Orrin Hatch: The 'Poor' Should Do More To Shrink Debt, Not The Rich

"I hear how they're so caring for the poor and so forth," Hatch said in remarks on the Senate floor Wednesday, in reference to Democrats. "The poor need jobs! And they also need to share some of the responsibility."

Responsibility, Senator? A variation on the word Responsible. The word Responsible:

1.
answerable or accountable, as for something within one's power, control, or management (often followed by to or for ): He is responsible to the president for his decisions.

or

3.
chargeable with being the author, cause, or occasion of something (usually followed by for ): Termites were responsible for the damage.

Who's responsible for the high deficit, Senator? Who added five trillion to our national debt?

Don't talk to me about responsibility, Senator. In fact don't talk about it at all, to anyone. It doesn't become you to use words you so clearly know nothing about.

I'd like to start a rumor--tee hee--that Demi Moore's daughter's real father is Tom Bailey of the Thompson Twins

Contempt Prior to Investigation

I haven't seen any of the films on Yahoo!'s list of "The 10 Biggest Movie Flops of 2011 (So Far)," but that's not going to keep me from Schadenfreude about some of them...and/or use them as an excuse to run some photos of aesthetic young women...

THE BEAVER

Yahoo! sez:

Many saw it as a referendum on Mel Gibson, who stars in the $20 million film.

That may well be. But personally, I think they might've had a chance of selling a few more tickets if the director had taken a possessory credit.

MARS NEEDS MOMS

It's possible you may never know the joy that it gave me when this latest motion-capture eyesore by that dullard Robert Zemeckis fell flat.

ARTHUR

Teach them to try to remake one of my two favorite romantic comedies...

PROM

Actually this one I don't care one way or the other about, except that I'm sorry Aimee Teegarden of Friday Night Lights hasn't had a smooth transition into films.

JUDY MOODY AND THE NOT BUMMER SUMMER

A film where Heather Graham stays completely dressed. Who would've thought that would fail?

GREEN LANTERN

All I know is that from the first time I saw Ryan Reynolds in a trailer, I said, "That's not Hal Jordan."

PRIEST

I freely admit this is pure sexual jealousy, but I think it's just beautiful whenever Jennifer Connelly's husband goes splat.

SUCKER PUNCH

Nothing for me to say about this one except that the characters had lovely bodies (at
least, based on the posters, which as we all know are never deceptive).

But it does give me a chance to plug one of my favorite Podcasts: How Did This Get Made?

I'm feeling a little pressed for time, so I'm just going to copy and paste the description from their web page:

Have you ever seen a movie so bad that it's amazing? Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael and Jason Mantzoukas want to hear about it! We'll watch it with our funniest friends, and report back to you with the results.

And finally--

HOODWINKED TOO! GOOD VS EVIL

I knew this didn't have a chance when I heard they'd made the inexplicable decision to replace Anne Hathaway as a voice performer.

(Rio made $140.5M--You hear what I'm saying to you?)

Did you idiots learn nothing from when O'Reilly sued Franken?

Remember that? When Bill O'Reilly tried to sue Al Franken because Franken's book annoyed him, and it only had the effect of publicizing the book to the top of the bestseller lists? Yeah, I remember that too.

Unfortunately--at least for them--some anti-Obama "Birthers" seem to have missed that memo altogether. Specifically, one Joseph Farah and Jerome Corsi.

Farah is the CEO of WorldNetDaily.com, a shameful website that complains whenever someone suggests homosexuals are actual human beings (at other times, too) and promotes the nonsensical "war against Christmas" idea.

Corsi at least can say he's no anti-Obama come lately, as even before Obama was elected President, Corsi was comparing the then-Senator to Hitler. He was also one of those vulgar enough to say that when Obama flew to the side of his dying grandmother--who you know he loved very much if you read his books--he was really going to get his birth certificate.

Speaking of, Corsi wrote, and Farah published, the book Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to Be President, and now:

...have filed suit against Hearst [corporation], Esquire magazine and writer Mark Warren over a satirical article that they say defamed them and damaged their business interests.

Warren published the article on May 18, 2011, just after Obama released his long-form birth certificate, answering the doubts of Corsi and other so-called birthers...“BREAKING! Jerome Corsi’s Birther Book Pulled From Shelves!”

Fellas, fellas, fellas: You've failed to learn from what G.B. Trudeau wrote in his book Flashbacks: 25 Years of Doonesbury:

Satire picks a one-sided fight, and the more its intended target reacts, the more its practitioner gains the advantage.

And so it was, later, as the Miller told his tale, that my face at first just ghostly turned a whiter shade of pale

Oh, my god. So help me, I'm actually starting to feel sorry for Dennis Miller. Like a lot of people, I used to think he was a pretty great comic; I liked him a lot.

I used to quote his lines very often, some I still do, like the one comparing therapists to hairstylists: "When I leave, my head looks great, an hour later I can't get it to look like that again." Even saw him live in San Francisco once--with a bonus walk-on performance by Robin Williams, yet.

