Do you hear that? That wet, flapping sound? Don’t be alarmed friends! It’s just the the sound of one old-media prick being an insufferably entitled docuhe bag. Dean Reynolds, a campaign correspondent for CBS recently saddled up to the to world wide web to type up a little missive about, as he called it, “How the Other Half Lives.”
Quick point of reference! How the Other Half Livesis the title of a book published in the late 1890 that acutely captured the squalor of New York tenement life. It’s considered to be the finest example of American muckraking. It’s a disturbing expose of American poverty, violence, and naked anguish. With stunning pictures!
So Reynolds snatched the historic title and slapped together a laundry list of gripes about the arduous life of a MSM campaign reporter: you know all the private jets, hotels, plush buses, etc.
Baggage calls are preposterously early with the explanation that it’s all for security reasons…The McCain campaign plane is better than Obama’s, which is cramped, uncomfortable and smells terrible most of the time. Somehow the McCain folks manage to keep their charter clean, even where the press is seated.
It goes on like this. And gets SO much worse. But was this just a moment blistering satire of Swiftian proportions? Nope! This is the subsidized droppings of an “asinine” member of the media elite. Thank fucking Christ brethren of Blogistan caught onto this and are now railing against him.
Read their hilariously scathing highlights after the jump!
You guys! We just checked Hipster Runoff and OMG! They just grabbed hold of yet another resurgent 90’s trend that could rival Nu-Ravers: Step-Dad Jeans.
The 90s were a black hole of suck for fashion. Flannels, Doc Martens, and bodysuits worked in unison to make your teenage body look like a young replica of some chubby proletariat auto mechanic enjoying his day off at the track. But the biggest fashion failure of the 90s was by far, women’s jeans. Why did it take the jean industry so long to figure out that high wasted, FUPA covering pants was no way for ladies to waddle through life???There was the exceptional wide leg jean that prevailed towards the latter half of the decade. Their slimming appearance made nearly every beer-faced freshman look decent when donning a pair and hitting up a Ben Harper show.
So what was the alternative to the unflattering high wasted pegged jeans your local mall was offering you, besides spending $100 (gasp!) on a pair of Diesel jeans that sort of made you look not homeless? The answer was hanging in your stepdad’s closet, right underneath his stash of Playboys. To the sheer horror of their mothers, teenage girls in the 90s donned their dad’s pants in order to free their newly pierced belly buttons from rubbing up against their buttonflys. Also the pants were big enough so that they would hang off your hips in just the precise manner of exposing your silky underwear straps (the precursor to the whale tail!). They were nowhere near flattering, but at least they were comfortable.
And now it seems, those thriftstore dad jeans might be making a comeback. We predict they will make more of an impact than those high wasted jeans Jessica Simpson tried to unleash on the world a while back (big shout out to my pal RJ Beavers who makes a background appearance in that shot). But don’t go thinking you can run back to your parents’ closet and make away with a pair of jeans that will leave you looking fly. Those days are long gone. These new designer stepdad jeans are subtly fitted in areas where they need to be and baggy in a way that will still make you look kinda slim. If any designers reading this post want to send me a pair to try out, I would totally dig it. (I’m a 26 waist).
This may surprise you, but the cringe which adds hundreds of irreversible wrinkles to your face when you hear Sarah Palin speak doesn’t come from her inane policy proposals. (Or not totally.) For the most part, it comes from witnessing Palin desecrate our most precious resource: verbs
Remember verbs? They’re the valuable action words which come between subjects. They’re awesome! They tell you exactly what happened and when. But Sarah Palin hates verbs. She twists them, snips them, and hides them from us. The result is a tangle of decontextualized ideas and dizzying logic collapsing in onto itself. When you are confronted with the sentences of Sarah Palin, you are confronted with the abyss.
Forget singing popcorn and poor Hollywood folk begging you not to buy pirated movies in Koreatown! There’s a new annoyance in your multiplex.
Kid Rock is a motherfuckin’ patriot. He breathes red, white, and blue. He is a warrior. A warrior that has annihilated his shampoo bottle into non-existence. So you don’t have to waste 2:35 of your life, we’ll break down what the video wants you to know. If you like race cars, Kid Rock, and blowin shit up, then you should join the National Guard. And if you don’t like any of those things, then you’re a fag.
The video is totally is super insulting to the troops: there’s not a single (bikini clad, beer guzzling) chick anywhere to be found! At least the jihadists promise a harem of virgins to their “warriors.”
This was pretty popular last time we did it. So I’m gonna try to make it a weekly thing. Here’s stuff on the internet that doesn’t involve snark or scorn. Just beautiful allure.
