Is 'Green Day' Really Punk?

You have been warned:

Green Day's album American Idiot has been turned into a musical by fanboy Michael Mayer, who "discovered American Idiot while he was still in the early stages of directing [Tony-award-winning] Spring Awakening, Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater's musical about the pubescent struggles of 19th-century German youth."

Discovered? I think 'assaulted by' is more appropriate.

How do you discover something that is as omnipresent as the sun? We're not talking about some obscure, self-produced punk 45 found at a garage sale--we're talking about a pop album that sold 12 million copies, that played everywhere in the world for what seemed like forever. We're talking about a band that everybody and their parents know about--a Green Day song (Time of Your Life) played over the ending montage to the last Seinfeld episode, for Devil's sake!

As if only to encourage me, Mayer goes one further:

I can only hope this wasn't a thought he had while listening to Mozart, although, sadly, I can't take that for granted at this point.

Get your extremely expensive tickets through Ticketmaster soon, or all your Abercrombie-punk friends will make fun of you until you intentionally overdose on Advil in the suburbs!!!

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Now I've Heard Everything

Apparently, there is a retirement home for chimpanzees who were actors.

The home was funded largely by the late Johnny Carson, who bequeathed the center (in his home state of Nebraska) $1 million in his will, in addition to donations given while he was still breathing.

The idea of a chimpanzee retirement home is funny enough--but one that is exclusively for those who were actors? Is there also one for chimpanzee Harvard alumni? (And a separate one for Yale, obviously) How about the Chimpanzee Daughters of the American Revolution?

What is so perilously wrong with humanity that we do such things?

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