Spawn of Spoonfreude

Arnold Schwarzenegger sends a message—or rather, two of...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:38:33 -0500

Arnold Schwarzenegger sends a message—or rather, two of them. [WSJ]

Consuming the Corpse--with Relish

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:28:00 -0500

“Art is dead; Godard can’t change that,” the Situationists proclaimed in 1968. “Comrades, stop applauding, the spectacle is everywhere.” Jean-Luc Godard must have anticipated both of these sentiments when crafting Pierrot le Fou (1965). Quoting literary art at every turn, the titular Ferdinand-Pierrot insists that art remains very much alive… [continued]

Look at this f***ing hipster

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:51:58 -0500

Look at this f***ing hipster

Wonderful! Lars von Trier’s The Perfect Human. Bigger...

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:50:00 -0500

Wonderful! Lars von Trier’s The Perfect Human. Bigger version [here].

Hall-of-Famer George Brett: Auto-Tuned and Uncensored

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:34:27 -0500

Hall-of-Famer George Brett: Auto-Tuned and Uncensored

Alabaster!

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:44:40 -0500

Alabaster!

Roman Polanski Is Mad

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:16:14 -0500

After spending thirty-two years living the life of a carefree sociopath in France and three days as a child rapist in a Zurich detention center while he waits to be extradited to the United States for raping a 13-year old California girl in 1977, Roman Polanski is reportedly in a “fighting mood” and will fight any and all attempts that will force him to man the fuck up and serve his sentence that he already plead guilty to before running like an escaped slave…

Samantha Geimer is the victim, not Polanski. She only wants the case dismissed because she just wants this to be over. Much like how I want Grey’s Anatomy to be over.

UPDATE: Here are a list of names in the entertainment industry who have signed the FREE POLANSKI! petition. Woody Allen is obviously no surprise, but fuck you Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, and Darren Aronofsky.

[idontlikeyouinthatway]

I have a couple of quibbles with this (her response to...

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:01:55 -0500

I have a couple of quibbles with this (her response to Cameron’s dubious claim that atheist professors are responsible for growth of atheism is weaker than it could have been), but for the most part, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Brilliantly weird PlayStation3 commercial that was not shown in...

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:43:53 -0500

Brilliantly weird PlayStation3 commercial that was not shown in the US.

Hakuna Matata!

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:49:08 -0500

Hakuna Matata!

"We have no intention of changing our tactics until every last animal on the planet is given more..."

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:06:24 -0500

“We have no intention of changing our tactics until every last animal on the planet is given more respect than women.”

- Pseudo-PETA commenting on PETA’s degrading protests, [here].

"Okay, while this is probably a horrible use of taxpayer’s money during a fiscal crisis, the..."

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:19:13 -0500

“Okay, while this is probably a horrible use of taxpayer’s money during a fiscal crisis, the important thing to remember is at least nobody’s kids are getting touched. By Michael Jackson anyway. — Wow, I feel better already. They should put that on the programs.”

- The Superficial on the $3,500,000+ that Michael Jackson’s public memorial is costing the city of Los Angeles.

Is this Sacreligious?

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:12:00 -0500

Is this Sacreligious?:

And if so, is that really such a bad thing? The Kirk Cameron bit is priceless.

[viewer discretion advised]

Now that’s creative!

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:21:08 -0500

Now that’s creative!

The Devil Is in the Digits

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:43:39 -0500

The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran’s provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average — a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another — are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

As a point of comparison, we can analyze the state-by-state vote counts for John McCain and Barack Obama in last year’s U.S. presidential election. The frequencies of last digits in these election returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent, a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair elections.

Statisticians Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco on the Iran vote counts, [here]

The Nine Cliches of Stripper Memoirs

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:12:56 -0500

#5.

Our heroine has what she inevitably calls “boundaries.” (Elisabeth Eaves declares, “I realized I had to approach the booth knowing my own boundaries,” and “it was a matter of setting up boundaries somewhere so that one didn’t feel like one’s entire sense of self was oozing away.” Or Lacey Lane: “I quit working in one Sin City strip joint because I refused to prostitute myself like some of the other girls.” Ruth Fowler, again: “How do I find this job tolerable? I don’t kiss.”) Our heroine, in other words, knows how to draw the line. In order to underscore this point, she will discuss at least one girl who does not have boundaries. Unlike our heroine, who is asserting her sexual power over men, this girl is a slut…

This reflection on another girl’s morality is interesting, because however much our heroine revels in her naughtiness—and she does revel—she is at pains to tell us that she is not promiscuous like the other girls. Even in this genre, which is almost explicitly about how we shouldn’t judge the naked girl on the stage, we find the same judgment, the same innate, catty, female dividing of the world into sluts and non-sluts, that takes place in the rest of the world.

[Katie Roiphe for doublex]

Photo

Sat, 16 May 2009 00:41:13 -0500

Get ready for the raddest belly flop you’ve ever seen.

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:30:41 -0500

Get ready for the raddest belly flop you’ve ever seen.

Video

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 23:45:03 -0500

Why 3-D Film Still Sucks

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:52:34 -0500

Let me go on record with this now, while the 3-D bubble is still inflating: Katzenberg, Quittner, and all the rest of them are wrong about three-dimensional film—wrong, wrong, wrong. I’ve seen just about every narrative movie in the current 3-D crop, and every single one has caused me some degree of discomfort—ranging from minor eye soreness (Coraline) to intense nausea (My Bloody Valentine). The egregious side effects of stereo viewing may well have been diminished over the past few decades (wait, does anyone really remember how bad they were in 1983?) but they have not been eliminated. As much as it pains me to say this—I love 3-D, I really do—these films are unpleasant to watch.

That’s because the much-touted digital technology is not fundamentally different from anything that’s been used in the past. Today’s films, like those of yore, are made by recording and projecting a separate pair of image-tracks for each eye. These are slightly offset from each other, giving what’s called a binocular disparity cue, which in turn produces an illusion of depth. (It’s the same idea as an old View-Master, or an even older stereoscope.) For at least the past 50 years, and across several theatrical revivals, 3-D filmmakers have used the same technique for separating the two tracks: They project the footage for each eye through lenses of different polarizations for an audience wearing polarized glasses with matching filters. (Despite frequent claims to the contrary, the 3-D films of yesteryear were rarely shown in anaglyph with those schlocky red-cyan glasses.) Whatever breakthroughs we’ve seen in 3-D technology have been relative refinements of the same technology. The essential mechanics of the medium—and its essential side effects—haven’t changed at all.

[here]