IN A WORLD where apparently anybody can come up with a movie idea, the Friday Random Ten+5 is going to tell some toy stories.

When last the Friday Random Ten+5 reared its ugly head, we came to the sad but necessary conclusion that the second "Transformers" movie just wasn't all that good. Not quite bad enough to ruin my fond memories of playing with the toys as a grade-schooler, but we're not out of the woods yet: Brace yourselves, Dudes In Your Late Twenties To Mid-Thirties, if you played with G.I. Joes as kids, there's a G.I. Joe movie coming out this summer that may just be bad enough for you to disavow any knowledge of that franchise's existence. And at least "Transformers" and "G.I. Joe" have reasonably engaging source material; apparently there's a whole slew of movies in development right now that will rape even the most mundane of our childhood memories. You may have heard, for example, that there's a Monopoly movie coming out that's going to be directed by fricking Ridley Scott. But what you may not have heard is that McG, fresh off of steering the "Terminator" franchise straight into the ground, is in talks to make a Hot Wheels movie. And it gets worse: Apparently someone at DreamWorks is angling to buy the rights to a View-Master movie. Lemme stop you right there, DreamWorks: If the magical View-Master in this prospective film isn't showing a special story disk titled "Erin Andrews and the Thong Bikini of Destiny," you're probably not getting my $9.25.

But there's a silver lining to all this cinematic dumbfuckery, and it's kind of along the lines of the epiphany Patton Oswalt had toward the end of his "Death Bed" bit: Apparently any talentless douchebag can just pick a childhood toy at random and turn it into a major movie project these days. With that in mind, I think it's finally time for me to do something with my nascent screenwriting career, and I've got plenty of ideas. And you're getting an exclusive preview, you lucky fucks: This week's +5 is Five Toy Lines I Could Probably Turn Into Movies. Feel the excitement!



The Game of Life
If you think about it, there's a real opportunity for some heavy-duty black comedy here. Maybe you've got Philip Seymour Hoffman and Michael C. Hall as friends who build an increasingly intense rivalry as teenagers, and they make a vow to turn the rest of their lives into a competition where they try to amass as much money as possible and the person with the most money at the end wins. From there it's a non-stop battle to come out of college with a good job, have as many children as possible, and fall ass-backward into the right money-making opportunities until they can finally face each other as old men at Millionaire Acres and attempt to crush each other's lifetime hopes and dreams once and for all. As all this is unfolding, of course, they go progressively crazier and crazier until they both end up as nutty as Daniel Day-Lewis at the end of "There Will Be Blood" and they're both completely broken and miserable. (I didn't say it was going to be an uplifting movie.)



Lego Agents
I got some of these a few days ago (yeah, I did, what of it?), and they're actually pretty badass -- the little mini-figures have computers and pistols and rocket launchers and everything. Since they've already made extremely well-reviewed video-game franchises out of the Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones series, I'll bet somebody can squeeze a movie out of this. It couldn't possibly be any worse than "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."

(Audio NSFW)


Power Wheels
I'm thinking this movie takes place at the point in our dystopian near-future at which we finally run out of our last drop of oil, and adults have to resort to relying on their kids' Power Wheels for transportation. Then someone discovers a revolutionary energy source and the shadowy intelligence organizations from all the world's major powers become locked in a deadly battle to obtain it, which would be the perfect excuse for some "Ronin"/"Bourne Supremacy"-style car chases through the cities of the world, recreated entirely with Power Wheels vehicles.



Galaga
This video game looks absurdly simple compared to what kids are playing these days, but I have yet to be able to resist one of these machines in a bar, arcade, bowling alley, or any other locale. Could a feature film be as addictive? I mean, you've got the first act, where our protagonist is blowing up alien spacecraft; the second-act complication, in which his ship is CAPTURED and he has to make his way back to base; and the thrilling third act, in which he has to blow up the alien tractor-beam ship without blowing up his own ship so that he can get it back and blast away at the aliens with twice as much firepower. That's at least 80 minutes' worth of screen time right there.



Rock Band
Actually, I just want Trey Parker and Matt Stone to turn the "Guitar Queer-O" episode of "South Park" into a full-length feature film, because that episode was on the other night and I was reminded of how fucking brilliant it is. All it needed was a Yoko to turn Stan against Kyle and break up "the band."

Producers, my e-mail address is on the right at the top of this page; don't everyone bum-rush my inbox at once. In the meantime, here's the Ten:

1. Flight of the Conchords, "Foux Du Fafa"
2. Pet Shop Boys, "Flamboyant" (Scissor Sisters Silhouettes & Shadows mix)
3. Orbital, "The Girl with the Sun in Her Head"
4. Pet Shop Boys, "I Don't Know What You Want but I Can't Give It Any More"
5. Passengers, "United Colours"
6. Weird Al Yankovic, "Another One Rides the Bus"
7. Underworld, "Shake It Higher"
8. Underworld, "Lenny Penne"
9. Johnny Cash, "Joe Bean"
10. The Streets, "Stay Positive"

Back to you, folks. Your Random Tens and terrible ideas for cash-in toy-based movies in the comments, please.

A memo from the desk of Arnold T. Pants, Esq.:Alabama guzzles beer while Lindsay avoids "The Hangover."

"All aboard," says Orrin Hatch. (This eventually makes sense, I promise.)

· First things first, and the first thing today is self-aggrandizement. With the illustrious Dr. Saturday traveling earlier this week, I've been chipping in a little bit more than usual over there, including an assessment of the will-he-or-won't-he questions about Steve Spurrier retiring and a slight stretch of a metaphor regarding Orrin Hatch's BCS hearings (but it does have a point, I promise).

Keep your eyes peeled over there too, Bulldog Nation, because my next installment in the Better Know an Embattled Coach series concerns a coach we've all loved to hate over the years. I'll also be popping up tomorrow over at Team Speed Kills to critique their assessment of the Dawgs (this has been Georgia week over at TSK, where they're breaking down an SEC team each week leading up to the start of the season) and offering some thoughts of my own.



· According to this map, beer consumption in Alabama is about average compared to the rest of the nation. And it may increase now that Free the Hops has succeeded in ridding our fair state of its oppressive alcohol-content-limit laws. What I don't understand is how little ol' Alabama is outdrinking Georgia by so much. And what the hell's going on up in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut? At least Utah has a religious excuse -- what's y'all's?

· Just when I thought I was done having to explain, rationalize, or excuse my divided UGA-UAB loyalties, along comes news that the Dawgs and Blazers will be playing a home-and-home in basketball this year and next. But lest anyone allow themselves to assume I'm not All Dawg, I'll be rooting for Georgia in both matchups -- we've got a new coach who needs to get some early wins under his belt, while an increasing number of UAB fans seem like they'd only be too happy to unload their guy.



