Amy's Robot

Our awesome justice system

Jury duty is an aspect of public life that many people think about only in terms of what strategy will get them out of it. You can try claiming you don't believe in the justice system, saying you're racist, saying your brother-in-law is a cop--everybody has theories about what to say during voir dire so that you don't get picked for a case.

This is totally the wrong approach. The chances are low that you'll get to put away Uma Thurman's stalker, but there are still lots of good things about serving on a jury. Once you get past the boring part of sitting around waiting to get selected, it's sort of cool:

• For today's TV-loving juror, court rooms have been turned into entertainment venues. Everything that happens in there really is just like what you see on "Law & Order" and "Judge Judy". You'll almost definitely get to hear "all rise" every time you enter or leave the room, lots of objections (often vehement), deal with crotchety old world-weary judges, and maybe even get a few tears from emotional witnesses.
• If you're dealing with a civil case, you get the opportunity to feel like you're leveling the playing field of our unfair world just a little bit by making corporate America/greedy doctors/unscrupulous landlords/corrupt nail salon owners/your oppressor of choice pay up, big time. This is incredibly gratifying.
• During deliberation, you get to re-enact your favorite scenes from 12 Angry Men and either coolly persuade dissenters to come over to your rational way of thinking, or play the insane crabby jackass who holds out and almost ruins the whole trial. Not that you would actually change the outcome of the verdict through manufactured drama, but for anyone who enjoys playing devil's advocate, it's kind of fun.
• Getting a whole jury to agree on a dollar amount for a civil case award is tricky, but everyone loves throwing around other people's money. Why stop at 50 grand? Let's give 100! No, 200! It's like you're on Oprah's show where you compete to give away a million dollars, but you don't ever get eliminated and, as far as I can tell, you can pick whatever huge number you want.
• And let's be honest here, you get a legitimate reason not to go to work for a few days. Some days the judge will probably release you hours earlier than you would ever be able to leave work, and you should feel no obligation to go into work or use this time productively at all. As long as you're not self-employed, it's not a bad deal.

So go ahead, send in that juror questionnaire! It's not as bad as you think.

Third World? Third Helpings!

That title was coined by a friend, T-Rock, when reports of growing obesity rates in developing countries emerged a few years ago.

But now it relates to Bush's recent explanation for why we are in the middle of a global food shortage--people in poor countries are eating too much.

This is incredible: in talking about the food crisis, Bush referenced India and its growing middle class. "When you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food, and so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up."

High demand for food is because of India? So if all those people in India would just stay poor and malnourished, there would be plenty of food to go around! Wow.

A representative from a poverty research institute in India hit back, and is quoted by the Times as saying:

Americans eats an average of 3,770 calories a day, which is more than anyone else in the world according to the UN, and 50% more than what the average Indian eats per day.

Maybe Bush is coming down on India for being such greedy snack-hogs because they've ignored his recent request to stop their plans to pipe gas into their country from Iran. Of course, they'll probably just use the pipeline to blast in more delicious Iranian cakes and halva and kebabs, those piggies!

You really oughta know

Alanis Morissette's new album is called "Flavors of Entanglement", by which I think she means "Jagged Little Pill, Pt. 2: I Can't F'ing Believe I'm Going Through This Breakup Bullshit All Over Again".

She tells People that the album is about the "unraveling" of a significant relationship, and "chronicles the rock bottom finally being hit."

There has been much speculation about who she was singing about in "You Oughta Know", her first single about how much it sucks to get dumped, with most theories pointing to Dave Coulier from "Full House" and, more recently, "Skating With Celebrities". It's a lot clearer this time around--she and Ryan Reynolds dated since 2002 and broke up last year. He was with Scarlett Johansson a few months later.

"Flavors of Entanglement" comes out June 10; Scarlett's vanity-album of Tom Waits covers comes out next week (and generally isn't getting great reviews.)

Maybe not that surprisingly, it looks like Alanis is appearing in better movies than Scarlett this year. Alanis has got Radio Free Albemuth, an adaption of a Philip K. Dick novel about an extra-terrestrial resistance movement against a despotic president, and The Other Side, a supernatural mystery with Giovanni Ribisi and Jason Lee.

