Some of you may recall the catchy viral strains of Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” which was popular on the Internet last year.

This year, journalist Jon Ronson visits “Friday” producer Patrice Wilson to conduct a viral experiment. Ronson’s theory is that journalists wield too much power in the subject/chronicler relationship. To subvert that dynamic, he submits entirely to the whims of Wilson.

The results, which are very funny, can be seen below.

[Read more →]

Tags: Michael Cade's audio files by Michael Cade
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“There’s a wild and crazy man inside of there just waiting to come out.” – Mrs. Romney on her husband

I used to watch Mitt Romney and think, “He’ll make a fantastic villain on Dexter.” (Maybe not one to hold our interest for an entire season – he’s no John Lithgow – but definitely a two or three episode arc.) Either that or he could be in American Psycho 3 – yes, there was already a sequel and it starred Mila Kunis – as the new Patrick Bateman: perfectly attired, great hair, then he opens his mouth and it gets weird. Indeed, Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign often seems to be less about taking the White House than dropping as many subtle clues as possible he’s actually a serial killer. (I’m almost positive Christian Bale quips, “Corporations are people, my friend” before attacking the hooker with a chainsaw.)

Now I take that back: Mitt Romney is no Patrick Bateman. Mitt Romney is Prince Joffrey. Both born rich and destined for power. Neither with a knack for handling the common man. And each of them with a line that cannot be crossed.

For Game of Thrones‘ Joffrey: You don’t hit the king.

For America’s Mitt: You don’t use blonde highlights.

It’s time to ask ourselves: will Mitt Romney make more sense if we stop thinking of him as a human being… and start thinking of him as character from George R.R. Martin’s Songs of Fire and Ice? [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment by Sean Cunningham
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The curtain rises on a dingy office. It could be the 1980’s: a man sits silently at an ancient computer screen and pushes buttons but nothing happens.  In frustration, he rifles through a box next to the computer, and finds there a copy of  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. He begins reading aloud –  and gradually, without undue artifice, other co-workers come and go and assume various roles. Our original Office Man becomes Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway, while his colleagues provide other dialogue. Thus adapted to the stage, the short novel unfolds over six hours like a brilliant origami of the layered contradictions in American life. [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment, books & writing, just fantastic by Jeff Scheuer
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I have been declared Emperor of the World. Let us not waste time explaining why or how; let’s all simply accept the fact that we are better off, as a result; hence, my next decree:

Emperor’s Decree No. 34-A: While directors of automobile commercials will continue to be permitted to cast the ubiquitous “slightly-graying-youngish-but-not-old man” in order to send a message of a certain level of maturity which doesn’t preclude the ability to woo and subsequently satisfy multiple women several times each in one evening, said directors may no longer instruct these actors to drive the car whilst wearing a self-satisfied and slanted “knowing smile.” The Emperor has found that every car commercial made in the past twenty years has contained an exact duplicate of this smile and he has had quite enough. (Worse, such a smile implies that the character in the car knows everything about everything and, as anyone who is likely to avoid the Imperial Dungeon of Eternal Woe knows well, only the Emperor himself has this quality.) Further, that smile is downright nauseating. Directors shall find another way to induce the impotent sheep in the purchasing world into buying a car–some method other inspiring them to say: “I will be like that handsome and no-doubt sexually successful guy who knows everything, if I drive that car.”

The Punishment: Violating directors (and, what the heck, the actors, too) will be forced to have dinner with Rush Limbaugh. Twice.

The Emperor will grace the world with a new decree each Tuesday morning

Tags: television, The Emperor decrees by Chris Matarazzo
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This Friday, the dreams of every single diehard comic book fan who has ever lived will finally come to fruition, when a little movie called THE AVENGERS opens in the United States. Maybe you’ve heard of this film. It’s only going to be the BIGGEST and the GREATEST film ever made! And it’s not just the so-called “fanboys” who are excited. Critics have given the film an overwhelmingly positive response (the Avengers Tomatometer is currently at 94%).