So the economy is in the shitter and Wall St. wants to throw itself in front of a train for reasons we don’t fully comprehend (we’re waiting to catch the layman explanation for the crash on an episode of Oprah). But here’s what we do understand - Americans have been living above their means for the last eight years and we hold The Frumputantes personally responsible. Quick vocab refresher!
Frump-yoo-tahnt - noun: Derived from the American word frump (meaning slothlike slob) and a derivative of the French word, debutante. A woman aged 15-60 who exerts little to no effort when it comes to maintaining personal appearances because she is deluded by the fact that a name brand purse or fancy pair of sunglasses counts as effort.
We can all bitch and moan about what’s become of our beloved Runway in season five, but the signs were already there.Even The USA Today had noticed that winning big on Project Runway was even more meaningless in the fashion industry than an American Idol win was for a musical career, and Bravo set out in season four to collectively skullfuck us until we remembered the names of their chosen disciples.Season four brought us the “Show Us How You Rethink Design” commercials and spawned Christian Siriano’s circlejerk cameo on Ugly Betty.Christian, in spite of finally showing a genuinely likeable outpouring of delight when he took the prize, was more of a cartoon than a human being for most of the show.
How many long months and Top Chef casts did we wait between seasons three and four of Project Runway?By the time the commercials were aired, we were so happy that we didn’t even stop to snark about how we couldn’t tell it Bravo’s advertising staff was punning on “It’s Show Time” or “It’s so time” (emphasis, hopefully, implied by Bravo ad execs).We were all so pleased with Christian that we all let it slide when those same people told us that casting was already underway for another season—send in your audition tapes, y’all!
We lapped it all up with a spoon and the Weinstein’s mistook our ravenous need for more Runway with genuine approval of their formula.This season, we’re reaping what we’ve sewn: the product placement challenges are more pronounced and the focus is on a cast of characters who could sell real estate for David Mamet; while the challenges have been phoned in like Stephen King pitching his next book.If Runway has any hope of a future at Lifetime or anywhere else, the Weinsteins are going to have to realize that their success depends on more than just Tim Gunn saying “Thank you, Mood” in the most homosexual way possible.
As if the blog world weren’t bleak enough with layoffs and a few well-compensated sites hoarding traffic and precious memes, now mainstream media outlets are chipping away at bloggers’ quotas by doing their posts for them. Esquire’s Web site has a feature about the making of its current cover, which features Halle Berry posed like Bill Clinton from the magazine’s December 2000 issue.
We balked at Esquire’s cover tactic a little while back (before any one read this delightful blog!), and in the spirit of re-hasing your own bullshit, I just want to re-broadcast my weighty disapproval. And I quote:
Nothing screams relevance like self-aggrandizing nostalgia! This is much like a coked-out and bloated Dirk Diggler trying to relive his glory days by masturbating furiously in front of a mirror. Trying desperately to prove to himself and others that’s he’s still got “it”. What made Esquire’s great covers great was daring, innovation, pushing the envelope and tapping into the zeitgeist. Hey, Esquire! Want to channel your heydey? DO SOMETHING NEW.
*We’re suckers for muckrakey reporting glory (even if it’s in print!). So imagine our delight when the Wall Street Journal published this awesome missive about fish mongering felons!
For years, the cigarette pack was the clichéd currency of prisons. But since 2004, when smoking was prohibited in federal prisons, prisoners have been using mackerel, sold in prison commissaries in foil-and-plastic pouches, to purchase goods and services. The cans can be used to make shivs, and funnily enough most prisons aren’t comfortable selling sharp metal containers to a group of people with a lot of free time and notoriously poor anger management.
Prisoners tried different items after losing access to smokes –books of stamps, Power Bars — before settling on the preserved fish. It makes a good currency, ironically because almost no one wants to actually eat them.
But the mack is being affected by the crappy economy, just like the value of your condo! The weak dollar, combined with recent poor catches, have made the cost rise. Whereas a packet of mackerel used to be almost exactly $1, prices are surging in prison commissaries. I guess they could always go back to using bitches; but they aren’t as portable, and you can’t stack 20 of ‘em in a prison locker.
Public School Intelligentsia was designed by Matty and Natasha, who aren't experts like a sommelier will tell you that your lamb would taste better with a 1970 Rothschild Cabernet Sauvignon, but experts like that kid who inexplicably puts together an awesome party mix in fifteen minutes from somebody else's music library.
Prisoners tried different items after losing access to smokes –books of stamps, Power Bars — before settling on the preserved fish. It makes a good currency, ironically because almost no one wants to actually eat them.
