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A lot of buzz about Gus van Sant's new movie Gerry. Is it Waiting for Godot for our age? Is it masterfully shot? Is it interminably boring? Is it The Fast Runner but with Matt Damon (tm Whiskas)? One reviewer suggests that your take on it will depend on how old you are [via King Pigeon]. Tell you what: I'll see it and tell you about it, so you don't have to go. That's what the 'bot is here for.
NYT columnist Clyde Haberman on backlash against France in the city. The story so far: not much anger, just some "rumblings from the cheese counter" at Zabar's. Unlike in Beaufort, NC, says Haberman, "where a restaurant called Cubbie's replaced French fries with 'freedom fries.' It seems not to have dawned on the people of Beaufort that the very name of their town is French."
Salon has part 2 of the article about the Loebner Prize and its eccentric founder...and you only have to sit through a 5-second ad to read it. Hurry up, in case Salon goes out of business before you finish reading the ad.
NYT has a piece on Callaway-modified Corvettes, which go 190 mph and are engineered in a sleepy Connecticut town. Not sure why the NYT is running this article now, as the company has been in business nearly 20 years.
Letterman's "eye infection", turned out to be shingles, aka herpes zoster, aka "Chickenpox: it's not just for kids anymore." Anyway, here's some info on shingles. At least he doesn't have rickets, scurvy, croup, or ague.
Case you're interested, here's the complete DNA sequence of the virus. (thanks matt)
Follow up to Amy's "Playboy/Starbucks" post below: Here's the actual press release from the Bunny. Not exactly safe for work, since the URL is
playboyenterprises.com/promote_corporate_and_sexual_
objectification_of_women.html
Relatedly, Playgirl is seeking models for its upcoming "Men of Amy's Robot" issue. Well, PG, look no further! Still not convinced? Try this on for size.
There's a bit of a flap over Spain Tourism's "Spain Marks" campaign, which (among other things) features the back of a woman with thong-shaped tan lines. This is already widely known in an Internet kind of way. The other pictures from the campaign, in case you're interested, are more mild, except for the one of the, uh, topless mermaid which, IMO, is even more suggestive than the thong one.
Interestingly, the controversial thong picture has been removed from the English language portion of www.spain.info, but remains at the Norwegian(?) version of the same site.
Remember that brief moment in the mid-90's when London was the coolest city in the world and the Blur/Oasis battle made headlines? A new documentary about it all is called Live Forever. I'm already misty.
Starbucks is about to join the ranks of Enron and 7-11 as a company whose female employees have been featured posing naked in Playboy.
A 35-year-old West Pottsgrove, PA woman displayed an artificial penis, in a sexual nature, to three juveniles, chased them and hit one child on the head with it, according to court documents. [via obscurestore, which is the best at this sort of thing.]
This article made me wish I lived in LA, for the first time ever: "Heroic Grace: The Chinese Martial Arts Film," is a five-years-in-the-making UCLA Film and Television Archive series that opens Friday. I may as well take a moment to mention some martial arts movies that are truly extraordinary, a couple of which are screening at the festival: Iron Monkey (which was re-issued a couple years ago and which most people know about by now), Twin Warriors (aka Tai Chi Master, starring Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh), and Last Hurrah for Chivalry, an amazing early John Woo movie. Seriously, if you haven't seen these, you should, even if you're not wild about martial arts movies.
While we're on the topic, remember that The Bulletproof Monk (which is like a cross between The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, but whose source material predates both of them) is on the way in April, but doesn't look particularly great.
All you NY'ers who want to jump on the orchid bandwagon after seeing Adaptation or reading The Orchid Thief can head way up to the Bronx this weekend to see some special flowers at the New York Botanical Garden's orchid show. NYT has an article.
I'm glad. I wonder if it'll ever get built.
Some stuff:
Amy's Robot Special Edition: Fun With Food! We share our favorite recipes:
Kitty litter cake, with tootsie roll accents! [via Whiskas]
Beer cake! Very moist.
Brad Pitt saves pedestrian from out-of-control car! Wow, he's the new Tom Cruise! Wow, he's the new Harrison Ford! Wow, he's the new Leo DiCaprio!
