Murmaider, Mermaid Murder

Nic Cage's son Weston Coppola-Cage is quite obviously the living embodiment of Nathan Explosion. (Albeit with a touch more makeup)


Just sayin'.

Video proof below! Sorry, its from TMZ (barf noises) but it only furthers the point when he talks about "unleashing the dark, icy winters with the Norwegian black metal."


Best celebrity spawn ever.

Never Tear Us Apart

Chloe Lattanzi "Rock The Cradle"
Uploaded by TheDlisted

Poor Chole Lattanzi, AKA spawn of Sandy (AKA Olivia "Let's Get Physical" Newton-John).

Perhaps a young girl with body-dysmorphic disorder and severe (we're talking recent hospitalization) anorexia shouldn't be put on stage live to preform in front of millions of people (plus countless repeats!) and be judged.

Maybe?

Perhaps also certain plastic surgeons should discourage 22-year olds from unnecessary collagen and face-lifts.

You think?

She said she couldn't hear herself sing. It sounded like someone who knows what singing is, technically, trying to sing big words as if English was their second language. She was singing sounds really. Maybe it was a really a tone poem set to an INXS song and she's just a brilliant performance artist.

After much debate, I settled on her looking like a mix of Miss Newton-John and a Cat-Person. That would make her 25% feline as the cat-person is assumed to be 50/50.

This story of rape and/or pedos is brought to you by . . .

Law and Order: SVU (reruns on USA) just had a sponsored by ad for KFC run before the commercial-break proper. The family in the ad had SVU on the television in their kitchen while they ate their fatty-chicken dinner. The kids appeared to be about 8 and 10.

This seems inappropriate.

Medical Examiner: The prostitute was held down and asphyxiated while our perp violently raped her in the subway.
Stabler: We'll get the bastard.

Kid, 8: (takes a bite of chicken): Mom what's a prostitute?
Mom: (finishes her delicious country biscuit) Well, son, a prostitute is a person who sells their body to people for money . . .
---
Doctor: This boy's been raped.
Benson: We'll get the bastard.

Kid, 10: Why is that kid in the hospital?
Dad: Well son, a sick man who likes little boys in a bad way brought him to this country for terrible reasons . . .

AND SCENE!

I'm not even comfortable eating dinner with my parents while SVU is on the TV. I love me some SVU though, CHUNG CHUNG!

Does the hand say CLAV or CLAW?

And if its "Claw" is it a reference to Jim Carrey in Liar Liar? I hope it is!



Holla.

Some thoughts:

• I love Jack White's new hair. (NOTE: I am weirdly obsessed with Jack White's hair) Although it kinda looks like hipster-girl hair, it is a vast improvement over his V from V for Vendetta look.
  
  Or Zorro. It's the same look really, one's just more Mexican-y Robin Hoodish. Also, to be fair a lot of hipster-girl hair is just boys' haircuts (often young boys' haircuts) on lady faces. Example:
  
  



• The video reminds me a bit of Bishop Allen's Click Click Click, but more RAWKIN' less WALKIN'


• The part where Jack and Brenden yell the lyrics at the same time makes me giddy.


• I am VERY UPSET I won't be able to see them live this year as my schedule prevents me from going to see them on their closest appearance to Missoula (Seattle, duh).


• Congrats to them for bucking music industry standards and getting this released on their terms.


• Autumn de Wilde makes me jealous.


• Somebody watches Lost.
  
  Hey Guys . . . Where are we?
  Also, what's the deal with the polar bear/smoke monster/four-toed statue?
  
  

(cue black screen - Lost title and music fades in gently)

Ungawa!

I saw this band last night.



They must preform like that all the time since they did it on a Tuesday night snowstorm crowd of about 40 at the Palace. It was great, and worth staying up until 2AM (I work at 8AM! Today is fun for my brain!). They are heavy on the crowd-participation which can go either way for a lot of bands - it went the good way for Chow Nasty. They made us dance, yell "Boom Cha Cha!" and we got to play instruments (plastic tambourines and maracas)!!! It reminded me of the No-Fi Soul Rebellion shows of yore a bit, except they only had a drum machine instead of a "Soul System" guitar/cd player. Good show chaps!

Sigh - I miss NoFi now.

Operator: Stop opened up. For a local band, I was pretty impressed to be sure. Along with about 6 other genres they covered "Hot For Teacher" which was pretty damn funny and the lead singer has some chops. He sang in (by my very flawed/distracted count) about 6 different styles from Mars Volta-style yowling to well, David Lee Roth.



HAWT.

My next Lost theory to be disproved.

