SAD

i've not been feeling terribly bloggy of late, dear reader. where to begin?

is it the shitey weather in new york? oh ann arbor, how you're laughing at my misfortunes. is it the occupational irony of wolfie? (also watch the video--as much a fan as i am of americone dream, jon stewart can hit it out of the park every once in a while).


then there is the massacre at both virginia tech and iraq. ughhhh....

i need a bahamavention.

in other news-related news, i sometimes like to peruse the atlanta journal-constitution's long-standing column, "the vent," which is exactly what it sounds like. the paper prints peoples' various gripes, which range from the obvious ("if you don't wear a seatbelt in your SUV or truck, you're too stupid to be driving") to the nonsensical ("i met her in metter, then i wined and dined her in winder") to the insane. in response to the recent british-iranian hostage crisis, one reader wrote: "If Gandhi had known what a pushover the Brits were, he could have been eating the whole time".

American History X, Fight Club, 25th Hour...

What does one do after having starred in these three towering achievements of recent American cinema? And before you answer, note that said one is Edward Norton, in c4ts' view the most interesting American actor of his generation--a man so persnickety he turned down Matt Damon's role in Saving Private Ryan, a man so protective of his career he fought Paramount tooth and nail when it forced him to make good on an obviously valid old contract? (The studio's efforts resulted in Norton reluctantly playing the mustachioed villain in The Italian Job, a middling, though not embarrassing, remake of a cockney Mike classic.)

Well, apparently what one does is to strip down to his tattered purple chinos (pictured) and jump head-first into the sea of artistic compromise: Norton is set to play the Incredible Hulk in a sequel to a movie I am pretty sure no one even saw. Here's to hoping this arrangement is part of some sort of Faustian bargain that will result in Motherless Brooklyn actually being made and released. Or maybe the two movies could be combined: Bruce Banner gets exposed to gamma rays and develops a weird form of melanoma and a bout of Tourette's? Hollywood, thoughts?

Train of Thought

You know there's something to that whole butterfly-tsunami thing. I got to thinking about it yesterday with Jon Corzine's Curse of the McGreevo car accident . If All-American superstar phenom Lindsay Harding (pictured)--the best player on the best team in the country--hadn't choked and missed both her free throws at the end of regulation in Duke's Sweet 16 match-up against Rutgers--a team they had beaten by 40 points earlier in the year--Rutgers would never have advanced to the final, Don Imus would still have said any number of asinine racist-sexist things, but not the thing that gotten him into trouble, and Jon Corzine wouldn't have been misusing New Jersey gubernatorial resources to go play Henry Kissinger at the Imus-Rutgers summit, and that Dodge would never have run him off the road. And there wouldn't be Captain Obvious headlines like this one. And Snoop wouldn't have made me dumber just by reading his take on the whole Imus fake news story. Basically, if Harding had hit those free throws, the world would be a better place. Kurt Vonnegut would probably still be alive, and that kid from that show who everyone loves to hate, well, he'd be dead. So, basically hers was about the most devastating sports-related choke in history. Except for this one.

Music Video of the Day: "Breakers" by Low

Friend--and non-reader of the blog--Natalie pointed me to this. If you like Kobayashi you will like this spirited, if failed attempt to match his skills.

The Day the Music Died, Leaving Eddie Vedder to Sing His Way into Total Obscurity

I don't know how I missed this, but as of April 5th it's been 13 years since Courtney killed Kurt, which means his death anniversary is out of its tweens, hates its parents, and is ready to channel its angst into flannel and grunge. It's amazing how fast they grow up. Anyway, if you cried along with Kurt Loder on April 5th, 1994, and then cried again when you read Nick Hornby's About a Boy (which, by the way, does not end with Hugh Grant singing in a talent show), this one's for you..

Nirvana - Jesus Don't Want Me for a Sunbeam.mp3

great moments in occupational irony

i had lunch yesterday with my friend's brother who is in the new york fire academy. his tales of hazing, tears and 4am 5-mile runs made us look at him in awe and, in turn, shamed us. we paperpushers are such whiny wusses.

he was told that he should not bring any valuables with him when he's permanently placed in a fire station (fire company? who knows) because, get this, the other firefighters will set your shit on fire as a part of your initiation. huh? then he told us that sometimes the other firefighters will attempt to test your mettle by setting YOU on fire.

SAT Time: Bush is to Iraq (pictured) as Electricity is to...?

Blogger E, in an earlier comments section you had the gall to suggest that Ford CEO Alan Mullaly maybe doesn't deserve 28 mil. for presiding over a hemorrhaging company, but see below. How you like him now?

From the Detroit News:

Plug it in, fire it up, Mr. President

Credit Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally with saving the leader of the free world from self-immolation.

Mulally told journalists at the New York auto show that he intervened to prevent President Bush from plugging an electrical cord into the hydrogen tank of Ford's hydrogen-electric plug-in hybrid at the White House last week. Ford wanted to give the Commander-in-Chief an actual demonstration of the innovative vehicle, so the automaker arranged for an electrical outlet to be installed on the South Lawn and ran a charging cord to the hybrid. However, as Mulally followed Bush out to the car, he noticed someone had left the cord lying at the rear of the vehicle, near the fuel tank.