A recent informal census of NYC's homeless (that this blogger's do-gooder graduate program tried to get her to take part in) seems to indicate that... there are hardly any homeless people in New York. Maybe that's because the census takers were asking hotel night clerks outside for a cigarette break if they were homeless.
Kazem al-Sahir, an Iraqi pop star who tops the charts in Muslim countries, is performing now in Vegas and on Friday in New York. It probably helps that he carries a Canadian passport.
It's already on Slashdot, but this is probably the best web-only article I've read in my entire life. Salon has a long piece about the craziness behind the Loebner Prize, a competition based on the Turing Test for artificial intelligence. Except for a couple paragraphs in the middle, it is an amazing piece, esp. if you are interested in AI and the culture of technology.
Oh yeah, I meant to tell you about candlepowerforums.com. These people are really into their flashlights. Don't believe me? Check out this thread.
Maybe you heard Broadway's musicans union is about to strike. But, the show must go on! So, computers will play the music instead. [NYT] I hope it's not the same computers that (apparently) came up with the idea for Dance of the Vampires.
If you're not already horrified at the ass-kissy hubris surrounding media coverage of celebrities, look no further than Fametracker's recap of the GQ Hollywood issue: they suffer through it so you don't have to. Features coverage of the GQ Man of the Year awards, probably the most made-up irrelevant waste of time award yet. In case you have occassion to read this magazine (over 300 pages!) the story about the filming of The Outsiders (p. 240) contains lots of exposes courtesy of C. Thomas Howell, who judging from his recent career, had nothing to lose by telling all.
Don't forget about American Candidate, the forthcoming reality show from FX, which will allow Americans to choose a candidate for President (of the United States) American-Idol-style. The show has a strong pedigree -- its creator worked on The War Room and the doc about Oliver North's run for the Senate. Remember, of course, that whoever America chooses to be president won't actually be president -- or even an official candidate. The winner would have to become an actual candidate of his/her own volition and then go through the whole process again, except this time in real reality, against some senators instead of cast-offs from Survivor and The Bachelorette.
Wired has a story about a guy who wrote some software that (link fixed) looks at a scanned image of a record, interprets the grooves, and produces music loosely connected to the original. You can listen to the results, and even download the software yourself for free (if you know how to compile software and run it on Linux). Turns out this story was on Slashdot, but since I didn't see it there, I guess I'll blog it. Great, now it's on blogdex, too. Oh, well. And I thought you'd hear it here first.
Struggling, listless MSNBC has finally axed the Phil Donahue show, presumably in favor of the forthcoming Jesse Ventura show. If that doesn't work out, I guess they can always exhume the body of late-80s crypto-fascist Morton Downey Jr. and give his warmed-over corpse a show.
Here's some good afternoon reading: Robert Blake talking to Bonnie Bakley about the baby she was carrying before she was killed. He really wanted her to get an abortion. He thought she was up to something bad. This page is from the middle. You can scroll around and read the rest.
Any guesses on which single Supreme Court justice ruled against an inmate on Texas' death row, who claimed he got an unfair trial stacked with white jurors, and didn't get to show his own evidence? Take a shot. Yes, it's our old friend Clarence Thomas. The former chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and only black justice on the Supreme Court.
I don't know about this Arby's oven mit mascot, mentioned below. It just reminds me of the Hamburger Helper glove, and so doesn't seem like a new or original idea. Plus, Tom Arnold (the Mit's voice), is the last person I want talking to me about fast food.
Globalization sucks: Carnival in Rio is being attended by fewer locals and more foreigners on package tours, who can't sing or samba.
Arby's is unveiling its new "fun", "exciting", and "modern" marketing mascot: Oven Mitt. Apparently this is not a joke, though it bears striking resemblance to a fake fast-food character we read about last year.
Angelina has had her Billy Bob tattoo removed. [via saltyt]
Scraggly truck driver from LA won $1 million on the syndicated, afternoon version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, hosted by Meredith Viera. Here's a question-by-question account of the madness.
NYT's intrepid TV reporter Bill Carter briefs us on the forthcoming reality TV series that the networks have lined up for the summer: Roseanne a la Anna Nicole, and Paris Hilton (not her sister, too), a la Green Acres. One twenty-something viewer explains: "When a scripted show isn't smart, it's bad; but when a reality show isn't smart, for some reason, it's entertaining. For some reason, you get off on the vapidity, sluttiness, stupidity and awkwardness of these shows."