Lost has been jaw-droppingly awesome this season. Last week Desmond pulled a Billy Pilgrim and became "unstuck in time." Yes, they actually used the phrase. There are 2 seasons and 8 episodes left in the series so (albeit very slooooooowlllly) we are getting some answers, or more correctly pieces of possible answers. Lost is a harsh mistress.

Those answer pieces seem to indicate some form of time travel. That would both be a secret Ben thinks is worth keeping at the cost of killing everybody who messes with him and that scary dudes think is worth constantly harassing the Oceanic 6 about. Time travel has many applications, not the least of which is accidentally seducing your mom and bringing hoverboards from the bratty girls of the future to the Teenwolves of today.

The Lost-verse expands beyond the TV Show - as I have written about before - and that includes a new Lost game called Lost: Via Domus. Ohhhh latin. It (almost) means "The Way Home." Thanks Wikipedia! Sad news though, the game's not that great. Apparently the in-game version of the show's characters are dead-eyed and strange, the gameplay is short, the load times are long and the puzzles come out of nowhere. Eh, I'd probably never play it anyway.

There is something worth mentioning though: the game's ending has clues! Sweet delicious clues to satiate your hunger for the knowledge of what the hell is going on on that damn island. The review I linked to above has the full plot detail at the bottom of his post, I am putting the part I find most interesting below.


SPOILER ALERT!
There, don't get mad at me.

In the game you play a photographer that has amnesia and makes a deal with Ben to get off the island on a boat (just like Michael! Ben makes deals with everyone, that cad!). Then you hoodwink Ben and side with Jack and then you get to the boat anyway. . .

Here's the kicker: When he gets on the boat, he follows a bearing of 325 degrees, as instructed by Ben. Halfway through his trip, he looks up and sees Flight 815 exploding above him. Then all fades to black, and he's back on the island during the crash sequence, only this time with a friend from his past appearing to lift him from the ground.

Ahhhh what? Is Amnesic Photographer "unstuck in time" like Desmond? Was he also exposed to radiation? Did Michael ever really get away - or is he reliving the whole thing in some sort of time warp?

A theory: in the movie Primer, the main characters create a time machine. The catch is that the machine can only go back to its "turn on" date and you have to spend as much time in the machine as you want to travel back. Perhaps the Island works the same way? It allows for time travel, but to how far back depends on how long you've been on the island/ within the island's "reach." Which is why Desmond traveled back to 1996 and Amnesiac Photographer only went back a few months. This may also explain Richard Alpert's non-aging, if he managed to physically travel through time instead of just mentally (like Desmond's consciousness jumping from his 1996 body to his 2004 body). I suspect we haven't seen the last of George Minkowski. Fisher Stevens (he was in HACKERS! HAX0RZ!) is kind of a bigger actor to kill off in one episode. My suspicion? He has done more with the island than just "checked it out" like he told Desmond.

We shall see.

Kids are dumb, No Country for Old Men was not

According to USA Today.

Apparently 17-year-olds don't understand references to books or historical events associated with important references (the examples they give are big brother, McCarthyism and the patience of Job). Given, I am six years older than the kids taking this survey, but I am 100% sure I could have - at age 17- explained the concept of Big Brother if asked (and I didn't even read 1984 until freshman year of college). At some point in my public education those ideas seeped in and stuck.

Some stats from the survey:

Among 1,200 students surveyed:

• 43% knew the Civil War was fought between 1850 and 1900.
• 52% could identify the theme of 1984.
• 51% knew that the controversy surrounding Sen. Joseph McCarthy focused on communism.

In all, students earned a C in history and an F in literature, though the survey suggests students do well on topics schools cover. For instance, 88% knew the bombing of Pearl Harbor led the USA into World War II, and 97% could identify Martin Luther King Jr. as author of the "I Have a Dream" speech.

Whew, well I'm glad they got a few things right. I haven't been out of high school that long, Pearl Harbor and MLK were drilled into our brains. Unless you were taking something that left out US History, they were repeated every year in every history class and MLK was usually represented in English class as well. I remember having to analyze "I Have a Dream" at least once if not more.

No Child Left Behind is to blame for a good chunk of this problem. Children are trained to parrot facts so they can pass tests so the school can stay out of hot water. When a teacher has to spend all their time trying to get students to pass tests, they suffer. They learn facts, yes, but they don't obtain knowledge. They stay at the surface and never explore the depths.

How this relates to No Country For Old Men: (spoiler alert!)

