Month: March 2006

Well, it must’ve just slipped his mind while they bantered about margaritas.

They Fuck You Up, Your Mum and Dad: The casts of The Celebration and Arrested Development.
Daily Variety is reporting that Mitch Hurwitz, creator of FOX’s beloved—but chronically ratings bereft—sitcom Arrested Development, will not oversee the Bluth family’s move to Showtime’s gated premium cable community.
Fans of the series will no doubt be saddened by this news, but Bluth lovers should celebrate. Specifically, they should have a Celebration—Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme # 1: The Celebration.

Arrested Development	The Celebration
Stately, isolated location: Model Home	Stately, isolated location: Hotel
Imposing yet flawed patriarch: George Bluth (Jeffrey Tambor)	Imposing yet flawed patriarch: Helge Klingenfeldt-Hansen (Henning Moritzen)
Tightly-wound, well-preserved mother: Lucille Bluth (Jessica Walter)	Tightly-wound, well-preserved mother: Mother (Birthe Neumann)
Male/female fraternal twins: Michael (Jason Bateman) and his sister Lindsay (Portia de Rossi)	Male/female fraternal twins: Christian (Ulrich Thomsen) and his late sister Linda
Blustery, dim-witted brother: GOB (Will Arnett)	Blustery, dim-witted brother: Michael (Thomas Bo Larsen)
Ditzy younger sibling with an “inappropriate” lover: Buster (Tony Hale) and Lucille Austero (Liza Minelli)	Ditzy younger sibling with an “inappropriate” lover: Helene (Paprika Steen) and Gbatokai (Gbatokai Dakinah)
Deep Dark Secret: Broke	Deep Dark Secret: Too dark to reveal
Funny ha-ha	Funny awkward

Un-Ironic Sheik: Larry the Cable Guy and Joe Pantoliano (who really should know better).
Indian Food: What, no beef? What’cha’ll think? Cows is sacred cows? And dang, this stuff is hot!
Japanese Food: Raw fish? You gots to be kiddin’ me, hoss! Maybe if you battered and deep fry that there sashimi I’d eat it. The only fisherman I trust is the Gorton’s Fisherman! And that wasabi? Dang, that stuff is hot!
Ethiopian Food: Anybody ever teach ya’ll about forks and knives? Maybe if ya’ll learned to eat respectabably you might’n’t be so dang hungry all the time!
Chinese Food: Spare ribs’r good, boy! But I ain’t gonna touch that cum of som yung guy! Dang! I’m hungry again fifteen minutes later, hoss!
Thai Food: If I wanted me some peanuts, I woulda gone to the ballpark, hoss! And dang, this stuff is hot!
Italian Food: Y’all got some catsup for my noodles? And dang, that’s a spicy-a meat-a-ball!
Mexican Food: Man, this gives me the toots, boy! And why’s that tortilla so flat? So ya’ll can slip it under the border when you come here to steal our jobs? And dang, that salsa’s hot!
Afghan Food: No way, hoss! Ain’t gonna touch it! These colors—and my bowels—don’t run!
British Food: This stuff’s awful! Dang! How come no one ever mentions how awful this stuff is, hoss?
Pakistani Food: There ain’t no difference from that In’jun food, right? And, dang, this stuff is hot!
Korean Food: These kimchis ain’t no pickles I’ve ever seen! And ya’ll left ’em in a jar where?
Soul Food: The historical legacy of slavery weighs heavily upon us all. Respect for our fellow man requires that citizens with conscience offer a hand-up—not a hand-out—to level the playing field and eradicate the still painful sting of institutional racism. And, dang, ya’ll like some fatty foods, boy! I mean… sir.

Not All Dogs Go to Heaven: Snarly & Me, hitting bookshelves in about 8 years.
Earlier: The George W. Bush Book Club (All Hack Edition).

Benny and Billy McGuire

Record: Heaviest Twins, weighing 1,500 lbs combined
Whereabouts: Dead. Obviously.

Don Cook

Record: Wearing a 21,000 bee beard
Whereabouts: Retired after severe allergy attack caused anaphylactic shock. (Though not from a bee sting—from a peanut.)

  Karna Ram Bheal

Record: Longest Moustache, 8’ 6”
Whereabouts: Got out of the longest moustache business because it was getting way too commercial. “Back in the day, we just had 7’ moustaches for the sheer pleasure of it, man. And for her sheer pleasure.”

Sorin Monteanu

Record: Juggling 7 clubs at once
Whereabouts: Had a long hard look at himself and decided juggling was really uncool.

Shridar Chilal

Record: Longest Nails, length totally 108.5” long
Whereabouts: Met a nice girl at a fair in 1985 and decided it was time to cut his nails.

  Theraphosa blondi

Record: Largest Known Spider
Whereabouts: Crushed by Largest Known Copy of Newsweek

   Ned Weeks

Record: Largest Peanut (3.5”)
Whereabouts: Acquitted of attempted manslaughter for feeding Don “Bee Guy” Cook a really big peanut.

 Dixie Cup

Record: Largest Paper Cup, 6’ tall, holds 569 gallons
Whereabouts: Widely available at all 7-11 outlets and Loews-AMC movie theaters

 Linda Kurth

Record: Eating 23 2-oz. Hotdogs in 3 minutes 10 seconds
Whereabouts: Unknown. If you know Linda—or if you are Linda—please contact the authors, care of this website. Pleeease.

