humor

This is hot:

Politics is like a good martini, or conjugal relations after a period of disagreement and strife. It’s hard for it to be too dirty.

James Lipton: French Pimp.

If you haven’t seen this already, give it a peep. It’s quite funny and good. I never made any effort to get into the entertainment unions, but as someone who has paid his/her rent from time to time with my cultural production, I would like to express my solidarity with the writers.

One big union, bitches.

Some of these Onion video clips are fucking sharp, man.

Brilliant parody of Lou Dobbs from The Onion: Immigration: The Human Cost.

I hope they keep it up. It’s pretty sharp so far. Another, In The Know: Our Troops In Iraq:

On the darker side, from the annual Whitehouse Correspondents Dinner, Karl Rove Raps and the propaganda comes clear.

“Circling the drain” is the phrase that comes to mind.

All the way home.

There’s more here at The Kevin Murphy Show. Apparently the real thing will begin to air soon. This is a collaboration between a whole lot of folks I know back in BKLYN. Sassy bastards.

I just think it’s a great new nickname for Dick Cheney: Blood Clot!. From everything2:

“Blood Clot” is the most virulent insult in Jamaican Patois English. It is similar to ‘fuck’ in usage, but does not change form for different parts of speech. Blood Clot has entered the slang lexicon in other dialects of English through the Rastafarian sub-culture.

It can be an noun, as in “Shut up, blood clot,” or, more commonly, an adjective, as in “The blood clot government is cracking down on the growing of the herb.”

I got this idea from a comment in this Rolling Stone blog post about the distant potential of a Bush Impeachment (600+ days and counting): “As for Cheney becoming prez… C’mon bloodclot!!! make your move!!!”

While I’m dishing about movies I watch, here’s another: Idiocracy, by Mike Judge (Office Space), starring Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph. It’s totally great, and totally you’ve never heard of it because Fox Studios and Judge are alleged to have had some kind of feud over the movie’s content.

Fox seems to have tried to bury the film, slashing the post-production budget, giving it a very short/limited release, and failing to market it in any way.

The only reason I can think of for a movie studio to intentionally not try and make money is if there’s beef:

Since the announcement about Idiocracy’s very limited release, Judge has refused all interviews, so it’s impossible to confirm any of this with him. However, I remember hearing him speak to a University of Texas class in February about his future filmmaking plans. He wanted to make inexpensive films that wouldn’t be financed or produced through a studio, citing Christopher Guest’s films as an example of what he’d like to do. He was working on a script but wouldn’t divulge details.

“I’m only going to make a movie again if I own it or have final cut,” Judge told the class, obviously unhappy with the Idiocracy experience.

Anyway, you should check it out, because it’s quite a worthy comedy. The gist of the plot is that Wilson and Rudolph do a little Rip Van Winkle, and 500 years in the future, people have become much dumber. It’s a simple but serviceable setup for the salvos of social satire that follow.

Much like Office Space, the little touches really make the film, such as the quick close-up you get of the future’s money: instead of any “E Pluribus Unum,” it has the words “Haulin’ Ass, Gettin’ Paid.” I loved that so much I took a screen-grab.

The film is peppered with these rather intelligent riffs on stupidity. You can guess why Fox wasn’t thrilled:

An idea who’s time has come:

And this is the brilliance — it is a conversation starter, and the conversation that it begins will be a vital one that you might not otherwise have had about the importance of a Democratic majority. The conversation might begin, “Hey, so you decided to grow out your moustache, eh?” or “Couldn’t help but notice you’re lookin’ like a slovenly idiot nowadays, what’s that about?” But from there, the answer immediately turns the conversation to your explanation — they will laugh, it will be a fun conversation, and yet by the time you’re finished you will have had exactly the kind of person-to-person contact that is so valued by campaigns everywhere, and perhaps the person who so admired your ‘stache will now be much more inclined to vote, to volunteer, or to support your local Dem candidate. And, as noted in #1, the whole process was hilarious.