Do these stills look like they come from a documentary, or a bad commercial?

Here’s a red flag for you. I became aware of Waiting For Superman because I saw episodes of Oprah and Larry King  about the film when those programs floated up at work. I saw Oprah first and, without audio, it was just this machine processing deep-fried Faberge eggs into tears in a way that seemed to eventually benefit a disadvantaged little girl who had been flown in for the occasion, so I thought that it must be OK. I didn’t completely realize how fortunate I was that the sound was off until I caught the lies and stupidity at full volume, tugging the standards of Larry King Live even further beneath the earth’s crust, which, by the way, is where they found that Piers Morgan guy. It was one of the most disturbing discussions I’ve seen on cable news, and I’ve never seen one that wasn’t at least troubling.

The main panel consisted of Ben Stein, Michelle Rhee, one of the films “stars,” and a reform-minded D.C. Superintendent, singer John Legend and Steve Perry, not the singer, but a “straight talker” who contributes to CNN on the subject of education. Really, they put this on TV. The latter three were there to argue that the plight of the struggling underclass in the United States is due to the greatest device for human cruelty ever conceived: a free public education. Largely to blame were the teachers. I swear to God, Ben Stein found himself in the position of having to defend public education and teachers. Ben Stein. I swear to God. Ben Stein. Ben Stein. I had to dredge up the transcript because I knew you would be skeptical, no matter how many times I said it.

One thing I noticed from this discussion endlessly is we blame the teachers, blame the teachers, blame the teachers, and I’m sure many of them deserve blame, but we don’t ever say, why don’t the kids wake up and smell the coffee and say, look, it’s up to us to do some work?

- Ben Stein

Meanwhile, Perry the lesser, Rhee and Legend presented a reductio ad absurdum of thoughtless pseudo- leftism. As we already know, the poor, especially if they are not white, never have culpability for anything. How did so many of the parents at poorly performing schools get kids they can’t support, for example? Whenever you notice something like that, a wizard did it. If some urban schools are graduating less than 50% of their kids, it is entirely the fault of schools and teachers because, obviously, it is a total coincidence that those families happen to be living in a ghetto and that the parents could easily be mistaken for the students’ older siblings. Certainly, cultural or personal shortcomings played no role in creating the situation. If certain classes of poor people are always completely blameless, the only option is the left’s version of blaming the victim, which is blaming the helper. The mechanisms that might help one out of poverty are the reason for poverty. A free education from college trained professionals is the reason for poor education.

Perry made one argument on King that evidenced a special kind of stupidity, even for a mass media chatter-clown. It’s hinted at in the film when a vacuous, wealthy, white mom is unable able to help her daughter with chemistry homework, even after investing almost ten seconds of effort and almost being late for a spa treatment.

Parents have an important role. But the parents are often blamed for that which the school is responsible for.

I have a son. I have two sons and they play the piano. And I don’t know how to play the piano. If my piano teacher ever came to our home and said, you know what, if you were a better pianist, your sons would be better piano — players, I’d fire him so quick he’d forget he ever taught my sons to play.

I paid that man to do this. We are asking parents who in some cases haven’t taken chemistry either in 12, 15, 20 years or if ever, to help a child with chemistry homework.

–Steve Perry The Lesser

So it is unfair of schools to demand that education begin at home, because parents often lack knowledge of the subjects at hand. If you hired a private piano teacher, you wouldn’t expect that they ask you to teach the piano to your kids, right? Well, in reality, they probably would ask you to oversee practice sessions, but never mind reality. Reality has nothing to do with this film and the views it advocates. It’s so much easier to point out that most of us don’t know high school chemistry. So how could parents possibly have a role in educating their children? It is the ever appealing political philosophy of Homer Simpson: Can’t someone else do it?

Anybody who has spent time around public schools should smell the bullshit from miles out. I was a sub in The Los Angeles Unified School District for a couple years, which is long enough to ascertain that the chief obstacle to learning in the home for most students is not the fact that their parents lack a working knowledge of chemistry.

One of the most difficult schools I worked at had 45% of students in foster care. That isn’t the kids’ fault, of course, but it isn’t the fault of the teachers either. In schools like this, it is not uncommon to send a student to the dean or vice principal and have them sent back minutes later because the disciplinary load is so overwhelming that there is physically no room for them. This doesn’t happen because the guardians or parents don’t know chemistry. It’s because they don’t care if their kids get into fights, never mind learn to read properly, never mind do any homework at all, never mind learn chemistry. I know a full time teacher at a LAUSD school that is relatively lower-middle class. Students there often complain of being hungry in class. The school had to implement a “second chance,” free breakfast. Yes, there is a free breakfast in the morning. But it turns out that many of the parents in the area, on top of supposedly being unable to afford generic cereal, bread, beans and rice or eggs, also can’t be bothered to get their kids to school on time to eat for free. This was, of course, determined to be the school’s fault, so it was up to the school to adjust by adding a disruptive “second chance,” free breakfast to the schedule. But realistically, what do you expect a teacher to do with a kid whose parents cannot be bothered to feed their children, even when someone else is paying? Of course, many of these kids have overextended young single mothers, and one might question whether having kids you couldn’t afford to feed was such a great choice, or, since the historically disadvantaged cannot be held responsible for anything, maybe even blame the lack of access to family planning and birth control in certain neighborhoods instead of blaming the teachers, but that would only serve as a distraction from the indisputable fact that a wizard did it.

Here’s the most extreme case I encountered. None of this is exaggerated. I turned a student over to security because he punched another student. He wasn’t horsing around, it was a real, malicious punch in the face. I told the security guy what happened and that I didn’t want to see the kid for the rest of the day. He was back at the door less than five minutes later. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to touch him, so I just played offensive lineman and physically blocked him from walking through the door as he shoved me and threatened to kill me (he was only fourteen, and I am tall and a big fatso, so this was merely annoying) until I was able to flag down another staff member. She got the same security guy and I tried not to yell as I explained again what I meant when I said the student had punched another kid in the face and that there was no circumstance in which he and I would be in the same classroom for the rest of the day. I later learned that the boy’s single father ignored all reports of problems at school. It’s about as hard to expel a kid as it is to fire a tenured teacher. Therefore, the disciplinary apparatus of the school was pretty much helpless until he seriously hurt someone. Thanks to Waiting For Superman, I now realize this was all my fault. The reason this kid thought it was OK to go around punching people is that I expected his parents to teach him advanced chemistry. Maybe a little piano.

The point of the anecdotes is that, while the film blames educators and schools, we’re never given an even vaguely realistic picture of what they face. It’s like watching the CNN coverage of the first Gulf War and wondering why veterans have problems. Didn’t they just push buttons and make those cool smart bomb videos? It was just a big video game, right? In Superman, we meet about half a dozen great kids with active parents. That is 100% of the depiction of the students and parents in poorly performing schools. So teaching in poor, urban areas means dealing with bright, eager students and parents who can’t do enough to help, right?

What about the student who punches kids in the face, but can’t be expelled and doesn’t care if he’s suspended? What are teachers to do when they threaten to call home and a student can truthfully say, “they don’t care.” And yes, I’ve actually heard that exchange more than once. What about kids who are not only sent to school hungry, but arrive too late for the free food? Do you think that they received adequate stimulation in early childhood? Do you think that they received proper nutrition in the womb and early childhood? Do you think their mothers abstained from smoking, drinking and drugs during pregnancy? Do you think kids subjected to that kind of development resemble the kids highlighted in this film? Where were the gang bangers? Where were the parents who are gang bangers? The parents who despise learning? The neglectful foster parents, or overwhelmed grandparents? When dealing with parents who do not value education, don’t make their kids do homework and who don’t respect authority themselves, the teachers are supposed to wave a magic wand and fix it all, but the film never presents any of the actual problems teachers face and it certainly never explains how magic wands work. It just asserts that a free education is not an opportunity of which you take advantage. Rather, it’s an entitlement that should be bestowed upon you, with no effort on your part, even if you actively resist it.

The truth is that teachers aren’t really supposed to deal with many of these issues, but they do anyway. At least in LAUSD, teachers are not theoretically in charge of serious discipline. But in reality, if the student hasn’t committed a felony, the dean is too busy and the everyday teachers, as opposed to subs like me, are expected to call home and talk to parents (or whoever) about behavioral problems. This is not part of their job description, but they do it anyway. It’s quite common that the parent’s reaction will be one of anger towards the teacher. So, put yourself in that position. You teach a class of 30 that is disrupted by a few students. You send them to the dean and they are sent back. You go beyond the call of duty and call the parents (or whoever) to discuss the problem and they say, “why the fuck you calling me about this bullshit?” And here comes some mongoloid with a camera to tell you that it’s all your fault.

The film? I’m not sure what there is to review. The technique is average, if unoriginal. I think the trick of using outdated educational films as a humorous way to make your point is outdated. Though the film is not nearly as thoughtful as Football In The Groin, it leans heavily on “Simpsons” clips. It has original animation and I guess if there was any substance, it would go down smoother than an episode of “Bill Nye The Science Guy.” Instead, the lies and distortions come so fast and thick, I’m not sure how to categorize the film, since, it strains the definition of the word, “documentary.” I can’t believe that intelligent people of any political persuasion found it possible to overlook the direct contradictions, even in the film’s narration. Within the space of a few minutes, the narrator explains that public school funding per student has doubled in recent decades. Then he says the No Child Left Behind Act seemingly signaled the end of “years of empty lip service.” Obviously, he never really thought that No Child Left Behind was the solution. He is just pretending that he thought so, in order to create a narrative in which he is continually disappointed by our efforts at improving education. He never explains how doubling funding to education is “empty lip service.” I think it is possible that he does not know the meaning of that phrase. Mendacity or stupidity: who cares which?

I’m not a parent, and yet I’ve felt like one ever since I started making Waiting for “Superman.” Until now, I don’t think I’ve read sixteen books on any single subject ever…

– Lesley Chilcott, producer of Waiting For Superman blogging for CNN

In the same span, the narrator decries our level test scores in reading and math. On its face, it’s another piece of political thinking from a Simpsons character. Presumably, he believes test scores should always be on the rise because… I don’t know. Are people getting smarter every year? As always when discussing test scores, the fact that white and Asian American students test well compared to students in all other countries, and that our averages are dragged down almost entirely by the scores of black and Hispanic students (as I learned from the noted arch-conservative site Salon.com), is tiptoed around as testing data are chopped and sliced to disguise that truth without mentioning it. For example,the film points out that our top 5% of test results is worse than the top 5% of students in most other rich countries. It’s a way for the film to deflect us from the actual test results of various ethnic groups without dirtying itself by ever mentioning the facts. We are left to assume that our top 5% excludes poor, urban students. So then it must be a direct comparison of our top white and Asian students against the top students in countries that are almost all white or Asian. This leads to the argument that even schools in affluent areas are failing. This is when we meet the affluent housewife who “can’t” help her daughter with chemistry.

Well, why not just skip all of that and present the top scores of white and Asian students? Let’s think it through. Countries like Finland and Japan have more homogeneous populations. We have large black and Hispanic populations and it is among these large groups that we see a dramatic fall off  of test scores. So, while our top 5% will be predominantly white and Asian, it is still the result for the top 5% of the overall pool of students, so the scores are still diluted. The top 5% of just our white and Asian students would certainly test much closer to the top 5% of whites or Asians in predominantly white/Asian countries. I base this, again, on the fact that American whites and Asians, overall, test well compared to their counterparts abroad. If you still have trouble seeing this, imagine that you measured the test scores of the top 5% of Japanese students. Then, you injected a few million economic refugees from Mexico, and their children, into the Japanese system. Then you did a second study that measured the top 5% of the new pool, including the new students. Clearly the second set of test results would be lower, but the actual students included in the first top 5% would be just as smart and educated as they were before. If you consider that, you might wonder if level math and reading scores here in the US with the influx of millions of illegal immigrants and children of illegal immigrants into the system might actually be a pretty respectable result.

Regardless of what you do with the disparate results among American students, if you pretend the gap between racial groups isn’t there, you are not discussing reality. Or in the case of the film, you are trying to hide reality. Are the disparate test results due to white racism? Are they because whites (and Asians) are the master race? Is it the will of Xenu? I don’t propose to solve the problem here, but that is the problem. Education isn’t failing. The education of specific minorities, particularly poor members of those minorities is failing horribly. It is a very real problem. Too bad nobody is interested in discussing it.