· Lindsay Lohan turned down the role in "The Hangover" that eventually went to Heather Graham. Yeah, who'd want to play a prominent role in a hilarious blockbuster movie that's already grossed nearly $300 million at the box office? "A washed-up actress who's so broke she's having to charge $70,000 to make an appearance at her own birthday party" would be my guess. But then maybe Lindsay found out that Mike Tyson had a cameo in "The Hangover" and decided she didn't like the Which Former Superstar Has More Completely Embraced Teh Crazy? comparisons that would invite.

· And finally, a photo from one of the many massively strongly somewhat attended "Tea Parties" that took place on July 4, with brief commentary courtesy of Google Reader.

The Saga of Sarah.

I guess I don't have much to add to the continuing astonishment over Sarah Palin's decision to say "no mas" and vacate the Alaska governor's mansion except for this: I'm disappointed. I was seriously hoping that the Republican Party, in its current state, would continue to hold up Palin as their Great Oh-So-Very-White Hope for the next three years, just long enough to nominate her to go up against Obama in the 2012 presidential election, at which point she would flame out and put the GOP right back at square one in terms of rebuilding their national stature. God, what a fun ride that would've been. I was fully prepared to go deep cover and volunteer for Palin's 2012 Alabama primary campaign if it looked like that scenario might come to pass.

But it's not going to. My knee-jerk reaction to Palin's announcement the day before Independence Day, like a lot of people's, was that she was unloading her gubernatorial responsibilities so that she could devote herself full-time to the business of laying the groundwork for a balls-out 2012 presidential run. With her brand name beginning to take on some tarnish from Todd Purdum's unflattering Vanity Fair profile and the resulting infighting with McCain's people, she was going to metaphorically stomp off to her room in a huff, sulk for a few months until enough people in the Republican base came groveling to stroke her hair and tell her how pretty and awesome she was, and then burst forth in February 2011 (or earlier) with a recharged ego and a refreshed arsenal of lame down-home witticisms, determined to yank the reins away from President Hussein and reclaim America for the real Americans.

But if she really wanted to do that, why not just wait a few months and announce she wasn't going to be running for another term as governor? Why quit in the middle of her first term? If one of the big knocks on you as a vice-presidential candidate is that you have minimal political experience, why throw away the opportunity to gain any additional experience if you don't have to?

"Sarah Palin isn't smart in what we might call conventional ways," writes TBogg in a short but highly incisive post from earlier this week, "but she has grifter smarts" -- or, as Holly characterized it, "middle-school, mean-girl, locker-room smarts" -- and that elementary cunning was enough to lead her to a conclusion many of us arrived at months ago: There's no way she's ever going to get elected president. Her favorability ratings began tanking within a couple weeks of her acceptance speech on the floor of the Republican National Convention last September, and while dyed-in-the-wool religious conservatives thought she was the greatest thing since sliced bread (and still do), independents quickly decided they wanted nothing to do with her (and still don't). Reports say even her fellow Alaska Republicans had started to turn on her, to the point where she might not even have been able to win a primary challenge in a potential re-election bid -- and when you can't even hold together a Republican coalition in one of the reddest states in the country (Democrats haven't broken 40 percent in a presidential election in Alaska, much less won outright, since the 1960s), your prospects for building anything resembling an effective base of support nationally are in deep ka-ka.

So why'd she do it? Let's go back to TBogg:

. . . [Palin] knows that she can make a better living working the wingnut welfare circuit preaching to the already converted than she can in politics.

He also quotes Jill from Brilliant at Breakfast:

If she were about helping other working mothers and parents of special-needs children and health care for all and a stable job base, she could have been a credible contender for first female president. But alas, she is only an aging beauty queen, a Mean Grrrl who in politics has found a way to extend her reign as Prettiest Girl in High School to use people (or states) and then throw them away when they stop feeding her massive ego . . .

That description stops just short of summing up what I think is a central truth about Sarah Palin, a truth that clues us in to both why she quit her gubernatorial term in midstream and why she'll never be president. For all the talk about all the things that made Palin such a refreshing novelty on the national political scene over the past year or so -- her gender, her good looks, her unusual family, the exotic locale from whence she sprang -- she's not actually unique at all: She is George W. Bush, only female and cute. Like Bush, her most substantial political experience was a governorship of modest responsibilities, and whatever renown she'd acquired was primarily for superficial reasons (good looks = Bush's famous family name). Without much of an actual track record or stated policy slate to speak of, the neocon wing of the Republican Party decided on her as a blank slate upon which they could project their hopes and ideals, an assignment that she, like Dubya, tackled with gusto. But through it all she's expressed the same intellectual incuriosity that Dubya demonstrated throughout the entirety of his presidential term -- they both know what they feel about this issue or that issue, their minds are made up, and they're not interested in acquiring any additional information about it, especially not anything that would challenge the worldviews and prejudices they'd already spent so many years setting in stone.

Seriously, does a woman who can't come up with an answer better than "all of 'em" when asked a question as simple as "what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read" sound like she gives a flying fuck about becoming knowledgeable on the major issues of the day? Does she sound like someone interested in doing anything other than what Bush did as president -- i.e. bringing in "advisors" who will tell him/her exactly what he/she wants to hear and nothing more? Palin's legions of right-wing fans may not demand any more than that from her, because her willingness to "go with her gut" in the absence of any debate or time-consuming deliberation is one of the things they most admire in her, just as they admired it in Bush before her. But the rest of us, as evidenced by the 2008 election outcome, have come to our senses, and have started demanding a little more from the person who holds the most powerful title in the free world.

Evidently, even people in Alaska are starting to demand that as well, and that, as much as anything, is why she resigned so abruptly: The job got too hard, too many people didn't like her, she wasn't having fun anymore. So she quit, just like she quit a series of colleges and a position as head of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. She's going to lay low for a while, then write a book (or have one ghost-written for her) and probably get a talk show on Fox News, re-establish her position as the spokesperson for the great not-so-silent not-quite-majority of aggrieved Tea-Party-throwing, Obama-hating ultraconservatives without actually having to get elected to anything, and thereby become the only thing she ever really wanted to be all along: a celebrity.

Is that an overly harsh assessment? Probably, but as hard as I try, I just can't find one shred of evidence that Palin has any stomach for the difficult and sometimes spirit-sapping work of actual policy-making, consensus-building, or governing. Leave out the sob stories about catty Vanity Fair articles or tasteless jokes late-night talk-show hosts have made about her kids; in the end, that stuff's got very little to do with actual politics. It's got more to do with the travails of simply being a celebrity, and while Sarah Palin may look like she's selflessly falling on her sword and giving up the limelight for the good of her family or her state or whoever, she'll be back. Only as a pricey lecture-circuit choir-preacher or Fox talking head, of course, not as someone poised to make any direct, tangible difference in what goes on in Washington.

