In keeping with this week's (year's?) penis theme, here is another one for ya--painted on a drawbridge facing the windows of FSB (née KGB) headquarters by Russian art-warriors Voina.
The folks at Voina have also thrown cats at McDonald's employees, staged a pantomime orgy at the Biology Museum, and generally just given the Putin/Medvedev camp the finger as many times as possible, in front of as many people as possible. [Further reading from The Independent. -Ed.]
As a result, Voina are of course on the lam or being beaten by thugs in a damp prison somewhere, but you gotta hand it to them for their Extreme Creativity in the Face of Thinly-Veiled Totalitarianism, which should be an award category next year in one of those self-congratulatory pageants that happen all the time.
Now, I think it's important to clarify that I am not saying defacing public property or throwing cats at innocent people are good things to do in any situation; what I AM saying is that they are far from the worst things you can do to draw attention to the fact that hundreds of millions of your countrymen are getting fucked by the cigar-smoking, vodka-swilling, mother-nature-raping Russian oligarchy every second.
Easily the most vain Amish people in the entire world
Amish communities in Illinois (which apparently exist) are upset over a law that will soon take effect in the state that will require photos on all firearm-owner identification cards.
Can you imagine being upset over that? It seems like a reasonable requirement (we require a photo to verify you are the correct person driving a car but not buying a gun?) and I'm surprised it wasn't already in place, so...what exactly is the problem?
Well, it seems the Amish--much like Australian Aborigines living off the land in the middle of nowhere, as they have for thousands of years--aren't big fans of photography. While it does not appear they are afraid it will capture their souls (that sounds so stupid, right?) they ARE afraid of what embracing this newfangled technology will mean:
The Amish are also known for being uncomfortable with photography, especially posed photography, which they believe leads to idolatrous vanity, according to AmishNews.com.
If the Amish don't figure something out quickly they might be royally screwed because apparently a lot of them "hunt and they usually use squirrel or rabbit rifles to bring some food back home" as well as "to disperse varmints," according to the Mattoon Journal-Gazette and the Amish America blog.
So let me get this straight--the Amish have a blog, their own news website, and apparently unfettered internet access, but believe photographs of themselves will end the world as they know it? Is a blog not the height of vanity? [Don't answer that. We can't handle it. -Ed.]
Get real, Amish--you've been kicking around for a long time and seem to be doing pretty okay (somehow), but as H.G. Wells once said, "adapt or perish." Either join the real world already or slowly turn your evaporating culture into little more than a quaint museum exhibit fourth-grade schoolchildren draw penises on with Sharpies during interminable field trips.
Probably nothing nearly as cool as what this mook did:
Miljenko Parserisas Bukovic at the top of his game
The gruesome details:
Parserisas, a 56-year-old newspaper seller from Mexico, revealed his inked artwork in a photo shoot in Valparaiso city.
He has so far spent a million Mexican pesos (just over £51,000) for the 82 tattoos. The newspaper vendor's obsession with tattoos of Roberts started after he watched her in Erin Brockovich.
In the film Roberts plays a legal assistant who brings down a US energy company single handedly.
The American actress is tattooed all over Mr Parserisas' body in artwork inspired by a number of scenes from the film.
The Roberts fanatic has said that he has plans to get more faces inked on his chest, back and arms.
As long as he has the space on his body and the money, his tattoo tribute will continue.
I guess if you can't figure out a feasible way to have sex with your (questionable) celebrity crush, you might as well (semi-) permanently ink her face all over your naked body and get your picture in the papers so she at least has an opportunity to fly down to Mexico and make your dreams come true before you die from unfulfilled lust (the silent killer).
Celebrities do that all the time, after all--make dreams come true. They're very generous people who unfortunately cannot afford good public relations personal and so they get a bad rap as greedy selfish millionaire Vanity Smurfs afraid of intimacy, aging, death, and--most of all--obscurity.
If you see your favorite celebrity today, give them an awkwardly-long hug and kiss them softly on the neck with moistened lips. It'll make everything they do finally seem worthwhile. If you DON'T see a celebrity today, cash out your Roth IRA early and head to the nearest tattoo parlor to cover every square inch of your flesh in their likeness (worth it). It's the next best thing you can do for them.
Sometimes it's easy to be brilliant--all you have to do is have a great idea that is simple to execute and go ahead and do it. So go do it, Internet! For the kids, so they understand where we came from.
Thanks for the simple brilliance, Videogum/Internet--put another fur in your cap and keep up the good work.
PONTIAC, Mich. — A homeless man in southeast Michigan says a woman accidentally gave him a gold ring laced with diamonds when she handed him a handful of change.
