Categories
Grave

Pyramid Scheme

Credit Guy Womack (no relation) for even further lowering the bar on the bullshit we can expect from defense attorneys. As lawyer for Charles Graner, the alleged ringleader of the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal, Womack yesterday offered a defense that managed to be at once offensive, incredible and troglodytic. From Reuters:

Graner’s attorney said piling naked prisoners into pyramids and leading them by a leash were acceptable methods of prisoner control. He compared this to pyramids made by cheerleaders at sports events and parents putting tethers on toddlers.
“Don’t cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year. Is that torture?” Guy Womack, Graner’s attorney, said in opening arguments to the 10-member U.S. military jury at the reservist’s court-martial.


Outrage was registered in all the expected outposts, but what of the slander to cheerleaders? Surely the Pyramid Defense doesn’t do the spirit industry any favors. I contacted Sheila Noone, editor of American Cheerleader magazine, for her thoughts.

Categories
Shallow

Dax Power

daxter.jpgIn honor of today’s DVD/video release of the Dax Shepard vehicle Without a Paddle, low culture is proud to present the following unpublished excerpt from an interview with Ashton Kutcher, Dax’s Punk’d co-star. (The interviewer shall remain nameless.)

X: Alright my friend has a question for you. He wants to know if we were supposed to accept Dax Shephard as an actor in Without a Paddle or if we were being Punk’d? (chuckles)
Kutcher: I haven’t seen the movie. It may have been. You better tell your friend to stop talking shit about my friend unless he’s an actor and he can outperform that.
X: (chuckling) Do you ummm… are you doing like… your roles like a business person and like a producer?


And now Ashton will finally have his chance to catch the film, described by the Boston Globe as “harmlessly cretinous.”

Categories
Shallow

I Almost Drowned, But They Saved Me (and Then I Lost My Pants)

001flood.jpg
America’s Funniest Rescue Video
You gotta watch this dramatic real-time video (QT) of a guy being saved from the Los Angeles river from CNN.com. (Or, choose your preferred version here.)
Now, try watching while listening to the music from The Benny Hill Show.
And before you get mad at me, the guy was okay.
Update: Turns out video is for CNN Premium subscribers only. Damn, but it was so funny.

Categories
Shallow

You’ve Come A Long Way, Big Willie

hitchgrab.jpg
King of Queens: Will Smith and Kevin James in Hitch.
“Talking about Six Degrees [of Separation] with Premiere magazine a decade ago, Smith raised eyebrows in the p.c.-sensitive media by confessing that before he accepted the role, his friend Denzel Washington had warned him, ‘Just don’t be kissing no man.'”
It’s a queer eye for the straight thesp, by David Rooney, Variety, March 14, 2004 (subscription required).

Categories
Shallow

Adventures in the Skin Trade, Vol. 3

johnplus.jpg
moremoore.jpg
(Answer Key: John Goodman + Ricky Gervais = Michael Moore at Sunday’s People’s Choice Awards)
Previously: Vol. 2, Vol. 1

Categories
Shallow

Least Believable Pull Quote Ever

spearsseventeen1.jpgFrom the (barely visible) cover of February, 2005’s Seventeen magazine:

Jamie Lynn Spears – Britney’s Sister Confesses… “I Don’t Want to Get Too Famous”

Really? Then why exactly are you on the goddamned cover of Seventeen?

Categories
Shallow

Tomorrow’s Corrections Today, Vol. 6

“‘Strange Love’ is a documentary about Brigitte Nielsen, the Danish giantess from ‘Rocky IV’ turned dissolute nudist, and Flavor Flav, the wily Ritalin-deprived clock-wearing Public Enemy hype man from the South Bronx.
[…]
“But Flav, who steals the show here, also lets his guard down sometimes, admitting to crippling anxiety. And when he is not able to make Brigitte laugh with his antics, and the cultural gulf between them seems unbridgeable, he can also look like a small, lost old man who has come far from the South Bronx but does not quite know how or why.”
Flouting Convention, Embracing Eccentricity, The New York Times, Jan. 8, 2005.
“[Meth] Aiyyo Flav
[Flav] Whassup Meth?
[Meth] What you know about niggaz from Long Island right?
[Flav] Huh?
[Meth] True Long Island right?
[Flav] All my life!
[Meth] All your life right?
[Flav] All my life!
[Meth] Westbury
[Flav] Word up, Freeport, Long Island, Roosevelt, Long Island”
– “Soul Power (Black Jungle),” Wu-Tang Clan, feat. Flavor Flav
Related:
Artist Name: Flavor Flav
Born: 1959
In: Roosevelt, Long Island, NY
AOL Music: Flavor Flav
Date of birth (location)
16 March 1959
Roosevelt, Long Island, New York, USA
IMDB