But that just kind of makes the Saga of Sarah -- to the extent that there is one -- only that much more pointless and wasted in the end. You will have Sarah Palin to kick around anymore, sooner or later, but only if it's on her terms, and in a capacity where she doesn't actually have to put anything on the line. She'll say stupid things on big stages, people who should know better will give her more air time than she deserves, but in the end history won't remember her as anything even resembling a transformative figure; the Saga of Sarah won't end up being remembered as anything more than a year in its political life that America won't ever get back.

Monday Morning Cage Match IV:Heavily armed VTOL ground-attack aircraft vs. AWW WOOKIT THE WITTLE BABY.

For the first time in the history of the Cage Match, I've got a dog in the fight -- a literal dog in the fight, come to think of it -- but I'll try to be as objective as I can in judging the battle royale of Harrier vs. Terrier. No animals will be harmed in the production of this post.

	[Boeing/BAE Systems AV-8B] Harrier	[Boston] terrier
Price	$30-35 million	$300-$1,000
WINNER: Terrier
Lineage	Hawker P.1127, first flown in 1960	Bull-and-Terrier and various breeds of bulldogs, first bred in the 1870s
WINNER: Tie
Original purpose	Ground/naval attack	Pit fighting, catching and killing mice and other vermin
WINNER: Harrier
Cuteness	Negligible	OFF THE CHARTS
WINNER: Terrier
Lethality	Considerable	Generally only to stuffed toys and Milk-Bones
WINNER: Harrier
Biggest drawback	Not supersonic	Gassy
WINNER: Harrier
Notable owners	Armed forces of the United States, Italy, and Spain	Rose McGowan, Famke Janssen
WINNER: Terrier

FINAL SCORE: Harrier 4, Terrier 4. From which we are forced to conclude that both are equally awesome.

America, f%$# yeah.

Why a chick in an American-flag bikini? For the same reason the United States ever does anything: Because we can.

Amongst the many things I'll be declaring independence from today, the biggest is sobriety. Happy 4th, dorks.

The (belated) Friday Random Ten+5 writes an open letter to Michael Bay.

Dear Mr. Bay,

I'll start this off bluntly: I'm not the hugest fan of your work. "The Rock" was pretty entertaining, with a stellar cast of actors, but "Armageddon" and "Bad Boys II" might be the two worst movies I've ever seen in my life. In fact, my favorite entry on your extensive and varied résumé might just be the "I Touch Myself" video. So when I heard that you'd be directing a series of "Transformers" movies, I was conflicted: Worried that you'd turn them into a "Bad Boys"-esque farce, but at the same time admiring that you'd have the stones to take on the task of creating live-action films around my absolute favorite toy/TV show from when I was a little kid.

I liked the first "Transformers" a lot. It wasn't deep, it didn't give any sort of greater insights into the human condition, but the robots were absolutely fucking beautiful, and overall I felt like it was $9.25 well spent. The second one, though . . . not so much. Perhaps I shouldn't have seen it from the second row of an IMAX theatre, a vantage point which, combined with your usual frenetic editing and blizzards of explosions and crashing metal, made me feel like my brain's occipital love had just gone ten rounds with Tyson. I didn't even have the chance to appreciate the majesty of the beautiful CGI robots you put in there because they were all -- remember that YouTube video some guys did of putting an iPhone in a blender? That's what that whole movie looked like to me. (Except for the slower parts with Shia LaBeouf and his family or Megan Fox, and we'll get to that in a minute.)

I know there's a third "Transformers" movie already in the works, and Michael, you've got some redeeming to do with that one. My sister, in her usual take-no-prisoners manner, has told you what you've done wrong; now I'm going to tell you how to do it right. Mike, I'm devoting an entire +5 to you, and I don't do this for just anyone, so pay attention while I give you Five Ways To Make The Final Movie In The "Transformers" Trilogy Not Suck.



Make the Transformers do more actual, you know, transforming.
Without the ability to turn into cars or airplanes or household appliances or whatever, Transformers wouldn't be Transformers; they'd just be big-ass robots. Yet that central gimmick was largely lacking from this movie. The actual act of a Chevrolet Camaro rising up and turning into a huge robot is, in my opinion at least, way more fascinating than two huge robots simply beating the shit out of one another, so if you're spending all that money on CGI, maybe you should try dialing the balance back in favor of the former. I'm just saying.



Stop making Megan Fox's character so needy.
The central conflict in the romantic subplot in "Revenge of the Fallen" is Megan Fox's character's desire to hear Shia LaBeouf's character say "I love you" and his inability or unwillingness to do so. Sorry, but I'm calling shenanigans on that. It is impossible for me to willfully suspend disbelief there, because if all this were actually happening, Megan Fox's character would eventually look into a mirror at some point and say, "You know what? I look like Megan Fox," and realize that if her current boyfriend isn't willing to say "I love you," she can just go out and select from any of the millions of adult males who would be willing to do that. And no offense to Shia LaBeouf, but if a guy who looks like that is dating a girl who looks like Megan Fox, he's playing with house money. In real life, he'd not only be telling her "I love you" (and whatever else she wanted him to say), he'd be walking her dog, changing her oil, and cooking her a three-course meal while he did so.



Leave Sam's family out of it. Completely.
I've met many of my friends' parents, from parents I thought were unbelievably cool to people I wouldn't want to be seen in the same room with, and Shia LeBeouf's



Simplify and differentiate the robots.
The animation of the original Transformers cartoon series might have been somewhat primitive even by mid-1980s standards, but the benefit to that is that you never had trouble telling who was who. Bumblebee was yellow, had little Viking horns on his head, and his feet were the front fenders of a VW Beetle. Megatron had that big cannon on his right arm because he was a gun. And so on and so forth. The robots you've created for the live-action films are gorgeous to look at, and almost frighteningly realistic, but there's just one problem: They're so complex I can barely tell which one is which. Megatron and Starscream, in particular, have practically been interchangeable from the get-go. Especially during the fight scenes, I pretty much have to resign myself to a blur of metal parts from which somebody is eventually going to emerge victorious, and that leads me to my last suggestion:



Before signing off on any of the action scenes, give them one last viewing and ask yourself, "Do I have any idea what the fuck is going on here?"
If the answer is no -- and if this third film ends up anything like "Revenge of the Fallen," it will be, frequently -- go back and change it. If you've created what you think is this awesome sequence of two gigantic robots kicking the crap out of each other, but you go back and watch it and the robots actually look more like that iPhone-vs.-blender video, you need to spend some more time in the editing bay. For all our sakes.

Thanks for listening, best wishes on the third movie, and happy 4th. Hope you're treated to a fireworks show befitting your status as American cinema's foremost connoisseur of Shit Blowing Up.

