The last time Lewis Black went to the polls it "was 1984 and that was a write-in for the California Raisins." But he's excited for 2012 because he believes Trump has the balls to be what this country needs: a dictator.
Jack Black turns 40 today. Jason Priestley of Beverly Hills 90210 fame is 40. Actor Ben Gazzara is turning 79. Country singers Shania Twain and LeAnn Rimes are 44 and 27, respectively. Olympic figure skater (and Celebrity Apprentice contestant) Scott Hamilton is 51. Actress Jennifer Coolidge is turning 46. Filmmaker Robert Greenwald is 64. And one of the Osmonds (Wayne) is turning 58. Some of the people celebrating birthdays this weekend—including Warren Buffet, Lisa Ling, and John McCain—are below.
Like Rudolph Giuliani, the news crawl was great on 9/11 but was soon useless and despised. Now CNN is killing it, and hopefully Fox News will too, if the Simpsons mock them again.
Two people who are both a little too told to be doing what they're doing are celebrating birthdays today. John McCain turns 72 today and Michael Jackson is 50. Also celebrating today: Bob Rubin is 70, hedge fund manager Eric Mindich is 41, Hollywood director Joel Schumacher is 69, choreographer Mark Morris is 52, and Robin Leach is 67. Christine Schwarzman, gala staple and wife of Steve Schwarzman, is 56. On Saturday, Warren Buffett will celebrate his 78th, Lewis Black will turn 60, Andy Roddick will be 26, and Cameron Diaz will turn 36. On Sunday: Richard Gere will be 59, Patrick McMullan turns 53, Chris Tucker will be 36, SonyBMG CEO Rolf Schmidt-Holtz will turn 60, and Giants head coach Tom Coughlin will celebrate his 62nd birthday.
That Lewis Black show Root of All Evil, in which two comedians orate about two awful things and then Black decides which one is worse, tackles blogging in its next episode. King of Queens shlub Patton Oswalt is tasked to excoriate the dreaded medium and offers a pretty well-tread argument about how grammar and decency and experience and all that goes out the window and blah blah. There is a funny bit where he imagines Thomas Jefferson n' Pals signing the Declaration of Independence and then foolishly allowing an extra "comment scroll" so people could voice their opinion. Basically it's a build up to a joke about not wanting to fuck Sally Hemings with Betsy Ross' dick. Oh commenters! Everyone hates you. I mean not as much as they hate us. But, you know. There's hate. Watch Patton's statement above and below is Lewis Black's little opening anti-blogging rant. Can we find some new people to be mad at? Let's just go after all the iPhone users, OK?
Super-rich guys who work in private equity may be the masters of the universe, but it's remarkably easy to get under their skin. All it takes is some crappy "street theater" mocking them as mean, heartless wealthy elites, and they run back into their corner offices and cry into their monogrammed handkerchiefs. The huge union SEIU has, for the last year, been staging little theatrical protests of the private equity industry's greed, featuring puppets and megaphones and whatnot. Which you would think would be as effective as sitting across the street from the White House with a "No Nukes" sign. But it really gets the rich guys worked up! Now the SEIU is taking their campaign international, with help from grumpy comedian Lewis Black, and it's making the titans of finance so upset they want to run out and buy the Kleenex Corporation. It's not fair!
Further evidence it's an election year: One of the biggest unions in the country, Service Employees International Union (or S.E.I.U.) is teaming up with MoveOn.org and Amnesty International to expand its campaign against private equity firms. (This is the same group, as you may recall, that staged protests outside the homes of KKR's Henry Kravis and Carlyle Group's David Rubenstein last year.) They've even roped in comedian Lewis Black, who's now appearing in commercials to rail against buyout firms for downsizing companies, taking on too much debt, and treating employees like numbers on a spreadsheet. Cute! Kinds of sounds like Viacom, the company that signs Black's paycheck, too!
"What's Lewis Black mad about now?" Larry King asks the Daily Show frequenter and comedian-author-actor, and the answer is: blogs! "I will not blog... I hate the word 'blog,' it sounds like a condition." It is a condition, Lewis, and that condition is called "carpal tunnel syndrome." Black is in the Lee Siegel school of internets-hating, in that it lets total amateurs from Podunk Oklahoma dictate public opinion. The video follows.
Lewis Black is a lefty comic and Comedy Central staple whose angry political rants became more resonant (and popular) under the reign of George W. Bush.
Contrary to popular belief, sometimes we actually turn up to parties unannounced. Last night was such an occasion: Editorial Assistant Heather and her trusty sidekick Kate got wind of the DVD release party for Farce of the Penguins, Bob Saget's star-studded parody of March of the Penguins. Acting as if they belonged, our girls marched straight past the clipboard-wielding meanies to the open bar where they managed to mingle with the likes of Tracy Morgan, Lewis Black, Gilbert Gottfried, Neel Shah (seriously, does that guy ever go away?) and Mr. Danny Tanner himself. Take a look through our gallery of goodness here (NSFW if you're a penguin, or a zoologist, though), and for an extra uh, treat, check out the viral videos of fake penguin porn here.
