Category: Politics

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Truck Stop Women and Phil Gramm

HEY! I just heard/watched this on Keith Olbermann, who mentioned IMDb! It turns out former senator Phil Gramm has an IMDb page and was an uncredited executive producer for a film called “Truck Stop Women”. Porn! Republicans! VHS! Anyway.

These scenes “really got Phil titillated,” Caton told journalist John Judis in 1995. Gramm enthusiastically cut Caton a check for $15,000. Because the film was oversold, however, Caton returned his brother-in-law’s money, offering him an investment opportunity in an upcoming feature.

Phil Gramm’s page and Truck Stop Women.

AND! Apple co-founder Stephen “The Woz” Wozniak may have been spotted on “The Price Is Right,” according to a post on macrumors.com.

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Bat to bra in three sentences

I love how Harper’s Weekly connects dots in their weekly emails. An unaltered paragraph from their latest digest:

“The British retailer Marks & Spencer defended a policy of charging extra for bras that are bigger than size DD, saying the charge represented “a small premium for [necessary] specialist work,” while the protest group Busts 4 Justice derided the price increase as an unfair tax. A British teenager who assumed that tremors in her bosom were caused by her vibrating mobile phone found a baby bat nestling in the padding of her 34FF bra. The World Health Organization warned people not to go into Ugandan bat caves after a Dutch tourist died from the Marburg virus, a hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola.”

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Bruno is the new Borat! With Iranian missile “enhancement”.

They’re filming Sacha Baron Cohen’s next movie, it seems, when things like this appear in the news:

Crowds in Arkansas came for the lure of cage fighting and $1 beer, but police say what they got instead was men ripping each others’ clothes off and kissing _ a stunt suspected of being orchestrated by Sacha Baron Cohen of “Borat” fame.

…The two men would then wrestle, rip away some of their clothes and share a brief kiss reminiscent of one between Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell in the film “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.”

An elaborate array of mounted and handheld video cameras caught the crowd of 1,600’s reaction as the two men “went right up to the line” of the city’s morality laws, Holland said. The two men stripped down to their underwear, kissed and rubbed on each other, the sergeant said.

The audience, as well as local fighters drawn to take part in the show, became enraged. “It set the crowd off lobbing beers,” Holland said. “They had beers in plastic cups. Those things can get some distance on them actually.”

The article finishes with a bit of Mike Huckabee trivia!

If the cage match visits came from Baron Cohen, it wouldn’t be the first time Arkansas fell for a practical joke. In 2000, then-Gov. Mike Huckabee fell for a prank and congratulated Canada for preserving its icebound Parliament, calling it a “national igloo.”

National igloo! He ran for President! National IGLOO!!! Brüno releases May 15, 2009 in theaters.

Is having Photoshop overseas a recipe to enhance your missile testing? Iran thinks so, and got most major US dailies to run the photo untouched!

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A double-dose of The Stranger

I normally just skim our alt-weekly The Stranger, but this week provided two must-read articles: one person’s perspective on the economic slowdown, called United States of Anxiety, and a book review of Steven Seagal’s filmography and discography, relived in order of release.

Humanity is not dead in “Wall-E,” but it is in peril. The world’s population cruises the heavens ceaselessly on a mammoth luxury spaceship that it boarded in the early 22nd century after the planet became uninhabitable. For government, there is a global corporation called Buy N Large, which keeps the public wired to umpteenth-generation iPods and addicted to a diet of supersized liquefied fast food and instantly obsolete products. The people are too bloated to walk — they float around on motorized Barcaloungers — but they are happy shoppers. A billboard on the moon heralds a Buy N Large outlet mall “coming soon,” not far from that spot where back in the day of “Hello, Dolly!” idealistic Americans once placed a flag.
from the Frank Rich column, “Wall-E for President“

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Denny’s: to go; Borat’s mankini: “Success!”

Developers: infinity, Preservation of sentimentality: 0.

And in the interest of balance (Warning: disturbing photos of callout below can be found here):

FROM the beaches of Kazakhstan to the catwalks of Milan, the mankini has finally found its way into high fashion.

In an outfit that can only owe its inspiration to the male one-piece swimsuit worn by the Sacha Baron Cohen character Borat, British designer Alexander McQueen sent this brave male model to front the crowds for Milan Fashion Week.

Guaranteed never to let the wearer down, the original mankini made its debut in the movie Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan.

The mankini was a low point of the male collections, which included Donatella Versace dedicating her collection to US presidential hopeful Barack Obama, Giorgio Armani presenting jackets and suits, and Dolce & Gabbana unveiling pin-stripe suits as loose and easy as silk pajamas.

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Disbelief.net

A clever retooling of beliefnet, to promote Bill Maher’s upcoming film, “Religulous”.

I’ve heard this video has been discredited, but cellphones popping popcorn still makes for great entertainment.

“Ringing the phones doesn’t help because they’re interfering with each other and receiving a signal [from a cellphone tower] — not transmitting it,” he said. Furthermore, while it is possible to heat with sound, it’s not likely to happen at the low volume emitted by a mobile phone. “It would be like gathering opera singers together to sing, and trying to make the corn pop,” Bloomfield said.

Physicist Debunks Cellphone Popcorn Viral Videos

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Battle in Seattle: opening night at SIFF

Tracy and I went to opening night at SIFF to catch the Stuart Townsend movie, “Battle in Seattle”. It was… okay, but like many in the audience, I was there when the WTO protests happened, and it was a bit strange to see a semi-fictionalized version of the events on screen. Andre Benjamin (from Outkast) was the runaway hit, though — while Woody Harrelson, Charlize Theron (with a completely unnecessary-to-the-plot pregnancy-with-horrible-end subplot) and the script playing distant second. Ray Liotta was completely miscast as the Mayor of Seattle, as was the actor who played the Governor. There was also an unnerving disconnect between real-world footage and the film’s footage, which made me wonder that a straight documentary would have the better solution.

It wasn’t all bad, though — apart from Benjamin’s performance, the fight scenes were very spot on, and Townsend worked with people involved on both sides of the WTO protests to help build a story.

BUT, the best account I’ve seen from any of these films is Showdown in Seattle: Five Days That Shook the WTO. On VHS, though.

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GOP R&D budget: $0. “The Change You Deserve”: Priceless

I understand that not everyone uses the Internet, but even an advertising agency or marketing firm would do a Google search, since they’d have at least three or four Internets, or even a series of tubes, to play with. This seems to be an independent effort free from research,  totally in lockstep with Republican domestic and foreign policy.

What the GOP doesn’t seem to realize, because they are idiots, is that “the change you deserve” is the registered advertising slogan of Effexor XR, a drug that many of you might have started taking as a result of all the…you know — terrorism.

More at the Huffington Post.