Sincerely,
Doug Gillett

P.S. Here's the Ten:

1. Elton John, "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting"
2. Pet Shop Boys, "Losing My Mind" (Disco mix)
3. Max Graham vs. Yes, "Owner of a Lonely Heart"
4. Pet Shop Boys, "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing" (Grandballroom mix)
5. David Holmes, "69 Police"
6. Pet Shop Boys, "Miracles" (Eric Prydz remix)
7. David Bowie, "Space Oddity"
8. The Streets, "Don't Mug Yourself"
9. Elton John, "Tiny Dancer"
10. Ween, "Hey There Fancy Pants"

If you're even reading this on the 4th of July -- and why on earth would you be? seriously -- go ahead and put your own Random Tens, and your thoughts on basically anything, be it "Transformers" or whatever, in the comments.

This week in extramarital booty.

A week after the initial revelation from South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford that he'd been carrying on an extramarital affair with a woman in Argentina, the best tidbits are now coming out. Read this story and this one, and then let's go over the highlights:

· "As recently as this month," Sanford "begged his wife to let him go visit his Argentine hottie." When I first heard about that, I thought, man, the balls on that guy! But the more I think about it, the more I'm thinking maybe Sanford's actually a wuss: You think Sarkozy or Berlusconi ever gave a fuck about asking for permission?

· The debate between "ballsy" and "wussy" might be purely academic, though: Since Sanford asked his wife for permission -- implying that he did care a little about her feelings on the subject -- but went anyway even after she said no, I'm going to settle on "asshole" for the time being.

· In a cabinet meeting last week in which Sanford apologized to his staff, he compared himself to King David, who had an affair with a married woman, Bathsheba, yet managed to maintain control of his kingdom. Presumably this means that Sanford will be ordering the death of his mistress's husband and then marrying her himself.

· Sanford confessed that he "crossed the lines" with several other women over the years but hadn't had sex with any of them. That still leaves a lot of wiggle room, though, and can include everything from "making out" to "third base" to "naked baby-oil Twister with a group of Singapore Airlines flight attendants." Not that I, uh, spend a lot of time thinking about stuff like that.

· Sanford is convinced that the woman from Argentina is his "soul mate," but he adds that he's "trying to fall back in love with his wife." So basically he's telling his wife, "Honey, this woman from Buenos Aires is my soul mate, but I'm TRYING to fall in love with you again." Wow, what woman wouldn't be made weak in the knees by an expression of romance like that? Not that you asked me, governor, but here's a tip: You "try" to lose a few pounds or get more organized at home. If you have to try to fall in love with someone, it ain't happening.

At this point, I have two pieces of advice for Gov. Sanford. First, shut the fuck up already. Your ratio of "words uttered in public" to "times looked stupid and/or like an asshole" is rapidly approaching 1:1. Second, bite the fucking bullet and get divorce proceedings started. It's obvious you don't particularly want to be married to your wife, she can't possibly want to be married to you all that much, and whatever benefit you think you'd be doing for your kids by staying together has probably already been negated by their knowing that you blew them off on Father's Day to go chase some South American strange.

But that's just one guy's opinion. At the end of the day, all I can really say is what a weird, weird dude. And kind of a tortured, conflicted one at that. But I will say this for him: I'm glad he's there, because compared to him even I look smooth with the ladies.

Then again, I've never managed to carry on a torrid affair with a woman from Argentina, either. Hey, anybody know what Yamila Diaz is doing these days?

Support our troops.

On a day when Josh was reminiscing about some of his favorite movies from 25 years ago, I got bored and ended up in one of those trances where you spend like a half hour bouncing from link to link in Wikipedia until you can't remember what you were looking for in the first place, and I stumbled upon a movie that time has mostly forgotten. Among other things, it features:

· Carla Gugino in her feature-film debut

· Tori Spelling, also in her feature-film debut

· Kellie Martin in only her third big-screen appearance, and still months before the premiere of "Life Goes On"

· The lead singer from Rilo Kiley

· Cameos including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Cheech Marin, and Annette Funicello

It's killing you, isn't it? Here's the film in question:



Yeah, I remember seeing this as a 10-year-old back in 1989, and have probably caught at least a few minutes of it rocketing through cable channels at some point since then. Here's a clip:



The girl telling the ghost story at the beginning of the clip is Emily Schulman, whom I know you remember as Harriet the annoying next-door neighbor kid on "Small Wonder." (Well, I know Josh remembers her.) In the two shot at 0:29, that's Kellie Martin on the left, and on the right I think that's Ami Foster, whom even Josh may not remember as Margeaux Kramer, the rich girl from "Punky Brewster." Shelley Long's daughter is played by Jenny Lewis, who went on to appear in "The Wizard" (yes, the Nintendo movie) and "Pleasantville" and then helped form Rilo Kiley in 1998. Tori Spelling doesn't show up until more than halfway through the clip, but she's helpfully marked by whoever posted it to YouTube.

And Carla Gugino is the one on the right at 0:17, playing "Chica Barnfell," whom the movie's Wikipedia page describes as a "stern girl who is generally left alone by her jet-setting parents." She appeared in "This Boy's Life" four years later, "Snake Eyes" five years after that, and appeared in 10 more feature-length films before making about the most memorable entrance in film history in "Sin City" in 2005.

And earlier this year, of course, she stole the show in "Watchmen" by looking like this:



Wow. I don't know whether to feel turned on, uncomfortable, or just old. I guess I'll go with "a combination of all of the three."

But anyway, the point is that "Troop Beverly Hills," despite its lukewarm reviews and negligible box-office performance back in the spring of 1989, might have just turned out to be one of the great bellwether films of our time. Prolific careers were launched here, people. So at long last let's give the movie some credit.

Oh, and Shelley Long was a fox back in 1989, too. Never should've quit "Cheers," but a fox all the same. I'm just saying.

Monday Morning Cage Match III:The cyborg hunter meets the moose hunter.

This week's Cage Match pits two very strong women against one another: the ripped matriarch of the "Terminator" series, Sarah Connor, versus the bespectacled matriarch of Alaska's first family, Sarah Palin. I would avoid, however, characterizing this as a catfight. A pejorative definition like that one no longer applies when there's this much ammunition involved.

	Sarah Connor	Sarah Palin
First job	Waitress	Wasilla, Alaska, city councilwoman
WINNER: Palin
Defining moment	Conceives John Connor whilst being chased by the Cyberdyne Systems model T-101	Chosen as John McCain's running mate
WINNER: Connor
How'd that work out?	Pretty well -- successfully destroyed both the T-101 and its successor, the shape-shifting T-1000	Not so great
WINNER: Connor
Hot?	Sorta	Yes
WINNER: Palin
Stance on gun owners' rights	Very pro-	Very pro-
WINNER: Tie
Child(ren)'s achievement(s)	Leading the resistance against Skynet	Impregnated by Levi Johnston
WINNER: Connor
Quote	"Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you're so creative. . . . All you know how to create is death and destruction."	"As Putin rears his ugly head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska."
WINNER: Connor

FINAL SCORE: Sarah Connor 5, Sarah Palin 3. Maybe John McCain should've picked Connor as his running mate.

