Dan Aykroyd appeared on the Tonight Show last night to promote the James Brown biopic Get On Up. While there, he shared a story about the time he and Bill Murray ran into James Brown in a rental car lot.
Last week, Valerie Macon became the poet laureate of North Carolina. Valerie Macon is a disability claims processor with no major publications who was picked singlehandedly by the governor. And you still can't get the slush-pile intern at Copper Canyon Press to answer your goddamn emails.
Even death hasn't put a stop to the tragic family feud over Casey Kasem, the most beloved top 40 DJ in American history.
Fox News has detected a grave injustice in the television industry: Earlier this week, News 12 New Jersey suspended staff reporter Sean Bergin for veering off, in the middle of a news broadcast about the murder of a Jersey City police officer, into a disquisition blaming violent crime on fatherless black men.
Remember, kids: Through the palate and into the brain. And tell the police you learned it from former hitman (and acclaimed director of Slacker and Boyhood) Richard Linklater.
Everyone is guilty of a little procrastination sometimes. If you're a writer, you might screw around for an hour before actually putting together a blog post; if you're a mechanic, perhaps you let a few repairs pile up before handling them. Funeral directors are no different: sometimes you just have to fill a storage unit with dead bodies until you get around to a proper burial.
Igor Girkin, the Russian separatists' top commander in eastern Ukraine, suggested today that Ukrainian authorities somehow killed the passengers on Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 before it was shot down. He told the pro-rebel website Russkaya Vesna that "a significant number of the bodies weren't fresh" at the crash site.
James DeMonaco's The Purge: Anarchy has a high concept, and it is in over its head. The film is set in 2023, picking up one year after the events of last year's highly profitable The Purge ($89 million global gross, versus a $3 million budget), which DeMonaco also wrote and directed. As that flick did, Anarchy is set during a government-sanctioned annual event in which violence is legal and emergency responses are shut down between the hours of 7 p.m. and 7 a.m.
The average man's ignorance could fill a bowl the size of the whole world. "Well, how would you make a bowl that big?" wonders the average man. Exactly.
In the video above, Eric Garner, a 43-year-old father of six, can be seen arguing with plainclothes NYPD officers on Staten Island. When the officers attempt to handcuff him, Garner asks them not to touch him, and one puts him in a chokehold. Several other officers pile on, slamming Garner into the ground, and he begins complaining that he can't breathe. Now, Eric Garner is dead.
Frances Fragos Townsend spent five years as George W. Bush's key advisor on homeland security and counterterrorism. She's currently a national security correspondent for CNN. And she can't tell the difference between actual news and a joke by the military's answer to The Onion.
"There are a lot of corpses of women and children," the rebel commander said. "It has a Malaysia Airlines logo on it, they say." He seemed to seek advice. "That means it was carrying spies," came the response. "[Expletive] them, got it?" So spoke one of the most influential and well-connected Cossacks in Russia.
American colleges and universities face a climate of soaring costs, soaring student debt, and general wariness over the long term financial viability of our higher education model. The chief financial officers of colleges say, collectively: oh, shit.
Regarding yesterday's shockingly racist Straight Outta Compton casting call, Universal Pictures said in a statement that "the filmmakers ... did not approve and do not condone the information in this casting notice. We regret and sincerely apologize for being in any way associated with the offensive descriptions it contained." They did not say they've stopped working with the casting agency.
