We are uncouth. As is most of America. We are not highly literate; we are middlebrow and low-minded. But still. Do not try to trick us into reading shitty poems with an enticing title. We do not like that.
I'll admit, I tuned into CBS' new comedy 2 Broke Girls last night with much trepidation. Here is a show about two mismatched waitresses in a Williamsburg Diner—on CBS. It had the potential to do everything wrong. Surprisingly I was won over, but it's still doing everything wrong.
Bethenny drifts for 20 hours with no land in sight. Lea Michele is single. Lindsay Lohan's "shady" hotel rendezvous photographed. Entourage guy says he didn't turn Jane Lynch gay. Tuesday gossip is afraid of water.
Here's a trailer for J. Edgar, the Clint Eastwood biopic of the original G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover. Here the gradually Brandoing actor Leonardo DiCaprio plays the conflicted and controversial man, with plenty of heavy accent and face putty.
These two actors blew more than air kisses on the red carpet, but do their spouses know? This Dancing with the Stars contestant is a little crazy, and this actor left his date in the car at the Emmys so he could hit on other women. That show really saw some action!
The 2011 MacArthur Genius Grants (aka "The Emmys of Smart People") have been announced. Among the 22 winners of the $500,000 prize were a physicist, a cellist, a silversmith and Jad Abumrad, the host of the NPR radio show "Radiolab". Now they will be flown to the rain forests of Brazil to do battle in a series of increasingly-absurd physical challenges. See who emerges as "America's Strongest Genius!" Wednesdays, this fall on NBC.
In the "olden days" of this great nation—when we still had that pioneering spirit—young Americans, upon turning 14 or whatever, would immediately get married, have a bunch of kids, and settle into a life of poverty, scratching a living from the harsh and pitiless soil. Things change! Now we're all too fat to scratch anything from the soil. We scratch our poverty-level subsistence from Wal-Mart. And we're free to marry people of different races! But we're all still poor.
Are you a pretty savvy and health conscious person who maintains a slim and attractive physique along with the body of a much younger human by dining solely on "all natural" foodstuffs? Congrats, good for you. You are dumb.
After being robbed of $400 in a drug deal, the mother of Cassondra Marie Rassi—the smiling woman whose mugshots you see here—decided to retaliate against the alleged dealer-thief by building a pipe bomb and blowing up the person's car.
Fourteen-year-old Brian Thompson was handcuffed, placed in a cop car, and suspended from school for 10 days, all because he ran down the sidelines at half-time during a football game while wearing a banana costume. At least he wasn't arrested!
Developer Arturo Castro becomes Paris Hilton, Chairman Mao, Vladimir Lenin, and other beloved American folk heroes using realtime face substitution—a magical thing he created using FaceTracker (an API developed by Australia-based research scientist Jason Saragih) and the ofxFacetracker add-on (developed by Brooklyn-based developer Kyle McDonald). Your fantasies about looking just like your favorite celebrities might come true after all, and you won't even have to pay a plastic surgeon for the privilege. [Vimeo, via The Daily What]
Looks like our skepticism regarding Percy Foster—the 35-year-old dwarf, Gordon Ramsay look-a-like, and porn star whose murder by hungry Welsh badgers captivated the world/Internet—was well-founded: Foster seems to be a made-up man, as mythical as the Gordon Ramsay look-a-like unicorn and the Gordon Ramsay look-a-like minotaur.
If you watched the all-new, Charlie Sheen-less Two and a Half Men Monday night, you caught a gag in which the recently dead Charlie's ashes are accidentally tossed all over the place. The kind of thing you only see in a sitcom? Perhaps, but nevertheless, it served to underscore what a dusty mess cremains really are. But now there's an alternative: liquefaction!
The latest bizarre twist to the Michele Bachmann campaign, which has quickly devolved into the political equivalent of sticking a 7x7 blotter of bad acid directly to your eyeballs, involves recent claims she made linking HPV vaccines to mental retardation in young girls. Now Bachmann is backtracking, telling the AP — in a story titled, "Bachmann says vaccine retardation claim not hers" — that she was simply "relaying what a woman had said...I wasn't attesting to her accuracy. I wasn't attesting to anything."
Ahead of Wednesday's premiere of The X Factor, Simon Cowell is in full promotional mode. Tonight's PR pit stop brought Cowell to The Tonight Show, where he shared some brutally honest opinions of his three X Factor co-judges to Jay Leno.
The NYT has an interesting piece on Topix, an online news aggregator and bulletin board that has been kicking around for a decade, but never really caught on in urban centers. But in rural, small town America — where casting aspersions is a way of life — it's flourishing as the hot place to post shit about your friends and neighbors. Like the ones you run into at Dee's Place, for example, a diner in Mountain Grove, Missouri.
A marauding gang of cross-dressing bandits stand accused of stealing "thousands of dollars of filmy fabrics, sequins, feather boas and other accessories" from stores across Florida. This loathsome act of scrunchie-jacking larceny has produced some of the best eyewitness quotes from any single news story in recent memory. Orlando Sentinel, you are the best.
Look, we're all for taking an interest in your children's extra-curricular activities, but we draw the line at going all hockey groupie on members of your son's team. (Actually, we draw the line way before that.) Sadly, Katia Maria Davis, a 44-year-old mom from Laguna Niguel, looks to have felt differently, as she was arrested last Wednesday on suspicion of having sex with two members of the Beach City Lightning, her son's youth hockey team. One was "under 16" at the time of the alleged incidents, thought to have occurred around six years ago. The other was "under 14."