The Friday Random Ten+5 gets its mourn on.

So Michael Jackson has died, and we're knee-deep in wall-to-wall media coverage that isn't as intense as 9/11 (so there, Ocho Cinco) but is every bit as intense, if not more so, than Princess Diana's 12 years ago. Honestly, I can say I was never that big a Michael Jackson fan; I think it goes back to when the "Thriller" video was released in 1983 and that final scene, where Jackson looks back at the camera with those glowing yellow wolf-eyes, frightened me about as much as anything I can remember from my childhood and scared me off of the King of Pop for quite a while. (Seriously, I was only six at that point and I was probably sleeping with the lights on for a solid week after that. Agghhh, that shit still scares the living crap out of me!)

So anyway, I'm not going to be one of those folks camped out in front of the hospital or in front of his mansion in L.A., not that I've ever been the type to get so worked up over a celebrity's death to do that anyway. But that doesn't make Jackson's death any less sudden or sad, and I'm certainly not above being affected by the death of a celebrity to some extent. And that's the subject of this week's +5: the Five Celebrities Whose Deaths I Took The Hardest.



Phil Hartman (1998)
Easily my favorite "Saturday Night Live" cast member of all time. In fact, I can't remember a single thing I've ever seen him in where he wasn't funny, whether it was any of his numerous "SNL" sketches, "NewsRadio," his voice-acting on "The Simpsons," his cameo as "Vicky" the tour guide in "So I Married an Axe Murderer," or anything else. And the thing was, he didn't go the coke-binge-and-numerous-unsavory-sexual-partners route that so many really popular comedians seem to go down; by all reports he was a faithful husband and a good dad. So that made it only that much more shocking when his wife (who apparently was drug-crazed) shot him and then committed suicide in the spring of '98. I'm convinced that if Hartman were still alive today he'd be hailed as one of the best comic actors on the planet, and maybe he'd have a recurring role on "30 Rock" or something.



Theodore "Dr. Seuss" Geisel (1991)
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Dr. Seuss is still my favorite writer of all time. I've still got bunches of his books proudly displayed on my bookshelf, and he saved my ass when I was taking the AP English exam during my senior year of high school, when the open-ended question was something like "Choose a book that deals with the topic of discrimination in society and how that book's depiction of a certain type of bigotry added to its message." Obviously we'd read a ton of books that year that would've worked for that question, but we'd covered the various eras of English lit in chronological order, which meant that the most recent material -- and therefore the stuff I remembered the best -- was postmodernist stuff that I couldn't make heads or tails of (while the older stuff I'd understood better was too far back in my memory to be able to pick out specific details). So I went for what NFL draftniks would call "a reach": I picked out Dr. Seuss's 1961 story "The Sneetches." I wrote the hell out of that essay, and you know what? I got a 5 on the test and got to exempt out of all the freshman-comp classes in college. Thank you, Dr. Seuss, for being a brilliant writer whom even doctorate-level literature scholars apparently have to respect.



Ann Richards (2006)
I've liked or agreed with plenty of politicians and elected officials; rarely, though, have I been naïve enough to admire any of them. But Ann Richards, former governor of Texas, was a major exception. She was unashamed of her liberalism on a number of issues and unafraid to call out people whom she thought were full of bullshit no matter where they sat on the political spectrum. And she was one of the last of an era in which certain Democratic politicians could actually be described as "badasses." Hopefully that era is on its way back, but either way, we could still use someone like Ann Richards right about now.



Optimus Prime (1986)
OK, yeah, Optimus Prime is a fictional character. But Transformers and Legos regularly traded the titles of my favorite and second-favorite toy when I was a child, and the "Transformers" TV cartoon was must-see after-school viewing all through elementary school, so when Prime finally bit the bucket in the feature-length animated film of '86, that was a biiiig, big deal. This Slate article explains it pretty well: As much violence as there was in the action cartoon series of my childhood, nobody ever actually died. But not only did Optimus Prime die in the movie (and not come back), he was gone from the subsequent season of the cartoon show, and didn't return until the three-episode "Rebirth" arc from the fourth and final season in 1987. Man, that show was a lot harder-core than I realized.



Johnny Cash (2003)
I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of country musicians I've ever actually liked (and probably still have enough fingers left over to do this). But I love Johnny Cash. And his death, less than four months after the passing of his wife June, was one of the saddest and somehow most romantic deaths of any popular musician that I can recall. He and Nanci Griffith are probably still the only two country artists whom I've deemed worthy of having entire albums' worth of material on my iPod.

Speaking of which, here's the Ten:

1. Nanci Griffith, "Love at the Five and Dime" (fancy that)
2. Underworld, "Born Slippy (NUXX)"
3. Pet Shop Boys, "It's Alright"
4. Radiohead, "Karma Police"
5. Dead Kennedys, "Short Songs"
6. Wu-Tang Clan, "Clan in Da Front" (which reminds me, Ol' Dirty Bastard should get an honorable mention on the above list)
7. Underworld, "Juanita/Kiteless" (live)
8. Elton John, "Bennie and the Jets"
9. A Tribe Called Quest, "Find a Way"
10. Talk Talk, "It's My Life"

Your turn, folks -- the celebrity deaths that had the biggest effect on you (Michael Jackson's is eligible, by the way) and your Random Tens go in the comments.

A memo from the desk of Arnold T. Pants, Esq.:Illicit affairs, meth-cooking Vikings, and other examples of people being s%$#ty to one another.

· Courtesy of a Twitter (a Tweet? I've been doing Twitter since before Christmas and I still don't know what the fuck these things are called) from the illustrious Dawgter Feelgood (a/k/a DAve), World War III propaganda posters:



· EDSBS's Orson Swindle became Public Enemy No. 1 for a while in the greater Shreveport-Bossier City metropolitan area for this column on Shreveport and the Independence Bowl. (Seriously, peruse that comments thread for a spell. I'm pretty sure there are a couple thinly veiled death threats in there somewhere.) Today, though, he gets at least a small measure of vindication:

In a mother-daughter fight that included pushing, shoving, wrestling, biting and wielding a pan, a woman kicked her mother unconscious and then defecated on her while she was lying on the floor, Bossier Parish sheriff's deputies said.

"It was a donnybrook," Lt. Ed Baswell said of the Tuesday morning brawl at a residence on Chelsy Drive in Benton.

The women -- Destinie Rechelle Duvall, 37, of Willis, Texas, and Patricia Ann Hacker, 62, of Benton were treated at LSU Hospital and then booked into jail.

Sheriff's deputies went to the house after Hacker's 12-year-old granddaughter called 911.

Deputies said they weren't sure what started the fight, but they said the daughter knocked her mother out of a chair and then kicked her in the head, causing her to lose consciousness. While Hacker was unconscious, Duvall defecated on her back, Baswell said.