Since much of the film is an attempt to misrepresent the problem it is ostensibly discussing, it doesn’t have any value. It’s like a movie about homelessness that treats the occasional instance of mental illness among the homeless as a coincidence. “Why are so many of these homeless people mentally ill?” you might wonder. The film would never address it, but it would include some mentally healthy homeless as subjects and play statistical shell games to conceal the rate of mental illness among the homeless. Well, what would be the point of that? How would it be in anyway helpful in addressing the problem? There would be no legitimate point and the film would be detrimental to the discussion of homelessness.

The hook of Superman is the lottery system by which some students get into exceptional, innovative, and demanding public schools. Mysteriously absent from the film are the parents who sell drugs out of their homes. None yell profanities at teachers who use their free time to call home about discipline. In the world of this film, Hispanic immigrants value higher education above all else, especially for their daughters. These handpicked parents are devoted to their kids’ educations and the absurd reverence this inspires in the filmmakers is condescending and embarrassing. The film kind of shoots itself in the foot here because the unintentional indication is that the norm is something less. Otherwise, why get so misty-eyed about the fact that these parents and students want a good education? One mom says that she will work multiple jobs to see that her daughter has the chance to go to college. Great. That’s called being a reasonably decent parent. But good for her. I can’t say I’d be so committed myself, which is one reason I don’t have kids (also, the wizard never gave me any, thank goodness!). Another mom in the film begs a lazy teacher for a conference. My friend teaches in a mostly minority community, though a more solidly working class one than those in the film. Most of those parents don’t turn up for parent teacher night, never mind PTA meetings. The turnout shrinks every year. I believe the scene in the film happened. I believe that there was one interested parent who could not arrange a conference with one lazy teacher. I also know that parent/teacher night turnouts can be well under 20%. So,which scenario do you think happens more often? By a factor of what? Go ahead and take a guess, because you won’t learn the answer from the film.

Another mom talks about how if the filmmakers were to visit her daughter’s school, they’d be unable to get past the security desk. We’re meant to stroke our chins and go, “wow man. Wow.” But, wait a sec. Particularly if your kid went to school in Harlem, would you want adults to roam in and out of the school at will? Even if your kid went to school in Beverly Hills, would you want the school to allow people to come in off the street and film them? When I was a sub I heard about a recent fight on campus. Two girls had gotten into it and when their moms showed up to take them home, they got into it. The mom fight started with extensions being pulled out and tossed to the ground and culminated with attempted murder by SUV in that parking lot. I know what I was thinking when I heard that story. “This school should really cut back on security.” Also, “well, the obvious problem here is the teachers.”

The pain continues. Who would have guessed that a nation of 300 million people would have complicated school funding and bureaucracy? The film drops facts like, “there are more than 14,000 autonomous school boards.” Yeah… that sounds about right. It uses such “grass is green” observations as “evidence” that the system is broken and that failure becomes unaccountable. Do problems exist? Everyone knows they do to some degree. How is that related to the fact that there are 14,000 school districts? I don’t know. I guess bigger things are harder to manage, but I was already pretty sure that the United States was a large country before the film explained it. Would more charter schools and weaker unions change that? I’m really not sure why this information is in the film. I guess it just makes schools look bad.

Look how terrible this gets. Here is a direct quote from the film.

TAKEN TOGETHER, the TWO biggest teachers unions, the NEA and the AFT are the largest campaign contributors in the country. Over the last 20 years, they’ve given over $55 million to federal candidates and their parties. More than the teamsters, the NRA or any other INDIVIDUAL organization.

Even if you are deluded enough to believe that trade unions bend Washington to the nefarious whims of the working man while corporate interests look on in envy, all you really need to look at here are the phrases “taken together, the two..” and “any other individual organization.” I don’t know how to characterize such a brazen manipulation. Is it even propaganda? If I were to sincerely  argue to you that Los Angeles is superior to New York because, taken together, two Angelinos have twice the IQ of the average New Yorker, taken individually, I sincerely hope that you would murder me on the spot.

Moreover, if you pay attention to these things even a little bit, $55 million in campaign contributions over 20 years probably doesn’t seem like all that much to you. There’s a good explanation for that: it isn’t all that much. Since 1999, the financial sector, for example, has contributed $1.8 billion to federal campaigns and spent about twice that on lobbying. But we are to believe that the real muscle lies with $55 million contributed over twice that amount of time by teachers unions. The extent of misinformation and manipulation here renders the film useless, regardless of your views. It might as well be set in the world of Starship Troopers. It’s the bugs who are undermining education!

Similarly, the film’s discussion of charter schools just has nothing to do with earth, where there is a reasonable debate to be had on the subject. The film presents the top charter schools as models for success. It completely ignores the top traditional schools. It completely ignores the vast majority of charter schools, which don’t perform better than traditional schools. Amazingly enough, it provides no overview of charter school vs. traditional school performance. Not only that, it conceals the extent to which the top public charters depend on heavy private subsidies. We do learn that one school asks parents to contribute $500 a month and the fact that people like Bill Gates contribute to these schools is established, largely for the purpose of squeezing Gates into the film. But to watch the film, you’d never guess that the justly celebrated Harlem Children’s Zone receives two-thirds of its funding from private sources. So they have triple the money to work with. That’s got to come in handy. Do you think there’s a small sampling bias when the top charters have students and parents who are deeply motivated to do well as evidenced by them bothering to enter these lotteries in the first place? Do the charter schools have a big advantage in being able to simply kick out any problem students, whereas their traditional counterparts just have to deal with them? Go ahead and guess again, because the film won’t address these questions either.

I was prepared to grapple with the film’s anti-union stance, but there is almost no substance to take on. There’s nothing here but a horrible movie that will leave you less informed than before you watched it. Cheap shots, emotional condescension, manipulated statistics, fallacies and other bad reasoning, almost non-stop. A lot of narrative techniques are clumsily lifted from Michael Moore, but we’re not meant to take it as a polemic or a satire. Waiting for Superman is meant to be taken seriously, but it can’t be, any more than a Michael Savage book or a teenage anarchist’s fanzine. At its best, it is completely obvious. Wouldn’t we prefer to spend prison money on education? Yes! That’s one of the oldest sales tricks in the book, by the way. Get them agreeing with you off the bat, then slip in your dubious wares. Don’t you hate child molesters? Yes! Do you like cake? Yes! Do you want to buy a dishwasher? Yes, yes, yes! Er… wait a sec.

Do I hope the profiled kids do well in life? Yes. Are there very badly run schools? I know it all too well. Are there terrible, stupid and lazy teachers. Yes (even in wealthy white suburbs). Wouldn’t it be great if every school was like the most outstanding schools and every teacher was a cross between John Wooden and Richard Feynman? Yes! Aren’t bad students entirely the fault of educators? Yes! Er… wait a sec.

Amidst the “don’t you like cake?” questions, here are some questions that the film completely disregards during its two hours, some of which I’m reiterating. Given that their degrees and work experience don’t translate well to other fields, if teachers lose their high job security, what will happen to the pool of applicants? If top charter schools are so rare and difficult to get into, what does that mean in terms of the quality of students and parents they deal with, in contrast to a traditional public school that must take everyone? What disciplinary options, expulsion in particular, are more readily available in charter schools? What general measures are charters allowed to take with their students that parents in a regular school would never allow? What are educators to do with problem students who have indifferent guardians or parents? How much of the difficulty faced by the bright and eager students, or even merely average students, is due to the fact that they have to share a classroom with so many students who are not there to learn? What effect does it have on the motivations of an average kid when the standards for passing are lowered to accommodate students who will barely learn to read, no matter what anybody does with them? How much of their superior resources do these top charter schools expend on autistic, retarded, physically handicapped, psychologically disturbed and/or non-English speaking children?

The film does find several minutes to draw a tremendously strained comparison between the achievement of succeeding with disadvantaged kids and Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier. They are similar, you see, because in both cases some experts said it couldn’t be done. That just goes to show you what so-called experts know, amiright?! One time a mean bully told me I would never be able to have a threesome with Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman, but Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier so I’m gonna go pick up some condoms and lube right now. When the graph of test scores was overlaid with a jet, Waiting For Superman crossed a barrier as well. It clearly became one of the five worst films I’ve ever seen. It might be saved from the very bottom slot by the fact that the drama of the drawings to get into the top schools is powerful, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the filmmakers paid someone off to make sure that that the cutest kid was rejected. Even Oprah should be embarrassed.

Does Terrell Owens deserve bust in Canton?

Now if you’re foreign or a woman or something, the stench of stupidity might not overwhelm you instantly. Give me a few minutes, and I promise it will build. And no, this is not one of those “hot topic” blog things where the shocking headline doesn’t match the content. Cole is actually challenging TO’s Hall Of Fame credentials.

CANTON, Ohio – Terrell Owens(notes) stood next to the ticket office just inside the glass doors of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, headphones covering his ears, sunglasses on his face, and stared outside at the throng of people Saturday evening who were here for the enshrinement ceremonies.

Owens, who joined the Bengals last month after an offseason of little interest in his services, looked out of place.

Reason one Owens doesn’t deserve to be in the Hall of Fame: He doesn’t show much interest in the Hall of Fame. This is just classic sportswriting. I mean, if you write about football for a living, you should probably understand that there is no major sport in which one of the Hall of Fame criteria is “how much does the player like this museum?” Yes, it’s vaguely annoying when somebody so fortunate becomes blasé about it, and jock resentment is the engine that drives much of this type of sports writing, but you know what?

A place he may never arrive if you buy the opinions of some people in the game.

“Absolutely not,” a long-time NFL team personnel executive said recently when asked if Owens deserved a spot in the Hall of Fame. Another prominent team executive echoed that, calling Owens a “figment.”

“I think he is so overblown statistics-wise, it’s unbelievable,” the first executive said. “If you play long enough, you’re going to have stats. He’s playing long enough and he’s got stats and now he has another gig, so there are more stats coming. But he’s no more a Hall of Famer than this bottle of water.

“I’m talking about the route runner. I’m talking about the hands. All that stuff, the wide receiver skills. I just don’t see it. Big, strong, all that that? Yeah. That’s there. But Hall of Famer? Years ago I would have said he was heading in a Hall of Fame direction. But a winner? He doesn’t have any of that. We don’t even have to bring that [into the discussion]. ”

Reason 2: He is overrated. Obviously these people have some sort of resentment against Owens, which probably has more basis in personal interaction than Jason Cole’s hysteria and envy. So I guess this is the spot to lay out some facts. TO was considered, throughout his prime, to be somewhere among the top two to three players at his position by the overwhelming majority of the people watching the game. For me that’s it. If you spend a long stretch doing that, you are by definition, a Hall of Famer. The “overblown statistics?” Normally I’d pull out all kinds of stats that would show how good the player I’m arguing for “really” is. In this case, there’s no need. Third all-time receiving yards with 14,951 (very soon to be second). Third all-time in receiving touchdowns with 144. Sixth all time in in receptions with 1,006. Maybe he is overrated. With those numbers, it doesn’t matter. Devalue them by 10% and it’s still not even debatable, at least within the realm of rationality.

His game is not flawless, of course, but diminishing the stats because he used speed and power more than hands and route running is kind of like saying Warren Beatty wouldn’t have gotten laid so much if he wasn’t a movie star. It’s like saying Nolan Ryan wouldn’t have been as good if he had an 85 mph fastball. Well of course, TO is a totally unprecedented case of a guy who is good at football because he is freakishly big, strong and fast, but they don’t give you less points for a touchdown because you are too strong.

As for the asinine, “if you play long enough,” argument, the guy is not exactly George Blanda. He’s had 14 seasons. It’s the same bullshit. “Well sure, Oscar De La Hoya fought in so many bouts, of course he would eventually win multiple world titles.” “Well sure, if you jot down enough figures, of course you will eventually come up with the theory of relativity.” And though nobody was smart enough to bring it up, you could point to the fact that passing is more prevalent in recent years, which inflates passing stats. But if this is true, it also means that receivers are more important.

