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Howard Stern said what all of us were thinking about Gabourey Sidibe and actually, I’m surprised he’s the only one who’s said it publicly – especially the way he did so. The whole spiel is very un-Sternian in its lack of crudeness and cruelty. He really just says the truth: she’s unhealthily huge and should change that and that Hollywood isn’t an industry-town that rewards obesity with acting roles. If you’re a big fat fatty in Hollywood, you can be a comedian or a one-shot role player and Gabby is the latter. It’s not mean to point that out – it’s mean to lead her on by pretending she’s going to move on to an illustrious career after this. eek.

Which is not to say that she’s gonna vanish immediately either. duh. not after all the buzz on her. Actually, I hear she has been given a role in the Showtime series The C Word and a role in a feature called Yelling to the Sky, so ya, she’ll have some kind of a wave to ride at least. But staying that size isn’t going to make that surf a long one. just makes sinking inevitable.

Stern also made the same Gabourey/Cabaret song acknowledgment that I’ve been saying to myself every time I hear her name, so I liked having that validated as a reference.

Avatar/Pocahontas Mashup FINAL VERSION from Randy Szuch.

and that’s not a paraphrase. the dude (liberal pundit Bob Beckel) said “shit” on Fox News without batting an eye – which is, i’d say – amusing enough to post it. It’s cable news so it’s not illegal or anything, but… its cable news. people don’t normally say “shit” on it and it’s generally frowned upon. It’s funnier though that everyone except conservative columnist Cal Thomas doesn’t react at all to the naughty word that was uttered and just keep rolling along.

A left wing movement calling itself the “Coffee Party” has been formed to respond to the right wing movement against Obamas expansion of government policies calling itself the Tea Party. Washington Post did a profile on them and they have a website, but… it’s all kinda murky as to what exactly is going on with it.

The first thing I thought of when I heard of this though was, how come no one is calling these people evil brainddead bigots like the Tea Partiers are constantly labeled? A rally over Barack Obama’s policies called the “Coffee Party” and no one has cried racism? How soon ye forget…

I guess a “Chris Rock” impression voice needed to be present.

Clearly this Coffee thing is kind of all over the place when it comes to explaining wtf it’s even attempting (follow the link for video vs interview clips of its founder saying how she created the moment to oppose the Tea Party but that she’s not opposed to the Tea Party and prepare to be confused) and looking to them for more specifics is an exercise in vague niceties:

We want the political process broken down into three steps:
1) open and respectful dialogue
2) thoughtful and informed deliberation
3) competent and decisive execution.

The process is so broken, we can’t get past step 1 right now. We demand cooperation, productivity and accountability in government in the same way we would demand it of an employee we might hire for a job.

We want local chapters to have the autonomy to figure out their own legislative and electoral priorities. At the national level, we’ll make recommendations for direct action on legislation. But they will only be suggestions. We value and celebrate diverse opinions just as we value and celebrate diverse backgrounds. All that is required to be part of this movement is a sincere commitment to participating in, and protecting the democratic process.

Okay… so they have a problem with there being a lack of open and respectful dialog in Congress and they want to organize against it..somehow. Alright.. I guess. although it’s a really weird thing to rally over. whatever. these “can’t we all just be nice?” types like to look across the pond as examples of Government things we should emulate when it comes to larger government and more control from the state, but never nuclear power, social issues that lean to the right or civility in politics.

Recently in the UK, this happened:

Ukip’s Nigel Farage faces reprimand after calling Herman Van Rompuy ‘wet rag’ . (you know this is a story from UK as soon as you hear there is someone named “Nigel” involved. charming).

MEP and UKIP leader Nigel Farage on Wednesday delivered another major tirade against EU President Herman van Rompuy and, along the way, severely insulted Belgium and Greece during a plenary debate in the European Parliament. Farage said Van Rompuy had the “charisma of a damp rag” and the appearance of a “low-grade bank clerk.”

