Easy Joke Department 2

Joe Paterno Dead: Former PSU Star Lydell Mitchell Says, 'We Won't Let Joe's Legacy Die'

"The next time we hear about someone who works for us sexually abusing children, in what is virtually the church of our religion, we won't do the right thing about that either!"

In my case, BOY is that a loaded question...

Move On sent around an email today with the subject line:

Do you trust women?

I don't know why, but this photo really works for me.

I mean it shouldn't, individual-elements-wise-speaking...

Goldie, Shields and slides

Okay, it's time to double down on the geekdom.

You know how things go around sometimes with comic book fans picking who they'd want to see play this character or another in a movie, if it were up to them? (The kind of thing where they would say for instance, "Ryan Reynolds! He would make a good Hal Jordan!" Except that no one ever said that. No one.)

But anyway, I happened to come across a page which took that idea a little further:

Not who would the poster like to see playing these characters now, but who would they have liked to have seen? If a film had been made when the characters were at their hottest?

In this case, those characters are the Teen Titans, which makes the time at which they were hottest the '80s (for the most part. One or two peaked in the '60s). So you know I'm all over this. Here's a few characters they missed along with my period choices for them.

Brooke Shields and Kim Basinger as Hawk & Dove (Holly & Dawn Granger version).







Christopher Atkins as Jericho.

(It would've been the perfect role. He wouldn't have had to talk.)



Kristy McNichol as Terra.



Mario Lopez and Kate Hudson...



(This is the one and only time I'm likely to run a picture like this, so drink in, ladies)



... as Aqualad and Aquagirl



Timothy Hutton...



...as Zachary Zatanna.



Elizabeth McGovern...



as M'gann M'orzz [Miss Martian]

and Dinah Manoff as Supergirl.

Shia LaBeouf



as the Jason Todd Robin. (Nothing personal, Shia)

Adam Baldwin



...as the Dick Grayson Batman, and Chris Makepeace

As Damian Wayne.

P092911PS-0344

P092911PS-0344, a photo by The White House on Flickr.

Hmmm, again.

My observations about actors whose TV shows go bad after they leave them, even though I wouldn't have expected it at the time, are being sent around again. This time it's the one about Elisha Cuthbert.

He...didn't...WHAT?

Former Penn State coach Joe Paterno says he “didn’t know which way to go” after an assistant coach came to him in 2002 saying he had seen retired defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky sexually abusing a boy

Y'know...I understand that a lot of football players get brain damage. But I didn't realize it was true of coaches too. "Didn't know which way to go," for the love of god. Creatures living on the bottom of the sea would've known which way to go. Of course, they probably didn't need Sandusky for their all-important team...

God, I loathe this culture.

Super Bowl Viewers Will See Graphic Anti-Abortion Ads With Pictures Of Bloody Fetuses

The ads are being paid for by fringe anti-abortion candidate Randall Terry

This is obvious, yes, but it needs to be said: Would somebody like to tell me what the controversy over Janet Jackson's (barely) exposed breast was all about?

Do you realize that this year, the three biggest football stories are:

Jerry Sandusky rapes children (and BTW, just as an aside: Did you know Sandusky had published an autobiography called...“Touched"? I know. Just when you think it can't get any creepier.)

Gory anti-choice ads to be shown on the super bowl.

And Tim Tebow apparently can't play very well, but it's okay 'cause he's a good Christian... who may have won a game with an illegal touchdown.

This is all reminding me that Friday Night Lights, much as I loved it...was fiction.

Jennifer Love Hewitt IS Rachel Maddow!

Much ado about gushing

So, one of those little boxes on the Yahoo! main page declares

"Sesame Street" controversy!

And what does it turn out to be? A rehashing of the "boobies make some people uncomfortable when they're used to feed children instead of getting people to watch television shows" thing. After running down a list of the pathetic and immature reactions some have had in recent years--

Stores have thrown women out for discreetly nursing their infants, angry moms protested at places like Target, and any magazine that shows a nursing mother on their cover still sparks outrage, even if the woman is showing less of her breast than a bikini-clad model on the front of a typical fitness magazine.

--we get to what purports to be the main point of the entry, which is that

...some parents are pushing to bring breastfeeding back to public television. Specifically, on "Sesame Street."

Now, if you, like me, are a '70s child, you may well be asking yourself: Didn't they already show that? And the answer is yes, yes they did. Well into the '80s, Sesame Street felt free to show women discreetly breastfeeding and talking about it

They stopped in the '90s. The entry doesn't give a reason, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the abuse of "political correctness" was involved. (I should emphasize, however, that is sheer speculation.)

Anyway, almost 3,000 people have signed an online petition to convince them to start again. I agree with this. In fact...there, I just signed it. But here's the thing. From the way the entry leads off, you'd think there were at least as many thousands of people organized to oppose it.

And there's not. At least, not according to the entry itself, which quotes three internet commenters as its sole examples of this "controversy." Three commenters.

Not figures who have some influence or power in this country, not even (cough cough) very small-fish bloggers like yours truly. Just three commenters; all anonymous, so you know their words should carry weight.

So I'm left with the question: What was all the to-do about?

And in the "No! You're kidding me! Honestly? I had no idea" department...

Kristy McNichol has come out as a lesbian.

And in other news relevant to the same period, did you know you get to see Yori from Tron's breasts in Caddyshack?

Denny Goes Airsurfing!

I've been looking for this online for years. It's an an unjustly obscure animated short I saw at a festival back in the early '90s, IIRC.

A message to the good people at Disney

Don't make me wait 30 years to see another Tron sequel.

Come to think of it, Elisha Cuthbert should also go on that list of actors whose leaving shows seemed like a mistake at the time, but proved otherwise

Hmmm...

Someone emailed my "Rob Lowe in West Wing, etc" post to somebody else. Until and unless I hear otherwise, I'm just going to assume it was sent to Julie Benz.

Oh no, wait...that's what he did

Newt Gets Choked Up Recalling Sick Mother

And then, he mentioned how appalling it would've been if his father had presented her with a divorce settlement while she was in the hospital struggling with her sickness.

Why do I want recognition of the fact that I thought Emmy Rossum was sweet and talented BEFORE she started really working the sexy?

Now that's what I call REALLY a wrong turn

Rare Asian bird takes "wrong turn," lands in Tennessee

And the winner of the 2011 "Rob Lowe in West Wing" memorial award is...

...Julie Benz!



This award is given to actors who leave series which seem perfectly fine to me at the time, and I think they must miss such a good gig. But within a season or two they (the actors) seem to me to have gotten out while the getting is good.

Granted, the situations are different--Lowe walked away of his own volition (as I understand it) while Benz's Dexter character was killed off by the showrunners. Still, this is my way of saying...this past season of Dexter was really, really, really, really, stupid.

It wasn't stupid because they'd killed her character off. I actually liked last season, the first in which she didn't appear (save for a cameo flashback in the first episode), as much as any in the series. I thought they dealt with Dexter's..."unique" grieving process very well.

But this season...well, did I mention it was stupid?

Now here's a headline/lead sentence combo someone may have wanted to rethink...

Bags that age with you

Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway, star of Get Smart...