But look, these are obviously just some jowly old guys who work for teams (we don’t know what their jobs are or if they involve much talent evaluation) and who have some kind of gripe with TO, which is pretty understandable. To dig up the small number of NFL people who are so sour on TO that they would make such stupid arguments, and to quote them exclusively, is dog shit reporting.

Whether the 44 media members who vote on the Hall of Fame agree with that one day remains to be seen. Owens enters his 15th season with his fifth team, an impressive résumé of stats and a bad reputation even he acknowledges.

And zero concern about whether the Hall is in his future.

I hate when hacks do this, and again, pretty much every sports hack does. Figure out some way to emphasize your point other than giving one sentence its own paragraph. For example, you could try writing a better, more persuasive article.

Fuck off, you moron.

“Even when I came [to the Hall] the first time, the second time, I never really thought about it,” Owens said Sunday. “Toward the end of my career with the numbers where they are now, people tend to say, ‘You’re going to be here some day.’ Of course, from a statistics standpoint, yeah, I’ll be here.

“But there are going to be a lot of things that factor into that, probably reputation and character and things of that nature. For me, honestly, I could really care less. When I started playing in this game, football wasn’t my first love. I didn’t have that passion the way some guys who grow up have that passion for the game of football. … If I get in, I get in. If I don’t, I don’t, it’s not a big deal.”

Back to reason 1. Man this shit drives me crazy. Jason Cole thinks that TO should be really into the Hall of Fame, and, because he is very good at football, TO should be a huge fan of football. But TO doesn’t have the outlook on things that Jason Cole thinks he should. What a fucking crime against humanity. It’s a wonder that all professional athletes don’t instantly turn into Barry Bonds. Can you imagine people routinely writing articles about what your personal priorities should be, down to how interested you should be in a particular museum? Is a great salesman less great if he doesn’t read books about P.T. Barnum?  You can have the lawyer who regales you with awestruck stories about Warren and Marshall. I’ll take the one who wins all of his cases.

Cole, raging hemorrhoid though he is, certainly knows that TO grew up in severe poverty and had a very repressive and moderately abusive childhood. Maybe that’s a factor in why he sees things kind of differently than people who were privileged enough to grow up regarding sports spectating as an issue of great importance. Perhaps this is enough to forgive him, just this once, for thinking out of lockstep with the mighty sage, Jason Cole. Let him have a second chance here. If we later find out that TO’s interest in collectible sports memorabilia is not exactly equal to Jason Cole’s, then I agree: obviously he should be kept out of the Hall Of Fame and possibly imprisoned.

The 36-year-old Owens, who has 1,006 receptions and 144 receiving touchdowns, backed that up with a nearly defiant attitude Saturday as the Bengals visited the Hall prior to their preseason game with Dallas on Sunday night in the Hall of Fame game.

Owens took about 30 steps to the top of the spiral walkway that opens to the Hall’s main floor. He then spent the better part of an hour leaning back on the rail at the top of the walkway, arms crossed and saying little. He didn’t look at any of the exhibits and never wandered anywhere close to the Hall’s best display, the room filled with the busts of all the inductees.

Almost every other Bengals player took it in. Left tackle Andrew Whitworth spent almost every moment researching the offensive tackles in the Hall, including Anthony Munoz, Gary Zimmerman and Jackie Slater. Wide receiver Chad Ochocinco walked around tweeting about the things he learned.

“This is sweet, really nice,” Ochocinco said with a genuine smile.

Linebacker Dhani Jones, who had been here four times before, walked around taking it all in again.

All the while, Owens struck a disaffected pose, like a teenager forced to see an art exhibit. He said he wants to wait, his body language edgy. He said his other visits have been the same. He has never walked the halls of football’s greatest shrine.

“I didn’t even walk around [Saturday],” Owens said. “It’s not a disrespect to the people who are in the Hall of Fame. I think that I’m going to leave that up to the day when I walk away from the game that I can bring my kids and experience it with them. I want to have a full experience.”

Let me expand on the point I made earlier. I’m pretty sure it is true of all museums, not just sports museums. How much you are interested with the museum should have nothing to do with whether you are in the museum. Like, if it is discovered that Goya didn’t like to go to art museums, should all of his stuff be pulled out of the Prado? So how is his “defiant attitude” (defiant of whom? Kim Jong Cole, I guess) “backing up” his stats in any sense whatsoever? There is no connection between his stats and his interest in this museum. The fact that Cole labels a thirty-seven year old man “defiant” says everything about the state of sports punditry.

Perhaps that’s believable,

WHAT? You just spewed like nine “paragraphs” taking him to task for not liking a museum and then you present his explanation, as if one were necessary and say “Perhaps that’s believable?” Good show.

but Owens is missing the bigger point, even as it came walking past him. As he stood in the front of the Hall, the Dallas Cowboys entered a little later. His last best team strolled past him. He gave hugs to some of his old buddies and ignored those who helped force his departure.

He continues to believe that his dismissal from the Cowboys after the 2008 season wasn’t his fault. He continues to deny that his pouting, distrusting, divisive attitude (which also helped hasten his departures from San Francisco and Philadelphia) is what hurt him.

“I think about it, but it is what it is at this point,” Owens said. “There’s no turning back at this point and I still stand by the things that I said and what was done and I know, honestly, it wasn’t my fault.”

Reason number three: Owens is kind of a dick and is a poor teammate. Most people would agree with this assertion and maybe for a borderline candidate, it could nudge them the wrong way. But even in backing up an assertion everyone agrees with, Cole is petty and stupid. Oh my fucking God, TO was warm with the teammates who were his friends, and not with those who shared a mutual dislike. I mean, suppose all of the co-workers from your last job came walking by. Wouldn’t you take a minute to say hello to your friends and politely ignore the people you had problems with? What else would you do?

And even though everybody agrees that TO seems like kind of an asshole, who cares? The hall is full of felons and genuinely nasty, mean-spirited people. Now all of the sudden we are going to keep people out, not for serious crimes, not for using performance-enhancing drugs, not for point-shaving, not for anything other than the fact that TO seems kind of dickish and is a poor teammate.

You know, it’s a shame. Maybe if, instead of pulling himself from a debilitating childhood into massive success, fame and wealth, though maintaining an abrasive personality, TO had followed Ray Lewis’ example. If only he were a really great teammate, who participated in a murder and let his buddies take the fall for it, maybe then he’d be deserving of a Hall of Morality spot.

As the saying goes, denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.

No! Bad hack! Nononono NO! You are not supposed to take money for regurgitating a horrible catch phrase you heard a drag queen spew on a five year old “Maury” rerun when you could have been learning some of the elementary aspects of football. Push that, and a bag of chips, out of your brain and instead try to absorb this fact: a touchdown gives you six points.

But it is the reason that Owens is now playing his home games on a riverfront. Owens has arrived in Cincinnati – the Ellis Island of the NFL – because nobody else wanted him. He was on the market for the better part of five months and the Bengals were the only team that showed real interest. St. Louis thought about it and the New York Jets rolled the idea around, but neither made a serious offer.

That seemingly shouldn’t happen to a guy such as Owens. Unlike the men who are in the Hall, Owens has let too many things get in the way. There are moments when he gets that point. He even admitted to showing great restraint last year while he played through chaos in Buffalo. Between weird coaching moves and numerous injuries to other players, Owens said he kept his mouth shut and his attitude positive.

I officially have a headache. Does Jason Cole know what Ellis Island is and/or was? Because I cannot think of any way that his analogy makes sense. Is he confusing Ellis Island with Alcatraz? Fuck. Let’s move on with some facts. TO is thirty-seven and obviously on the downside of his career. I wonder how many of the wide receivers currently in The Hall would have found a great market for their services at age thirty-seven. Almost none? Also, it’s not like, if the Bengals were not in the league, TO would have been forced into retirement this year. That’s how Cole makes it sound because he is a disingenuous piece of shit, but I don’t think anybody seriously believes that it is actually the case. Especially since, by Cole’s own admission, TO had a positive attitude last year to go with decent statistics.

Finally, TO is still a thirty-seven-year-old man. It is troubling and even borderline creepy how, in a short piece, Cole has compared him to a petulant teenager, attempted to assert what his priorities should be, called him “defiant,” wishes to tell him how he should interact with his ex-coworkers and is only willing to praise him when he “keeps his mouth shut.” This is totally normal in the world of sportswriting. Even though if you tell an average man, “keep your mouth shut,” you’d better have health and dental, there’s some weird swirl of homoeroticism, racism and envy in which it is commonplace for sports writers to say things like this.

That brings up the obvious question: why didn’t he do that before? Why not keep your mouth shut after making the Super Bowl for the first time in Philadelphia? Why not suck it up in Dallas when you had an owner who loved you and wanted to pay you?

Why not get it before you have to finish your career on a series of one-year deals with teams that build the way some people play craps. Take a bunch of long shots and hope it works.

I don’t know. None of your fucking business, maybe? Look, I’m not saying that TO isn’t a headcase. But he is a clear cut, first ballot, hall of fame headcase and it is fucking ridiculous and pathetic for some second tier sports writer to sit back and play Saint Peter on him.

Instead, Owens has created a has-been aura. It’s to the point that football people dismiss his once overwhelming skills.

This headache keeps getting worse. Of course Owens is a “has been.” He is several years past his prime. Technically, Jerry Rice is a “has been.” So what? In fact, you must be a “has been” to get into the Hall Of Fame, so it’s hardly a disqualifier.

“I just don’t see the talent,” the first executive said. “I see a big guy, who in his heyday did damage when with other weapons. Damn right you better deal with him. But all the accolades of the ‘One-man band’ and ‘You can’t stop him,’ I never bought any of that. Just stay on him, do your job and eventually he’ll self-destruct. He’ll drop balls, lose concentration, run a [bad] route, leave the quarterback out to dry. Not in a verbal way, in route running. All those things are what he is. Add it all up and he’s not in the conversation.”

When writing a terrible article, might as well conclude with a paragraph that just quotes some idiot. If he is saying you can leave TO isolated now, well no shit. He’s entering his fifteenth season. Otherwise, great plan. If someone would only have left a prime TO in isolation all game, in the course of racking up 250 receiving yards and scoring four touchdowns, he would have run a bad route at some point. Clearly he shouldn’t even be in the conversation for the Hall of Fame.

The moviefone article has a little preamble about how Steven Seagal is not as popular as he once was and then consists of nothing more than a list of his direct to DVD movies using the exact same format: release date, DVD cover or poster, tagline, tongue in cheek summary.  To author Kevin Polowy’s credit, however, he doesn’t copy our format any further by continuing with actual writing.  So here’s the moviefone version:

I guess the similarities speak for themselves.  Oh, and yes, we did do a series on the direct to DVD videos of 80′s action stars including four of Seagal’s films. So it’s not like moviefone even came up with that aspect of it.  The format is tweaked slightly in our version of the direct to DVD reviews.  For those, we still have the taglines, but the summaries are longer.  Also, we decided not to use the box covers as much to try to freshen up the format.  I guess freshening up the format is less important if, like Polowy, you are just stealing your format from someone else and hoping nobody will notice so that it will seem fresh.  But, other than that… see for yourself.  Here’s our review of Out For A Kill.

Moviefone's Kevin Polowy

Of course the joy to be found in later Seagal has been explored in several other outlets, like The Film Fiend as well, and everybody fucking knows about these movies and making fun of them is a very common internet past time. Polowy didn’t just stumble upon this incredible discovery, as he tries to represent. He’s dumbing down and regurgitating content from all across the web and pretending to do something original. He is however, specifically ripping off our format to do it.

Obviously, this pisses me off because it involves our site.  But there’s a trend towards very big sites like this one and The Huffington Post simply stealing content from smaller sites and communities and passing it off as original articles.  In the case of moviefone, they actually bothered to rephrase our stuff rather than copying and pasting it.  Kudos to them!

The net is a huge, stupid clusterfuck and one function of the high traffic outlets should be to cull some of the better, but more obscure content out there and bring it to their readers.  But be fucking honest about it and don’t steal.  Maybe include one whole sentence saying “here is some cool shit I found at another web site” or “let’s use the Ruthless 80s Action formula for a quick glance at some of Seagal’s recent work.” Then, everyone is happy. Don’t pretend to have made it up yourself, because then you reveal yourself to be a hack with no integrity.  Or worse still, one day, you might just push the wrong man too far. Polowy, I’m gonna take you to the fone.  The blood fone.