Michael Secaur tells The Oakland Press that he was panhandling at an intersection in Pontiac on Monday when a woman pulled up in a vehicle and handed him some money. He says the ring was among some coins, and that he thinks she "did an oops."
Secaur says he would recognize the woman if he saw her again.
He says he quickly dismissed a plan to pawn the ring. The owner of a shelter where Secaur often stays has locked it in a safety deposit box.
Secaur says he has lived on the streets of Pontiac for nearly two years.
Could you imagine a rich person doing that? Hard enough to squeeze some spare change out of them. You gotta get creative, get your finger poopy, and make quaint signs that say things like "Homeless Veteran Father of Three Mongoloid Preemies Who Can't Catch a Break. God Bless." just to get your hands on some Diet-Coke-greased pennies from the polished-walnut-lined cupholder between the cabretta leather-skinned bucket seats of some old bag's Bentley that could fetch enough bank at auction to feed an entire town for a year.
The kind of old bag that doesn't realize for weeks she lost an extraordinarily expensive ring during one of her 5000 daily moments of carelessness--if she ever noticed at all.
And this guy's who's been living in the street for a year is begging to give it back to her. Shades of that Homeless Radio Announceritis outbreak not that long ago.
Thank you, Homeless Men of America, for keeping it classy.
Seriously, though--how bad do they need to make us feel about ourselves before this increasingly derivative hubbub is over and the homeless men are once again a phantom population everybody pretends is already dead, thinks of as naught but a swarm of charming and smelly holographic reminder of the desperate lives people lead when they don't work hard enough or get born to rich parents.
And I bet when you woke up this morning curled up under your 2000-thread-count Hermês duvet with a soiled Playboy/girl stuck to your paw you thought you had this little boy right where you wanted him, totally out of contention for Romantic Person of the Year.
But the votes are in and you lost. 7,000,000,000 to 0.
Question: Who's more out-of-touch with reality--an 84 year-old oft-hospitalized Communist dictator under a decades-long trade embargo or a womanizing Italian billionaire president?
Answer: Silvio Berlusconi
Viz:
"I hope that in Egypt there can be a transition toward a more democratic system without a break from President Mubarak, who in the West, above all in the United States, is considered the wisest of men and a precise reference point," he said.
-Silvio Berlusconi
"Mubarak's fate is sealed, not even the support of the United States will be able to save his government. The people of Egypt are an intelligent people with a glorious history who left their mark on civilization. 'From the top of these pyramids, 40 centuries of history are looking down upon us,' Bonaparte once said in a moment of exaltation when the revolution brought him to this extraordinary crossroads of civilizations."
The wisest of men does not do...hmmm, let's see...just about anything Mubarek has been doing recently. Does the wisest of men reap millions of dollars from running a nation and then insist on sticking around to get his head chopped-off?
I think not.
If what Berlusconi said were true, Chateau Mubarek in the south of France would be bustling with activity right now, dozens of humble servants preparing for the master to retire there indefinitely and enjoy his spoils.
Instead, 'rental guillotine' has been the most searched-for term on Google Egypt for weeks now--among those with pirated internet access, of course.
Bon voyage, imbécile. May your blood stain the sands of Egypt sooner rather than later. I hope it was all worth it.
And somebody in charge of such things please grant Fidel Castro +16 cool points right now for understanding the will and power of the masses. Bravo, señor.
If you're a middle-aged man who loves trikes, you'll love the Uno!
If you believe every famous actress/actor/musician/model--and I do, unequivocally--they each used to be "such a big dork in high school."
So, clearly, all the dorks grow up to be sexy, cool, and rich...okay...but what becomes of the meatheads who major in football/cheerleading and minor in autoshop/blowjobs-under-the-bleachers, you ask?
Well, they all grow up to be dorks who buy an Uno to get around town. Probably.
Is that the perfect revenge? Some 19 year-old dork designs the Uno and gets rich--and cool--as all the cool kids from his high school lose their hair/wives/looks and buy Unos to impress the fat Leather Mommas smoking outside the biker bar?
Hmmm...assuming we all have to be a dork at some point in our lives, I'm glad I got that out of the way in high school and can have been able to spend the rest of my life basking in an unrelenting torrent of coolness, soaking in my oceanside saltwater hot tub, telling jokes to eager supermodels and making fun of Emeril as he grills my dinner.
Oh, and I definitely need to look into getting Biff to detail my entire collection of classic automobiles on a daily basis, while I'm at it, since I just never know which one I want to drive ahead of time...