I loved the film. It blew me away. I thought it was incredible, up to and INCLUDING the ending. Several people disagree. I have heard several people grunt and moan over the end of this film, claiming it to be stupid and lame. Hell, when I saw it there were audible annoyed grunts when the movie ended and cut to black. Case in point: because of a technical glitch at ABC affiliate WKBW, the anchor's mics were on when the Coen Brothers won the Best Picture Oscar and they called the movie bullshit. Right.

No Country is a literary adaptation of a book by the same name by Cormac McCarthy (who was at the Oscars - awesome!), but not only is it an adaptation of the book, it is a faithful adaptation of the book. That is the important part. I am not going to lie and said I have read the book, although I kind of think I need to now. Themes in books - especially in good books - are often like undercurrents. They lie beneath the surface and you have to look for them. Adapting a novel to the big screen often makes the book's audience angry, they inevitably leave out or change things to fit 400 pages into 1 hour 35 minutes.

In my opinion, the main character in No Country is not Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). The main character is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). The movie is not THERE IS No Country for Old Men it is THIS IS No Country for Old Men. While the story shows the Llewelyn coming into possession of a case full of money and trying to evade Anton Chigurh, the story is ABOUT Sheriff Bell feeling and fearing his own mortality. This is made evident in the final scene.

The Coen's know what they are doing - do you really think the guys behind The Big Lebowski and Miller's Crossing would end that way just cause? Like they ran out of film stock or got fed up and just decided "Ehh eff it, print it, we're done. Let's go get burritos." No. Thankfully, the Coen's do not edit films like I edited news pieces at the end of the semester.
 
The final monologue by Tommy Lee Jones nails the point and firmly establishes that this movie was about him all along. He is an old man in a new world, a world where his morals and methods are irrelevant. He can't compete within this new amoral, violent world. He vowed to save Llwelyn and Carla Jean, his friends or at least acquaintances for sure in such a small town, but he couldn't help them. They died, he failed. In the second dream he speaks of riding horseback in the dark with his father. His father goes up ahead to make a fire and Bell knows his father will be waiting for him when he gets there. "There" is death, something of which Bell is afraid and has come very close to, in the police-taped hotel room he narrowly avoids death-incarnate (Chigurh) and gets to go on with his life. Fate is a huge theme in this movie, and when Bell finds Chigurh's coin on the floor he has been spared (like the gas clerk much earlier on). He was unknowingly betting everything, and he won. He beat death.

"And then I woke up."

He didn't meet up with his father, not yet.

It's poetry. It's excellent writing. Its meaning had to be sussed out and ruminated upon. It did not smack like a hammer between your eyes like so many of the other films you see today. This angers people who wander into the theater expecting to see an action film and getting something different, something all together more powerful and brilliant. You can't stay on the surface to appreciate the film, you have to explore its depths. We don't see the final second's of Llewlyn's life because he didn't see it coming either. We see Sheriff Bell come across the aftermath, death. It is his story.

Note: After writing this in looking for other analyzations of the film I found this one - which I thought was excellent and deserved to be shared. If you disagree feel free to let me know, I can't say I'll debate it with you, but I'd love any other interpretations.

Google Reader proves I'm all over the place.

Seriously.

This is the result of constantly becoming obsessed with new blogs, among what I regularly scan/check out:

• Jezebel - for the lady news!
  
• Best Week Ever - for quirky irreverent pop culture
• Consumerist - So I can be a smart shopper
• Slog/Line Out - Cause I love Seattle/Dan Savage/Liberalism
  
• Gawker - I'm mean sometimes
• Lifehacker - I like to be smart about computers
• Stereogum - I hate pitchfork
• A List Apart - Web designer
• Reddit main page / Digg entertainment/design - When Reddit isn't all Ron Paul all the time, it is full of interesting and oft overlooked news. Digg Design is full of great articles and freebies while the entertainment channel gives me up-to-the-minute updates on Shia LeBeouf (Newz U Can Uze).
  

YAY

I just read that The Blakes and Vampire Weekend are both coming through town in the next two months on Feb 13 and Mar 29 respectively.

When I read that I reacted in this order:

1. Cheer silently
2. Realize nobody is in this room with me to make me feel lame
3. Cheer for reals, with noise and everything
4. Set phone alarm reminders
5. Text 3 people
6. Change Facebook status to "is excited for The Blakes next week!"
7. Check Facebook updates
8. Blog about it! HOLLA!
9. Thank pollstar for being up to date.
10. Post Blog

Here's half the reason for my excitement:


Here's the other half (plus Letterman!):

Re: Hatin' on Romney

So it turns out that it's not just Huckabee that hates Romney - everybody hates Romney!