Even so, CBS still hasn't figured out that no one cares about Big Brother. Also funny, CBS apparently has a senior official who is the "CBS executive in charge of reality".
This article from the NYT might shed some light on Amy's Iraqi psyops post below.
I guess this was mentioned in a Washington Post article last week: Naval Safety Center's "Safety Photo of the Week". New photos of people doing stupid things everyweek. It's funny but sickening, as some of the photos get pretty graphic. Whoever writes the narrative for the photos has a pretty sardonic view of things.
The psychological war on Iraq has already begun: some sneaky country has taken control of Radio Tikrit and starting broadcasting to the Iraqis about their horrible living conditions and their impending doom [via Agent 0019].
NYT has an interview with Rael, who, obviously, is leader of the Raelians, who claimed to have cloned a human or two. The article comes to an abrupt end, which makes it seem like it doesn't take its subject very seriously.
More cross-over between ads and porn, this time for Pony sneakers. [nyt]
Roman Polanski's rape victim has an editorial in today's LA Times. The gist: "Give him an Oscar if you want to." In case you're wondering, she identified herself as his victim in 1997. Oh yeah, and she'll be on Larry King Live on Monday night.
LA Times has a pain-in-the-ass login process, which you can skip by logging in as "amysrobot" and using the password "password". You're welcome.
NYC bar owners are making preparations for the smoking ban, which begins in a few weeks. [NYT]
NYT has another long profile of Spanish Harlem, the third in the last month or so, though this one is written by a former resident, Ed Morales, a writer for the Village Voice. SpaHa, he says, is what people are calling it. He makes the point that the culture of the place is threatened with extinction, mainly because people like me (or maybe a little wealthier) have moved up here. I tend to agree...but I also think it's not fair to move out of a neighborhood and then complain that it's losing its identity because outsiders are moving in (as the author seems to have done). The piece also discusses the artist De La Vega, whose murals and sidewalk scrawls are familiar to anyone who has walked around on the east side above ~94th Street.
It's also interesting that the restaurant the author says he feels most comfortable in, La Fonda Boricua, is as upscale a restuarant as the neighborhood has, and is (as far as I've seen) the one most populated by outsiders.
In this NYT article about Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell moving to Vancouver because their teenage son wants to be discovered as a hockey player, it states Goldie was "dressed in a tight lavender tank top and drawstring pants with 'Juicy' spelled out in rhinestones on the rear". Well, isn't that funny? Why is it funny? It's funny because Renee Zellweger was photographed just the other day wearing exactly the same pants.
I don't think Spacey's career is necessarily over, but I do think his legitimacy as an important actor is now in grave doubt. What was the last movie in which he turned in a significant performance? Arguably American Beauty, which wasn't a particularly challenging movie. Before that, it seemed like maybe he was on the right track, with Hurly Burly and LA Confidential. In my opinion, since he won his first Oscar (for Usual Suspects), those two films are the only truly decent things he's done. And yet, somehow, he has been annointed both Hollywood's moral barometer (replacing Tom Hanks) and one of our great actors.
Listen, Kevin, I loved you in 1995, but you have to realize (like Spider-Man) that with great power comes great responsibility, and that means you need to make good movies, not schmaltzy, melodramatic, pseudo-Spielberg "important" fluff. It doesn't matter whether you do comedies or dramas or Bobby Darin biopics -- just please do things that have a fresh approach and challenge your audience. Everything you've done since Hurly Burly has bit the big Kahuna, if you catch my drift. So please, get yourself back on track, lest the same fate befalls you as DeNiro and Pacino, men whose later careers can be summed up with a deadly accurate, tossed-off phrase from someone I used to know: "What a waste!"
OK so Kevin Spacey. The Former Moral Barometer of Our Nation (tm ADM). From all reports, The Life of David Gale is a well-acted movie, (Time Out review says: "It's difficult to warm to the effective performances because David Gale preaches its anti謀eath penalty views so relentlessly that even those who agree with them will be put off.") but the political agenda is so in-your-face that it makes it, well, pretty much just as sanctimonious and lame as say, Pay It Forward. Or as insulting to the audience's intelligence as K-Pax. Or as full of empty sentimentalism as The Shipping News. The Fametracker Fame Audit from earlier this week isn't quite so harsh, but I think we can say that Kevin Spacey's career is over.
