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I just watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind for the first time in over 30 years with my son of seven. Throughout the film, as is his way, the boy kept leaping to conclusions of what would happen next: the army guys are gonna try to kill that guy; the army guys are gonna try and kill the aliens; the aliens are gonna try and kill the army.
For years, grown men have been allowed to act like teenagers, buying expensive, candy red sports cars, donning too much “bling” around their necks, in their ears and on their clothing, and abruptly announcing to their wives one day over cereal that they are leaving them for someone who is half their age because well, they feel like it.
Someone figured out what the internet’s going to be like in 2020. Lots of hackers, interplanetary connectivity and robots. Infographic after the jump.
That’s right. You can now use the internet to play with a group of cats at The Oregon Humane Society with little robot arms! Sadly, you only get 2 minutes with the little webcelebs, and they’re liable to ignore you entirely. But it’s really cute.
Maxime Luère‘s short film, A Life On Facebook, tells the accelerated life story of Alex Droner. Through the stream of information on his Facebook profile we see him accumulate friends and photos, fall in and out of love, and eventually grow old and logout.
Doesn’t she know that it’s difficult to convince people of your sobriety when you’re not actually sober? I mean, I’m glad she signed up because when the cameras rolled, they provided us with so many delicious gems but c’mon!
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You haven’t even cleared Thanksgiving, let alone started drafting your best of 2010 lists (um, well, maybe you’re already working on that, you nerds), but there’s already a growing heap of new music to look forward to in the early months of 2011.
“These hipsters constantly steal our memes and claim them as our own. They even plan their own little ‘raids.’ They also refer to themselves as a secret cult, obviously they are just copying off of Anonymous. They are organizing a ‘raid’ against us at this very moment. We cannot stand for this.“
Feel resigned about the fact that sex sometimes doesn’t happen for weeks. Start to feel apathetic about lack of intimacy, orgasm and physical touch. Become overly silly. Hide the fact that you’re not addressing her problems with jokes, funny voices, inappropriately loud talking and tickling.
You always hear about how New York’s Times Square was more fun way back when, when hookers and porno ruled, before America’s terror mayor Rudy G. “took back the streets” by banishing the Squeegee Men and welcoming Disney into the fold. And maybe it was.
A tombstone for the internet-age, it stores all a dead person’s social presences – Facebook, Twitter, blogs, photos, videos, etc., in one easy to access space. A bluetooth-like device – the cross on the front of the tombstone – transmits and makes available this data. When the departed’s relatives visit the stone, they can interact with their now defunct internet presences via mobile.
Certain subway lines give off a beacon of efficiency while others remind me of the flu. So, for no other reason other than that I enjoy personifying inanimate objects, I have decided to equate each subway line with an American President.
Surprise! Not only was the talent on display at the drag pageant just as impressive as anything you’d see televised on Miss USA or Miss Universe, but it involved so much more than lip-synching to Garland, Streisand, Cher and Madonna. And the turnout was massive.
No one in my family – Canadian born and raised – served in the military, so I have no personal attachment to the poppy or its powerful association. But a visit in November 2008 to the Canadian cemetery near Juno Beach, in Normandy, left me weeping for an hour, stunned by the rows of maple-leaf-etched gravestones, the wet green grass carpeted by the reds and golds of the maples planted there.
… And I call this guy in Ireland and within five minutes I knew that he was a big perv because he started telling me that I have a sexy voice and asking me about sleeping with women and stuff.
Artist Pete Cullen has taken the time to immortalize this epic failure in an oil painting. The work captures Smith right before the snap, starring at five giants defenders who are about to charge him unblocked. It is currently on display in Baltimore…
Disturbing new footage of Adolf Hitler hearing the news that his memoir, Mein Kampf, has been rejected by New York publishers Simon & Schuster has surfaced over at HTMLGIANT. Video after the jump.
It’s a pretty inventive lie if you ask me. I consider myself clever for coming up with it, but it didn’t spawn from a love of the supernatural—although that has always been a true love of mine—but from something else entirely. Something equally as forbidden!
Two teenage boys, ages 15 and 16, have been accused of putting a kitten into a microwave and tossing it out a three-story window in the Juniata section of Philadelphia. Quick, somebody call 4chan! No, seriously.