Actually it just showed that Smokers Have Lower IQs Than Non-Smokers, but I’m going with the words “proof” and “stupid”, cuz duh.

Cigarettes are the only drug type substance people get hooked on that starts with a horrible experience. You do heroine or wine coolers and anything in between and you’re like “dude, this is AWESOME” or at least “ya, this is giving me what I want enough to keep doing this”, but with smoking it’s horrible for everyone. You cough, it hurts – everyone reports bad first try’s, yet they are stupid enough to force themselves to get hooked and dependent on this expensive life shortening and quality-of-life decreasing product. Good one…idiots.

According to the investigators, 28 percent of the study participants smoked at least one cigarette a day, around 3 percent said they were ex-smokers, and 68 percent had never smoked.

The smokers had significantly lower intelligence test scores than non-smokers, and this remained true even after the researchers accounted for socioeconomic status as measured by how many years of formal education a recruit’s father had completed.

The average IQ for non-smokers was about 101, while it was 94 for men who had started smoking before entering the military. IQ steadily dropped as the number of cigarettes smoked increased, from 98 for people who smoked one to five cigarettes daily to 90 for those who smoked more than a pack a day. IQ scores from 84 to 116 are considered to indicate average intelligence.

Recruits aren’t allowed to smoke while intelligence tests are administered, the researchers note, so it’s possible that withdrawal symptoms might affect smokers’ scores. To address this issue, they also looked at IQ scores for men who were non-smokers when they were 18 but started smoking during their military service. These men also scored lower than never-smokers (97 points, on average), “indicating that nicotine withdrawal was probably not the cause of the difference,” the researchers say.

The researchers also compared IQs for 70 pairs of brothers in the group in which one brother smoked and the other did not. Again, average IQs for the non-smoking sibling were higher than for the smokers.

This French anti-smoking ad campaign (whats next? German anti-bratwurst commercials?) says the message nicely.. Read the rest of this entry »

Jay Leno moves from his canceled variety show at 10pm back to his role as host of the Tonight Show at 11:35pm on March 1st, so naturally NBC found it necessary to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties to have a Beatles song score the Public Service Announcement of the change. A clever Youtuber however has flipped the sentiment of the ad to make it a bash on Leno.

The original ad features the Beatles’ “Get Back,” at a point in the lyrics that say “get back to where you once belonged” which I guess is their way of saying the whole ‘Conan O’Brien as host’ thing was a big mistake and that Jay should have never been pushed out in the first place.

UPDATE: I’m leaving the embed here even though it’s expired cuz… wtf? that’s weird that a network would let a commercial for themselves expire on their own video distribution website. Hulu videos and whatnot, I understand expiring – but a commercial for the Tonight Show? really? you don’t wanna just leave that up for posterity and another excuse to show people a preroll commercial? whatever dude…

While I think Leno is getting smeared to hell over this debacle, I can’t deny that this Leno-bashing remix of the above promo is diabolically clever. It’s the same ad, slowed down for an unsettling effect and the audio replaced with Radiohead’s “Creep”, ending in the lyrics “I don’t belong here”.
Ouch + Zing = Win.

FINALLY an environmentally friendly mode of transportation that is logical and affordable…

At the age of 13, Zara Hartshorn already looks 50.

Hartshorn, who is from Rotherham, England, suffers from a rare genetic disease known as lipodystrophy. The disease causes layers of fatty tissue under the surface of the skin to disappear. Only around 2,000 people in the world are said to have the condition, and there is currently no known cure.

The effects of the disease have caused Hartshorn a great deal of hardship and discomfort.

“People call me ‘granny’ and ‘monkey,’ ” she told the New York Post. “Sometimes I’ll just go into the toilet and cry.”

It was more entertaining when Robin Williams did it =(

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Late Night Lesson: Separating emotion from reality.