Most critics, that is. A select few have decided to play the troll and unfairly criticize this masterpiece of cinema. How do I know their criticism is unfair? Because ANY criticism of this film is unfair. And even if there are only a handful of these unfair reviews, they could still derail this film, that only has about a squillion dollars worth of marketing and licensing behind it, and only about 100% total population awareness. Thankfully, RottenTomatoBot isn’t afraid to stand up and protect this film, with his withering and biting comments on these negative reviews. Below we see the RottenTomatoBot standing up for each member of the Avengers, with RTB’s dialogue taken directly (verbatim, misspellings included!) from Rotten Tomatoes Avengers critics message boards and from these comments sections over at the New York Post.

(Click the images to embiggen.)

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Tags: books & writing, movies by Ricky Sprague
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If you know Bob Marley only through the greatest hits album Legend and your college roommate’s poster of him smoking a spliff the size of a toddler, see the documentary Marley now. It makes a convincing case for him being one of the great musical talents of the 20th century – he wrote a whole lot of songs that sound nothing like “Three Little Birds” – while revealing a life that makes Roman Polanski’s seem downright bourgeois by comparison. Among the things you many not have known:

-His mother was a Jamaican teenager and his father a British “captain” (apparently he was not actually a captain, but enjoyed being referred to that way) a minimum of three decades her senior who quickly vanished from both their lives and then died. [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment by Sean Cunningham
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This post started out as a piece about the band Riot, whom I vaguely recall reading about in such magazines as Hit Parader and Hit Parader when I was a metal-obsessed youth.

Riot’s album covers were notable for featuring some kind of humanoid, polar-mammal guy.  At first I thought the guy/creature was a snow owl. But then I looked closer, and the features revealed themselves as mammalian, not avian.

The Internet informs me that the Riot guy is called “Johnny.”

[Read more →]

Tags: Michael Cade's audio files by Michael Cade
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1. There are many Kardashians.

They’re like the Jacksons, if the most talented Jackson was La Toya.

2. Time is cruel.

The lesson’s offered by The Girls Next Door, not so much by Hugh Hefner (who died years ago and is now moved from room to room of the Playboy Mansion Weekend at Bernie’s style) as a surprise cameo from ex-Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson, who showed up for Hugh’s birthday…naked. I thought, “This is a woman in her mid-40s with multiple children and a well-publicized case of hepatitis”; it couldn’t have been creepier if Hefner elected to hang dong on her birthday. [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment by Sean Cunningham
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I. Look on the Watchmen, Ye Mighty

Back in February 2012, DC Comics officially announced that they would begin publishing seven miniseries based on characters and situations from what many people consider to be the greatest superhero graphic novel of all time, Watchmen. The series, which will begin shipping in June, are known collectively as “Before Watchmen,” which right there gives you a hint about the main problem with these books, and the mainstream comic book industry in general.

The writer of Watchmen, Alan Moore, is the most important and influential author of graphic fiction since Stan Lee. Watchmen is the most influential graphic novel of all time. Since its publication, it has been the benchmark by which all other works are measured. Most mainstream comics creators have been re-writing it for 25 years. It’s a masterpiece, at least in the Renaissance sense of that term. The three primary creators, Mr. Moore, illustrator Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins, all employed every tool at their disposal in its composition. It was a unique experiment in storytelling and printing techniques, an elegantly constructed and dense meditation on the idea of supeheroism, and a deconstruction of the serial comic book form itself. [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment, books & writing by Ricky Sprague
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I didn’t know much about Johnny Ramone before I read his autobiography, Commando. After a brief time as a thug, he became the leader of The Ramones. Johnny Ramone was serious and businesslike, maybe both to a fault. There are no throwing-televisions-out-of-hotel-windows-rock-star stories in this book. Johnny liked to get milk and cookies after performing a concert, and he meticulously tracked and saved money he made with The Ramones, planning from early on for his retirement. He brought his construction worker blue collar work ethic to rock music. If none of this sounds like the behavior of a punk rocker, maybe your definition needs rethinking. As Johnny Ramone wrote in Commando:

People have asked me, “What makes a punk?” About five years after we’d retired, I was driving in Los Angeles, and somebody called out to me, “Hey, you’re driving a Cadillac. How’s that? How are you a punk if you’re driving a Cadillac?” I said, “What the fuck are you talking about? I wrote the book on punk. I decide what’s punk. If I’m driving a Cadillac, it’s punk.”

Tags: books & writing, music by Scott Stein
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