The world's most ironic toddlers strike again.

8:46 PM :: Comments (4)

I distinctly heard him say Jew Wants To Be a Superhero. Canonist has the Semitic angle on my favorite new reality show: Iron Enforcer is a member of the tribe — and he has a secret plan for peace in the Middle East: "If you can’t get along together, I will blow the land up."

I think they're ahead of you on this one.

11:45 AM :: Comments (0)

It had to happen. For the first time in history, an anti-caption contest winner is a finalist in the actual New Yorker caption contest.

Harry Effron, who signs himself just plain Harry in his anti-caption submissions, was honored for his entry, "The hours here are obscene." (I'll let you figure out what the cartoon was.)

Attentive anti-captioners might find that a bit familiar, so here's the behind-the-scenes scoop.

Harry's father, Eric Effron, is a colleague of mine at The Week who sometimes submits to the New Yorker contest but not to the anti-caption contest. A couple of weeks ago, Eric forwarded me his submission for the dingbat clock toon: "The hours here are obscene. Yesterday, I couldn't leave until #@^!." My reply was that it could make a good anti-caption if he changed it to ""The hours here are obscene. Yesterday, I couldn't leave until 7:30. Also, someone has defaced my clock."

As a little inside joke, Harry then submitted that anti-caption to this site -- while also streamlining his father's entry to the actual contest. A few hours later, anticaptioner mypalmike, not knowing any of this, wrote, "Predicted real winner: The first sentence of Harry's entry: 'The hours here are obscene.'"

So let's make that prediction come true! Head over the The New Yorker and vote for Harry Effron (not that he needs our help, given the competition).

10:11 AM :: Comments (7)

Submit the worst possible caption for this week's New Yorker cartoon. Click here for last week's results. Click here for an introduction and "rules" to this contest. Click here for amplification of those rules. Click here for contest index.

"You're perfectly healthy, baby Suri."

Results after the jump

Continue reading "The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #61" »

9:56 AM :: Comments (102)

It's obviously harder than it looks to create a good reality show. I would have thought that taking the Amazing Race formula and adding genuinely difficult puzzles would be brilliant. Instead it's Treasure Hunters. On the other hand, Who Wants to Be a Superhero could have been a disaster. How do you make a show out of ordinary people putting on costumes and pretending to have superpowers they obviously don't have? But holy Speedos, Batman! I'll be damned if the Sci-Fi Channel hasn't pulled it off.

If you missed the first episode last night, catch it in reruns. It takes a certain kind of guts these days to do high camp with a straight face, but Sci Fi, host Stan Lee and most of the contestants hit their notes perfectly. Good casting is obviously the first key. From Monkey Woman, who tried out for the opportunity to use her "many talents: climbing trees, making monkey noises," to Iron Enforcer, a lunkhead with a ridiculous supergun attacked to his arm ("Can you caulk a bathroom with it?" asks Major Victory). Everyone is superfriends so far, but you know there's going to be tension when raw foodist Creature finally confronts Fat Mama about getting her powers from doughnuts and Twinkies.

The first competition shows how the program will find clever ways to test for superhero qualities in people who can't actually leap tall buildings in a single bound (so far there has been no discussion of powers, though I gather from the Web site that will come out at some point; One of Cell Phone Girl's powers is listed as "download any information available on a computer," which seems less like a superpower than, you know, an Internet connection). The heroes are told that they'll have to compete to be the fastest to covertly change into their costumes (with no phone booths available, Creature jumps into a garbage can) and run to a location. But before the finish line, Stan the Man has planted a little girl crying for someone to help her find her mommy. The footage of several costumed would-be heroes running right past her without a second glance is priceless.

Despite the plethora of hot superchicks, my early favorite is Major Victory, a square-jawed all-American repentant stripper trying to redeem himself in the eyes of his daughter. Victory has internalized the old school angst-free blue Boy Scout ethos of the classic Superman comics and dressed it up with some flashy dance moves. Brandon Routh, watch your back. When Victory literally scoops the little girl into his arms or cocks an eye at the camera and says, "be a winner, not a wiener," this is what geek TV is all about.