"I just thought, 'Oh my goodness!' So, I started walking faster, and the President walked faster and he got to the cord before I did. I violated all the protocols. I touched the President. I grabbed his arm and I moved him up to the front," Mulally said. "I wanted the president to make sure he plugged into the electricity, not into the hydrogen This is all off the record, right?"

So, what do you think: Cry for help? New, desperate, if-you-can't-beat-em-join-'em Qaeda policy? If so, Mr. President, know one thing: I've got my DVD of Heathers (pictured) and an unopened tub of Americone Dream at the ready. Let's talk, and more important, let's hug it out, bitch.

there ain't no doubt i love this land

i, too, have a food product to tout. i've been dying to try this and i was finally able to procure a pint. it sounds like a flavor they've already made (vanilla ice cream, waffle cone pieces covered in fudge, caramel swirls). no matter. it is delicious.

Sugarpockets introduced me to Sharffen Berger's 41% cacao chocolate. It's the greatest packaged food-related thing ever to happen to me. If all my teeth rot out and I gain 50 pounds and turn into some bizarro--and obviously more attractive--version of Jennifer Connelly's character in Requiem for a Dream, you'll know why.

Shit and Its Attendant Glories

Because I violated my own rule against posting about the prurient earlier, I shall now violate its accompanying rule--the one that proscribes me from posting about the scatological...

Woman saved by pile of poo

April 05, 2007 12:00am

Article from: Reuters

A CHINESE woman survived a plunge from a sixth-floor balcony thanks to a convenient pile of excrement which broke her fall, local media said.

The accident happened when the woman was hanging out laundry on Monday in Nanjing, capital of the eastern province of Jiangsu, the Kuaibao tabloid said on its Web site (www.kuaibao.net).

"Workers happened to be emptying the building's septic tank, which had not been tended for a long time and had regularly blocked sewage pipes," the newspaper said.

"She probably stretched out too far and fell ... right on to a 20cm-thick heap of excrement."

The woman suffered only slight injuries, the newspaper said.

In March, a six-year-old girl broke only her left leg when she fell six floors on to a pile of snow in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang.

fame...it's a bitch

i've done one of these celebrity look-alike things before, but i wasn't going to post a photo of myself on this blog. then i thought, hey, what if i tried one of a celebrity? would his own photo be a match? turns out the answer is no, but at least i get to use this giant alan thicke photo once more.

My cool celebrity look-alike collage from MyHeritage.com. Get one for yourself.

Cutters: A Love Story

In honor of 30 Rock's return tonight and NBC's renewal of its contract, here are the top five scar-faced celebrities in Hollywood. Criteria for admission include sex appeal, bad-assedness and acting chops--the last of which of course disqualifies Al Pacino, for whom the only emotion worth committing to screen is primal anger/epileptic rage. Along with Robin Williams, he's one of the worst actors in America. Yeah, I said. it. Jealous? Feel free to add your own nominees in the comments section, but note, any use of the phrase "Say hello to my little friend" will draw the ire of the blog administrator and might see you permanently banished from future comments pages.

5. Jeremy Irons in The Lion King
4. Harrison Ford
3. Diane Lane (pictured)
2. Tina Fey
1. Omar from The Wire

Detroit Grape City

Now, I'm just a long-term visitor up here in these parts but I've picked up enough to know that there's plenty of reason to feel pessimistic about the future of Detroit: nothing's stopping the auto-industry blood-letting, white people have fled en masse to Birmingham and the Grosse Points, and unemployment abounds as the city infrastucture crumbles. To that littany you can now add this (courtesy of Sugarpockets): thirty-four city schools are being shut down, and what really gets school-board vice-president Joyce Giles's goat is that upon hearing the news a disgruntled parent (pictured) threw a grape at her in protest. What's a histrionic middling bureaucrat to do? Well, press assault charges of course.

Meat Cake

Thanks to Justin B. for pointing us to this. I know Blogger E and Sugarpockets agree--he's the meat cake in our lives.

Hey, Look at Me. I Finally Came up With a Catch Phrase.

Billy Packer has been the lead college basketball analyst at CBS for as long as I can remember, which means his old-man surliness is as much a part of the Final Four as say Luther Vandross' One Shining Moment. And, oh, what memories Packer's given us. There was that one time, for instance, when he called Allen Iverson a "tough monkey." And that other time when two Duke co-eds asked to see his press pass at Cameron Indoor Stadium, and he said, "Since when do we let women control who gets into a men's basketball game. Why don't you find a women's game to let people in." And now the gem above. According to one random internet dictionary, there is a non-homophobic definition for "fag out," but the Internet says a lot of things. So, let me join the fray: Billy Packer's a homophobe, a misogynist, a racist, and a biased analyst. Put him out to pasture already, CBS, and give his job to Bill Raftery.