I still say his best role ever was as Mel Profitt on "Wiseguy".
Washington Post has an interview with a novelist who, according to the reporter, has written the worst novel in the history of the English language. The plot: the inequity of Bush tax cuts. Will there be a sequel? Of course! "It will be about Bush's plan to exempt stock dividends in perpetuity from taxes."
Hey, Peter Arnett, who was the pillar of Gulf War I coverage, will be covering Version 2.0 for MSNBC. Arnett, who has been freelancing since CNN fired him over that Operation Tailwind mix-up, deserves the post.
STOP THE PRESSES!!! STOP THE PRESSES!!! ROGER EBERT GAVE KEVIN SPACEY'S NEW MOVIE ZERO STARS!!!!
Amy reminds you that the last movie (we think) to receive that distinction was TOMCATS.
The Boston Globe, which used to love everything, gave it one star!
The NYT doesn't use a star system, but describes it as such "a crude undertaking that it doesn't actually seem to have a heart at all".
So those are the facts. I guess I'll let Amy weigh in with the commentary, since we think the same thing.
Mr. Cremaster, has a new show at the Guggenheim. The article doesn't mention Bjork, even though she is his baby's mama.
NYT reviews the new Ali G show, previously mentioned here.
Once Bitten, Twice Shy: apparently going to a club is one of the most dangerous things you can do in the U.S. these days. [via Agent 0019]
Here are two things I've seen in the subway in the last two days:
How about that astonishing finale of The Bachelorette last night? My goodness!! We all hoped for Ryan, but figured party girl Trista would take the plunge with Slick Charlie. Wow, were we relieved! It's true love, that's for sure. Way to go ABC...you strung us along and did not disappoint us with the obvious. Once Trista chose the shy firefighter, I knew there was only one thing left to do:
Bomb Iraq.
Alfred Molina, who is a big-time actor, will play Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man 2. I remember Molina mostly as the fire-cracker-tossing, psychotically ranting drug dealer at the end of Boogie Nights, but you probably remember him as Diego Rivera in Salma's Frida. Either way, he gets around.
So, since Doc Ock is some kind of doctor, maybe this news goes to confirm what I learned in a dream the other night: Spider-Man 2 will be about me going to the dentist, and Spider-Man will spend most of the movie sitting in the waiting room, reading magazines.
Are you like me -- not cool enough to know how to pronounce the names of artists you like? Well, you might turn to Google for some help, and try to figure out how to pronounce some of them. My SOP on such queries is to type in the name of the person I'm looking for, along with the word "pronounced".
E.g., looking for "Goethe" and "pronounced" will give you the expected result, whereas "Van Gogh pronounced" will yield differing opinions.
So, today I tried out the technique on one recent favorite emcee: Xzibit. Now, in my mind's mouth, I've pronounced it "Zie-bit" all this time. But a certain blogging partner friend of mine said the other day she's pretty sure it's "Exhibit". Honestly, I totally missed the word play on this one. My brain isn't wired like that it seems. Anyway, to confirm this blogging partner friend of mine's suspicions, I tried out my old Google pronunciation guide trick on Xzibit. The results are funny...but not for the reason you would think: instead of telling you how to pronounce "Xzibit", they tell you how to pronounce every other ambiguously-pronounceable rap artist's name out there, and even some whose names you wouldn't think had debatable pronunciations (viz, "Air Force 1" is pronounced "AUR force one", apparently.)
But amongst all these pronunciation tips, I can't seem to find one (after an admittedly perfunctory search) that tells me how to pronounce "Xzibit". My only conclusion: Xzibit must be self-evidently pronounceable as "Exhibit", and I'm the only one who wasn't in on the joke.
One thing I love about the Times is the down-home, local weekly paper feel that it sometimes achieves. The coverage of the Big Storm has a few great little moments, featuring thousands of free Krispy Kremes, thousands of squashed chickens, and some strange deaths attributed to the snow. Some of us found ways to forget we live in a mostly flat, paved city.