Wow, look at that! Look, look, right there, up above! Why, it’s me, Jean-Paul Tremblay, standing with genuine, honest-to-god famous person David Cross, and photographed for all the world to see. That’s some fucking posterity, right? The sort of posterity that can only come through posting this photo on Friendster, Flickr, and my personal space on MySpace. We awesome types put that shit up in all those media, because someone who consorts with celebrities is clearly stellar enough to show their lesser friends just what it is that makes this particular fellow here (me!) so goddamned great. In this case, it’s all about proximity…to the star! (Let’s not mention proximity to that obvious hanger-on next to him: That loser wishes he were as close to The Crossroad [as friends call him] as I am.) This here’s a degree of familiarity that shows one isn’t just a conventional starfucker, but a straight-shooting celeb-consorter. A friend. A brother-in-famous-arms. And it’s important to not distract your acquaintances or peers or friends with cluttersome non-celebrities. That’s where a handy knowledge of Adobe Photoshop and the specifics of image-doctoring come in. (I use Adobe Creative Suite 2 because it’s piracy-proof. Take that, you license-stealing BitTorrent users!) (Continued after the jump.)

	OK, good thing we got that jump out of the way, and you made it this far. And now for the lesson. First, get to know the cropping tool. Most image-editing applications have this sort of apparatus, and if you want to get ahead in the realm of showing off your star-partying chops, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of removing non-celebrities from your photos. In this case, I removed the annoying black fellow who kept popping into conversations around the room saying, “I’m Rick Jameson, bitch!” (I assumed it was a pretentious Frederick Jameson reference; social climbers can be so pretentious.) I don’t know his name, but get a good look at him above, because that’s the last you’ll see of that guy in the course of this particular lesson plan.
	Next, make sure you’re well-versed in the various brushes available to you. You’ll need them to remove additional hangers-on, such as the curly-haired idiot in the beret who somehow managed to squeeze the back of his head into my moment of glory with The Crossroad. It’s like he heard the photographer asking, “Hey, David, smile! Let’s get this on film!” and knew that this was his moment to finagle his ugly neck and mini-mullet into the shot. Well, look over here on the left. By matching the brush’s paint color with that of the dark, shady background behind David, and delicately skirting the top of Cross’ shoulder, I’ve certainly showed the mysterious El Beret Assholia a thing or two about the perils of working your way into the limelight. And this particular fucker’s been removed — for posterity.
	So, here we are. Me and The Crossroad. As you can see, I also made usage of the lasso tool and various distortion filters to better convey my newfound cheery demeanor. It’s like it’s just me and David, and he’s just gotten his drink from the server in the jean jacket next to him, and he’s turning back to face me, but I’ve just said something really fucking funny, and he’s laughing at it, he’s clutching his drink, he’s eagerly waiting for me to deliver another great one-liner… We’re buddies, Dave and I. No, you know what? We’re more than that. We’re friendsters. Which is where you can find us trading jokes and LOLing all day long, losers. Because that’s one thing I’m not: a loser.

As a virtuecrat-turned-Bobo-turned-security dad-turned-values voter, I was excited to read about Rod Dreher’s minimalist-titled new book, Crunchy-Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party)… When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight And He’ll Win the Whole Thing ‘Fore He Enters the Ring There’s No Body To Batter When Your Mind is Your Might So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand And Remember That Depth is the Greatest of Heights And If You Know Where You Stand, Then You Know Where to Land And If You Fall It Won’t Matter, Cuz You’ll Know That You’re Right… For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf in this week’s New York Times Book Review.
Kirkpatrick helpfully explains the newest creatures to join the great chain of being along with those already well documented Food Court Druids, Cherehonkees, and Lieberals (not to mention those famous Patio– and Organization men) as a follows:

Crunchy cons disapprove of abortion rights, same-sex marriage, illegal immigrants, public schools, secular liberals and mothers who work outside the home. But they don’t like Wal-Mart, McMansions, suburbs, pollution, agribusiness or processed foods, either.

Still confused? Here’s a breakdown that will help you to figure out which you are: “crunchy” or “con.” Or both!

Crunchy	Con
Trout Fishing in America	Quail hunting at the Armstrong Ranch
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Adams	Midge “Rummy’s a Babe Magnet” Decter
Woodstock Nostalgia: “If you remember it, you weren’t there, man.”	Kent State Nostalgia: “If you remember it, we weren’t shooting straight, hippie.”
“The Diggers”	“The Plumbers”
“If It’s Yellow, Let It Mellow; If It’s Brown, Flush It Down”	“These Colors Don’t Run, So Let’s Roll!”
Knowing the perfect place to get a deal on Tom’s of Maine soap for your wife	Knowing the perfect place to hide your Tom of Finland stuff from your wife

Click to expand.

“Let’s make it something that we never would have dreamed about.” – Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn borough president.
“Food would be a very important component there… Coffee would be critical. From there, you might go to something jeans-oriented, or footwear.” – Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates, a retail consulting and investment banking firm. (Both quoted in Brooklyn House of Detention Seen as a Jail With Retail, by Paul von Zielbauer, The New York Times, March 10, 2006)
“There’s a tremendous amount of potential to sell what I call the nifty-gifties… You have a captive audience, even with the visitors… Think of it as more of an upscale airport gift shop.” – Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst for the NPD Group [emphasis added] (Quoted in Prisoners Up Above, ‘Nifty-Gifties’ Down Below, by Paul von Zielbauer, The New York Times, March 12, 2006)
“It’s been the devout wish of the neighborhood to get this thing closed and gone, because it does not do a thing for the neighborhood.”- Heloise Gruneberg, president of Brooklyn Vision. (Quoted in Jailhouse Blues? On the Contrary, by Jake Mooney, The New York Times, March 12, 2006)

With all due respect, as a former resident of Boerum Hill, I think I have a solution. There’s an easy way to reopen the jail, enhance the neighborhood, and bring in new revenue.
Check out the excellent drawing I did with some friends over beers Saturday night at Boat.