Daily Briefs: Does the red carpet match the velvet curtains?
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Because, who cares? The Pitch‘s Carolyn Szczepanski writes a great blog feature called “The Give a Shit List.” This was kind of adapted and evolved from my original idea, the “I Could Give A Shit List,” demonstrating the power of one or two words to completely change the semantics of a phrase. My list included things like internet “bacon” jokes and the Academy Awards.
One time, I enjoyed a sit-down pee inside a pink-colored porta-john at the Lillith Fair. But even that doesn’t make me girly enough to sit through, or give a shit about, the Academy Awards. According to my source, the Internet, Australian entertainer and Van Helsing star Huge Ackman’s hosting duties actually included tap dancing with a hat and cane, an obstinate rejection of about a hundred and fifty years of technological innovation in the field of entertaining audiences. For instance, any given inexplicable Cirque du Soleil performance is likely to include flaming children painted like blue jungle cats dangling from the rafters above a human pyramid of golden-leotard-wearing French acrobats juggling midgets dressed like dolphins. That’s a real tribute to the jadedness and tiny attention spans of today’s theater-going audience. To get their attention, you actually have to set children on fire. Here’s Patton Oswalt on that whole thing. Like fighting the Viet Cong, you’ll see a whole lot of things at a Cirque du Soleil performance that you never thought you’d see in a million years. But you’ll never, ever see a guy tap dance across the stage with a hat and cane.
I know which movie I thought was the best one last year (Wall-E). And I know how many of the actual nominated films I saw (none of them). Don’t know what happened there; I really got into my bodybuilding last year, and spent all my money on 8-gallon tubs of protein powder at GNC instead of buying tickets on Fandango. So I guess maybe The Kansas City Star‘s Robert Dubya Butler could beat me in any trivia category involving Kate Winslett. But I guaran-damn-tee he can’t clean-and-jerk 320 pounds, then set the bar gently on the ground (my gym doesn’t have bumper plates, and they’ll kick you out if you damage the floor).
This Day in Douchebaggery: At the Hardin County Republican Party’s Kentucky Fried Lincoln Day Grits ‘n’ Possum Dinner, U.S. Senator and former Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Jim Bunning took the opportunity to remind everybody that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg is going to die, and that he is giant, flouncing douchebag. Saying he supports conservative judges, he added, “… and that’s going to be in place very shortly because Ruth Bader Ginsburg … has cancer… Bad cancer. The kind that you don’t get better from.” Ordinarily, I’d pick this as the moment to add some rude little observation, but that would be interrupting, because Bunning actually kept going, saying, “Even though she was operated on, usually, nine months is the longest that anybody would live after (being diagnosed) with pancreatic cancer.”
And I’ll just wait here for a minute to see if he’s done. Yep, it looks like the rest of his comments dealt with his totally inexplicable fundraising problems and the support for moderate Republicans by the National Republican Senatorial Committee instead of straight-shooting strict constructionist oncological diagnosticians like himself. Not to be rude or morbid, but it’s not just the liberal side of the Supreme Court that’s looking kind of haggard these days. Judge Antonin Scalia looks like his heart is actually pumping a life-giving mixture of bacon grease and duck fat. Thank god for the age of beta blockers and vasodilators, because without them, I’ll bet Noam Chomsky or some other hippie descriptive grammarian would be a Justice.