10:08 AM :: Comments (1)

Woah! You could take out Haifa with those missiles. There's a sustainable cease fire for you in my pants, honey. [Hat tip: Steve]

Earlier protest babe pics: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Bonus! Previously unreleased Cedar Revolution Lebababes after the jump.

Continue reading "Hezboda-bing!" »

6:18 PM :: Comments (2)

"If people can stop yelling do I know what a quarter-pounder with cheese in France is called and start yelling get these motherfucking snakes off the motherfucking plane, I'll be fine, I'll be great." —Samuel L. Jackson on the advantage of his latest catchphrase. But shouldn't he hold out for let there be light? [hat tip: Andrew]

12:47 PM :: Comments (5)

I'm trying to figure out why Slate slugged this story with the category seen in the menu image at left. Either a lucky someone has figured out exactly what color his parachute is, or he really loves his Treo 700p.

2:45 PM :: Comments (2)

Submit the worst possible caption for this week's New Yorker cartoon. Click here for last week's results. Click here for an introduction and "rules" to this contest. Click here for amplification of those rules. Click here for contest index.

Results after the jump

Continue reading "The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #60" »

9:13 AM :: Comments (82)

Well this should make the Charlotte's Web junkets just a little more interesting. I wouldn't want to be the guy writing press releases at Walden Media today. [Via Gawker]

3:33 PM :: Comments (5)

An image from the Wikipedia entry on the Israel-Lebanon conflict earlier today.

Apparently, "This article may not conform to the neutral point of view policy." Ya think?

5:03 PM :: Comments (2)

Based on the sinking box office numbers, it's probably safe to assume that if you haven't seen Superman Returns yet, you're not going to. I'm one of the few people who saw it after opening weekend, so this warning is coming a little late, but please: avoid this stinking hunk of craptonite [hat tip Jake]. Somehow the critics were largely suckered into thinking that slow and boring equals thoughtful and grown-up, but in this case, nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, it's not as bad as the the painfully frenetic Fantastic Four — possibly the all-time worst comic book movie — if only because you won't actually leave with a headache, but Superman -- well, I was about to say it fails on every level, but it doesn't even try hard enough on any level to actually fail. Is it an homage to comic books? To the 70s movies? A love story? A social commentary? A Christ allegory? An action movie? A comedy? It just sort of throws out elements of all of those and then lets them sit there lifelessly. They shoulda called it Stuporman. No wait, Pooperman. Um, Superscam...

So tell me, trusted readers. Do I need to see that pirate movie? I liked the first one quite a bit, but from the moment I heard that the plan for the sequel was to make the comic relief the main character, I've been suspecting nothing but the worst, box office records be damned.

4:55 PM :: Comments (8)

So some guy in Arizona is proposing a ballot measure to turn general elections into lotteries, offering a shot at a million bucks to everyone who votes.

This happens to be a violation of federal laws, which make it illegal "to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate."

This is more than just a technicality, it's a bedrock principle of democracy, which correctly values the right not to vote as highly as the right to vote. Most people argue that civic duty values voting over not voting, but a lot of the time, there are plenty of good reasons to not vote at all.

Perhaps a way to make the Arizona measure legal is to also embrace a reform that we ought to be considering anyway: adding a "none of the above" choice to all ballots. Not only would abstainers get their shot at the prize, it would allow elected officials and the general public to quantify how much non-voting is truly apathy, as we're usually told, and how much is a protest against inadequate choices.

11:45 AM :: Comments (2)

Submit the worst possible caption for this week's New Yorker cartoon. Click here for last week's results. Click here for an introduction and "rules" to this contest. Click here for amplification of those rules. Click here for contest index.

"Honey, I'm taking down the family picture. Its conventionality undermines the quirkiness I'm attempting to convey with my novelty clock."

"How about @:$!!? Does @:$!! work for you?"

Results after the jump

Continue reading "The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #59" »

5:23 AM :: Comments (72)

Sorry about that dead air, folks. For the past couple of weeks I've had just enough Internet access to check my e-mail and maybe the news. Sure I could've recruited a guest blogger to fill in for me, but here's the thing: this is my hobby. I'm thrilled that so many of you keep coming back and I appreciate you and everything, but I'm not -- and never will be -- one of those bloggers who feels obliged to post ten times a day, every day, or even every week. I do it because, most of the time, I easily can, and because it's fun. Frankly if I ever started worrying about posting regularly, the quality would probably suffer. I know it seems unlikely that some of the stuff here could be even more lame, but trust me, it could.