"It was very common for e-mails to be flying around between the Thompson, McCain and Giuliani campaigns," says the former Thompson staffer, "Saying, 'No matter what happens with us, we all need to make sure it's not him.'"

Additionally:

The day before the Republican primary, Huckabee mocked Romney for ordering lunch at a Kentucky Fried Chicken, then peeling off the fried coating and eating it with a knife and fork. Presented with a golf club, Huckabee said he wouldn't be very good at the game: "I'd be like Mitt Romney eating fried chicken."

LOL!

Yeehaw! 08 Roundup.

So I feel the need to share these stories, but rather than do a bunch of mini posts about how much I dislike Mittbot ver. 2.3, Hickabee, etc. I am going to do a roundup of the awkward clusterf*** this race has become!

Romney totally identifies with the black community, he understands their concepts of "bling bling" and letting dogs out of the places they should be and into places they shouldn't be - woof woof woof! Somebody did a BIOS upgrade on his system, but they accidentally set his internal clock to 1998.

EDIT: holy good god there's video! Just a bit out of touch there Guy Smiley.

Huckabee hates Darwin, duh, but Huckabee also hates Romney! He may be continuing down the campaign trail, in part, to spite Romney because as long as both of them are in the race they split the conservative vote and keep Romney in second place. This split may give McCain the edge and the nomination, according to this Politico article. If McCain and the Mayor of 9/11 don't cancel each other out with the moderate vote in Florida, McCain may be on track to take the cake. Oh and Fred Thompson likes butterflies, America, Sam Watterson and afternoon naps.

EDIT 2!: Fred's out. Now the only canidate still(?) in the race with a ridiculously hot wife is Kucinich.

This is a bit surreal

Whoppi + Kimya + Adam = kind of an odd fit, but great nonetheless. Kimya really loves Whoppi and was excited to meet her. The one song Moldy Peaches reunion was originally supposed to happen on Conan (which seems to make more sense than the harpie gabfest), but:

Well, we said yes initially because I didn't realize what the situation still was with the strike. Then John Darnielle emailed me and told me what the deal was with Conan being forced back on and when I realized that no agreement had been reached with the writers, I cancelled.

-Kimya via Gothamist, read the rest of the interview.

At any rate, this was adorable! I've had three people tell me that they really liked the music in Juno, specifically "Anyone Else But You." All three people were new to the Moldy Peaches, and probably would have never found out about them otherwise. Kudos to Ellen Page for getting the songs in the movie, and sorry to the poor hipsters who feel another shred of their indie cred slipping away into the mainstream! You'll have to find another ironic-cute song to add to your repertoire, or you'll have to spend a minute before or after each performance to specify that you knew the Peaches before George Michael Bluth and Kitty Pryde covered it.

Rich, Desperate and Lashing Out Like a Drunken Fratboy

"Do you want this primary season to be over? Or do you want this primary season to be hilarious?!"

It's video day. I do declare!

Garfield is a cat who says funny things!

Garfield hates Mondays!

Several of these showed up on YouTube yesterday. They are all comic gold.

- via Best Week Ever

I'm a Viral Marketing Whore.

There. I said it. Got a kickass movie or television you want me to be excited about? Throw some weird canon websites up there that tell a back story or give clues or expand the movie's narrative and I AM ALL OVER THAT SHIT.

No kidding.

Cloverfield comes out in just under two weeks and I could not be more excited, until after I see it and I count the days until The Dark Night in July. Both films have been doing the viral marketing tango on the internet the past few months and I've been following them both with gusto. THE JOKER SENT PEOPLE TO GET CAKES, REAL FRIGGIN CAKES!

In Cloverfield, the events in the movie presumably happen on January 18, 2008 (same day the film is released) so the events that lead to the monster attack on NYC would be happening right now. Over the weekend, news clips from all over the world (read: in different languages) started showing up to report on the destruction of the fictional Chuai station in the Atlantic Ocean. Here's the American entry:



Cloverfield News has them all if you'd like to see the above news in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Korean or Japanese. Multi-cultural!

Additionally, all the main characters in the movie have MySpace accounts and have been interacting with each other for a while now. Recently, "Rob" announced via his MySpace that he got a job with a Japanese company called Slusho . . . thus the going away party for him featured in the movie's trailer. Slusho also has a crazy online presence as well as it's parent company Tagruato. There is even a Tarugato-opposed group called TIDOwave involved in the story. Oh and then there's Jamie and Teddy, two more characters that have a website (password: jllovesth)on which Jamie can communicate with Teddy while he's gone. . . working at the Chuai station! There is actually a lot more to this online puzzle and if you're interested I would go to Cloverfield News and catch up.