But now? It's not just that he's no longer funny. It's not that his political vantage point has changed. It's that I fear for his sanity. And not for the first time. I noticed back in 2004, writing about his low-rated MSNBC show:

Miller treated his invited guest the way a sulky adolescent treats a chore he doesn’t want to do, like homework.

Then there's this post I wrote two or three years ago, saying of an appearance with Bill O'Reilly,

Watch this and tell me if at some moment you don't get the feeling you're watching a man who is literally out of his head.

Whether or not that's from drink and/or drugs or just his mind snapping from the sheer weight of his stupidity is not for me to say.

And most recently, like 15 minutes ago, I was trying to be brave and watch him on the Ferguson show. Literally the first words out of his mouth are an Anthony Weiner joke. Always on the cutting edge.

But then a little bit later he and Craig get to talking about some tour he's doing with the self-same O'Reilly. Craig throws a line about how they should do a set "like Martin & Lewis," with O'Reilly trying to sing straight and Miller cutting up the act with interruptions.

Ten seconds later (I swear to you), Miller says, "Oh, like Dino and Jerry." In other words, for ten full seconds, he'd had no idea what Ferguson was talking about. He totally spaced.

Now, granted that Dean and Jerry's peak was around the early '50s (give-or-take), when Miller was born. It'd be one thing if, like, some CW drama star named Brandon (they're all named Brandon) was not hip to the reference.

But for a 58-year-old man, a comedian, someone who was alive when the team was still working together as a duo to go up on that...well for me at least, that moves past sad through scary all the way up to spooky.

Then after Craig talked about how he prefers to avoid politics on his show for the most part (which is true), Miller's reaction was to take a couple of swipes at Nancy Pelosi. And just when I think that I couldn't dislike him any more, he takes a shot at Jonathan Winters. In fact, you know what I was saying about feeling sorry for him? Forget that.

I have to admit, I'm not terribly surprised...

...that Cars 2 has ended up being the first Pixar film to receive a "Rotten" rating from the Rotten Tomatoes site. Making a sequel to that first film was always going to be a dicey affair. It was by far their previously weakest, especially in terms of having a solid plot; it was pulled up mostly by some fine voice work (including by, I hate to say it, Larry the Cable Guy).

But, they had to stumble and fall eventually. I suppose I'm glad it was an attempt on a franchise that I don't care about. Rather than, say, a Ratatouille Deux.

Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice (UPDATED)

UPDATE:

Hmmmmm...a possible clue. Per her Facebook page, the great parodist--and, we hope, future Dancing With the Stars contestant--Julie Brown (of "The Homecoming Queen's Got A Gun" fame) is in Hawaii.

Original post:

Todays "Who's searching for me now?" question:

Someone from a Hawaiian IP found this blog yesterday by Yahoo! searching "Ben A. Varkentine." That's the version of my name I use on Facebook, and I do have a friend on there who is currently "second honeymooning" in Hawaii. But she says it wasn't her, 'cos...she's second honeymooning, for crying out loud.

So I am left but to wonder.

It was probably President Obama. Or maybe Hewitt's on vacation again, and remembered the nice things I've said about her body.

A prediction: It is only a matter of time before Katy Perry starts making out with Marilyn Manson.

Then he can ruin her too.

this is where the classic phrase "running around like a rapist with your head cut off" comes from*

Woman walks through market holding severed head of man who tried to rape her

*Joke courtesy of Ed Crasnick. Used by kind permission.

I wonder what it's like to know that you pissed off the king of Hollywood.

Chilly, I would bet.

STEVEN SPIELBERG ORDERED MEGAN FOX TO BE FIRED AFTER 'HITLER' COMMENT

Ok so we reported a couple of days ago that Megan Fox apparently 'left' Transformers because director Michael Bay was over sexualising her and making her feel uncomfortable in her new role as America's sexiest woman.

...it was no surprise to learn that there may be more to this story, as apparently Michel Bay was told to fire Megan by executive producer [Spielberg] after some 'Hitler' comments that Megan was quoted as saying about Bay.

So what exactly did she say? Well in 2009 Fox told Wonderland magazine;

"He's like Napoleon and he wants to create this insane, infamous mad-man reputation," she said. "He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is. So he's a nightmare to work for but when you get him away from set, and he's not in director mode, I kind of really enjoy his personality because he's so awkward, so hopelessly awkward."

To which Bay was reported as saying; "You know the Hitler thing, Steven said, ‘Fire her right now.'"

Fuck you, Green Lantern.

Ok, so, like, on 4chan somebody posted images from Saw III and made like it was some sort of "Take revenge on the Muslims" thing. I *think* they were trying to be funny. But in an attempt to one-up them and show what the images really were, somebody else on the thread linked to one of my posts, which is how I found out about this.

That's right. My Saw obsession is now being used to help spread truth and light throughout the world.

Ladies, I still say: If we can see your ribs, you're too skinny.

Thought upon seeing the new "Miss USA."

If you Google "dictionopolis in digitopolis nudity"...

......the first four results are all from this blog.

Fair enough, I suppose, but I do try to mix it up a bit.





Perhaps more oddly (or not), two of the posts are about Kate Winslet.