There's a mysterious phenomenon in which some men, immediately after having an orgasm, come down with a flu-like illness. Now Dutch scientists are saying these men may be allergic to their own semen.
Waldinger also identified a treatment for POIS, known as hyposensitisation, which essentially desensitizes the recipient of the treatment. The men were given skin injections of their own semen -- first highly diluted and eventually increased -- and after one to three years symptoms were greatly reduced.
Symptoms of POIS include fever, runny nose, extreme fatigue and burning eyes. They come on straight after climax and can last up to a week, reported The Sun.
Considering Dutch researchers have already identified at least 45 men in Holland alone who have been diagnosed with POIS, that does not bode well globally if that percentage holds. Assuming (incorrectly, I know, but it's just easier) that 50% of the population is male, here is how it breaks down in some larger countries:
Holland - 16,642,000 people - 8,321,000 men - 45 unfortunate men
U.S. - 311,904,000 people - 155,952,000 men - 844 unfortunate men
India - 1,192,870,000 people - 596,435,000 men - 3226 unfortunate men
China - 1,341,800,00 people - 670,900,000 men - 3629 unfortunate men
So, in approximately 41.5% of the world's population, we are looking at a group of 7,744 men who are allergic to their own semen. Allergic to their own semen! Can you imagine going through life becoming miserably ill immediately after having an orgasm? Can you imagine how many men who are afflicted by this will never tell anybody about it?
I think we need to get these 7,744+ names on paper and cross-reference that list with lists of serial killers, murderous dictators, mental patients, heroin/opium addicts, and pathologically depressed men.
Something tells me there will be a strong correlation...
Here is a shortish clip that may or may not be from an episode of the Australian television show A Current Affair, which may or may not be a serious news program (verifiable information is scant):
Reminds me of a Monty Python sketch that never aired. Michael Palin hosting John Cleese would have been funnier, but points to these chaps for making a go of it.
Milestones are meant to be reached, right? Congratulations, Internet--that is the only bright side I can see in this travesty:
That piece of garbage was viewed 126,558,675 before I ever heard of it. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
There's no way around the fact that I feel dumber for having seen it, I worry that some innocent people out there might have seen it and unwisely viewed it as successful comedy worthy of imitation, there's no stopping it now, and it irritates me that the guys who made it have no doubt profited in some manner as a result of its creation.
On the other hand, it has ostensibly shown a lot of people a good time since its release--only 29,869 people officially DISLIKE it (please ignore the fact that only 24,299 people bothered to officially LIKE it).
Maybe this video is what America craves. Maybe the entertainment provided by this video is the reason generations of hard-scrabble immigrants bled to death tilling our soil and shaping our skylines. Maybe 2011 has ushered in the zenith of mankind's presence on Earth and not its nadir.
There was once a Dutchman named Robert Wolders. He was born in Rotterdam in September of 1936, to a man and a woman, although if you asked her, the woman did most of the work.
In 1965, Mr. Wolders became an actor, starred briefly in a TV show, but never achieved much success. By 1975, he decided to retire from acting and marry legendary Hollywood nutjob Merle Oberon.
Below are more than a few words about Merle Oberon, for your pleasure:
She was an exotic beauty born on the British side of Bombay to a British mechanical engineer working on the Indian Railways and her own (half) sister, Constance.
To hide this embarrassing bit of incestuous pedophilia, one of Merle's birth certificates listed her father's wife--a Eurasian from Ceylon with partial Maori heritage, who had Constance at age 14 with an Irish foreman of a tea plantation--as her mother and the story stuck.
Merle and her "mother" moved to England, where she dated a retired actor who passed her off to a studio in France when he realized her "mom" was dark-skinned and he was irretrievably racist. The "Sexy Extra All the Powerful Men Hit On at Craft Service" roles poured in and once famous director Alexander Korda got the hots and cast Merle as Ann Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), she was officially going places.
Alexander Korda, Merle Oberon, and Samuel "Thug" Goldwyn
Scarred for life in an automobile accident a mere four years later, skilled lighting technicians were at least able to hide Merle's disfigured face long enough for her to tear up the silver screen opposite Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights (1939).
By the following year, Merle's face "suffered even further damage...from a combination of cosmetic poisoning and an allergic reaction to sulfa drugs." Mr. Korda, now her husband, paid for several treatments at a skin clinic in Nueva York, but to no avail--without makeup she was hideous to behold.
So Mr. Korda decided to join the knighthood and make Merle a Lady, to give her something else to do with her time. Three years later, bored of being a Lady knight and day, Merle divorced her knight and married cinematographer Lucien Ballard, who then created a special light--the Obie--to obscure her facial scars on film.