Kira shares her thoughts on another topic.

I’m not sure if I’m going to continue making fun of Kira Cockrane beyond this third installment, but it’s so easy. Even in the case of World Net Daily, which is like an independent ecosystem of stupidity, I had to poke around a bit before I found a guy who believed that dragons were real and disproved evolution (really). Yet with Cochrane, I’ve simply run with her three most recent columns in The Guardian. In all earnestness, they should be ashamed for publishing them. Note: this opening is not the thesis statement from an 8th grade report.

Over the past five years, Margaret Mountford has established herself as the only person you can truly respect on The Apprentice.

The fucking Apprentice? I’ve gone through Cochrane’s archives and this is the kind of shit she always talks about. We all like dumb TV shows and movies, but even Ruthless occasionally tries to address something serious. Remember when feminists were less concerned with trashy TV and movies and more concerned with starving, abused women in third world countries, or the spread of AIDS through rape in Africa? I don’t either, but it would be nice once in a while. Anyway, let’s see Kira’s take on… The fucking Apprentice.
Quote:

Not bad for a former corporate lawyer.

Yeah, why would you respect someone like a successful lawyer? Unless, of course, they went on reality TV.

Of course, she doesn’t face too much competition. Siralan lapses ever more into cliche, Nick Hewer’s lips are so pursed he sometimes appears to be imploding, and the contestants run around in a storm of irrelevant numbers (“I’m giving it 110%”), and assertions that they’re not there to make friends – as if, for all the world, crowds of eager people were jostling by their in-tray, begging to be their buddy.

Oh my fuck. So you say that reality TV contestants are not the most dignified or articulate people? I think that became the consensus the minute everybody flipped out when Julie saw Heather’s pager and asked if she was a drug dealer. I realize we’re working from different histories of realty TV, but what I’m saying is that you haven’t made a very fresh observation here. You’re way behind the hack curve on this one. You were supposed to have moved on from marveling at the stupidity of the guests at least eight years ago and started ironically embracing it. Somewhere along the line, you might have observed “reality TV isn’t real at all!”

Which isn’t to suggest that Mountford stands out simply by default. She combines a steely core with acute moral and business judgment. She speaks rarely, but when she does, it’s with a waspish, careworn turn of phrase; “Edinburgh isn’t what it used to be,” she sighed, on hearing that one of last year’s more ludicrous candidates attended university there.

Oh, I get it. You’re writing a column about The fucking Apprentice because it has a WOMAN in the cast who you find likable and you are the WOMEN’S editor. Clever. What do you think of the wife on “Everybody Loves Raymond?” I think she’s fantastic!

How would you, of all people, be able to assess this lady’s business judgment at all, let alone from watching The fucking Apprentice?

Her appeal has often been attributed to her schoolmarmishness, her toughness, the idea that the nation would quite like to be put in its place by her. There is something in this. In a world of easy approval, where mediocrity is so often rewarded…

This actually made me laugh out loud. You are getting paid, pretty well I assume, to write a column consisting of three rudimentary paragraphs about The fucking Apprentice for a major newspaper. In this same article, you lament that this is a world “where mediocrity is so often rewarded.” I’m going to borrow that for the trailer to Hackwatch: The Movie. “In a world… of easy approval… where mediocrity is so often rewarded… One man… is about to shoot himself.”

Mountford’s endorsement has genuine worth.

More than that though, she seems to be a conduit for the audience’s emotions. Most of her communication is non-verbal, and it is always perfectly timed. Her eyes roll when ours do. She looks appalled when we do. Her jaw falls floorwards at exactly the same moment as ours.

Please don’t say “we,” assuming that everybody else shares in your enraptured journey while watching The fucking Apprentice. Oh, the dizzying highs and the invigorating drops. What has he said now? Appalling! Now, look what she has done. Jawdropping! And how comforting that the reaction shots of one of the hosts have been edited in to mirror your own! Kira’s world must be a magical place.

With her expressive eyebrows, her perfectly applied lipstick, her spot-on scepticism and her PhD studies in papyrology, Mountford represents the audience’s very best self.

I’m having a hard time seeing how the characteristics you’ve listed represent the best, check that, the very best, of the audience. She represents their skepticism… OK. I mean, you don’t realize her reaction shots are probably edited in and have serious moral and emotional reactions to The Fucking Apprentice, but OK, she represents your skepticism. Her lipstick, I guess, represents the class and dignity of the… audience of The fucking Apprentice. She also represents their… PhDs in papyrology?

An island of sanity in a sea of lunacy.

She is a fucking character carefully orchestrated to be the point of empathy amongst other characters carefully orchestrated to be unsympathetic. On. The. Fucking. Apprentice!

Kira Chochrane is upset again.

Following Kira Cochrane’s terrible piece on the decline of “lad’s mags” she’s come up with this terrible piece: a shocking expose revealing that many famous actresses have had plastic surgery. I thought about editing it for her, so you wouldn’t have to read all of the parts in which she explains what facelifts are and how Botox isn’t permanent. But it would defeat the purpose of Hackwatch if I were to spare you the searing pain of actually reading Cochrane’s articles as she, and The Guardian, intend for you to read them.

Age shall not wither them

A couple of months ago, a photograph was hungrily circulated around gossip magazines and websites and at a glance you would have had trouble explaining why. It showed an ordinary-looking woman in her mid-40s, out shopping in California, her specs on, cardigan buttoned. The clue was in the picture of Madonna that ran beside it. The anonymous woman was identified as the singer’s younger sister, Melanie Henry, and readers were encouraged to compare and contrast.

The difference was striking. Because while Henry, snapped unawares, looked as good as any woman could hope, Madonna seemed to have been beamed from another planet. Where Henry had the natural features of middle-age – mild creases beside her nose and beneath her eyes, for instance – Madonna’s face was eerily unlined, skin glowing, cheeks conspicuously plump. It’s not so much that, at 50, she looked much younger than her sister, as that she had no signs of age whatsoever. Not a crinkle on her brow, crow’s-feet by her eyes, or the slightest sag to her cheeks.

Of course, Madonna isn’t the only famous woman to look, quite literally, ageless…

I’m not totally sure I’ve nailed down the identity of the “Madonna” you are referring to. I saw a new video by “Madonna” and then I bought an older album with her picture on the cover called “Live After Death” and it seemed like totally different music. Among other things, why would Madonna be a good singer live, but not with the advantages of a studio production? Anyway, in neither case did Madonna look “ageless.”

Over the last 10 years, the public face of ageing seems to have changed completely, and many of the world’s most prominent women hardly seem to grow older at all. It’s not so much that they always look young, exactly, or that they have the tightly pulled skin of traditional facelifts.

They don’t seem to grow older at all, but they don’t look young? That…. makes no sense. I think you mean they look like they’ve grown older but tried to hide it. Like, you wouldn’t say, “Shatner doesn’t seem to have lost any hair at all!” He looks like he has a hairpiece.

But they do look completely different to their non-famous peers. Where other women’s lips recede, theirs stay mysteriously plump. Where others have laughter lines, they remain undimpled. And when describing how they stay so taut, the explanation is generally this. They moisturise. They drink water. They work out. They eat well. They avoid the sun. They don’t smoke. Which is enough to make the average healthy-living woman wince while inspecting her own wrinkles.

Why is it always feminists who assert that women are dumber than sacks of Polish potatoes? I’ll make fun of women for simultaneously believing in ghosts, angels and pet psychics, because too many actually do and it’s funny. But I’m not anti-woman, so I would never claim that women in general are too stupid to realize that Madonna’s had some work done.

Occasionally someone does break rank, and admits to having had treatments – in the past. Last week Kylie Minogue ended speculation when she admitted to UK Elle magazine that, “I’ve tried Botox … But I’m preferring to be a lot more natural these days.” Minogue added that she’s “definitely not one of those people who says, ‘You shouldn’t do this’ … Everyone individually can do what they want.”

“Everyone individually can do what they want?” Not when the hegemonic patriarchy is using mind control with gossip magazines, poor, naive Kylie.

Geri Halliwell says a similar thing in the latest edition of Red magazine (“I had some [Botox] squirted into my forehead and it gave me a headache”), echoing the comments of Jennifer Aniston earlier this year, who said she had “tried Botox once and it was really not good for me. I felt like I had a weight on my head.” Aniston’s former Friends co-star, Courteney Cox, told US Marie Claire magazine late last year that, “I went to this doctor once, and he was like, ‘Oh, let me do it just here and here and here.’ And I was miserable … It’s not that I haven’t tried Botox – but I hated it.

Wait, wasn’t your point that celebs pretend not to have had these procedures? A lot of them seem to be freely volunteering that they have. Maybe the rest of them are just being discrete and not bringing it up. You know, I’ve never seen Jenifer Aniston give a detailed account of having projectile diarrhea. I bet she has convinced most women that they shouldn’t have bowel movements.

For other performers, though, the rumours persist. Heat magazine has asked “Has Madonna had cheek implants?” while Grazia speculated “Has Madonna had the ribbon lift?”. (This procedure apparently involves a “flexible, tube-like device” covered in tiny hooks being inserted beneath the skin on the face. The hooks then attach themselves to the subject’s tissue, before the device is hoiked upwards.) But the source of most speculation is probably Nicole Kidman. The smoothness of her skin has caused the salon.com film critic, Stephanie Zacharek, to wonder whether her forehead is made of melamine, and Dr Martin Braun – who runs the biggest Botox clinic in Canada – to say he believes she has been an “enthusiastic user” of Botox.

Kidman has denied this. In 2007 she told US Marie Claire magazine that, “To be honest, I am completely natural. I have nothing in my face or anything. I wear sunscreen, and I don’t smoke. I take care of myself. And I’m very proud to say that.” Madonna, meanwhile, has stated she is “not going to have a press conference if I have plastic surgery. But I have said many times that I think about it, like everybody, and I sure don’t rule it out.”

Is there supposed to be an argument here? So far I’ve learned that you are a glutton for celebrity gossip and that lots of famous women have plastic surgery. The majority of your sample downplay it, which is pretty normal. You’ve found exactly one who flatly denies it. You’ve somehow convinced yourself that this is any of your business.

What is beyond doubt is that, in general, the aesthetic of ageing has changed, and that many women in the public eye are having extensive cosmetic work done, starting ever younger. Speaking to the cosmetic doctor, Tracy Mountford, who specialises in “non-surgical skin rejuvenation” – including Botox and other injectables – she says that many well-known women will “have had quite a bit done to maintain that ‘natural’ good look. People would be staggered … The majority of people [in the public eye] will be having something done.”

I’m staggered!

And in some ways, this is completely understandable. After all, ageism is alive and well. As Anna Ford said after leaving the BBC in 2006: “How many presenters do you know on television who are over the age of 60?” In 2002, the actor Rosanna Arquette made the documentary Searching for Debra Winger, in which she and other Hollywood stars questioned the paucity of roles for older women. Madonna has also commented on age discrimination, saying that, “Once you reach a certain age you’re not allowed to be adventurous, you’re not allowed to be sexual. I mean, is there a rule? Are you supposed to just die?”

I’ll just address the claim of ‘ageism.’ Doesn’t ____ism denote some kind of unfair treatment? Aren’t TV presenters supposed to be attractive? Are you going to sit there and tell me it is unfair of me to not be attracted to old women? But if–hypothetically speaking, now–I had ever rubbed one out to “Clarissa Explains It All,” I bet you’d find that somehow objectionable. I was only doing my part in the battle against ageism! Repeatedly! Hypothetically. And you have to admit that Ferguson was an early bloomer.

Until very recently, older women were simply expected to fade from view. As Susie Orbach, the feminist psychoanalyst and author of Bodies, says: “Thirty years ago, a woman of my age [62] wasn’t really in public space or contributing – you were terribly exceptional if that happened.” And the result is that women are still in the earliest stages, historically, of negotiating how to remain in the public eye.

