I just heard on the news that Jennifer Hudson's mother was found dead in her home. Early reports are saying that she had been shot to death. The body of a man was also found.
Terribly sad.
Why on Earth would Beyonce advertise her crazy like this? I just don't get it. First, no one didn't know that Beyonce is Sasha Fierce. She's been calling herself Sasha for years. (I got into a fight with one of my best friends, who is a giant Beyonce fan, for saying I thought calling her performance self "Sasha" made her sound unstable.) It makes her sound unstable. That is the kind of crazy you keep far away of the public. Unless, of course, you are trying to rip off Mariah Carey, which Sasha apparently is. Then, you advertise your crazy in a bizarre and ineffective ad campaign that brings to mind "Nomi Malone" from Showgirls. "Ain't nobody 'No-the-real-mi,'" an unmodern Beyonce seems to be saying, "that's why I'm trying to trick you guys!" Yeah, real tricky, B.
In her album "The Emancipation of Mimi," Mariah pulled herself from the brink of irrelevance with sheer talent. Now, we get Beyonce's ersatz version. She stole the idea to re-invent herself through a private personality directly from Mimi. And, I mean, "I Am Sasha Fierce?" Christian Siriano retired that word last year. Sasha should have just gone with "Sasha." And left the "fierce" for her drag friends trapped in a 2006 time-warp.
Even worse, her "double-album" features a total of 11 songs. 6 on one, 5 on the other. Her father, Music World CEO Mathew Knowles, says, "Beyonce was adamant -- and she has complete creative control -- about dividing her songs. She felt she couldn't mix the songs together. She's in a much different space now than she was one year ago. She's married and in a really good place and this album reflects that."
Uh . . . being a really famous person trying to trick people into thinking you're someone else in order to garner yet more attention for yourself(selves) is just a little too Jan-Brady-in-a-curly-black-wig for my taste.
Oprah just gave out the new Kindle 2 to her entire audience. The rest of us have to wait for Christmas. That was a hint. To my loved ones.
Now, she just offered a coupon code to give her home viewers a $50 discount. But when I went on her site, the discount was for the ORIGINAL Kindle! She was holding the much smaller and much NEWER Kindle 2. Bait and switch, is what that is. Jeff Bezos went on Oprah trying to clear his warehouse to make room for the new version. Shady.
In a nutshell, Google has an explicit policy for its advertising that says no ad may advocate against a protected class, and among those protected classes is "sexual orientation." Yet, Google is running ads from anti-gay forces advocating the repeal of gay marriage in California, and advocating against gays in Arizona.From Bilerico, where the story originated:
After I inquired with Google to see why they approved the ads since they are obviously in violation of the posted policy, spokesperson Diana Adair told me, "Google allows ads that advocate for a particular political position regardless of the views that they represent. We currently allow ads advocating both for and against Proposition 8." She directed me to another page of the advertising policy entitled, "Political Advertising."Both of these blogs think that Google is flat-out wrong to be doing this, and I am inclined to side with the bloggers. But, and it's a big "but," I think Google might be right about this.
Thinking that there must be a different set of rules in place for political advertising than other ads, I clicked the link and this is what met me.
"Political advertising is allowed. We permit political advertisements regardless of the political views they represent. Stating disagreement with or campaigning against a candidate for public office, a political party, or public administration is generally permissible.However, political ads must not include accusations or attacks relating to an individual's personal life, nor can they advocate against a protected group.
Might. It's painful and more than vaguely repulsive, but Google is accepting ads from a political group voicing a political opinion, however wrong that opinion is. If Google allows anti-Prop 8 ads, then they must accept the pro side as well. Do we really want a company as large and rich and powerful to step in and interfere with political advertising? Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google recently stated:
However, while there are many objections to this proposition -- further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text -- it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality.While, to many of us gays, gay marriage is a basic human right, it is a political issue to many others. Brin was expressing his opinion and the codes of conduct implemented within Google. He was not stating an opinion that would mandate the behavior of the companies dealing with Google. If the ACLU can take on less than savory clients in order to defend all of our basic rights, then I think Google should probably do the same thing.