Scarlett has He's Just Not That Into You, which looks sort of like Sex and the City but with worse clothes. Ryan Reynolds is starring in Adventureland, which is by the director of Superbad and feateres Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, so will probably be at least OK.

Who'dat?™

In today's Who'dat?™, look at the thinning celebrity photo below, try to guess who it is, then click on the picture to see if you are right.

Summer movie season

When it's 11:00 on a Sunday night and there's a crazy long line outside the men's room at the AMC, you know that summer movie season has started, even though it's barely May.

We bought $100 million of tickets to Iron Man last weekend, which is second only to Spider-Man for the non-sequel opening weekend record.

At the screening I went to, not a lot of viewers stuck around through the credits to watch the very very end of the movie. So in case you missed it, here it is, as recorded on a handheld/cellphone camera:

[UPDATE: these videos keep getting blocked by YouTube. I'll keep trying to find new clips to link to, but it's a losing game.]

New franchise! Marvel Studios just announced the sequel will come out in two years. Keep our pal RDJ off the smack, Jon Favreau.

Disney and underage girls

It's been interesting watching the Disney reaction to the flap over Vanity Fair's tamely sexualized photograph of Disney star Miley Cyrus. Even though Miley willingly removed her shirt while posing for magazine pictures, she says she's "embarrassed" to have those pictures out there in the world for everybody on the planet to see. Who knows, maybe she reconsidered and really is embarrassed. Or maybe the producers of her show are trying (in vain) to maintain her squeaky-clean image.

Whatever change of heart Miley may or may not have had, Disney's response to the photos is totally clear: they blame Vanity Fair for exploiting their young star. Spokesperson Patti McTeague said, "A situation was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines."

It's like Disney is just begging for someone to track down an instance of the company using sexualized images of young girls to promote their own products.

Slate contributor Daniel Brook is happy to oblige.

Brook dug out a photograph he took a few months ago in Beijing of a billboard ad for, of all things, a Disney bra-and-panties set intended for 12 year-olds. I have discreetly covered the potentially shocking areas of the ad with an emblem of unblemished virginal intactness (though the scaffolding in front of the billboard adds a disturbing, girl-in-cage kind of aspect) but you can click on the pic for the original version.

Embarrassing!

Asked about how this ad manipulates a pre-teen girl in order to sell Mickey-themed underwear, another Disney spokesperson has been trying to rationalize. Yes, they approved the image, which was created by a Chinese licensee of their brand. And in Disney's defense, the spokesperson says that in China these kinds of images are "not unusual at all" (like they are over here...?)

World discovers Arrested Development two years too late

Rumors about the future of Fox's canceled "Arrested Development" swirl around from time to time. Today's Times reports that since the launch of NBC and Fox's online TV service Hulu, the show has consistently been one of the top three most-watched shows up there. I guess all the people who couldn't be bothered to watch while it was on the air are just getting around to it now.

Creator Mitchell Hurwitz, who effectively ended renewal negotiations in 2006 when he decided he wasn't interested in going on, is surprised. "Isn’t that crazy?" he said in an interview last week. "This was a largely unwatched show when it was on network television," and said its too-little too-late popularity was "enormously rewarding in every way except for financially."

Money was probably one reason why he didn't want to keep the low-rated show on the air, and a few people streaming the show online for free probably isn't generating a lot of income for old Mitch. But the Times is obviously eager to fuel the recently resurrected ongoing low-level rumors about a movie in the works. From the article: "He also suggested that the show’s streaming success could enhance prospects for a film based on the series."

What that probably means is the interviewer said, "Is it true that "Arrested Development"'s success online would in theory make it easier to get a film made?", to which Mitch Hurwitz did not say no. Let's get "Untitled Bluth Project" up on IMDb!

Oo, how tantalizing: it already is. Someone 's trying to will a vague speculation into reality, but I want to believe.

Are you aware that Tina Fey's husband looks like this?

This photo is from last night's premiere of Baby Mama--Tina Fey and her husband Jeff Richmond.

They met while they were both working at Second City and have been married since 2001. I would bet cash money that he is a wonderful and funny guy. Incredibly, Fey says that before she met him she "could not get a date."