That act of devotion fell short, however, and Merle married twice more--to Italian industrialist Bruno Pagliai (with whom she moved to Mexico and adopted two children) and the Most Interesting Man in the World, Mr. Robert Wolders--who is 25 years younger than her.
But only four years after Merle marries Robert Wolders, she dies at age 68.
What does the most interesting man in the world do when this happens? Why, he immediately becomes companion to Audrey Hepburn (7 years his senior), of course--ever the proper lady, she was waiting patiently for her turn on the Wolders, no doubt--and the two of them even hang out with the Reagmeister General:
Thirteen years later, in 1993, the honorable Audrey Hepburn dies on him, too, leaving Mr. Wolders all alone in frigid Switzerland. How does the most interesting man in the world cope with this tragedy?
He hops on a train to France, where he becomes the companion of another older woman, of course. Then-64-year-old screen legend Leslie Caron is a French dancer discovered by Gene Kelly in 1951 who went on to become a successful actress at MGM for decades and dance with every famous dancer whose name you have ever heard.
Alas, their torrid, Metamucil-tinged affair lasts only two years before the furnace goes kaput and Mr. Wolders moves on--for the first time?--without anybody dying.
Where does he go? Sadly, one can only speculate.
Here goes:
Immediately after french-kissing his goodbyes to dear Leslie, Mr. Wolders steals her 1964 Peugeot 404 convertible and drives all the way to Marseilles on the wrong side of the highway, chain-smoking a box of Cuban blunts given to him by Johnny Depp at his birthday party last year.
After six martinis and a few bottles of cheap cognac in the backroom of a rough-trade dockside saloon, Mr. Wolders gets himself into a card game and wakes up to find himself at-sea in a 45-foot sailboat named Skye.
Upon hearing several members of the crew refer to him as "Captain" (as in: "Captain, you have vomit in your beard."), Mr. Wolders commands his crew to pull into the nearest harbor for supplies and a bit of barbering.
After a killer haircut and the trading of most of their food, medical supplies, and lifeboats for several dozen barrels of rum, six pounds of beef jerky, a prostitute, and two fishing poles, Mr. Wolders and his crew are able to outrun a couple police officers and set sail for anywhere else.
The crew becomes family as they drift around the Mediterranean with Mr. Wolders for the next 15+ years, mastering kung-fu, running guns for the Russians, trying to get invited to parties along the Riviera, counterfeiting their own Cuban cigars, making their own sushi, experimenting with mind-altering drugs...and subsisting solely on the bounty of nature, the naivete of strangers, and the small fortune Mr. Wolders inherited from his two famous dead lovers.
The crew was not terribly pleased to have their berths converted to rum storage,
but they eventually got over it and embraced the good life.
When his love of the finer things in life--coupled with his innate distaste for labor of any kind--catches up with him, Mr. Wolders sees no other choice but to adopt a fake Mexican accent and resume acting under an assumed identity in commercials for Dos Equis.
It's the closest he can get to not working while still getting paid, so that's alright with him.
Yes, at 74 years of age and still kicking, life has been good to Robert Wolders. I wonder if the next 74 will be so kind?
"Ted Haggard to bounce back from that whole male-hookers and meth thing with a reality show." This Onion A/V Club article is well-worth a read.
And this article about Larry the Cable Guy's new show on the History Channel is just sad.
To cheer yourself up, read David Cross' 'Open Letter to Larry the Cable Guy' once more and put that smile back on your face for a while...oh, wait--the website he posted it to is now defunct.
WTF? Did he and Bob forget to pay their GoDaddy bill or something? Luckily I found something even better--David Cross reading said letter aloud. You're welcome.
Turns out everybody's favorite hero, Ted Williams (no relation to the now less-famous asshole baseball player), was not just some tragic homeless guy who found his resolve in teaching himself to sing the paint off a barn, but rather a homeless former radio announcer who had fallen on hard times due to drug and alcohol abuse, arrogance, the changing face of media, etc. Huh. No way around that being a disappointment when I hear the phrase "golden voice."
She hates when people use teleprompters (exceptions include John McCain, Sarah Palin, and herself)
If there is one successful type of person in this world who deserves to be homeless, it is "actors who read anything you tell them to say on camera and tell you they are journalists."
If there are two, I would add "radio and television announcers/hosts" to the list. How many of the oft-ridiculed "Pig & Mikein the Morning!" ass-hats--and the vain, less-talented hacks who were paid to "announce them"--were out there in this country before the radio bubble burst and 90% of radio talent got the axe? [This is a wild, unsubstantiated estimate. -Ed]