Eli is my five-year old son. He has an older brother, Slade. Slade writes fiction and spends a substantial amount of time on FlipNotes, so he rarely says anything worth quoting. Eli, on the other hand, has unknown goals and will say things that I feel other people could relate to, so I occasionally quote him via Twitter and once on Autostraddle.
Discover that you like men when you’re 14 and in the shower. Think to yourself, “This is just great.” Keep it a secret for a few years. In the meantime, dye your hair strange colors and tell people that you watch Queer As Folk for the storylines. Masturbate a shocking amount. Become exhausted and depressed.
We see him applying construction adhesive to a small ceramic tile ‘Invader’ piece and sticking it to one of the steel uprights. As he works, a voice booms from a speaker atop the hill, announcing that the L.A. City Park Rangers are monitoring his activity.
An in-depth feature by Brendan Kiley at The Stranger this August reported that the percentage of cocaine seized by the DEA cut with a cattle deworming drug called levamisole has risen from 1.9% in 2005 to 78.2% in 2009. Levamisole has been documented to cause agranulocytosis in humans – a condition that can result in anything from diarrhea to fever to “skin infections” to “sores in [the] mouth or anus” to death. And no one can really explain why it’s in our cocaine.
Paul Auster is perhaps the most accessible writer of those considered to be part of the “high establishment.” And you know the echelon I mean—Roth, Morrison, DeLillo, McCarthy, etc. Yet his new novel, which comes out today, is too accessible, toeing a dangerous line somewhere between the inventive plots of Jonathan Lethem (one of Auster’s own protégés) and the facile sentences of Dan Brown.
A charity release for the Royal British Legion, the organizers of the song are hoping it’ll top charts in the UK next week to coincide with Remembrance Sunday. It has no sound at all, while the video (which seems to be, functionally, what users are ‘really’ paying for) shows people with various facial expressions set to ‘background noise.’
Tom Hanks has embraced many roles where his characters haplessly struggle in the modern condition, to ultimately find themselves. Were it not for Hanks’ subtle charm and humane generosity as an actor, such “Hollywood endings” might be trite, but they are not; rather, they mark the journey of common man. That many of them somehow involve the ocean, and its vicinity, will be examined herein.
I have received a mail suggesting I should marry the sender when we are single and something to do with that they would/wouldn’t wear bow ties, can’t find the mail. I regularly receive drunk mails from a friendly Scottish guy with an aggressive brand of humor. I have received a mail about how I destroyed someone’s life somehow…
I began to envision myself up on the stage, the crowd worshipping my secretary hips, my muffin top spilling over my G-string, the insides of my long thighs that would rub together as I’d slink seductively offstage. Finally last Thursday, I stripped out of my inhibitions and signed up for a $15 beginner class with the New York School of Burlesque.
Ernie Brown Jr, the Turtle Man, is a beast. His YouTube video has over 2.5 million views, landing him a website selling apparel decorated with his trade mark logo: “Snapper-Licious”. He also hired a manager, has a rap song, got a shout out by American troops in Iraq on CNN and took his turtle catching show on the road. Despite his remarkable talent and brilliant marketing effort he calls himself “the poorest famous guy around.”
A vague relationship basically feels like a real relationship, only it’s harder to tell when it’s okay to cuddle. Vague relationships can last anywhere from 0 to 8 years, but are usually just a few months long. You can have a vague relationship with your co-worker, your friend, your friend’s brother, your brother’s friend, your co-worker’s brother, your brother’s co-worker, your friend’s brother’s co-worker, or your brother’s co-worker’s friend – but not your brother.
Outspoken liberal pundit Keith Olbermann returns from his epic and controversial 3-day exhile from the upper echelons of MSNBC news “analysis.”
Next March, Actress come fashion designer Mary-Kate Olsen will emerge from her couture and drug-fueled haze to star in a film called, Beastly. We like Mary-Kate because, unlike other child stars, she’s managed to stay relevant by carving out a successful career in fashion.
She had a couple of drinks in her too, which helped. But alcohol, like it does for so many of us, inflected her words with a kind of Fuck you timbre, setting up, what in hindsight was perhaps a totally avoidable confrontation.
The young sport is experiencing some growing pains. Some want Quidditch to retain its lovable innocence, as acne riddled Potter fans playfully prance around on brooms. Others (presumably Princeton) demand more serious competition and regulation- equipping the sport with coaches, referees, practices, and even player cuts.