But I have to hand it to Tina Fey for staying with this guy instead of doing what other celebrities who suddenly find their public value rocketing to super-fame levels would do, such as divorcing him to trade up for someone more famous like Naveen Andrews or John Stamos (or even her agent.) She's a real movie star now; in terms of media measurement of her fame, she's progressed from being on the cover of Bust to being on the covers of magazines at the checkout at Rite Aid.

How many TV/movie stars under 40 at a Tina Fey-level of fame can you think of who are married to a someone who a) you've never heard of, and b) also isn't conventionally attractive (i.e. not a former model)? Anyone?

Seamy underbelly of Hell's Kitchen returns to obscurity

The two long-time Hell's Kitchen residents who wheeled their dead friend to a 9th Avenue Pay-O-Matic [above] in January and tried to cash his social security check were cleared of forgery and larceny charges yesterday. There was no proof that the dead guy, Virgilio Cintron, was actually dead at the time they brought him out of the apartment, so the case was thrown out.

And so, after a brief moment in the spotlight, this reminder of what the neighborhood (and a lot of the city) was like decades ago recedes to the background. The neighborhood is increasingly made up of $15/glass wine bars and posh baby-clothes stores, but those exist right next door to the check cashing places that serve the surprisingly resilient non-yuppie segment of the Hell's Kitchen population.

During their period of fame, the two defendants, James O’Hare and David Daloia, shared a lot about their lives with the press. Back at the apartment yesterday, O'Hare said that at the time of Cintron's death, his landlord was trying to evict him. "Maybe I feel like I should have done more," he said. "I could have done more to help him with the medication. I loved the guy. I miss him."

Daloia said, "If the medical examiner couldn’t tell his time of death, and they are the professionals, then how could we?," which doesn't make much sense, considering that they were actually there with the body, tried (unsuccessfully) to pull some pants up onto him, and carried him downstairs onto the street where a crowd immediately noticed that the man in the computer chair was dead.

Daloia and O'Hare have also expressed their surprise at all the media attention. From the Daily News: "Daloia said he was still amazed by all the attention generated by their arrests. 'I thought Britney Spears took her pants down again,' he said outside court."

From Newsday: "Daloia can't understand all the fuss. 'I robbed banks that got less coverage than this.'"

Pennsylvania gets ever bluer

Pennsylvania keeps getting named as a swing state or a battleground state in every recent presidential election, even though the Democratic candidate has won in each of the last four elections.

And while proud wearers of the t-shirt above in the central region of the state tend to vote Republican [county map of 2004 election], the election this November should be an even easier win for the Democrats. Over 200,000 new voters have been registered in recent drives, and 70% of them are Democrats.

It should be easy as long as the maniacal in-fighting of the last 6 weeks doesn't make all these new voters hate their party. So far, it looks like Pennsylvanians are responding to all the attention they've gotten: only 26% of Pennsylvania voters turned out in the 2004 primary, but they're expecting at least twice that level today.

Hopefully they'll still be interested in voting in the fall after the candidates have moved their bowling-and-whiskey-shots operations to Florida and other real battleground states.

Keshia, you're a big girl now

Little Rudy Huxtable = all grown up.

That cute elementary-schooler in pigtails that was America's kid sister in the '80's, Keshia Knight Pulliam, recently turned 29 years old. For people my age, Keshia is like a one-woman version of the Olsen twins that we watched grow up on tv. The difference is that Keshia's a lot better looking, and successfully graduated from college.

Her post-"Cosby Show" career hasn't really taken off (though she was in Beauty Shop with Queen Latifah), but now she's about to enter an important rite of passage for anyone transitioning from child star to adult actress: starring in Tyler Perry's latest family movie as a hooker named Candy.

Who's America's pigtailed cutiepie now? That'll show 'em!

I just learned she also appeared in a 2003 Chingy video with a brief shot of her in a bra [video]. OK girl, we get it, you can put your shirt back on.

Pope paraphernalia

The news media is up to its chasubles in photos of Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to Washington, DC and New York. So here are a few non-Ratzingerian shots of America's response:

Papal merchandising: bumper sticker and "Papa Ben" mug, which bestows upon Benedict a far catchier nickname than anything he probably had earlier in life (Joey Ratz is the best he could have hoped for):

Conceptual Pope/Mary/Jesus/hearts/flowers collage by a little girl in DC:

Meta-Pope: picture of a guy taking a picture of a cardboard Pope cutout in the Bronx: