Last week Iran’s Minister of Culture, Mohamed Hosein Sarrar-Harandi, gave an interview to Spanish newspaper El Pais where he talked about his taste in pop music.
Mr. Sarrar-Harandi said “I know there are music genres, mostly heavy metal, that can provoke - combined with some hallucinogens - young people to jump out of the windows of cars while driving at high speed. I’m opposed to that kind of music.”
Iran has got it all figured out. Homosexuals don’t exist and heavy metal is the greatest threat to our children. Sounds like the U.S. twenty years ago.
I’ve never watched the Q & A segment of a beauty pageant and thought to myself “wow, what a thought provoking point. How insightful. Please, carry on.” And I’m fine with that. All I ask is that you don’t stutter out sentence fragments about completely irrelevant topics in a vain attempt to answer a simple question. Watching Miss South Carolina take a huge whiff at this softball question makes me wonder if she, herself, might be one of those unfortunate citizens who did not have access to a map. To me, this question had a very simple answer: the South.
This halftime show performance by a group of Pop Idol losers from the Netherlands just overtook Roseanne Barr’s disgraceful rendition of the Star Spangled Banner as the most painful thing I’ve ever listened to in my life. The only thing worse than the singing in this video is the third guy from the lefts dance moves. Seriously, what are you thinking?
As is the case with any much anticipated release date, the usual crowds of excited fanboys and eBay vultures have converged on Apple stores around the country for the release of the Apple iPhone. Since every nuance of Apple’s latest offering to the tech world has been covered in nauseating detail for the past few months, I’ll spare you my own opinion on the topic. Instead, I offer you a hilarious video of the consequences of being a greedy idiot.
I think it’s fair to say that this woman’s business prowess wasn’t bankrolling today’s $100,000 trip to the Apple store. The only regret I have is not being able to see the smug arrogance washed from her face when she was informed of the one phone per customer policy. I have no doubt that every other person in line was well aware of this policy and was making every attempt to contain their laughter over this woman’s $800 mistake.
Having spent the formative years of my life in Buffalo, I’m always looking to find ways to keep my hometown relevant to the big city types who don’t acknowledge anything upstate of Westchester. What better way then to point out it’s grammatical flexibility?
“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo,” is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs. It has been known to exist since 1972 when the sentence was used by William J. Rapaport, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo.
The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word “buffalo”.
In order of their first use, these are:
The city of Buffalo, New York
The animal “buffalo”
The verb “buffalo,” meaning to bully, confuse, deceive, or intimidate
The phrase can be roughly translated to mean “Bison from upstate New York who are intimidated by other bison in their community also happen to intimidate other bison in their community.”
I thought this was pretty awesome despite the relative lack of bison feuding in the region for the past few centuries. Regardless, feel free to casually slip this phrase into conversation and wait for someone to correct your grammar. That should buffalo them.
Any shred of credibility that MTV was clinging to in the entertainment industry was destroyed last night during their annual MTV Movie Awards. Having not tuned in for their broadcast in the past decade I decided to give it a chance this year.
This was my first mistake.
The red carpet show was nothing more then a half hour of shameless promotion for the summer blockbuster flick Transformers, which stars a bunch of no-name actors with absolutely nothing interesting to say. Assuming the endless plugs and repetitive “exclusive clips” would end with the preshow was my second mistake.
The shows only redeeming quality was host Sarah Silverman’s relentless attacks on her fellow celebrities, most notably Paris Hilton. She is such a bitch and I love every minute of it. After the opening monologue had ended, so did anything that resembled entertainment. From that point on the show would be dedicated strictly to self-promotion and more nauseatingly drawn out Transformers promotions.
Now, it’s one thing to dump a monster marketing budget into one event and force feed your stars and trailer on the viewers, but the tactics employed by Transformers and supported by MTV sunk to a new low. Toward the end of the show, a new award was announced: ‘Best Summer Movie You Haven’t Seen’. At first I was interested, thinking this might be an attempt by MTV to pay homage to all of the great films not staring Will Ferrell or Sasha Baron Cohen. This was my third and biggest mistake.
This year’s award for the ‘Best Summer Movie You Haven’t Seen’ goes to, you guessed it— Transformers. God dammit that was the last straw! After the cast was done parading around the stage with a false sense of accomplishment, they returned to present the very next award for ‘Best Movie’ and, once again, remind us of the July 4th release date.
Although the list of unimpressive nominees included perennial MTV heavyweights like Johnny Depp and Will Ferrell, I couldn’t help but think that Transformers would somehow manage to pull this one out too. Fortunately I was once again mistaken as ‘Pirates of the Caribbean 2’ took home the grand prize. Finally, it’s over! But wait…
The show was immediately followed by a Transformers themed skit by MTV.
Then a Chevrolet commercial featuring the cars from Transformers.
I had to change the channel before I threw my remote through the television. The sad part is, I’ll still see the movie (I just won’t pay for it). As for the MTV Movie Awards— I’ll catch you in another decade.
Despite Giuliani’s best efforts to clean up the streets of New York City, Times Square is still dangerous. What is this world coming to that children aren’t even safe while Mom is distracted by a break dance circle?
Keith Richards will always be a legend for his music, but he will also be remembered for being the personification of a true rock star. Despite decades of complete disregard for moderation when using drugs and alcohol, Richards inexplicably continues to defy death. While he has always had a decadent reputation, he outdid himself this time. In comments published Tuesday, the 63-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist said he had snorted his father’s ashes mixed with cocaine.
“The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father,” Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.
“He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn’t have cared,” he said. “… It went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”
Richards, who was No. 1 on the ‘who’s likely to die’ list for an entire decade, was “really disappointed” when he fell off the list.
Rock on, Keith.
* * UPDATE * *
So it turns out this story isn’t actually true (according to his manager), but it sounded legitimate enough. Allow me to atone for this mistake with a true story about Ozzy Osbourne. While on tour with Mötley Crüe, Ozzy got into a cocaine-snorting contest with their bassist Nikki Sixx. Once the blow was gone, he proceeded to snort a line of ants off of a popsicle stick. Did I mention this was at a hotel swimming pool and he was wearing one of Sharon’s sundresses? Anyways, the two then engaged in a gross-out contest, which ended in Ozzy licking Sixx’s urine off the cement. You won’t find these types of stories in the memoirs of Nickleback. I miss the days when rock stars actually lived the lifestyle.