So far, the most popular approach seems to be to deny the ageing process altogether. Professor Virginia L Blum, author of Flesh Wounds, an analysis of cosmetic surgery culture, points out that a performer’s looks are “their livelihood, and we do know that actors – and especially actresses – can’t even really appear on screen unless they look a certain way. So they’re constantly forced to manufacture the look of youth and keep producing it.”

Forced? This is all painfully stupid. We’re talking primarily about successful actors who could easily retire or move on to lower profile performances if they wanted to. I know, the studio should have cast Jessica Tandy for the lead in Tomb Raider and the audiences would have had a moral obligation to enjoy the film. But anybody who tries to become an actor, athlete, model, etc. knows what the deal is when they set out. Just like doctors know they probably won’t see any real money or leisure until they are approaching middle age. It’s all very tragic. Who will be the voice for society’s most vulnerable members?

It’s also true that performers are under more scrutiny than ever before, at the mercy of both high-definition TV – which lays bare the tiniest “imperfections” – and tabloid culture. It’s an environment that is at once trashy and highly exacting: every hangnail a sin, every eye-bag a crime.

In the face of such constant surveillance, it’s not surprising that women would want to erase marks that might otherwise be circled with an exclamation of disgust. And the tools are now widely available. The stereotype of a woman who has work done was once of someone in their 50s or more, who visited a cosmetic surgeon in the hope of having a decade or two erased through a facelift – her skin sliced open, pulled tight and stitched.

So that’s what a facelift is. I’d been thinking it was like that John Woo movie. I was going to be Roddy Piper.

but since Botox was first used for cosmetic purposes 20 years ago – and particularly since 2002, when it won approval in the US from the Food and Drug Administration for the removal of frown lines – the landscape has been transformed. Now the onus is increasingly on “non-invasive” treatments that don’t require scalpels but involve substances being injected into the face, whether it’s botulinum toxin (of which Botox is the best-known brand name), which reduces wrinkles by temporarily paralysing the muscles; Juvéderm, a wrinkle-filler made of hyaluronic acid; or Restylane Vital, also made of hyaluronic acid, which promises to “counter the effects of sun damage and provide deep dermal hydration”. (Juvéderm and Restylane Vital are also approved by the FDA.) Non-invasive treatments have boomed over the last decade. While cosmetic surgery procedures in the US increased by 114% between 1997 and 2007, non-surgical procedures increased by 754%. In 2007, 55,000 Botox injections were administered in the UK.

When it comes to these procedures, the focus isn’t necessarily on rolling back time, but on starting in your 20s or 30s and achieving stasis. Dr Jean-Louis Sebagh (also known as “King Botox”) recently said that “preventing the ageing process is better, where possible, than correcting it, non? If a woman comes to me at 35 or 40 and we treat her every three to four months, I can keep her looking that way for 20 years or more.”

This would be interesting if it wasn’t all pretty much common knowledge. Or perhaps even if the article seemed to have any coherent point or direction. Also, I liked how you claimed this procedure generally starts for women in their “20s or 30s,” then the doctor you used to support the claim said “35 or 40.” Two fucking sentences later. What does this shit look like before it’s edited?

It’s a question of vigilance. Non-invasive procedures appeal to both the famous and the less so because they’re not radical but incremental, meaning there’s less chance of a sudden, major change in one’s looks. The downside is that they have to be regularly updated.

Slow down!

So there is something called “Bo-tox” that is a short term treatment that must be repeated more often, while the other thing, a “face… lift(?)” is a more invasive procedure done with something called “sur-ge-ry,” by a “doct-orb.” This is a lot of new information all at once.

Mountford says hyaluronic acid products require a top-up every six to nine months, so once you embark on these procedures, you enter an ongoing process of revision, your face an endless work in progress. And the cost can be astronomical. While a year’s worth of Botox treatments and dermal fillers might cost, say, £2,000 (£1,200 for the fillers, £300-£500 every six months for Botox injections), over 20 years that comes to £40,000. And that’s not taking into account either inflation, or the chance that you will be tempted by some of the many other procedures available.

One of the many, many ironies of the feminist movement is that it provides a banner under which writing of this caliber is tolerated in venues where it would otherwise be ridiculed, so the public voice of women becomes monglified. I mean, here we are back to the feminist positing the sharpest of sexist stereotypes. A while back, Cochrane wrote a condemnation of the movie Confessions of a Shopaholic. Now she’s talking about pitiful creatures who will be helpless to resist the temptation of expensive procedures they didn’t even know they wanted.

Also, nice job not understanding inflation. Barring unusual circumstances, the fact that the cost of a biannual procedure will go up right on line with everything else is not noteworthy and does not mean it will be more expensive in any meaningful sense. “At this rate, by the time I’m 65, I’ll have to spend a whole day’s pay on an oil change!” See how stupid that is? If anything, won’t the real cost of the procedure probably go down? Don’t worry about all that math stuff though, dear.

Not that the cost affects the Hollywood set. These new procedures are now so popular that they’ve been credited with a whole new aesthetic for women in the public eye – a specific “face” shared by many female stars. Where facelifts were often synonymous with the “windtunnel” look – a person’s features pulled tight and distorted – the era of injectables is all about filling out the face, replacing lost contours. It’s a look that was described in New York magazine last year as The New New Face, with the writer, Jonathan Van Meter, pinpointing “the Mount Rushmore cheekbones, the angular jawline, the smoothed forehead, the plumped skin, the heartlike shape of the face” as defining this aesthetic. That, and volume. Van Meter described these faces as not being “pulled tight in that typical facelift way; they seemed pushed out”, while Mountford explains it thus: “If you have a prune, and you tighten the prune, you don’t get a grape. You get a tight prune. But if you restore volume back into the prune, you get a grape back.”

I was about to give you props for making an observation that wouldn’t have been obvious to a child, but then I saw that you lifted it from a man from the New York Magazine. Good job citing your sources, though!

The sad thing is that, while these cosmetic procedures are supposed to lengthen a performer’s career, they often cut them short. We all know of actors who suddenly appear with painfully enlarged lips, weirdly raised eyebrows, or stunned foreheads, and who become very difficult to take seriously. Over the last few years, casting directors have talked about the difficulties they experience as a result, with Richard Hicks, who cast Hairspray, telling Radar magazine that, “There’s no way to light them so that they don’t look hideous. For the most part, what I find moving is the truth, and once you’ve had your face worked on, it’s often not the same thing.” The Wall Street Journal has reported that Warner Bros has had to double its casting staff in Britain and Canada, because Botox is so common in the US. And directors Martin Scorsese and Baz Luhrmann have reportedly complained that the vogue for surgery has undermined actors’ ability to express emotion.

I’m slightly skeptical of the WSJ claiming that the casting staff abroad has doubled specifically because there is a shortage of actresses without excessive Botox. To be clear, I both doubt that this is actually true and doubt that the original WSJ article made such a claim. Let’s find out. The original article says, “In recent years, Warner Bros. has doubled its casting staff in foreign countries like England and Canada Where Botox is less common”

This is shitty reporting too, so I can see how you were mislead. Botox might be a factor, but the only fact here is that the staffs have doubled over a period of years. To what extent is this simply commensurate to the growth of the casting department or studio in general? Certainly, your gossip rags have mentioned that US studios are filming increasingly more in Canada. Do you think the fact that more shows and movies are being filmed in Canada might mean that more local actors are required? And how would one select, or “cast” these actors? Perhaps WB is working more in Britain, as well. Who knows? Not me, because I’m reading your bullshit article. Fun fact: this WSJ piece is also where you lifted your earlier “observation” about high definition TV making flaws more evident.

What does this culture mean for ordinary women? Well, for one, the beauty standard we’re expected to live up to is, specifically, a surgical one – which is complicated by the fact that this is so rarely acknowledged…

…apart from person after person freely acknowledging it in your favorite gossip magazines.

The result is that we are presented with image after image of women (and, increasingly, men) who are astoundingly unlined, and are forced to compare ourselves with them. If we buy into the idea that these people are “naturally” unwrinkled, the comparison is always likely to come up wanting. As Blum says of the current face of ageing, “I think it puts women on high alert all the time. I think it’s just very anxiety-inducing and it causes a certain amount of unhappiness because it’s asking people to hyper-scrutinise themselves.”

Again… “forced?” Maybe you’d feel less inclined to compare yourself to celebrities if you read something other than magazines about celebrities. Once more, you assume that women are so amazingly stupid that they think someone like Angelina just throws on some blush in the car on the way to a shoot, walks straight to her mark and appears “‘naturally’ unwrinkled.”

Of course, these images also encourage women to have cosmetic procedures, which can sometimes go horribly wrong. In Britain, the use of cosmetic fillers is largely unregulated, and there are many stories of rogue treatments leaving strange, floating lumps beneath the skin. Nottingham solicitor Paul Balen spoke in the Daily Mail recently about representing six people who have experienced problems with filler treatments: “Clients who have lumps of this stuff erupting out of their faces. Others are dreadfully scarred, or they have strange bags of these filler products appearing under their eyes.” In the same article, Karon Kitchener explained that an injectable water-based filler treatment she had to enhance her cheeks had left her with “a moving layer of custard under the skin. Every morning I wake up not knowing how I am going to look.” A specialist told her that it would cost £50,000 to correct the damage.

So, these procedures, unlike others, are not 100% effective? Who would have guessed? I wonder what the actual risk is. Is it greater than the risk one takes in driving to the clinic and back? I guess I should read an article that actually provides that information. But, thanks to Kira, I do know that Botox didn’t work out for… some lady. Keeping the information train rolling, did you know that holding it in is harmful to the kidneys? I read it in medical journals.

These treatments also involve us buying into a culture that invites us constantly to critique how we look, what we’d like to change, and then holds our happiness just beyond arm’s reach. “The cycle of gratification is endless,” says Blum, “because what will happen? ‘Oh, I get an extra 17 years’ – but then what happens at the end of the 17 years? I think, again, it puts people on high alert all the time.” She also believes that once you start having cosmetic procedures, it’s very difficult to stop. “If you have a good result, you’re in it. And if you have a bad result, you’re in it, because you have to fix it. So either way it’s addictive.”

So women like to look young. Looping back, this is because ageist men don’t want to bang old ladies. Also, I don’t know what Virginia Blum is a professor of, but given her unscientific and irresponsible use of the term ‘addictive’ in an ostensibly academic book, I’m guessing… women’s studies? American studies? Definitely something studies. A competent woman named Catherine Bennett reviewed Blum’s book for The Guardian. The shifts in the quality of writing are almost jarring, as we move from Chocrane to her colleague to pseudoacademic hackery on a level not seen since phrenology, so buckle up, but here’s an excerpt:

The nose experience has left this American academic so “damaged and vulnerable” that she is always close, she confesses, to reverting to the passive “patient position” – in defiance of “half a lifetime of cultural inquiry and feminist protest”. Still, it seems safe to say that no reader of Flesh Wounds will be left in much doubt about the latter enthusiasm. Her zest for cultural inquiry and feminist protest is so great that, without the victim-legacy of her nose jobs, Blum’s book might be consistently, instead of sporadically, unendurable. For instance: “While the order of the simulacral is the consequence of western styles of power, specificially capitalism’s, it also constitutes the fundamental undoing of power, as Baudrillard shows

Do we want these to be the terms on which we’re allowed to participate in public life? Last year, the author, Charla Krupp, reached the New York Times bestseller list with How Not To Look Old, and argued in interviews that her “whole focus is about the workplace … [the book is] for the boomer woman who is finding herself looking older than everybody else at work, and realising that she’s very vulnerable”. While Krupp doesn’t favour plastic surgery, she is a strong advocate of non-invasive cosmetic procedures, saying that, “We are so fortunate to be coming of age at a time when we can go to a dermatologist and get Botox, and get the wrinkles in our forehead and the crow’s-feet to disappear in a week, 48 hours sometimes.” Krupp’s outlook is echoed in a series of articles that have recently hit newsstands, which suggest that older people are having cosmetic procedures to help them remain “relevant” in a recession-era workplace. These include one by Judith Newman, for US Marie Claire, who described the blood leaking out of her puncture wounds after liposuction.