Now that we've passed the 12 hour mark of this season of 24, I can say it with confidence: it's better than last season. Yeah yeah, the writers made a huge mistake by not killing off the infernal Kim Bauer, but at least they're demonstrating their solidarity with viewers by giving her hardly any screen time, flashing her erect nipples all over the place, and making her endure child abuse, getting arrested, a car wreck, possum traps, and leering militia men.
And the plot: it seems to have been thought through beyond the first 6 episodes this time. While I'm not sure the "I went away for my junior year abroad and instead of smoking pot and pretending to be a lesbian, I became a terrorist!" story (which Television Without Pity has dubbed The Junior Year Jihad) really holds water, it's more fun than the Palmer family drama.
The NYT reviews the last (and possibly doomed) Howard Johnson's restaurant in NYC. The verdict: the clam strips are terrible, the breakfast isn't bad. Includes some history of the chain, too, which originated in Massachusetts. Need more info than the article gives? Check out HoJoLand.com -- an authoritative guide to HoJo's legacy and current trauma.
If duct tape and plastic sheeting just aren't going to satisfy your homeland security needs, you should check out labsafety.com's Homeland Security section...they've got everything on your favorite pessimist's wishlist, be it a Tyvek suit, Emergency Decontamination Showers, or traffic barricades.
Not only is he rich (now), he's smart, too! Quoth the millionaire: "There's been something else I'd like to say to you that's been really weighing on my nerves," he added. "I don't have $50 million. I don't have $50,000. I'm sorry I lied to you, but I wanted to find someone who loved me for who I am."
NYT has a major story about information gleaned from an Al Qaeda informant, whom they name. The article discusses Qaeda operations, including organizational hierarchy, code words, etc.
NYPD has shut down a couple of night clubs in one of our neighborhoods. The problem: consistent, unconcealed use and sale of Ecstasy. You might also want to read about the break-up of a Coney Island drug ring which sounds like it had shades of New Jack City: "undercover detectives made 81 buys of crack and powder cocaine. They penetrated the inner ring of the drug gang that operated at Ocean Towers, and then identified and bought illegal narcotics from 29 key people. They estimated that the group sold about $1,200,000 of crack and cocaine a year. They also bought five illegal firearms. Most of the buys were captured on video."
Maybe it's time I dropped all my implied liberal cynicism for a minute, and offered something patriotic, in a Bush-y kind of a way: the specifications for the American Flag. You can download a 34-page official guide from the federal government, too. Make sure you get your ratios right! Go America!
I don't know why all these studies about the nature of love always use college students as their test subjects -- college students are the most unpredictable, idiotic, think-with-your-crotch group of people in the world. Is their exaggerated behavior supposed to be easier to measure than regular people's, so that's why they always get used? I'm not sure. Anyway, this new report says people who are in love are sometimes better able to suppress lustful thoughts than other people...Except when the subject thinks very lustfully about their partner, in which case they are likely to think lustfully about people who are not their partner. This last bit seems to explain -- although not excuse -- certain mistakes certain bloggers have made in certain lives.
WHOA WHOA WHOA. Nicole Kidman is responsible for recent troubles in Jude Law's marriage? I don't like the sound of that. I don't like the sound of that at all.
Here's some happy valentine's day news: there might be trouble in paradise between J. Lo and Shit-for-Brains.
I have no idea why this is in the New York Times, but anyway:
Hey! There's a cow eyeball in my Tropicana!
Hey guess what: even though it is set in Hell's Kitchen and has Jon Favreau in it, Daredevil is overly earnest and crappy, according to the Times.
There is a photo on Yahoo right now of a guy wearing "optical camouflage" that makes him look invisible. This, apparently, is a semi-official site related to the work that I came across coincidentally. The movie of the guy wearing the jacket outside is incredible.
This is what Kelly Osbourne looks like now. Good grief. Pretty soon she's going to look like this (she's so thin, the camouflage is more visible than her body), and then, eventually, she's just going to end up looking like this.
We brought you Hot Saints the other day, so I guess it's only appropriate that we give you Hot Convicts today.
Hopefully this will be the last time I mention Fred Durst and Britney Spears in the same post: Fred Durst explains the rise and fall of their whirlwind romance. Remember all that stuff about Fred waxing poetic about how they were like two trees swaying together in the winds of love? Well, forget all that. Says Durst, "I mean, she's got a great ass, that's for sure." What a piece of work.