Peggy Noonan says Obama looks like a winner. But she wonders, "One wonders if in the presidency he'll be like the dog that chased the car and caught it: What's he supposed to do now?" Um, a great job?
From Daily Kos: "You heard the story -- it was all over the right-wing blogs. Some poor white girl, 20-year-old Ashley Todd of Texas, was mugged at an ATM, but when the mugger (a big black guy) saw her car with the McCain sticker, he beat her and carved a letter "B" in her face with a knife. Apparently it was a dyslexic mugger because the "B" was carved backward, but whatever -- it proved that Obama's supporters were violent and craaazy!" Except it was a hoax, made up by a campaign volunteer.
Former Massachusetts governor William Weld, a Republican, became the latest political figure to cross party lines with his endorsement of Barack Obama today
McCain fights to keep working class men
There is, apparently, a movement called "Intellectuals for McCain and Palin."
Find more videos like this on !! omg blog !!
Video footage of Daniel Radcliffe naked in Equus. (NSFW)
Bono to write the occasional column for The New York Times
The director of Quantum of Solace: "Daniel and I are very much in sync; he's a highly intelligent and sensitive actor. His achievement has been to humanise Bond, so that he could be one of us - not a hero, but an antihero with a dark side. Meeting him made me want to jump in, take the risk.'"
Beyonce enjoyed gaining weight for her role as Etta James
The Bastard Life website (Kinda NSFW). I don't get this website at all. It's supposed to be about sex for straight people, gay people, bi people, but there's something kind of creepy about the weird whiteness of the site. But they had this pic, so . . . .No pride march for the gay king of Poland
CNNSI's Jon Wertheim's Weekly Tennis Mailbag
You don't need to be smart, just controlling. There's a new scientific appreciation for the importance of self-control. This trend began with Walter Mischel's astonishing marshmallow experiments, in which the ability of a four-year old to resist the temptation of a second marshmallow turned out to be a better predictor of future academic success than his or her IQ score. In other words, willpower trumped raw intelligence."
The New York Times' endorsements through the ages
From a DVD on the making of Mika's Paris concert. And, Mika is working on new album.
I was thinking last night that maybe guys who are into bears are the only real gays. The only real and true ones. I mean, look, 10,000 years ago, being gay meant being a guy who was attracted to beards, chest hair, body hair. There weren't a lot of razors or tweezers (or soaps), for men or women. But women, generally speaking, do not have heavy facial hair. Or chest hair. Or back hair. Gay people evolved to be bear-lovers, so maybe those of us (including myself) who sort of prefer a shaven (or slightly scruffy) guy might not have been so gay way back in the day. Maybe most of us aren't really gay.
Imagine this: It's 25,000 years ago, and you are out hunting for some now-extinct game because your tiny little village needs something to eat for dinner because, let's face it, the Flintstone's berries you've all been snacking on just aren't cutting it anymore. It's you, trekking through the savannah wearing a cute little loincloth, carrying your stone arrowhead, wondering how exactly you kill a three-toed sloth. Suddenly, you come across a couple, a male and a female, bathing in a clear pond that you had planned on drinking out of at some point.
You haven't had any kind of sex because the savannah is just not all the popular these days, and you've been wondering what you're supposed to do with all these body parts. You hide inside of some long grass and quietly try to unwrap your loincloth while spying on the couple as they walk out of the pond, their bare skin glistening with water. And then you start fantasizing. Nature takes over, and you need to have one of them. Do you start thinking about touching the hairy beast of a man with the two-foot ponytail and the three-foot beard infested with millions of parasites? Do you imagine kissing his mouth after parting his handlebar moustache with both hands so you could at least see his lips?
Or, do you imagine touching the smooth-ish woman? Sure, her legs are kind of hairy, and so are her armpits. But that's kind of hot. Her face is pretty smooth, although she's a little too round in some places. But it's either her or Sasquatch. Which person do you pick?
See, that's what I mean. You just might pick the woman. You might prefer the woman. But the bear-lover wouldn't. Not then and not now. He'd pick that beast of a man every time. Really, bear-lovers should be treated like gay royalty since they have a lineage stretching back millenia.