Blood leaking from surgical wounds can happen if you’re older. In fact, it happened to me when I was nine. Because it’s totally normal. Women like to look young, men like younger women because they are more fertile, evolution, science, male constructs… let’s wrap this up.

It’s natural to hold actors and performers up as role models, but to do so in this case is faintly ridiculous, since, of all of us, they are under the most intense pressure regarding their looks. It is understandable that they would bow to the most punishing ideals, but that doesn’t mean that the average woman or man should.

Disagreed.

Instead, we have to ask ourselves whether we really want to paralyse our facial muscles, wipe away all signs of age and accept that only by looking oddly youthful for as long as possible are we allowed any place in public life. If we do, then we’re bending to a viciously sexist and ageist ideal. And, let’s face it, obedience is never a good look.

“And, let’s face it… something completely obvious,” is always a good way to wrap up an article for one of the best known papers in the world. The whole paragraph is an embarrassment, though. False dichotomy? Straw man? Just pick a fallacy and run with it, sister. And if it’s a question of being “allowed in public life,” then it’s not up to you “ask yourself” if you accept the conditions laid out.

Of course the situation described has nothing to do with reality. Most people can be moderate with plastic surgery. Older looking women abound and can be seen everywhere. Why, I saw a woman who looked to be at least 50 roaming freely about the public square just last month. Why doesn’t the publication of this shit cause the competent, female staff at The Guardian to threaten to strike?

Kira Cochrane is the “women’s editor” of The Guardian.  We love The Guardian.  They linked to Ruthless back when we were even less popular than we are today.  However, “women’s editor” is as intellectually ominous as “no spin zone” or “intelligent design.”  I like some women writers, of course, but very few of them who are primarily concerned with “women’s” issues or specifically female perspectives.   I don’t like the idea that a paper needs a designated female viewpoint, either.  (Doesn’t The Guardian already have an astrology section?)  Someone who takes it upon  themselves to provide views from a political identity will general do so in a humorless, sanctimonious and hyperbolic fashion.  So it goes with Kira Chochrane, who will be the subject of multiple editions of hackwatch.   Let’s see how long it takes for Kira to carelessly throw around the word ‘misogyny.’

Maxim and other lads’ mags have taken sexism to unexpected lows

When Maxim magazine launched in 1995, “lad culture” was all the rage. Men Behaving Badly was on TV, Oasis dominated the charts, and Loaded magazine was flying high, dedicated to “the pursuit of sex, drink and football”. Maxim had similar ambitions. Its first issue was described by the Guardian’s media section as containing “the usual revelations that beer is good for you [and] sexy women are supposed to be looked at”.

And here we go.  “Sexy women are supposed to be looked at?”  Obviously, in the original context, this is meant to be a nearly meaningless assertion, yet Cochrane wants to question it.   Sexy women are looked at.  There’s no “supposed to” about it.  Men are visually stimulated, looking for good genes, human reproduction, evolution, empirical data, science, and all those bad things.  Perhaps only religious maniacs are so unrealistic as feminists in their denial of natural behavior, yet even they recognize the realities before denying them.  If sexy women aren’t to be looked at, they put drapes on them, they don’t insist that men recalibrate themselves to be physically attracted to knowledge of The Koran.

Oasis?    `

The men’s magazine sector was booming, and in many of the leading titles old-fashioned values – often outright sexism – were dressed up as ironic, funny and cool. This approach made it very difficult for anyone to protest. If you didn’t like the focus on birds and beer, you were easily classed as a frump and a drudge. In fact, if you didn’t like it, you just weren’t getting it (nudge, nudge).

Liking “birds and beer” are “old-fashioned values?”  Those tastes barely constitute values at all.  I suppose allowing magazines to focus on these things constitutes a minimal amount of liberalism.  Anyway, most magazines focus on specific things, so we’re not talking about a world view or a positive system of values.  It’s not as if someone who likes Car and Driver should be expected to side with the Decepticons when they invade.  They just like cars.  As to your other assertion, I agree that your job would certainly be easier if men weren’t so devious as to conspire  to have a sense of humor in order to preemptively undermine your joyless harping.

To be fair, in the mid-90s, the lads’ mags generally had less nudity than they do now.

But as time went on, covers featuring male celebrities were scrapped in favour of semi-naked female models, and this trend reached its zenith with the launch of weekly titles Nuts and Zoo in 2004. These were initially a huge hit, and they quickly took sexism to unexpected lows. Zoo ran a competition to “win a boob job for your girlfriend”, while Nuts held their Real Girl Roadshow, in which women were encouraged to pose semi-naked for the cameras. In Sheffield, they accidentally snapped a topless 14-year-old.

This would be an embarrassment to one of those Brit tabloids that treat Robbie Williams and Scary Spice as celebrities.  Assuming that taking a sexy shot of a 14-year-old is sexist, and not something else, how can doing it by accident possibly be construed as sexist?  Is it racist to accidentally spill black paint on your face?  Can you also, for example, be an accidental Jew?  “I didn’t know it was the kosher meal, I just bought it because it was cheape… oh shit, I am going to hell.”

Lads’ mag sales have been plummeting for a while now, and it’s hard to mourn the losses. The mistake would be to think that the decline of these magazines reflects a decline in misogyny. It’s likely readers are migrating online, where they can find much more hardcore material, much more cheaply.

Well, she almost made it to the end of her most recent column without the misogyny crutch.  Men liking porn and the female form constitutes misogyny.  If you like looking at hot women having sex, you hate women.  Granted, some porn is genuinely misogynistic, but only in the sense that some sparkling wine is Champagne.

David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’

March 11th, 2008 12:00 AM

Village Voice

John Maynard Keynes was twitted with changing his mind. He replied,
“When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?”

My favorite example of a change of mind was Norman Mailer at The Village Voice.

Norman took on the role of drama critic, weighing in on the New York premiere of Waiting for Godot.

Twentieth century’s greatest play. Without bothering to go, Mailer called it a piece of garbage.

When he did get around to seeing it, he realized his mistake. He
was no longer a Voice columnist, however, so he bought a page in the
paper and wrote a retraction, praising the play as the masterpiece it
is.

Wow, what a self-absorbed prick he was. But I think you’re getting
ahead of yourself here. Could you write a whole bunch of common
knowledge shit to first explain why one might write a newspaper
article. Then I’ll be prepared for the fact that you are writing
anything at all in the first place. Then you can explain that it is
actually reasonable for people to change their mind about things, then
you can finally get to the subject of the article.

I once won one of Mary Ann Madden’s “Competitions” in New York magazine.

What the fuck are you talking about? This is beginning to remind me of
those Harry Carey sketches from SNL. Hey! Did you know that in the 8th
grade I went to the California finals with a History Day project that I
did with a kid who is now the guitar player in Linkin Park? It was
about… well, I won’t bore everybody with the tedious details of some
dumb contest I was in years and years ago.

The task was to name or create a “10″ of anything, and mine was…

Jesus.

…the World’s Perfect Theatrical Review. It went like this: “I never
understood the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I’ve
ever written. When you read this I’ll be dead.” That, of course, is the
only review anybody in the theater ever wants to get.

So aaaanyyywayyy…

My prize…

Jesus fuck.

…in a stunning example of irony, was a year’s subscription to New
York, which rag (apart from Mary Ann’s “Competition”) I considered an
open running sore on the body of world literacy—this due to the
presence in its pages of John Simon, whose stunning amalgam of
superciliousness and savagery, over the years, was appreciated by that
readership searching for an endorsement of proactive mediocrity.

So… you won a contest in a small periodical you didn’t like eighty
years ago and the prize, which I assume was made clear to people
entering the contest, was a subscription to the paper. What stunning
irony!

But I digress.

I’m reasonably sure that you have to actually begin writing about the
subject at hand before you ‘”digress” from it. Doesn’t this article
have something to do with… Hey! My favorite food as a kid was chicken fried steak. What stunning irony!

I wrote a play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway,
some seats still available). And as part of the “writing process,” as I
believe it’s called, I started thinking about politics. This comment is
not actually as jejune as it might seem. Porgy and Bess is a buncha
good songs but has nothing to do with race relations, which is the flag
of convenience under which it sailed.
I have pretty much no idea what you are talking about, though I even
looked up ‘jejune’ to make sure that I really knew what it meant. One
thing is for sure though, when a 100 year old man announces that he’s
just started to think about politics seriously, my money says he
probably has fresh ideas and really knows what he’s talking about.

But my play, it turned out, was actually about politics, which is to
say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views.

Not so much, chief. I mean, you could say it, but you’d be wrong because by your definition, people arguing about Chicago vs. New York style pizza is politics.

The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested,
corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian,
utopian-socialist speechwriter.

Implying that Democrats are actual adherents of Thomas More… a fine
start, shit bomb. I also like how being a utopian socialist is
“leftish.”

The play, while being a laugh a minute…

Maybe even more.

…is, when it’s at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or
perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or
perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that
people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government
to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses
and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those
of government intervention.

What!? Nobody can ever change their… oh wait, you already explained
why people sometimes CAN change their minds. So this is like Norman
Mailer writing a fraudulent article about a play he’d never seen then
spending a bunch of money so he would not be remembered as the guy who
hated Godot…
although that’s not really changing his mind so much, because he never
really had an opinion about the play when he wrote the first piece.
Then the ad was just him trying to cover his ass with the same
selfishness that led him to write the fraudulent article. Actually,
it’s exactly like that because it is becoming clear that you never saw
the play in the first place and are now just parroting other people’s
views, with the one constant of doing what is self-serving.

As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that
government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people
are generally good at heart.

But establishing your political views based on sweeping generalizations
that you take purely on faith would make you an total idiot! If you
were an idiot for decade after decade and also a “liberal,” then all
liberals must be idiots. Thank God you are now a conservative.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as
increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable?
Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them
in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along
and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the
words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. “?” she prompted.
And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper
truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of
national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of
place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I
thought—referring to myself for years as “a brain-dead liberal,” and to
NPR as “National Palestinian Radio.”

National Palestinian Radio? You dumb donkey. I’ll admit that I haven’t
focused on NPRs coverage of one (mine or yours) particular ethnic
group. This is because I am not a bigot. But, the occasional “drive the
Jews into the sea” rant on “Car Talk” aside, based on NPRs standards
and coverage in general, and the fact that you are throwing out a wild,
goof fuck accusation with no support whatsoever, you were mad because
NPRs coverage has too much depth. Like maybe they explained exactly
what the Jewish settlements involve, or how the Israeli courts and
government openly assert that that God choo-choo chooses them to have
the unique right to torture other human beings. I’d also bet they
interviewed a person you don’t like and believe nobody should be
allowed to hear. You are well on the road to being a good
pseudo-conservative, though. It’s important to understand that simply
reporting facts and interviewing people with different opinions is
biased when it fails to conform to your agenda.

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

If this was your “worldview,” it truly was your own, douche copter,
because nobody else thinks that. “Liberals hate rainbows!” Moron. Like,
who the fuck have you been talking about politics with for all of these
years? Oh yeah, people in the theater.

But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always
wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I
live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous
communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes
of which I was at various times a part.

Wow, not every single thing was wrong in every community that you ever
lived in. I guess liberals must be wrong, since they believe that
everything, everywhere is wrong, as everyone knows. I guess that means
that the US doesn’t now imprison 1% of it’s population for mostly
non-violent crimes because none of them are from your neighborhood. I’m
detecting a trend here. Your experience, your neighborhoods, your
ethnic group… I wonder if your revelations have anything to do with
the fact that you’re rich and you’re selfish and you’re an ignoramus.

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought
everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought
that people were basically good at heart?
It is not difficult to piece together. You were a fool and remain a fool.

Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found
that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed,
that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for
the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can
behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject,
but the only subject, of drama.

Mind blowing. Why have you waited so long to share these revolutionary thoughts on human nature?

I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving
the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in
general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States
get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged
circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that
some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that
we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt,
inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly
effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner…
Again, who exactly is it that believes or believed that all people
behaved like gods? You know, there are other fallacies besides the
straw man. You might want to take one out for a test spin, because it
sounds like you are going to need them.
…recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any
opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they
consider to be their proper interests.

To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into
those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the
only thing we remember from 12 years of schooling.