Anyway, I'm just back from back-to-back research trips for my book. First to a massive Christian music festival in Illinois and then to the International Christian Retail Show in Denver. I'm going to stick with my practice of not revealing much about the book in advance, but I will make note of a couple of things that you'll be hearing about anyway long before my 2008 pub date.

First, the Left Behind computer game is really effing cool. I'm not sure how many video games there are based on books, but I suspect this will be the first one that's easily better than its source material. In fact, my fear is that it will lead more people to actually read the books, which would be a tragedy for everyone. Anyway, LB: the game is the first urban real-time strategy game, and it's set in a beautifully rendered and accurate (though not 100% open) Manhattan. I'm not a huge fan of the genre, so it's hard for me to fairly evaluate gameplay (especially after only five minutes) but it seems pretty smooth and fun, if you're a fan of all that building armies stuff. The question is whether gamers will be able to overcome their queasiness about the evangelistic nature of the game. Truthfully, there's no reason they shouldn't. After all, videogames are already rife with the battling of demons, evoking of supernatural powers, and wielding of mystic energies -- and having all that in a modern New York is much cooler than having it in some dungeon somewhere. You just have to not care that the game designers (seasoned professionals) happen to think this is all fact, rather than fantasy, and because they're courting the secular market, they try not to hit you over the head with that (scripture quotes and Christian rock on load screens can be blocked with a touch of the space bar). The initial reaction from the gaming community will almost certainly be shock at the competitive quality, something never remotely approached in the meager history of Christian videogames. Once that fades, the game will be evaluated on its own terms, and I'm very curious to see how that pans out. (The controversy among Christians about the fact that in multiplayer, gamers can play the Antichrist forces is a red herring; the segment of the evangelical market that cares about such things isn't the one that would be playing videogames anyway).

On a shorter note, the Passioning of Hollywood continues apace. Look for The Nativity Story from New Line to be the "sleeper" hit of Christmas with more to come in 2007.

And now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

Update: Thanks Wikipedia! It looks like there are very, very few videogames based on books (not counting games based on movies that were books first): a few Lord of the Rings games that preceeded the films, a couple of Pern and Ringworld games, and Infocom's brilliant Hitchhiker's Guide (which is arguably at least as good as its source material, and had a considerably higher bar than Left Behind). Oh, If any game moguls are out there, give me a call. I have a great idea for an RPG based on a bestselling book that has been optioned for the movies but that I'm guessing, because of its literary quality and adult audience, has so far been overlooked for adaptation as a game. Trust me, it'll make us all rich.

4:19 PM :: Comments (12)

Something is mighty fishy about this story. Supposedly the MPAA has given a PG rating to a mild film because of its Christian message. Terry Mattingly -- an evangelical writer who has an excellent religion and journalism blog -- writes that "the scene that caught the MPAA's attention may have been" a conversation in which the football coach witnesses to his star player.

May have been? How could anyone know. The MPAA is notoriously unforthcoming about the reasons for its decisions, and also notoriously harder on indie films (which this is). I don't have time to do the research now, but I suspect plenty of evangelical films have gotten G ratings. Somebody is talking out of their ass here and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's the filmmakers looking for a little publicity.

Which they got in spades. Now Congress is involved (shouldn't they be protecting the flag or something). Blowhards are blowing hard about "ratings creep," by which they mean that movies that would have gotten harder ratings in the past are getting looser ones now. If you watch any teen comedy from the 80s, you know the opposite is true. But ironically, Congress may be the only ones who can crack open the secret society of the MPAA and bring down this corrupt system. Sure, they'll replace it with something worse, but I won't exactly mourn for it.

8:55 PM :: Comments (5)

Blogging will be very light through July 17. Why not click randomly through the blogroll on the right?

9:56 AM :: Comments (2)

Submit the worst possible caption for this week's New Yorker cartoon. Click here for last week's results. Click here for an introduction and "rules" to this contest. Click here for amplification of those rules. Click here for contest index.

Continue reading "The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #58" »

9:20 AM :: Comments (87)