OK, on the one hand -- and clearly the bigger of the two hands in this situation -- that's unspeakably horrible. But on the other hand, it kind of makes sense as a strategic move. Go big or go home, right? I mean, you're committed enough to this fistfight that you know you're probably ending up in jail one way or the other, you might as well go in there with a story that lets the rest of the inmates know you're not to be trifled with. "What are you in for?" "Robbed a guy at knifepoint." "What are you in for?" "Broke into someone's car and stole a purse and an iPod." "How about you?" "Beat my mom unconscious and then took a shit on her." "Whooooaaaa." That's a woman who doesn't have to watch her back in the prison cafeteria line.

· Yours Truly has two contributions to Dr. Saturday this week: a new installment in the Better Know an Embattled Coach series, this one focusing on Colorado's Dan "GO PLAY INNERMURALS, BROTHER!" Hawkins, and a rumination on bowl games' cockroach-like ability to survive economic catastrophe, nuclear armageddon, what have you. But I don't think Holly will mind if I point out my contributions to her preview of the 2009 UAB Blazers. In particular, I would like to claim credit for directing the Dr. Saturday readership to our UAB Magazine feature on the strange, random history of UAB's mascot.

Personally, I think our dragon mascot is teh r0xx0rz -- the raging-ass fire-breathing helmet/midfield logo more so than the cuter, kid-friendlier fuzzy sideline version -- but even if you don't share that opinion, you have to admit it's a step up from Blaze the Viking:



Supposedly this iteration of the mascot got the ax because he scared little kids. I don't personally find him that frightening at first glance; I think he looks more like Burger King's ne'er-do-well younger brother who's been in and out of jail for a string of petty assaults and public-intoxication charges, finally got a steady job on a construction site but got hurt and has been cocooning in his trailer ever since, collecting workers' comp and brewing up the occasional batch of crystal meth with his good buddy Purdue Pete. In that sense, though, I guess there's a sense of incipient murderousness about him, like if you were taking a walk in the woods and stumbled across his meth lab he'd really fuck you up. Nevertheless, I think we're doing fine with the dragon right now, thanks.

· Finally, we have South Carolina governor Mark Sanford. This is the guy, you'll recall, whose most recent political claim to fame was wanting to refuse hundreds of millions of dollars in stimulus money that had been tagged for his state. Now he admits an extramarital affair with a chick from Argentina, and it's been one full day since this revelation and nobody's made a "stimulus package" joke yet? Come on, people. You disappoint me.

For once, I have nothing to add.

Baby sis, putting me to shame, as usual.

This is how it's done, Akron.

Since I've duly excoriated the city of Akron, Ohio, for their crimes against the integrity of the exotic-dancing industry, I thought it might be time to balance that out with some good news from a town that knows how to do strip clubs right: my former home of Atlanta.

First of all, some dancers at the Cheetah have challenged one of Georgia's many idiotic "blue laws," this one saying that under-21 strippers can't perform at clubs that sell alcohol -- and they're taking it all the way to the Georgia Supreme Court. As someone who had to watch the decline of one of his favorite strip joints (Topper's, oh-so-conveniently located across from what was then the Red & Black offices on Jackson Street in Athens) after Athens passed a ridiculous law saying strip clubs couldn't sell alcohol if they went full nude, I applaud the Cheetah girls' courage. If the good people of Atlanta can't convince their dumbass legislature to let them buy booze on Sundays, they should damn well be able to see a 20-year-old pair of boobs while they enjoy a beer the other six days of the week, by God.

Secondly, the building on Ponce de Leon that houses the infamous Clermont Lounge looks like it's fixin' to get foreclosed on, but fear not, Atlanta hipsters, curiosity-seekers and assorted pervs -- "the place where strippers go to die" ain't goin' nowhere:

The dank, smoky strip club is known for dancers old enough to be many patrons’ mothers, or even grandmothers. The most famous dancer, Blondie, is known for reciting poetry as she plies her trade.

In recent years, the Clermont has been adopted by urban hipsters who pack the venue for DJ dance parties. Recently, the actors Woody Harrelson and Bill Murray were seen taking in the sights at the Clermont.

Even if the hotel falls into foreclosure, the Clermont Lounge should stay open, said attorney John Ayoub, who along with Mansour represents Fairway Capital.

“There’s no reason to stop them,” he said. “They have a business. They make money. They pay rent.”

Yes, regardless of what happens to the building's ownership, you'll still be able to watch Blondie crush beer cans between her cartoonishly prodigious ta-tas. It's nice to see some people respecting Atlanta's heritage.

And yes, I know I'm defending a place that boasts at least a couple strippers who have to be in their 70s, even though I tsk-tsked Akron for having a strip club that hired a 52-year-old. But you know what? This is different. There's nuance here. There's a difference between "It's a Saturday night, I want to do something nutty, let's go down to the Clermont and pound some PBRs while we watch strippers who are collecting Social Security" and "Man, let's go to a strip club, I want to see some boobs, and OH MY GOD WHO IS THAT, HOW IS HER TITTY IN MY LAP, SHE'S STANDING UP FOR CHRIST'S SAKE." And the Clermont, Lord love it, embraces the crazy and falls on the proper side of that line.

I sure hope my mom's reading this. She'd be so proud.

"OK, but seriously, do you want to know?"

Since I discussed good movies in last week's Friday Random Ten+5, it's only fair that I balance them out with a horrible one. See how far you can make it into this clip before your brain cells start to spontaneously combust:



I don't know what movie this is from, I don't even know who those two actors are, but I can hypothesize two things: 1) The screenplay for this single two-and-a-half-minute scene is probably about 20 pages long, and 2) whoever wrote it had just started taking an ESL class and had only learned a handful of English phrases. (I don't know what kind of paranoid-ass English class opens by teaching its students "Don't touch me!", but that's just the world we live in, I guess.)

Oh, and if you'll permit me to go a little Patton Oswalt on you for a second, here's 3): Someone actually produced and released this film.

Enjoy your week, mofos!

Monday Morning Cage Match II:The guy from "In the Bedroom" vs. one of the girls from Hugh Hefner's bedroom.

Well, last week's inaugural Monday Morning Cage Match was fun, wasn't it? Hey, shut up, I had fun. Well, maybe this week's will be a more competitive matchup -- one of my all-time favorite actors versus . . . uh, a pair of boobs I also like: Tom Wilkinson vs. Kendra Wilkinson (no relation, that I know of). Begin!