No, only idiots. Twelve whole years of schooling! I’m very eager to read
more of your constitutional scholarship. I bet it’s brilliant.

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual
government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the
Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary
will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve
(destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits
them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but
rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one
branch from getting too much power for too long.

You are joking. You seriously did not learn all of the above in about
the eighth grade and know it from that point forward? Look, I’ll be the
first to admit to not knowing all of the amendments or whatever, but
you should realize that everyone who is reading this is laughing at you
and that is probably what The Voice intended by publishing it. Let me
guess, they offered, at most, cursory editorial advice.

VV–”The article is… mnnnn…hhhhhh… fantastic, David”

DM–”Whats so funny?”

VV–”Oh, I was just thinking of something I saw on ‘Herman’s Head’”

DM–”Mmmmmmmm.”

Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian
perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their
employers…

I like how you are a famous playwright and don’t know anything at all
about Greek gods. “Olympian perfection?” Yeah, my pie in the sky,
liberal, Pollyanna perception of government fits with the press
secretary saying, “Sorry, but the secretary of energy is unavailable
for comment because the president has chained him to a rock forever so
that his liver might be newly eaten by a vulture every day.” And,
assuming that it were even a sensible phrase, who is it again that
envisions “Olympian perfection” in Washington?

…the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with
our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the
pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.

So the Constitution is a rather brilliant compact that divides
government into three branches to curb power and the consequence of
this is that our government is worthless, politicians are horrible and
you should shoot them. I mean, that is my best guess at what you are
saying, but for the second time I don’t really know you are talking
about. Was it a joke? In this context it is hard to tell.

I found not only that I didn’t trust the current government (that, to
me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the
faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a
monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in
Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy
left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied
about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a
book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy
with the Mafia. Oh.

And this just now dawned on you.

And I began to question my hatred for “the Corporations”—the hatred of
which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and
services they provide and without which we could not live.

You are such a puerile dick tree. Like, corporations are not 100% evil and provide goods and services we need? No shit?

Nobody over the age of 13 is even arguing that. The leftist criticism
is mostly that corporations have way too much influence in the
government when it should be the government that is making the rules
for them. Of course, as an expert on free market economic thought (see
bellow) you know that Adam Smith himself was very worried about these
issues. Just kidding. No you don’t.

And I began to question my distrust of the “Bad, Bad Military” of my
youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women
who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very
hostile world.

Yeah, Iraq, Panama, Grenada… so much we need to be protected from.
The world is just a box of scary chocolates. Thank God our military
budget is literally larger than the rest of the world’s combined. Thank
God some kid is being eviscerated by shrapnel so that Saddam couldn’t
come to New York and hummus-fart in your general direction.

Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the
corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular
amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will.
Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of
mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So,
taking the tragic view, the question was not “Is everything perfect?”
but “How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose
definition?” Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding
pretty well.

Did you cereally used to go around asking if everything is perfect or are you just lying?

Do I speak as a member of the “privileged class”? If you will—but
classes in the United States are mobile, not static, which is the
Marxist view.

Who’s a fucking Marxist? I mean, independently of anyones assessment of
Marx and the fact that there is no fucking way you, in particular, have
even a rudimentary understanding of Marxism, there are no significant
political figures in this country who are Marxists. You know, I think
you should rejoin the “liberal” segment of society because American
heads of state are chosen through an electoral process, unlike in a
monarchy.
That is: Immigrants came and continue to come here penniless and
can (and do) become rich; the nerd makes a trillion dollars; the single
mother, penniless and ignorant of English, sends her two sons to
college (my grandmother). On the other hand, the rich and the children
of the rich can go belly-up; the hegemony of the railroads is
appropriated by the airlines, that of the networks by the Internet; and
the individual may and probably will change status more than once
within his lifetime.

I really can’t believe this shit is just hitting you and you think that
there might be one single person who is not already aware of most of
what your are saying. It feels dumb to even discuss things that are so
obvious, but moving up in class is difficult and often requires as much
luck as work or skill. Jesus, you’ve never heard an actor talking about
his “big break?” The point is we do not live in a meritocracy, so left
leaning people think it is fair to redistribute a certain amount of
wealth and try to give poor kids a chance in the race, to facilitate
the mobility you are so fond of. Stop just pointing out obvious,
obvious shit as though it backs up your point. I mean so far your
argument is that liberals are all simultaniously Marxists, nihilists
and utopians, but puppies are cute, so not EVERYTHING is wrong and
therefore, liberals, are wrong and and sometimes poor people get rich.

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from
my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but
tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me…

Stunning!

…and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an
instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond
sorrow.

You’ve made no actual argument for this, other than one time you were
afraid a zoning commission was going to take your $3 million house,
which happens all the time. The government is great at creating sorrow
with things like the war on drugs and actual wars, but presumably you
now like these things. If you’re talking about college scholarships and
aid, section eight housing, the Hubble telescope, the useful aspects of
law enforcement, providing roads, putting out fires, health and safety
in everything from building codes to food and drug standards, minimum
wage, employee rights, food stamps… all of the things your new posse
wants to stamp out or privatize (i.e., stamp out), I don’t see all that
much sorrow. Most, if not all of these things could stand to be
improved significantly but I don’t see how they inflict fucking
“sorrow.” “I’m driving on public roads, eating a safe burrito to buy
safe drugs and pick up my kid from a pretty crappy, but still free
school. Oh the goddamned humanity!”

But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?

I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and
here it is: We just seem to. How do I know? From experience. I referred
to my own—take away the director from the staged play and what do you
get? Usually a diminution of strife, a shorter rehearsal period, and a
better production.

Well, obviously things seem to work themselves out. Was your
expectation that, if your governor made enough poor decisions, the
state would suddenly be spring launched into the sun? I mean, I’m sure
day to day shit just kind of works itself out for most people in Mexico
too. Iraq, probably not so much. “Well, my entire family my home and my
business were all blown up, but at least I have a sturdy pair of shoes.”

The director, generally, does not cause strife, but his or her presence
impels the actors to direct (and manufacture) claims designed to appeal
to Authority—that is, to set aside the original goal (staging a play
for the audience) and indulge in politics, the purpose of which may be
to gain status and influence outside the ostensible goal of the
endeavor.

So now you are an anarchist? What in the fuck are you rambling about?

Strand unacquainted bus travelers in the middle of the night, and what
do you get? A lot of bad drama, and a shake-and-bake Mayflower Compact.
Each, instantly, adds what he or she can to the solution. Why? Each
wants, and in fact needs, to contribute—to throw into the pot what
gifts each has in order to achieve the overall goal, as well as status
in the new-formed community. And so they work it out.

See also that most magnificent of schools, the jury system, where,
again, each brings nothing into the room save his or her own
prejudices, and, through the course of deliberation, comes not to a
perfect solution, but a solution acceptable to the community—a solution
the community can live with.

It’s hard for me to believe that you do not understand how irrelevant
all of this is and that, if anything, it is an argument for
collectivism of some kind. I mean, your bus example is basically Rawls
run through the monglanator. And the jury system… I can’t really see
what it pertains to. Like, in your analogy the jurors represent what
exactly and the decision they reach represents what exactly? If it’s
not an analogy, what does it relate too, considering how contrived and
controlled juries are?

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack.

Oh my fuck, you actually believe in Captain Invisible. I like the part
where some shrubbery tells this guy that it is God and he believes it
and then tells everyone about it and they believe him. You believe the
shrub.

The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described
independent (read “conservative”), and he was driving the flock wild.
Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the
quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law
teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow
out.

You and the rest of the flock are obviously idiots. I mean, you can
sort of feel for a guy who is born into a Pentecostal family in
Arkansas. But New York Jews have no excuse for shrubism , so I assume
your congregation is made up of some real schmucks. And what kind of
idiot wants their clergyman to expound on the pork projects or
something. Like, why not the ice cream man, or your doctor or a fading
play write who started examining politics seriously for the first time
shortly after his 84th wedding anniversary.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding,
to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those
two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the
military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong…

Nobody fucking thinks that “everything is magically wrong!” Argh! It’s
just a bullshit straw man that a selfish fuck like you can use to avoid
addressing or accepting any responsibility for real problems.

“Mr. Mamet, we are working to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina, many of whom are still being neglected, and…”

“Oh, so you think everything everywhere is wrong, do you?”

“No, but in New Or…”

“Then explain this to me. If everything, everywhere is wrong then how do you account for my beautiful marble flooring?”

“But..”

“No, I will not fall for your Marxist ruse. Good day.”

…and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the
world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people,
most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by
getting along with each other (in the workplace…

“Workplace,” that’s pretty fucking rich my friend.

…the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

Um, the freeway, the jury room and even the school board meeting are
heavily regulated creations of the government. The market and workplace
would obviously revert to total savagery without government regulation.
And again, what is your point? Some guy waved you into his lane on the
freeway so Regan wasn’t a terrorist?

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation
in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not
a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

Aha!

Actually, it’s pretty simple to see what’s going on here. You openly
admit to not having thought or read about politics with any seriousness
at all from the day you were born until like last month which is
probably why you have no idea what you are talking about. You read like
four books that went way over your head by themselves, never mind any
understanding of the context of those books or the actual positions of
other thinkers (hint; that position is not that everything everywhere
is wrong). Now, you think that people should listen to your obvious,
yet incoherent thoughts on politics because you are famous.

“Aha,” you will say, and you are right.

I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest
contemporary philosopher but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele,
and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them:
a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my
experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

So, it only took you a few weeks of reading serious and semi-serious
books on politics to figure out who our greatest contemporary
philosopher is. You must be so smart!


At the same time, I was writing my play about a president, corrupt,
venal, cunning, and vengeful (as I assume all of them are), and two
turkeys. And I gave this fictional president a speechwriter who, in his
view, is a “brain-dead liberal,” much like my earlier self; and in the
course of the play, they have to work it out. And they eventually do
come to a human understanding of the political process. As I believe I
am trying to do, and in which I believe I may be succeeding, and I will
try to summarize it in the words of William Allen White.

White was for 40 years the editor of the Emporia Gazette in rural
Kansas, and a prominent and powerful political commentator. He was a
great friend of Theodore Roosevelt and wrote the best book I’ve ever
read about the presidency. It’s called Masks in a Pageant, and it
profiles presidents from McKinley to Wilson, and I recommend it
unreservedly.

So it is the best book you’ve ever read about the presidency, AND you
recommend it unreservedly? Well, you definitely pass the windbag test
for your new affiliation.

White was a pretty clear-headed man, and he’d seen human nature as few
can. (As Twain wrote, you want to understand men, run a country paper.)
White knew that people need both to get ahead and to get along, and
that they’re always working at one or the other, and that government
should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it.
But, he added, there is such a thing as liberalism, and it may be
reduced to these saddest of words: ” . . . and yet . . . “

Jesus Christ, you’re not so great at sharing the spot light are you.
Anyway, that is pretty clearly a stupid thing to say. It’s hard to
believe that you are arrogant enough to write an article about
fundamental political issues when you so obviously don’t understand
anything at all about politics. Like, you have made no distinction at
all between social liberalism and economic liberalism. How is NOT
wanting to throw people in jail for being gay intruding on their lives?
I mean, I don’t want to go on too much because anybody reading this can
see what a fool are and what an intolerable person you must be, but I
will congratulate you on being spectacularly misinformed and not making
a single correct or even plausible assertion, beyond stuff like “the
government is divided into three branches.” That’s why you, David
“whoopteedoo” Mamet are a hack. For writing about a subject you do not
understand at all, for spewing out nonsense that many school children
would recognize as trite and for somehow being unable to string these
simplistic and obvious statements into anything coherent or relating in
any way to planet earth. Congratulations, you suck.

The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and
many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of
the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler.

Not really. I mean, Hillary is running in hope of twenty-eight years of
rule by two families. The overwhelming majority of Senators are
millionaires. When the CEO of Raytheon sends me a Vermont Teddy Bear on
my birthday, I’ll see these fucks as folks like me.

Happy election season.

Fuck you.

