Respect Authority

Something like this was bound to happen. Maybe we didn’t know exactly which hip hop song about marijuana they would use, and we didn’t know precisely when it would finally happen, but mark my words, we all knew this was coming.

Breaking news, people! This is the shit you sit in front of your computer screen, pressing the refresh button over and over again for. And no, I’m not talking about porn.

A death threat, intended for the family of 3-year-old dictator Adolf Hitler Campbell, was erroneously sent to the wrong family this week. Reportedly, John and Joan Hitler are very upset about the confusion and don’t see how the mistake could have been made.

Their affable old neighbor, Hank Stalin, was in uncharacteristically low spirits yesterday afternoon. “We just elected a man named after Osama Bin Laden, and the Hitlers are getting death threats in the mail? They’re the sweetest people I know… Joan’s always baking these adorable little ginger bread men in the oven and sending them over to me,” Mr. Stalin remarked. “Sure, they make me take my shoes off when I come in the house, but they’re such nice folks. I’m sad to see our country come to this,” he said. Indeed, the mood was dark on East World Domination Lane early yesterday afternoon.

The death threat was intended for Heath Campbell, a white supremacist who won’t just fucking admit it already even though everybody else already knows, whose hilarious hatey antics we wrote about last week. The eloquent letter read, “you will all end up like your Nazi friends: dead.” Well, at least they have a sense of humor about it. Ah, insane murderer jokes, they kill me. Read More ›

While everyone was eying the Big Three, Toyota was secretly prepping itself to post its first operating loss - no small shakes, considering the loss is about $1.7 billion. If it plays out the way the company is predicting, the loss would be Toyota’s first since 1938, a year after it was founded and way before people realized foreign cars are da bomb. Moreover, it’s a pretty big blow to a company that made $28 billion in profits in 2007. 

And what about the question no one is asking? Wouldn’t all of these automotive problems be totally and completely solved if someone would just go ahead and invent the flying car already? I mean, barring hybrids — which have yet to trump the ever-present SUV as cool-car of choice — there hasn’t been a whole lot by way of massive technological innovation on the vehicle front. I mean, I know, J.D. Power and Associates seems to be forever giving someone a new rating because of their rear breaks, or shatter-proof glass, but that’s (clearly) not good enough anymore. We don’t need to improve upon the existing car structure, we need to invent a NEW one. The fact that the majority of this country’s 20-somethings have been waiting for flying cars since, well, forever, only adds to the likelihood that such an innovation will yield big bucks for the carmakers — you know, once we all have money again to afford things.

When I went to a taping of The Montel Williams Show a few years back, a lot of thoughts crossed my mind: “Why am I here?” “Look how fat that woman is” “I’m totally accidentally enjoying myself” – but at no point did I think to myself “Wow, Montel is really and truly a paradigm of intellect and class.” 

Which is why, when reading a New York Times article this morning on Montel’s fall from grace — from the realm of daytime talk television to that of late-night talk infomercials — I was surprised to find that Montel is actually capable of sinking lower.

The one-time talk star, whose show was canceled (who knew?) earlier this year, has basically re-created the self-help formula of his prior programming, except with the addition of various products he hawks to unsuspecting viewers as the cure-alls to their various ailments. Feeling depressed? Read his books. Feeling fat? Buy a $200 blender with which to blend fruit and vegetable smoothies.

These days, Montel doesn’t make a salary – only a portion or profits from goods sold on the show. This is pretty sad, considering I know he likes to take his kids on expensive skiing trips. I know this because attendees at Montel Williams Show tapings are afforded the luxury of watching a home video of Montel and his children hitting the slopes – as if we care. If I remember correctly, I spent that particular five minutes wondering if there would be any paternity tests or incestuous guests on the show. (There weren’t).

(Fun Fact: I spent the show itself trying to pretend I didn’t know Aaron - who couldn’t stop laughing, even as a woman with some sort of speech impediment told the audience how she was nearly killed when an 18-wheeler flipped over onto her car). 

