Color Commentary

Thanks to a post over at TBogg’s, I somehow got sucked into a discussion that involved Kardashians, and somehow in the course of googling, turned up this awesome video of three grandmas watching, and commenting on, the Kim Kardashian sex tape.  It’s pretty fucking hilarious, as you’ll see:

I was blissfully unaware of Kardashians up until a couple of years ago; after seeing them splashed on the covers of every trash celebrity magazine at the salon every time I went in, I finally asked, “who are the Kardashians and why does anyone care?”  The girl who did my hair, Nula, who hails from Queens, said, “Oh, they’re just a bunch of hoors.”  I thought that was funny as hell, especially when about a year later, Kathy Griffin, commenting on our brain dead media’s coverage of Kim Kardashian’s wedding (“The Kardashians are our version of royalty“), said “I think they’re more like our version of a family of dirty whores.”  On a later Griffin special, she described having to do some event with the Kardashian mom after having described them as “a family of dirty whores,” which just made it funnier.

Of course, having remained blissfully unaware of the Kardashians for so long, I didn’t know that the whole dirty whore thing wasn’t just hyperbole for the sake of humor, because I didn’t know that their whole claim to “fame,” such as it is, spun out of Kim Kardashian making a sex tape with a C-list rapper, which then somehow got “leaked” (my money is on Kim herself or her mother as the leaker).  So, yes, dirty whore it is. 

I’ve never seen the tape itself, of course, which probably makes the grandmas’ blow-by-blow even better.

There are a lot of these three grandma videos – I’ll be posting more.

Slow And Steady Kicks Your Ass

A few weeks ago, I observed that cat-biting seems to be a favorite turtle activity.  Here’s more evidence:

But apparently, cats aren’t the only things turtles like to bite:

I told you turtles were little bastards!

I also found this unrelated, but I thought amazing, series of bald eagles hanging out with cats.  I always thought an eagle would eat a cat, but maybe not:

You’ve gotta love the impotent paw swipe at the end.

The eagles seem to hang out with the cats fairly often:

The youtube is full of interesting animal interactions – deer grooming cats, cats nursing rabbits – you name it.  I went looking around because I’ve got a squirrel who’s pretty tame and will come up onto the porch when I’m out there to eat birdseed and fetch pecans (I have a bunch of unshelled pecans that are too small to bother shelling).  The first time the cat saw the squirrel out there with me, she went out and sat right in the middle of the pecans.  So the squirrel comes back after hiding one of the nuts, wants the rest of those pecans, and gets all up in her grill.  Eartha quite frankly didn’t know how to handle it – she backed off and went to sit in her chair.  That’s how it’s gone pretty much ever since.  I think the squirrel is very curious of her – it’s tried a couple of times to get up close enough to the end of her tail to sniff (or bite?) it, and when it gets within a couple of inches, she freaks out and either runs or menaces the squirrel to get it to back off.  She’ll still try to chase the squirrel sometimes, and a few days ago actually managed to jump right on top of it before deciding immediately to let it go.  I think she knows that squirrels are pretty scrappy, so it unnerves her when one walks right up to where she’s sitting in her chair and puts its face within 6 inches of hers.  Maybe at some point I’ll get some photos of them together and put them up.

Angelina’s Wide Stance

Prediction: Someone, somewhere, will show up at a Halloween party this October with a mannequin leg sticking out of a long dress

The intertubes have been all abuzz about the weird pose affected by Ms. Jolie, not only on the red carpet, but also on stage, during Sunday’s Oscars.  Several theories have been advanced to try to explain it, but I think I have figured it out: 

 

Yeast infection. 

 

Oh yes, I said it. 

 

If the vadge was in need of a good airing-out, perhaps Ms. Jolie should have called upon our friend, Hello Kitty, for assistance.  A wind has got to be more effective than the mere breeze that can be achieved with that pose:

Don't even ask

Glitterbomb prototype: Our 4th Weird Stepbrother steps up to the plate

It’s long, but stick with it. It gets worse and worse, I promise.

Thanks, Perry. At least the tune doesn’t stick with me like that Worst Music Video EVER.

It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Cthulhumas

The whole “War on Christmas” thing has always amused me for a lot of reasons, the primary one being that Christmas is so ubiquitous in this culture that you probably couldn’t kill it even if you rammed a pine tree with an angel on top through its undead heart, and anyone with even two brain cells to rub together must be able to see that with their own two eyes.  Hell, it’s so obvious that even a blind person could see it.

I think that’s what most of these posts this month have demonstrated.  We co-op Christmas and its symbols and lore for literally everything, creating mash-ups with the popular culture of the moment and in some cases, creating new lore and traditions that become part of the whole ball of wax going forward.