I hate guns. I feel like they’re dangerous killers and the fanatics who love them so much are creepy and awkward to me. I also know that that’s all emotion. I emote at a desire to have a large government apparatus to tightly restrict the use and sale of all firearms everywhere, but I’m not an animal – I’m more than just a sack of chemical causing emotions. Intellectually I have to observe reality and make an analysis from that, not my primal girly feelings, and that tells me that the 2nd Amendment makes a safer nation. More guns equal less crime. Which is one of the many blocks that pushed me into realizing more and more that I’m a Libertarian: I don’t ever want a gun, but I want everyone else on my block to have one… It’s not right for me to impose my illogical, baseless anti-gun emotion on others and that’s why it enraged me when Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine came out and I found out that it was a start-to-finish lie-fest. I saw the commercials for it on tv and thought “dude, this is AWESOME” and indeed it was – it was a very well crafted, interesting, emotional and most of all – persuasive film promoting a thesis I agreed with. So when I found out that nearly nothing in it was true (see BowlingForTruth.com for the library of staged scenes, factual misstatements, inaccurate statistics, gotcha interviews and truly despicable slander against Charlton Heston – from editing his speeches to editing the interview he was kind and open enough to grant Mr Moore). The point was that lying to your side is not only still wrong, but worse. because you are setting us up to be fools. Lying in service to push an agenda you feel is good is punishment in that it’s only a matter of time before those lies are exposed – and then what? you’ve done a disservice to both the cause AND it’s followers. You’ve hurt and embarrassed everyone for no damn reason.

This scenario is playing out again. and I hate it.

Here are the FACTS:
-Jay Leno was removed from the Tonight Show replaced by Conan O’Brien and moved to a new show at 10pm.
-Both the 10pm Jay Leno show and the 11:30pm Tonight Show suffered large ratings losses for NBC.
-In response, NBC asked Leno to cut his show in half, from an hour down to 30 minutes, and return to his own time slot, thus pushing Conan’s Tonight Show back a half hour.
-Jay accepted the change. Conan didn’t. as a result, Conan decided to leave NBC.
-Now left with a Tonight Show that has no host, NBC offered Leno his old position back. Leno accepted.
-Conan’s future in television has yet to be announced.

I watched the full hour of the Oprah edition with Jay where she asked him to appear (Conan got a separate invitation too, but he declined) and even went to him (the interview took place on the set of the Jay Leno Show in Burbank, not Oprah’s in Chicago).
He said everything right. Every. Single. Thing. Right.

Oprah, whom I’ve never seen so skilled and probing in an interview, tried to trip him up at every turn and nothing worked. Nothing. Jay won’t say anything bad about anyone. He said he was right to be fired from his 10pm show because he didn’t deliver for the network – a kind of responsibility acceptance you don’t often see in showbiz – but said he was heartbroken at being fired 5 years in advance from the Tonight show when he was #1 and remained #1 until his last show – and it’s a legitimate point.

None of the smears against Jay I’ve heard showed themselves as even being possible. The diabolical “he’s just painting himself as the victim so he can be the good guy” stuff makes no sense in context and the “he should have retired and stepped aside to let Conan in” is equally redonulous. The guy spends his vacation time doing stand-up comedy in Vegas. Why should he quit his one passion in life just because someone else wants his job? Answer: Because we like that other person better. Okay, fine – so support that other person. You don’t need to tear down the other guy with lies and tales of villainy to do it. Oprah’s only super lame moment was when she said Leno’s one joke about David Lettermans sex scandal with his employees was “beneath thim”. so… Sanford jokes and Clinton jokes and John Edwards jokes – but David Letterman is off limits? huh?

Stop lying about Jay Leno. There is no evidence that any of this debacle was his fault and just because you – like me – prefer the alternative, Conan Obrien, that doesn’t give you license to lie.

As Oprah noted in explaining why she thinks people are so anit-Leno: People don’t understand the way television works.

So stop it. You’re pissing me off. I’m sick of you lying to me.

TEAM COCOJAY.