Categories
Grave

Paging Don DeLillo

“Hundreds of people were kept from their homes Friday in Graniteville, S.C., because of chlorine gas that was released after a train crash early Thursday. Bulldozers began moving the derailed cars.”
Cloud Rising From Train Wreck, Then Death and a Ghost Town, The New York Times, Jan. 8, 2005.
“Finally, after ‘a night of dream-lit snows,’ an ‘airborne toxic event’ originates in a rail accident at a nearby train yard. The dark billowing cloud is full of Nyodene D…”
Summary of Don DeLillo’s White Noise.
Related: Don DeLillo and the Towers

Categories
Shallow

This Year At the Movies: Have A Ball!

001woodsman.jpg001carter.jpg
The Woodsman, in theaters now… Coach Carter, opening Jan. 14, 2005

Categories
Grave

Positive numbers, fuzzy math, and well-spun figures

bush_smiling_green.jpgThere’s an undeniable buzz in the air as January 30th, the date of the upcoming Iraqi elections, rapidly approaches. It’s much akin to that feeling of excitement one gets around the holidays as you watch presents slowly accumulate underneath the family Christmas tree, and they just keep accumulating, and you’re all, “Wow, how many of those presents are for me, and what did I get?
And since you’re such a simpleminded bastard, you hold a press conference, and you talk about how excited you are about your presents. You prattle on and on about how you “think elections will be such a incredibly hopeful experience for the Iraqi people.” And you add that

14 of Iraq’s 18 provinces “appear to be relatively calm.” The four remaining provinces “are places where the terrorists are trying to stop people from voting,” [you] said. “So I know it’s hard. But it’s hard for a reason. And the reason it’s hard is because there are a handful of folks who fear freedom.”

And then this Grinch-like Brent Scowcroft asshole, who served under your dad as his national security adviser, and who just now apparently decided to fucking betray you, starts trying to take a bunch of the presents away and opens them up and shows you that there’s coal inside the sloppily-packaged boxes. And then you go, “Wow, ‘coal’ is a bad metaphor for ‘dissent and civil war’, and the gift boxes are an even worse metaphor for ‘free and stable elections!'”
So, anyway, Scowcroft goes on:

“The Iraqi elections, rather than turning out to be a promising turning point, have the great potential for deepening the conflict,” Scowcroft said. He said he expects increased divisions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims after the Jan. 30 elections, when experts believe the government will be dominated by the majority Shiites.
Scowcroft predicted “an incipient civil war” would grip Iraq and said the best hope for pulling the country from chaos would be to turn the U.S. operation over to NATO or the United Nations — which, he said, would not be so hostilely viewed by Iraqis.

But you? You’re sticking to your guns; you’re a stubborn, close-minded simpleton, after all. You’re staying with those numbers you cited above, how 14 of the 18 extant provinces are “safe” and “calm.” And, yeah, there are those four troubled regions, but you know what? Four out of eighteen, thats less than a quarter of the Iraqi geographic spectrum.
But your math, as usual, fucking sucks, and is distorted to no end, and doesn’t accurately take into account the depth of the problem. Because what you’ve left out of your simpleminded assessment of reality is the key fact that, get this, those four troubled provinces together contain more than half the population of Iraq.
When even Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the commander of your ground forces in Iraq acknowledges this issue, it might help to pay attention. Particularly when he adds,

“I just can’t guarantee that everyone will be able to go to a poll in total safety,” he said. “I cannot put a bubble around every person walking from their home to the polling site.”

Because, while we’re dealing with tired clichés and bad metaphors, that “bubble” General Metz is talking about is so obviously wrapped around you, chump.