America's sweetheart Julia Roberts apparently only knows a handful of bad words, and most of them are too tame to censor on network TV. Sally Field, meanwhile, knows all the curses, and will gleefully combine any one of them with the suffixes "-sucker" and "-licker."
Is switching off the Internet for 1.3 billion people the ultimate demonstration of power since the Atomic Age? The Chinese government has blocked YouTube across the country since this weekend. The censorship campaign is blocking reporters (both foreign and domestic) from covering the story and blocking Chinese residents from hearing about it, apparently trying to kill the story at both ends. Below are the videos that allegedly made the government ban YouTube.
Parodying a high school principal? Weak but understandable. Making a MySpace profile for him which reads "I like to give anal to the little boys at my school"? Less defensible and possibly libelous! But after a thirteen-year-old boy was expelled from school for making the profile (which also lists Hitler, Michael Jackson and a purple strap-on as the principal's heroes), his parents are suing the school for violating the boy's free speech rights, since he made the joke on his own computer and because it's so clearly not a serious accusation of child rape. Below is the now-deleted profile, or at least the terribly grubby copy used in the court filing. If anyone has a better screencap, send it to tips@gawker.com.
I hadn't heard of Wikileaks until a California judge granted an injunction against the site, where anyone can upload a leaked document, shutting it down summarily at the request of Bank Julius Baer. Wikileaks had published and analyzed sensitive documents that legally implicated the Cayman Islands bank. The Daily Kos has a roundup and points to the many copies of the site that won't be as easily shut down. The site has also survived a denial-of-service attack, and a fire. Good thing too, because this site makes the Smoking Gun look like TMZ.
Rick Moody's Black Veil is a pretty standard nonfiction novel memoir travel book literary critical recovery tome. (Yes, that's his description. More interesting than the Ice Storm author's struggle with alcohol: what he didn't publish). A description of a trip to a tranny bar didn't make it past the publishers. Don't worry: Moody, the envy of his peers after two books were made into movies, has posted the deleted account to the Five Chapters website. The author's preamble: "I asked a writer friend who is an expert on the subject if he would take me to a tranny bar in New York City, and off we went," he says. (Yes, that's what they all say!) "I really liked this passage, still do, but I think my publishers were genuinely uncomfortable about it, as if it suggested a genuine inner disturbance of some kind." The girls, and their residuary knobs, after the jump.
NICK DOUGLAS — Thailand will continue banning YouTube even though the user who posted a video mocking the king has taken it down. (There are still two pics on YouTube, says Thailand, that harm the king's sensitive sensibilities.) But Google says they'll work with Thailand to help censor YouTube. So who's outlawed in what country? Where is Google banned, and where's it just censored? And what's with North Korea? Let's answer this with the magic of charts!
Valleywag abhors censorship. But it also abhors looking like a [CENSORED] that just [CENSORED]ed two double-D [CENSORED]s. The latest Conference Fonzie report belongs on "The Aristocrats" more than it does on this blog, so enjoy ConFonz's, erm, colorful metaphors as he describes the MI6 Conference.
