Documenting History

Guys, I just read something real important on imdb that you should know about the 2009 film Year One:

When Oh is hanging upside down in chains and begins peeing on himself, you can see a hand appear on the bottom right side of screen in the shot where pee runs down his face. Oh's hands are chained behind him so this mysterious hand cannot be his own.

Le Selfie

The French translation of the word "selfie" is "égo-portrait" which is just about perfect. It's like finding out that the French word for "facebook" is "kid-photos" or that Peter Mansbridge translates to "vapid-cueball".

ZOMG TMZ FTW! WTF?

Kudos to TMZ for shining more light on contemporary racism with one youtube clip than the 103 clubs devoted to identity politics at my university. TMZ could be the new Larry Flynt when it comes to exposing the hypocrisy of the rich and powerful.

By the way, amidst all the recognition Donald Sterling is getting for being a terrible person because he is racist, we should add he is also a terrible person for thinking he's entitled to tell his girlfriend who she can and cannot hang out with in public.

Boycotting the Clippers is basically a moral imperative now. The market must demonstrate that the team is significantly less valuable in Sterling's hands than it would be in someone else's. That's easy for me to say since I don't have any standing as a season-ticket holder that I'm giving up or any playoff games that I'll be missing but ending racism isn't all voting for Obama and watching The Wire, Clippers fans.

And every basketball fan can join the boycott. Sterling benefits from revenue-sharing like every NBA owner so you are lining his thick racist pockets anytime you consume an NBA product until he sells. If he won't sell voluntarily then we need to convince the other 29 owners to force him out. Good thing the Stanley Cup playoffs are on right now.

Lyrics for Thomas D'Arcy's "Credit!"

LYRICS:

They were lying when told you, told you

You can be anything you want

Getting all your hopes up so high

Gonna fall down, fall down hard

These kids, they got another thing coming

Can’t all be, all be best

Gonna hit the ground, hit the ground running

Gonna fall down, fall down fast

If you want less headaches

You better sell your soul

If you want more credits

You better play some roles

If you wanna be a big shot

You better set more goals

If you just don’t get it

You’re gonna end up broke

Everyone can’t have their dream job

There’s only so much food

It’s a small world that we live in

And we take up so much room

All these kids with their sense of entitlement

Gonna grow up pissed

Keep thinking they deserve what they got

When it goes to shit

If you want less headaches

You better sell your soul

If you want more credits

You better play some roles

If you wanna be a big shot

You better set more goals

If you just don’t get it, get it

You’re gonna end up broke

Take em up higher

To make em fall further

You take em up higher

To make em fall further

If you want less headaches

You better sell your soul

If you want more credits

You better play some roles

If you wanna be a big shot

You better set more goals

If you just don’t get it

You’re gonna end up broke

Timing is Everything

I’m starting to think I missed my Nalgene stock sell-window.

Red America vs Coastal Elites

Before the Wright Brothers people probably called the fly-over states the caravan-over states.

You can't spell "Hack!" without Big H

What’s crazy to me about Phillip Seymour Hoffman dying of a heroin overdose is that he was the last person I would have guessed had an addiction to hard drugs. This exposes my total ignorance of the junkie personality but I think of them as people with very little self-control, both in the sense that they caved into doing hard drugs in the first place and because a junkie's free will is undercut by his or her cravings.

But Hoffman must have had superlative self-control to completely inhabit so many distinct and fully-developed characters like he did. I'm paraphrasing here, but Chris Connelly basically said Hoffman was the best at simultaneously exuding to an audience the image his character wanted to show the world and what he really was underneath. I think that is a very accurate description of the man's talent but it is so hard for me to reconcile someone having control over their persona top-to-bottom like that but being unable to constrain their animal urge for dopamine/serotonin. For someone to act like Hoffman did is the epitome of higher-order consciousness yet somehow he was killed by a base impulse: to get high.

First Hedburg, now Hoffman. Watch out Kate Hudson. Heroin works alphabetically.