Word to the wise, Montel. Sometimes, when your daytime talk show flops, you take off your television shoes and move on, perhaps to a career out of the public eye. Look at Sally Jessy Raphael, whose talk show got me through many a sick day as a child, but has since segued into radio work. Or Jenny Jones, whose Web site doesn’t make it clear what exactly she does these days, except maybe invest in Lisa Frank color pallets. But unless you’re willing to admit that your days of sending teen prostitutes to boot camp are over, you’ll forever be trying to re-start a career that, to be honest, was never that impressive to begin with. And no one wants to be a Rosie O’Donnell.

For residents of a time period so fraught with uncertainty, so overwhelmed by doubt, our causes for concern so looming and concrete, we sure are pretty unconcerned about it. Relatively, of course.

We live in a strange time. Peril is loitering on our front stoop and we’re all pressed against the floor in the TV room, whispering, “It’s just a bunch of Jehovah’s Witnesses… stay quiet and hopefully they won’t know we’re here.” Chronically sheltered, our generation has barely acknowledged, and far too late at that, the coalescence of catastrophes bubbling just below the surface. Where are our flappers, our beatniks, our hippies and our punk rockers? Indeed, where have all the countercultures gone?

Our generation’s great youth movement, the ubiquitous hipster, is in fact not a counterculture, but an extreme excess of all that mainstream culture adores. Hipsters embody the hedonism of the late 90s and early 21st century without any of the guilt of having to go to work the next day. In a sense, it seems they have almost given up, accepting the inevitability of Western civilization as we know it coming to an end, and therefore choosing to get as fucked up as possible in the meantime. Why bother rallying around a cause when there is nothing left to save? Read More ›

It feels like far too often lately I’ve been reading about misguided female teachers getting caught pants-down, sometimes literally, with their students. At least four times in the last two months have I stumbled across a local news story about some lonely 33-year-old who convinced both herself and a semi-willing eighth grader to experiment sexually behind the jungle gym.

These stories culminated earlier this month with the tale of a Long Island PTA mom found pantless in a car with a 13-year-old boy. There’s a lot wrong with this picture:  44-year-olds and 13-year-olds probably shouldn’t be hanging out alone in cars regardless, but even when they do it’s most likely in everyone’s best interest that pants be worn all around. Oh, and when cops ask what you were doing, and you’re not wearing pants, “kissing” may not fly as a valid answer. Read More ›

Ever since last year, when I made my first attempt at watching Shia LaBeouf flirt with women way out of his league in Transformers, I have had a vehement hatred for the movie which was, among other things, poorly acted and exceedingly melodramatic.

I’ve always understood that there’s an element of superhero tales, and Transformers in particular, that I will never understand or appreciate – I was, after all, never a 13-year-old boy. And even though the social issues brought up by X-Men, or the chiseled abs highlighted in Batman, had enough universal appeal to cross gender lines, Transformers was a distinctly male show. (This is the point at which indignant females will insist that they watched, and loved Transformers. To which I say, shut up and stop lying). The concept, after all, is a veritable orgy of adolescent male favorites – good guys and bad guys, cars, trucks and giant robots. Throw in a cowboy and some astronauts and the sheer perfection would emotionally stunt boys the world over.

So it was with trepidation that I even approached the film in the first place. After all, I have no real nostalgia for Transformers and until Optimus Prime t-shirts re-entered pop culture as go-to apparel for endearingly nerdy 20-somethings, I barely had any idea what to expect, save a lot of metal and…gears and stuff.

Yet despite my initial rejection of the movie – and subsequent refusal to accept anyone else’s opinion on the matter – I took it upon myself to give the whole thing another go this week. Last night I sat down with some warm soup, cold beer and a bowl of …“Cheerios,” turned the lights off and settled in for some intense robot-on-robot action. (I’m talking about fighting, jeez). After all, my neighbors have been playing an ancient Mary J. Blige CD on repeat for weeks, at an absurd volume, so two hours of gunshots and screeching steel seemed a fair auditory rebuttal.
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The family that lynch mobs together, stays together.