I find this type of viral marketing fascinating. I have no idea how important the lot of this is to the film or if it will be even necessary to enjoy it, but it really shows us what we can do with story in the digital age. I am reminded of the 80s comic book series/graphic novel The Watchmen which was sooo much more than a comic book. Each chapter ended with an excerpt of a book, a magazine article, something that provided depth, back story, and motive to a character or situation that simply could not be expressed as well over a few pages of panels. I believe the internet allows us to expand on that type of storytelling. JJ Abrams seems to understand this very well, as he has been doing the same for Lost since the beginning (remember the weird ads for the Hanso foundation in 06?). Lost, by the way has some new websites to follow: Oceanic Airlines is back up and flying and Sam Thomas on Find 815 is looking for a lost girlfriend who was on the fateful flight.

So despite the title of this post, I am reluctant to simply call all this "viral marketing."The word "marketing" makes all of it seem really lame and I am smart enough to know I am being marketed to, but even without the online games I would still see Cloverfield and The Dark Night and I will certainly continue to watch Lost faithfully until the writer's strike takes its toll after eight episodes. I think this is more the artists in these mediums breaking the walls of the medium down and finding new and interesting ways to tell stories. You usually don't need to know all the back story to enjoy the final product, but it makes the world the writers have created become so much more dense and enjoyable. Just ask J.K. Rowling and her upcoming giant Harry Potter encyclopedia.

I'm not saying every movie needs these internet additions, surely we don't need to read the livejournal of Sandra Bullock's character before Keanu started sending her letters from the past (future? I never saw that one), but for a movie like Cloverfield or a series like Lost which breaks away from traditional narrative, it makes the overall experience that much more enjoyable.

How do I get in on this? I want in.

What I said about Conan last week?

Consider it officially taken back.



SOLID GOLD

Late Night Returns! It's Weird!

Conan said last night that people kept asking him "Whatchyou gonna do? Whatchyou gonna do?" (said in best Jersey guy voice you can muster in your head while reading hopefully).

Apparently the answer to that question is ring spinning, beard admiration, dancing, office tours and rock band in the style of Edith Bunker. . . oh and did I mention ring spinning? There was a lot of ring spinning. Clearly, late night is in no danger of running out of writer-less content any time soon! CLEARLY!

What I am more afraid for is next Monday's return of John Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Sure, the guys are funny, but their shows are basically 18 minutes of solid writing plus a 4 minute interview. The Daily Show and the Colbert Report are bit-driven with a singular interview whereas the rest of late night shows are nearly the opposite plus a monologue. Leno, Kimmel and Conan could, in theory, just cut the bits at the top by 20% and spend more time with guests, or have more guests per show. I don't really see the Comedy Central shows having that option. Since they belong to the WGA, Stewart and Colbert aren't really even allowed to write the whole show themselves. Leno wrote and his own monologue last night, and he's being called out for it today. So what will Monday's shows be like? I am not sure, but the prospect of Stewart just showing clips of those wacky presidential nominees and then mugging for the camera seems a possibility.

Conan's beard is pretty awesome though. He should shellac it and try to spin rings on it. There's at least 3 minutes of content right there.

Bustle in your Hedgerow!

Betcha thought you could never do the twist to Stairway to Heaven.

WELL YOU WERE WRONG!

(The Mp3 is available here)

Article VI doesn't mean I can't hate Huckabee

However, what Article VI does not do, and was never intended to do, is deny me the right to say, as loudly as I may choose, that I will on no account vote for a smirking hick like Mike Huckabee, who is an unusually stupid primate but who does not have the elementary intelligence to recognize the fact that this is what he is. My right to say and believe that is already guaranteed to me by the First Amendment. And the right of Huckabee to win the election and fill the White House with morons like himself is unaffected by my expression of an opinion.

-Christopher Hitchens, This Is Not a Test, Slate.com (emphasis mine)

It terrifies me how well Huckabee is polling. However, polls also say that most all the Democratic challengers would whomp him. When you add Chuck Norris as a running mate; however, a wrench is thrown into the system and the world spins off its orbit and into the sun.

PS: Polls mean nothing.

No You Cannot Has Teh Cute.

The Belz + David Cross FTW.

Set to the gloomy violin version of Chocolate Rain, animals refuse to cross the picket line and be cute for your amusement! Somebody writes that cuteness you know, and they deserve compensation goddammit.

This was written by the genius minds of the Colbert Show, which I sorely miss.