	Tom Wilkinson	Kendra Wilkinson
Occupation	Stage and screen actor	Glamour model
WINNER: Kendra
Big break	"The Full Monty," 1997	E! Entertainment Television's "The Girls Next Door," 2005-present
WINNER: Tom
Nudity?	Yes, rear only	Yes, full frontal
WINNER: Kendra
Awards won	BAFTA and SAG awards for "The Full Monty," SAG award for "Shakespeare in Love," Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy for "John Adams"	Second place on MTV's "Celebrity Rap Superstar," 2007
WINNER: Tom
Quote	"You think you got the horses for that? Well, good luck and God bless, but I'll tell you one thing: The last place you want to see me is in court."	"I don't really start planning my outfits until, like, a week ahead, because whatever I put on is gonna be hot -- you know, I could wear two Band-Aids and a cork."
WINNER: Kendra
Chest measurement	Unknown	34D
WINNER: Kendra
Upcoming project	British gangster film with Ray Winstone and Ian McShane	"Girls Next Door" spinoff
WINNER: Tom

FINAL SCORE: Kendra 4, Tom 3. Though Tom does get props for being a better actor.

The Friday Not-So-Random Ten+5(+20) has its list of desert-island films.

Not that this is a huge news flash to any of you, but on Thursday I once again had it confirmed that I have waaayyyy too much free time: I hit 10,000 rankings on Flickchart. That makes an average of 666.67 either-or rankings in the 15 days since Holly ensnared me in its binary goodness, which, in my half-assed defense, really isn't as bad as it sounds. As Josh, who's an even bigger movie nerd than I am, explains, when all you're asked to do is decide which of two movies is better, you can burn through a whole bunch of those pretty quickly, until it's 3 a.m. and you're staring at a screen with aching, bloodshot eyes and thinking to yourself, "OK, I know I'm supposed to think 'The Godfather Part II' is one of the greatest movies ever made, but did I really enjoy it any more than 'Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers'?"

So anyway, now that I've hit five figures it seems like I should have a pretty definitive list of my favorite flicks put together. Sure enough, looking at what Flickchart has determined are my favorites, I might put some of them in slightly different order, but all the movies that have truly taken my breath away and/or entertained the piss out of me are all right up there. So in honor of this momentous (or maybe just momentously obsessive-compulsive) achievement, this week's +5 is My Five Favorite Movies Of All Time As Determined By Flickchart:



5. The Usual Suspects
To describe this movie as "clever" is to give short shrift to the superb acting, the excellent use of music, the beautifully noir-ish look, and a whole bunch of other things . . . but be that as it may, Christopher McQuarrie would deserve a Nobel Prize (if they gave out Nobel Prizes for screenwriting) for coming up with this brilliantly convoluted plot. As it is, he had to settle for an Oscar, which makes for one of the few times my favorite screenplay from a given year actually won anything. (And on that note, here's the above "lineup" scene rendered in Legos.)



4. The Life of Brian
I may or may not be in the minority here, but I like it better than "Holy Grail" and consider it to be pretty much the funniest movie ever made. Organized religion is only one of the many things this Monty Python flick satirizes to within an inch of its life, and one simple exchange from the above clip ("Yes! We are all different!" "I'm not") sum up modern society about as succinctly as any seven words can. My mom got this movie for me when I was 13, not knowing anything about it, and was horrified by how blasphemous it was; today, tellingly, she loves it. And if we're going to hell for loving this movie, then so be it. (Another great scene: the "sermon on the mount." To me, the fact that these people are walking around ancient Israel talking in cockney accents is funny all by itself.)



3. Hotel Rwanda
I've already summed up my feelings on this powerful movie here, and my sister, as is typical, did a better job here, so I'll simply say that I haven't ever seen a movie based on real-life tragedy that did a better job of avoiding exploitative theatrics and cheap heartstring-pulling. Which is not to say that it avoids the visual horror of the 1994 Rwandan genocide -- there are some very gritty and harrowing moments, particularly Don Cheadle's nighttime van drive through the countryside -- but hardly anything about this movie comes off as overdone, gratuitous, or melodramatic. It's definitely not the kind of movie you'd sit down in front of for a fun evening with your girlfriend/boyfriend and a bowl of popcorn, but it's uplifting in its own way, and if you're anything like my sister and me it'll have you thinking and talking about it for a long time.



2. Children of Men
This isn't a happy-go-lucky sort of film either, but it's an incredible story, and one of the most visually arresting films I've ever seen, for reasons that go far beyond the unusually long takes described by the director in the above video clip. (Though on that note, I will say that it's nice to watch a movie whose action scenes aren't cross-cut every thousandth of a second like some kind of epilepsy-inducing music video.) The world of the (near) future envisioned by Alfonso Cuarón is bleak but incredibly well-detailed, and it's that level of detail (seconded by Josh, who knows a lot more than I do about this kind of stuff, here) that creates the film's sense of realism and thus a substantial measure of its overall power. I remember audibly uttering the word "wow" as the closing credits started to roll; you might, too.



1. Heat
And here's where Flickchart proves its unexpected worth, because if you'd asked me what my favorite movie was a few months ago, I'd have been most likely to say "Casablanca" or "Pulp Fiction." And not that both of those movies aren't great, but every time Flickchart asked me to compare something to this 1995 crime flick, "Heat" came out on top. It's one of those very rare (perhaps I'd even go so far as to say one-of-a-kind) action/crime movies that's so well-written it makes you care about literally every single character on the screen; it's got action scenes that are actually coherently shot (as a brilliant example, here's the epic shootout scene from about two-thirds of the way into the film); and the cinematography of L.A. and its environs is so gorgeous you find yourself wanting to crawl into your TV. After all that, the fact that it was the first move to finally put Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in the same scene together (above) just seems like gravy, but there it is. Clocks in at nearly three hours long but it could've gone twice that long and I would've been enthralled for every last minute. Yup, this is my favorite movie of all time, no doubt about it.

Rounding out the top 25, as of my 10,000th selection on Thursday evening:

6. From Russia With Love
7. Out of Sight
8. Grosse Pointe Blank
9. Fight Club
10. Trainspotting
11. Defending Your Life
12. Three Kings
13. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
14. Monsters, Inc.
15. Knocked Up
16. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
17. Big
18. Wolf
19. Michael Clayton
20. North by Northwest
21. Friday
22. V for Vendetta
23. Pleasantville
24. Batman Begins
25. The Incredibles

Nothing really out-and-out embarrassing in there, surprisingly. "Grosse Pointe Blank" might be a little high at #8, but, well, I think my affection for that movie was already obvious. Kind of surprised to see "Knocked Up" in the top 25, too, but I just really, really liked it, and it hasn't lost a thing after repeated viewings. (And before anybody asks, no, I haven't seen any of the "Lord of the Rings" movies, and the more people ask me "What?? You haven't seen any of the 'Lord of the Rings' movies?!?", the more it increases my resolve to see them out of a simple desire to be contrary, so don't bother.)

And now the Ten:

1. Van Halen, "Jump"
2. Beck, "Chemtrails"
3. M.I.A., "Paper Planes"
4. Oasis, "Fuckin' in the Bushes"
5. George Michael, "Freedom"
6. Underworld, "Juanita/Kiteless" (live)
7. Orbital, "Halcyon" (7" version)
8. Pixies, "Debaser"
9. Massive Attack, "Risingson"
10. The Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Take Five"

Your turn: Your five favorite movies, please (Flickchart-assisted or not), and/or your Random Tens, in the comments.