An insane person, from here on referred to as Heath Campbell, fathered a child three years ago. Tired of all the Mikes, Johns, and black people running around out there in the world, he opted to name his son something a little more special. The perfect name he finally decided upon? Adolf Hitler. That’s right. He named his innocent son Adolf Hitler Campbell, apparently for no other reason aside from wanting to see little Adolf get beaten to death by a savage mob on his first day of school.

Heath and his assumed equally deranged wife, Deborah (she did, after all, not only marry Heath, but then agree to name her kid after their beloved Führer) are outraged after a Pennsylvania ShopRite refused to decorate a birthday cake for the bouncing bundle of fascism and death with his name on it. Apparently somebody thought it might be offensive or something? Who knows. First a Muslim elected to the presidency and now this? The whole country’s going to shit.

Campbell believes that “people need to take their heads out of the cloud they’ve been in and start focusing on the future and not on the past.” And you know, what better place to start than with yourself, Heath? Considering the cloud your head is in looks suspiciously like the shape of a Ku Klux Klan mask, dickface. Read More ›

A prequel in the works?

We’ve already had Vampire Harry Potter see the light of day (heh, sorry guys), I’m sure Harry Potter in Space and perhaps even a Swashbuckling Pirate Potter can’t be that far off. Once the actual, original Harry Potter films come to a close, the very genre it created will have been so sapped of fresh ideas, the director might be reduced to pitting everybody’s favorite whining wizard against 600 CGI Agent Smiths as the final showdown just to surprise people.

With that in mind, I spent some valuable company time today getting paid to think of potential Potter spin-offs once the series is wrapped. It might be a futile effort, considering J.K. Rowling may actually have literally all the money in the world at this point, however, production company execs don’t… yet. I know, that came as a shock to me as well, but as it turns out, they gave it all to Will Smith. Anyway, I don’t think I’ll be the only one who thinks that, really, any one of these stands a great chance of getting greenlighted:

• Harry Potter Origins: Severus Snape
• Hagrid Unleashed
• Mudbloodz In The Hood
• Prison Break: Escape From Azkaban
• Dementors Live At Ozzfest
• McGonagall and Dumbledore: Before Hogwarts
• I Know What You Did Last Summer Locked Under The Stairs
• Hermione’s Leaky Cauldron

Okay, despite the fact that I could, literally, do this all day… I should probably stop. These are starting to veer a little porny and I really shouldn’t implicate myself any further… not that there isn’t a gigantic market for Harry Potter pornography, anyway (that link is relatively work safe, by the way… that is, unless you’re employed by the US Department of Homophobia — also known as the entirety of Utah). So who knows, maybe I’ll be able to squeeze a little more blood out of this sorcerer’s stone just yet.

While Great Depression II is putting the kibosh on a lot of things I’d rather see stick around (office holiday parties, extravagant Christmases, financial security), there are more than a few things I’m perfectly okay with letting go in the name of economic savvy – and Philadelphia’s annual Mummers Parade is absolutely 100% one of them. Unfortunately for me, and anyone whose mother has ever made them sit through this circus of inanity, the Philadelphia Mummers Association just inked a deal to keep the New Year’s Day parade in tact. Joy. Read More ›

President Hoover in a car, with a black man and people in turbans... which of these things doesn't belong?

Union busting and fiscal “conservatism” aside, if it’s considered neo-Hooverist to question the premise of throwing gargantuan sums of money at an industry that’s been failing for more than a generation and expecting a different result… then maybe neo-Hooverism isn’t such a bad idea after all.

It’s about time I admit that I don’t really understand how anything can be too big to fail. As I understand it, a country is a fairly big and important institution, and yet they fail all the time (Argentina more often than most). Propping up any industry, white or blue collar, is dumb. Governmental intervention in the failure of a major industry shouldn’t be approached with a bailout paradigm - it’s the wrong metaphor. Read More ›