Pillow fight on a mothafuckin’ plane. Even the flight attendant gets involved, albeit against her will. Hope your Sunday’s lazy. Video’s inside.
He falls in love with Robin at first sight, foolishly tells her so on their first date, and then makes the dumbest lovesick moves to get her. He’s neurotic, obsessive, nerdy, and a little more into her than she’s into him. So far, so Ross. But unlike Ross, who was genuinely nice to a fault, Ted can be such a douche bag.
So this weekend, America will be introduced to adrenaline-junkie Aron Ralston, the smart one who got his arm wedged between a boulder and a mountain, and was stuck like that for 5 days, or 127 hours. Audiences will ooh and ahh in amazement, as well as disgust, at the raw brutality of this man vs. nature true-life story.
Due Date is a bromantic comedy/road movie. I’m not sure of the origins of this particular variant on a genre that began with films like It Happened One Night, but Due Date is certainly not the first of its kind. It also might be called a screwball comedy, in that its characters are thrown into implausible, often absurd situations.
Little Edie: “There are some nice people in the world, you know, I just don’t happen to be related to any of them.”
Big Edie: “The cat’s going to the bathroom right in back of my portrait. I’m glad he is. I’m glad somebody’s doing something they want to do.”
MSNBC news host Keith Olbermann, one of the nation’s most outspoken liberal pundits, has been suspended indefinitely without pay for giving cash to three democratic candidates. This represents a violation of NBC News’ ethics policy.
Most people outside academia are totally unaware of what professors go through to get a single course approved. There are probably a million fabulous pop culture-savvy course proposals out there that get squashed every semester.
Lloyd Kahn, the do-it-yourself pioneer and former champion of the geodesic dome, is the focus of a new documentary titled Shelter. Directed by Jason Sussberg, and shot in 16mm film, Kahn discusses how home is more than a shelter, that it provides an intangible sense of safety and warmth that you feel the moment you walk in the door.
At least in Michigan. Yep. Banned! What suburban-minded Republican state with a majority of out-of-touch 50 and 60 year-olds is gonna step up next?
YouTube user, OnKneesforJesus, has uploaded a question and answer with intelligent Christians on the subject of homosexuality and marriage. It is amazing and refreshing to watch these young people publicly stand together against the dangerous cult of homosexuality in the name of Jesus Christ.
It is impossible to compare these places to Beatrice. Maybe it was strange because the Beatrice didn’t just die one night, it carried on for so long – what we were trying to save was something irreversible. It was special because it was a physical place that summed up a specific time. The bougie/slummy charm, the civilized debauchery – there was appeal that was just made sense in the moment in the city.
Hunger, despite it’s bleak subject, is often a comical novel. The narrator expresses a lot of indignation … But what is this indignation directed towards? The world? The worst thing is that there’s nothing really to direct it towards – except perhaps our own nature, which only inspires more indignation.
Ever since Gossip Girl made the transition from the pages of YA books by Cecily von Ziegesar to the small screen I find myself periodically having certain thoughts when I watch it. Thoughts like, So Blair Waldorf is the “queen bee” huh? Know who the original queen bee was? Blair Warner. Yep, that’s Blair from The Facts of Life.
In a Lower East Side record store, Henry Rollins regurgitated just about every hipster stereotype propagated by the anti-hipster blogger camp, first to a woman that was interviewing him, then directly – and awkwardly – to a group of hipsters he’d just confronted. “Feel exhilarated?” he said to the woman after the exchange. Then, in the car, later, “I knew that would happen. I could feel it when I walked into the store.” Video inside.
The use of Microsoft Paint and Paintbrush to create amateurish-looking, expressive, and fun art seems to be an emerging trend. Largely created by and for people who spend a lot of time online, “MS Paint artists” like Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half, Sam Brown of Exploding Dog, Mark Leidner, Tracy Brannstrom, and Tao Lin create simple geometric humans and creatures with lines for hands, often adding titles or speech bubbles to humorous effect…
In July 2007, rapper Lil Wayne was arrested and charged with carrying a concealed .40 caliber semi-automatic gun. He went to jail in October of last year and was released this morning, despite MTV’s initial reports of a possible day-long delay. Plans of a homecoming party at a Miami strip club have been confirmed.