A good example of how the holiday gets co-opted for everything might be 1988’s A Very Brady Christmas.  I watched this probably a few years after it first aired, though strictly for my own sardonic purposes.  When I told friends about it at the time, the response was, “why didn’t you call – we could have talked you through it.”  In my defense, at the time I got only 4 channels with the rabbit ears on my 13″ TV, so it’s not like I had a lot to choose from, and I’ll further note that when it premiered in 1988, it was the highest rated movie shown on TV that entire year.  Which just goes to show that the rot from within has been going on for a very long time now.

I said I had my sardonic reasons, and to be honest, primary among them was I was checking Robert Reed for visible signs of illness, or as a friend put it, “looking for lesions.”  Hey, I’ve never pretended to be a good person, but I am a better one now than I was when I was younger.  I’ll further admit that around this same time I had this idea stuck in my head of wanting to see Robert Reed doing a commercial and saying “I’m not a heterosexual, but I play one on TV…” like all those “I’m not a doctor…” commercials of the time.  The humor there for me was not “hee hee, Robert Reed is gay” but rather playing off the stupidity of the whole “I’m not a doctor but I play one on TV” thing.  It’s like saying, “I’m not an actual authority on this but I pretend to be on TV, so take my word for it.”  Which could explain much of our current pundit class, when you think about it.  Like I said, the rot has been going on for quite some time.

So my reasons for watching could be summed up under the heading of sick fascination, which pretty well covers the ground.  It wasn’t just Robert Reed – I wanted to see what lame-ass adult lives they had concocted for the kids.  I don’t remember it all, but I do remember these bits:  Greg has grown up to be a porn-stached Ob-Gyn, who’s banging a nurse in his office (of course, this is depicted as a very chaste relationship onscreen – it was a made-for-TV movie – but we know what was really going on.)  Peter or Bobby is now a race-car driver.  And so on and so forth.  The “dramatic tension” occurs when there is a structural failure at the jobsite for a skyscraper Mike Brady has designed (not at all surprising when you consider the only thing he had ever designed up to that point were insipid tract homes like the one they all lived in) and they all think Mike has been trapped or killed in the collapse.  In a true made-for-TV Christmas miracle, Mike escapes unscathed, and there is much rejoicing:

Like I said, this is just an example.  Other examples of holiday puerility as egregious or even moreso abound.

So it’s little wonder that the malcontents, the smartasses, and the curmudgeons feel the need to retaliate and take the holiday back from the Bradys and the Smurfs and Lifetime and everyone else with degrading depictions of Santa, observances of Festivus and Cthulhumas, and other not-socially-sanctioned traditions which lie outside the mainstream and probably always will.

That doesn’t stop them from developing their own holiday lore and traditions.  Cthulhumas has reached its tentacles out in several directions, encompassing not only the Christian but the more secular and commercial aspects of Christmas as well.  Below we see a depiction of the birth of the Hello Cthulhu Christ Child:

…wrapped in evil, laying in a manger.

 …and here is the more secular, commercialized version of Hello Cthulhu:

 

 

 

That depiction of Cthulhu Claus is downright warm ‘n cuddly compared to this next one:

He sees you when you're sleeping

…and of course, what would the holiday be without caroling?

That’s just one of many.  Other classics include:  Do You Fear What I Fear?, Great Old Ones Are Coming To Town, Have Yourselves A Scary Little Solstice, Away In A Madhouse, I Saw Mommy Kissing Yog-Sothoth, and several more. 

With this creative conflation of popular culture with both the religious and secular aspects of the holiday, how long could it be before the Shithouse Troll as Santa tradition takes root?

(h/t to B^4 for tipping me off to the Cthulhu carols.)

 

I Saw Frosty Nailing Santa Claus

I wouldn't characterize the look on Santa's face as one of "relief."

Bad Holiday Decorations, UK Edition

Here we see a “celebunativity” from Madame Tussauds, circa 2004.  Hey, sometimes you gotta go with the classics:

No description will suffice

Those are “wise men” George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Prince Philip.  The Virgin Mary?  Posh Spice, with Beckham as the cuckholded husband.  Samuel L. Jackson is on hand to shepherd the Baby J through the shadow of the Valley of Death, along with fellow shepherds Graham Norton and Hugh Grant.  Australian pop star Kylie Minogue appears in the role of the angel.

 

To be fair, Madame T’s didn’t think this up on their own – the British public voted on who to include in the scene, in which roles.  Proving that dry, acerbic British wit is alive and well.

 

Also, Too

Rick Perry fights a losing battle with Adam's Little Soldier

Courtesy of Gen. JC Christian.

One Wonders What Else He Tainted

It could be worse.  It could have been a headline about him wiping his taint.

Musical Interlude

Sorry there’s no video to go with it.  I just happened to think of this song this evening and wanted to hear it…and thought I’d share.  Aaron Neville sings Cole Porter, from the Red, Hot & Blue compilation to benefit AIDS research released way back in my youth (1990):