Respect Authority

So the moment we’ve all been waiting for is almost upon us. After four books, a national craze and seven million previews, Twilight will be here in just five days!

But don’t get your panties in a twist just yet. As anyone in the working world knows, Friday is a long ways away, and there’s plenty going on between now and then. Think of it as the week before Christmas: exciting, but full of last-minute To Do lists. Except there’s no eggnog.

This week’s Future Freaks Me Out is a testament to the pop culture phenomena that never were. After all, not every one can be a Harry Potter.

For Laughs

Remember Sister Hazel? No one else does either. That’s why I imagine it won’t be all that difficult to snag tickets to their Manhattan show at Irving Plaza this week. While songs like “All For You” captured the collective imagination of pop culture years ago, these days I picture the boys of Sister Hazel sitting around their shared suburban house and munching on two-day-old buckets of KFC. Maybe getting together for weekly Guitar Hero sessions with fellow washed-up soft rock groups like Savage Garden and Barenaked Ladies. In truth, their real mistake here is continuing to perform: I’d respect the group a lot more if I found out they had all become managers at separate Red Lobster locations throughout the country. — kira

For Tears

Not that long ago, there would have universal consensus that Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac’s newest movie, Soul Men, was destined for the $5 DVD bin at Blockbuster. But with Bernie Mac’s recent death, this movie has taken on a newer, sadder tone. Interesting how death will propel a half-assed Tommy Boy-esque comedy to the upper echelons of go-to nostalgia flicks. Although considering Chris Farley’s death, I suppose Tommy Boy is either a really appropriate or a really inappropriate example. In any case, respect for the dead wasn’t enough to boost Soul Men on Rotten Tomatoes, where the movie has a fairly lamentable 44%. — kira

For Shits and Giggles

Performers exist in a separate world than ours, and as a result, often have a skewed, odd approach to life. This could also be a side effect of all the cocaine… but no matter. For example, singers, and certainly rappers, have been known to change their names from time to time without reason. Old Dirty Bastard did it like fifty times, and Prince even changed his to a fucking symbol… which I don’t think is even legally possible but hey, Prince lives by his own rules, one of which is: it’s okay to wear leotards every day of the week. Despite the history of unnecessary pseudonyms in the music biz, Beyonce’s sudden adoption of an entirely new personality still comes as something of a surprise. Her new moniker is revealed on her epic double disc of bootylicious bodied beats releasing this week, titled I Am… Sasha Fierce. I mean really, what else?

Beyonce describes her apparent schizophrenia with, “I have someone else that takes over when it’s time for me to work and when I’m on stage, this alter ego that I’ve created… Sasha Fierce is the fun, more sensual, more aggressive, more outspoken side and more glamorous side that comes out when I’m working and when I’m on the stage.” Personally, I’m glad she cleared that up, because at first I thought it was just her Drag Queen Name she generated on the Internet. Mine’s Cinnamon McClaw. — aaron

Last Week’s Highlights

• In the Election, Dallas Loses Twice - “Unfortunately for the Dallas Mavericks, John McCain didn’t run his campaign into the ground by calling himself a ‘Laker.’ Unfortunately for the Mavs, Sarah Palin didn’t refer to her presidential team as a ‘couple of Knicks.’ And unfortunately for the Mavs, Barack Obama is a Bulls fan.”
• Info-Graphs Will Always Leave Me Wanting - “Point is, Nate Silver, you didn’t rock the world by proving that in all likelihood a Democrat without substantial ties to Iraq, Katrina, the economy, Bush and whites would win a political battle for what’s left of America. I probably could’ve thrown a bucket of paint against a wall, told you it was a graph predicating Obama’s sweep, and you would’ve factored it into your stupid algorithms, calculations, and computations.”
• Broadcast Yourself Electrocuting Prisoners - “In May 2007, the Defense Department banned employees and soldiers from accessing sites like YouTube and MySpace due to security and bandwidth issues. Indeed, it is a little known fact that friend requests are one of the most dangerous threats to the American public today.”