A memo from the desk of Arnold T. Pants, Esq.:Torturing Sims, executing flies, but still crying on the inside.

· As an addendum to the inaugural Monday Morning Cage Match post from earlier this week, an additional look at Jay-Z's "99 Problems," in visual form.



· My sister and I both got seriously addicted to the original "The Sims" back around the summer of 2002 or so, and we have, for the most part, maintained a respectful distance from the game ever since lest we both start rolling into work at 11 every morning going, "Hey, man, I am so sorry, but I've been trying to save up for an addition to my Sim's house and he's this close to getting a promotion at his job." Anyway, baby sis e-mailed me this link yesterday, and instead of wasting work time playing "The Sims," I found myself wasting work time reading about "The Sims," and by "reading" I mean "trying not to piss my pants due to sheer giggle-stifling effort." Behold, a mere sample:

Pinned to one spot, she refused to interact with Beef or me, almost as if the game forgot she was there. But Beef still knew. He refused to use the bathroom from the moment she arrived. He howled a picture of a toilet at her over and over, and she responded by staring through him until his bladder detonated where he stood.

Just to fuck with us, she showed she could move the whole time, and turned her back to give Beef privacy while he mopped up his shame. I’ll have to watch out for this woman . . . she’s pushing his fragile mind in directions I don’t have protocols for. Speaking of, since the government took the child away, I began removing toys from the home while Beef sleeps. I want him to think that maybe the kid was never there to begin with, which seems like an inadequate mind game now that ghosts are forcing him to pee on himself.

You simply have to read the whole thing; it's breathtaking. And yeah, now I'm probably going to go out and get "Sims 3."



· Among the many films that Flickchart has reminded me how much I like is Bill Murray's 1990 film "Quick Change," and I'm thrilled that The Onion's A.V. Club ran this article about it. Few people do cynical, world-weary gallows humor better than Murray, and while his movie and Spike Lee's "Inside Man" tread a lot of the same New-York-as-festering-cesspool-of-disillusion-and-resentment territory, "Quick Change" was the one I had lots more fun watching. (I also had a good time watching this.

· I can honestly say I have never been less interested in anything that was ever going to be published in Playboy, and that includes the time they did a nude pictorial of that chick from "Melrose Place" when she was like eight months pregnant.

· THIS IS HOW SKYNET GOT STARTED, you assholes.

· And finally: PETA, shut the fuck up and stick to what you're actually good at, which is taking pictures of naked supermodels.

This blog's new logo.

Keep on chasin' that dream, Pasty Rose-Wielding Pink-Shirted British Kid.



(Photo bogarted from With Leather.)

Praying for Tank Commander.

Robert Farley can insist it's "unoriginal" all he wants, but this is a great, great post, truly one of the best I've ever read.

And it speaks to a central truth about what's going on in Iran right now -- as much as we'd like to think we can help the Iranian protestors, or influence things, or push the country in a certain direction, it's not about us. What this all boils down to is whether Iran's "Tank Commanders" obey their Guardian Council masters or their better angels. Let's spend the next few days and weeks praying it's the latter.

Shut it down.

We're done, people. It's over. We had a good run, but after 233 mostly inspiring years, American culture, exceptionalism, and society are over. And it didn't happen because of Barack Obama, it didn't happen because of the Iraq War, it didn't even happen because of the Hummer H2 -- it happened because of this.



I know I've made fun of the Snuggie before, but compared to this little invention, the Snuggie is movable type; it is the fucking internal-combustion engine. That's right, America -- when the sarcastic question is posed "What, you need someone to help wipe your ass for you?", our answer is now apparently "Yes." We have become so lazy and disconnected that the act of wiping now requires a middleman. Coming soon, the Comfort Pee! Because nobody should have to endure something as icky and undignified as holding one's own penis while trying to urinate!

That's my favorite part of the ad, by the way, the part where the older lady talks about maintaining one's "dignity." Yes, because if there's one concept I associate with an ass-wiping wand, it's dignity.

So anyway, last person out of the country, turn out the lights. And please, please, let's all promise never to tell David Cross about this.

Kicking off your week with a new waste of time:The Monday Morning Cage Match.

As you may have noticed recently, I have trouble coming up with material on a Monday morning. Actually, I have trouble doing much of anything on a Monday morning other than despairing over having to return to work for another week and wondering what happened to my professional hopes and dreams, but that's neither here nor there. But I think I've found a solution to the first problem, inspired partly by the fiendish binary simplicity of Flickchart and the fact that I recently took an HTML class where I learned how to make tables: The Monday Morning Cage Match.

There's nothing complicated about the Cage Match. Basically we match up two people, places, or things that have some superficial, barely-worth-even-talking-about similarity and compare them in seven categories. Whichever one is superior in the most categories wins. If you believe in the infinite-monkeys-with-an-infinite-number-of-typewriters theorem ("Infinite Monkeys" is totally going to be the title of my movie-production company, by the way, whenever I get that started), then if we do this long enough theoretically we should be able to rank every last thing on the planet from best to worst, a la Flickchart, but I'm keeping the goals manageable for the time being (i.e. making it remotely tolerable to read on a weekly basis).

So here's the first Cage Match: "99 Problems" vs. "99 Luftballons." Do your worst; I know I did.

	"99 Problems" (Jay-Z)	"99 Luftballons" (Nena)
Subject matter	Mercenary media outlets, corrupt cops, annoying hangers-on	Nuclear armageddon
WINNER: Nena
Proof of artist's cleverness	Surprises policeman by invoking 4th-amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure	Releases balloons to confuse Cold War-era strategic-defense systems
WINNER: Jay-Z
Outcome of this brilliant plan	Vehicle searched by police dogs	Nuclear armageddon
WINNER: Nena
Sample lyric	"I got the rap patrol on the gat patrol/ Foes that wanna make sure my casket's closed/ Rap critics, they say he's 'Money-cash- hoes'/ I'm from the hood, stupid, what type of facts are those?..."	"99 knights of the air/ ride super-high-tech jet fighters/ Everyone's a superhero/ Everyone's a Captain Kirk..."
WINNER: Jay-Z
Primary negative of song	Casual use of the word "bitch"	Original version sung in German
WINNER: Jay-Z
Other hits by same artist	"Can't Knock the Hustle," "Can I Get A...", "Big Pimpin'"	None that I'm aware of
WINNER: Jay-Z
Questionable pop- cultural usage	Cookie Monster remix	Ally Sheedy dancing to it like a fucking loon in "The Breakfast Club"
WINNER: Nena

FINAL SCORE: Problems 4, Luftballons 3. Jay-Z gets additional style points by virtue of being married to Beyoncé and managing not to have started a nuclear war.