I’m so frustrated with the level of writing that people actually get
paid for, that I’m starting a regular feature about it. Before you get
any bright ideas, hacks, a future Hackwatch will focus on my
own writing. Of course, the shitty stuff I’ve written is mostly off the
cuff crap before my site got 10 times more readers than your well paid,
hackneyed garbage. Bitterness? Yes, for I will never earn a dime. But
you still fucking suck.

100 Unsexiest Men Alive

By Bill Jensen & Ryan Stewart for The Boston Phoenix

1. Gilbert Gottfried: Rumor has it that Gilbert is the heir apparent to
Uncle Milty when it comes to what he’s packing, but that still can’t
save him. The parrot-voiced, pickled-face comic is to sexy what
Kryptonite is to Superman.

I just can’t believe that people can make a living with writing of
this quality. If you must make such an unbelievably hackneyed
reference, at least say something like, “…is sexual Kryptonite.” Thanks
to previous generations of hacks, we know what Kryptonite is without
you prolonging the torture by spelling out Superman’s adverse reaction
to it.

2. Randy Johnson: If he couldn’t throw a ball 100 miles per hour,
Johnson would be wearing a wife beater and getting hauled into a squad
car on Cops. Could you imagine the nights when he pitched to Otis Nixon?

This might be very, mildly funny, if I thought for a moment that you
were subtle enough to intentionally evoke two sets of images with
“pitched.”

3. Roger Ebert: Yes, he lost all that weight. Yes, you still wouldn’t fuck him.

Shouldn’t that be “no, you still wouldn’t fuck him?” Also, Ebert’s
journalistic prose is inspirationally good. You probably shouldn’t have
brought him up, because it’s the seventh reminder of how much you suck,
and we’re only on the third entry on your shitty list. I’ll speculate
that Danger Danger don’t open their shows by talking shit about Miles
Davis.

4. Dr. Phil: Being a know-it-all is never sexy. Being a know-it-all who is also a bald-headed prick is downright horrid.

For some reason, Joe Pesci dialog from Casino doesn’t work
so well when it’s lifted by men critiquing the sexiness of other men.
I’ll acknowledge that “bald-headed prick” and “horrid” have probably
never appeared in a sentence together, but there’s good reason for
that.

5. Alan Colmes: Not really fair, since he’s got to sit next to brown shirt-stud Hannity each night. But Colmes – lazy eye, unkept hair, droopy features — has a face made for radio. Pirate radio. Garr!!

A face made for radio? Does he really sit around the house? Take your lives, please! Is this thing loaded?

6. Chad Kroeger: It’s not just the massive head, weird face, and bad
hair. It’s also the fact that he’s in Nickelback, the worst band since
the dawn of music.

How can a pair of adult men not be embarrassed to know what the
members of Nickelback look like? Who’s you’re favorite member of
O-Town?

7. Mike Mills: You’d want to talk music with the bassist from REM. Sleep with? Not unless you’re trying to get to Pete Buck.

No, you’d want to talk music with REM’s bassist. I want to make wind chimes out of his spinal column. And yours.

8. Osama Bin Laden: Power is sexy (notice how Dick Cheney isn’t on the
list). But a 6’5″, no-vertical-leap mass murdering douche bag is not
getting any style points.

Cheney’s sexy? I knew Ann Coulter was a closet fag hag, but I
figured she ran with fruitcakes who can string two sentences together
without humiliating themselves. Drudge,
for example. Who do you like more, Cheney or the “brown shirt stud,”
Hannity? You know, David Duke’s not a bad lookin’ fellah. And only a
hack’s hack–a hack among hacks who sits atop the peak of hack
mountain, throwing clichés down upon other hacks, would use an article
like this to take a shot at Osama. I’m surprised you didn’t put Lucifer
on your list. “Hey, he’s got a lot of power, but a horned, no pitching
arm source of all evil is not getting any style points. Zing!”

9. Jay Leno: “It would be like having sex with a banana, but not in a
good way,” was what one of our staffers remarked about the fruit-headed
comic.

10. Don Imus: “It would be like having sex with an old leather bag, but
not in a good way,” was what the same staffer remarked about the bag of
skin and bones.

You should have had your staffer write the rest of this shit for you
too. Those are nothing to write home about, but she is Thomas Pynchon
to your corpse of a vagrant that has been rotting in the back of an
alley since July. I’m deeply troubled by the implication that you are
full time employees of a newspaper and your job does not involve
unclogging.

11. Michael Jackson: What happens when an ugly JC Penny manequin has
sex with Pogo, the clown identity of serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

Congratulations. Although I’ve never seen a mannequin described as
“ugly” and you misspelled ‘mannequin,’ you’ve managed to compose a
sentence that is not completely unfit for publication. Let’s keep a
standing tally. That’s ah-one.

12. Wallace Shawn: Even if you’re attracted to his rounded dome, how can anyone get past that nasally lisp?

“Wallace Shawn has a lisp!” Well, that’s true. Not the criticism one
would expect to resonate through Swish Street, but there it is. Wally
will just have to dry his tears with the money his impediment has made
him as famous character actor.

13. Mike D. of the Beastie Boys: We hate to do this. But the sickly
looking Beastie “did it like this, did it like that, did it with a
wiffle ball bat . . . because no one would want to get within three
feet of him naked.

Mike D didn’t do the wiffle ball bat part. Ad Rock did. Stick to O-Town.

14. Richard Simmons: Words don’t do it justice.

A gas chamber could.

15. Jon Lovitz: Bald, annoying, unfunny, and hair in the all the wrong
places. For all we know, he was running through the cast of League of Their Own. But we doubt it.

Nice job. Calling Jon Lovitz unfunny in one sentence, then
unleashing that fucking bomb in the next sentence did not make me
cringe at all.

16. Carrot Top: Sheer obnoxiousness necessitates his placement on this list.

Jesus, was Bin Laden too tough of a target for you? Yeah, Carrot Top
really annoys me from those phone commercials that stopped airing in
2002. You forgot Joe Piscopo.

17. Jerry Seinfeld: This is for everyone who has ever yelled at the TV when Jerry brought home another model on Seinfeld.

Sometimes you’re so vacuous that I can’t even make fun of you
properly. I’ve never yelled at the TV for showing me a pretty girl. And
Jerry was playing a successful comedian, so it made sense for him to
date hot women. Your sentence is just so drab, it’s rendered me unable
to come up with a colorful way to call you morons.

18. Malcolm Gladwell: The Tipping Point.

Bill Jensen & Ryan Stewart: A Pool of Diarrhea. Boston Phoenix now give money to me.

19. Chevy Chase: He got unfunny with age. Then he got ugly.

So like, people become less attractive as they grow older? And most
comedians are less funny thirty years into their careers? “Why, you
couldn’t have been in more than eight or ten hit comedies!!” Suck on that Chevy.

20. Raffi: Maybe it’s his proffession. But no one surveyed, man or
woman, could think of any situation in which they would bed down with
him.

Speaking of “proffesions,” don’t you have a spellchecker? Or does
your computer just throw up on you whenever you type on it, relegating
you to spiral notebooks?

21. Ron Howard: He was cute as Opie, passable as Richie, but now as Ron
Howard, he’s just plain weird-looking. Especially with a beard.

OK, so you’re pederasts. That’s the least offensive thing about this article.

22. Clint Howard: Ron’s younger, balder, and weirder-looking brother. Yes, weirder looking than Ron Howard.

I guess so. That’s so boring, I can’t really come up with a response.

23. Bill Gates: To quote Dana Carvey: “Gates apparently made a deal
with the devil: ‘You can have $60 billion, but you have to go through
life looking like a turtle.’”

How much of your list is going to consist of just quoting jokes that you heard from other people?
From your number one man: this guy’s wife is in a car crash, and when
he gets to the hospital, the doctor says, “I have some bad news. It was
a terrible accident, and your wife was paralyzed from the neck down.
She’s really going to need you now. You’re going to have to feed her,
clothe her, clean her, help her go to the bathroom, change her
tampons…” The guy says, “Oh my God, this is terrible,” and the doctor
says, “no, I’m just fucking with you. She’s dead.” Boston Phoenix Now
Pay Me!!!

24. Paul Shaffer: The bic’d look does not work for everyone, plus he makes all those crazy faces while he plays.

“…plus he makes all those crazy faces when he plays?” Sorry guys,
I’m going to have to turn that snippet into the proper authorities.
It’s just not safe for the two of you to be walking around with GEDs.

25. Axl Rose: I mean . . . did you see the 2003 VMAs?

I mean… no. It took me 12 seconds to even figure out what
VMAs are because I’m not 15 and/or a retarded hack who would watch
something like that, let alone mentally cataloged each show by year for
quick reference. “Oh, do you remember what a dork the White Power
Ranger was at the ’99 Kid’s Choice Awards? Er… I mean KCAs. I am a professional writer.”

26. Tim Burton: He’s got the Robert Smith hair coupled with a mighty hunch. Yet he’s dating Helena Bonham Carter.

I know I’m being repetitive, but you actually know who Tim Burton is dating. You probably think that’s going to result in the two of you being invited to appear on Extra to wear scarves and critique Oscar gowns, but it just makes you pathetic.

27. Edward James Olmos: Remember season one of South Park? When Kenny was a zombie, everyone assumed it was an Edward James Olmos costume. Wonder why.

I think reading this article is damaging my liver. Look, we’ve all
scooped up a cheap laugh with a Simpsons reference or 6,000, but you
don’t just repeat the joke from the show in its original context, and
be like, “word up.” Hey, remember “The Chris Farley Show,” where he’d
interview celebrities and just be like, “remember in Goodfellas
where they… That was cool.” Chris Farley was a comedian, the joke was
supposed to be that no one could possibly be that stupid. Although
you’ve taken the legs out from under his gag. I encourage you to
continue following Farley’s example.

28. Gerard Way (from My Chemical Romance): Luckiest dude since Ringo. Or at the very least, since D12.

Again, although clinging to my 20s, I don’t know what you’re talking
about. I know My Chemical Romance are a band, I’m pretty sure that D-12
are more than one “dude,” and I’m one hundred percent certain that
using the phrase, “at the very least” does nothing to mitigate the fact
that this article seems to have been written by a hydrocephalic and his
hand puppet. But I have no idea what Gerard Way looks like.

29. Don Zimmer: The gerbil’s got a massive, ivory-white noggin’ that
never did much thinking to begin with. Ask any Red Sox fan over 35.

As a straight male, I’m pretty sure that it’s not unusual for a man
in his seventies to be “unsexy.” The only way this could be funny would
be if he had just had a stroke.

31. Chris Kattan

32. Otis Nixon

33. Julian Tavarez

34. Christopher Lloyd

35. Willie McGee

36. Pat Cummings

37. Scottie Pippen

38. Larry David

39. Michael Moore

40. Al Franken: Too arrogant

So you just couldn’t think of anything to say for 31-39? That’s
astounding. You were really happy with what you came up with for Edward
James Olmos, but when it came to Scottie Pippen, who looks like a “Fat
Albert” character, you wound up with a mountain of crumpled up papers
containing ideas that just weren’t good enough to make the cut. “Fuck,
why couldn’t South Park have had a Pat Cummings joke that we could quote?” I like how you
lay out the fact that kryptonite has an adverse effect on Superman for
us, but then just assume everyone knows who Julian Tavarez is. Finally,
you decided that you had to come up with something for the consistently
self-deprecating Franken — because you want to be Fair and Balanced.
How long did it take you to come up with something that is not correct,
funny or even a complete sentence? If you want a quick laugh, just call
him a hairy Jewball for chrisake.

41. Paris Latsis: Maybe not the worst-looking guy in the world, but, well, think about who was there first.

Again, who the fuck is that? I’m supposed to know the name of some
Greek guy offhand because, as I’ve learned from Google, he was briefly
engaged to Paris Hilton two years ago. Also, Paris Hilton is much
smarter than you two combined.

42. Rush Limbaugh: No doubt he will claim his placement on this list as
a result of a media bias and not the fact that he’s just butt-ugly

I doubt it, considering that you’ve been begging for rightward cock
throughout the piece. You realize that “brown shirt” is not a sex act,
right?

43. David Gest

44. Garey Busey: Those teeth would give anyone nightmares.

45. Nick Nolte: Busey’s oddball partner in crime, but at least he had a career once.

Yeah, I’m sure Nolte got no tang whatsoever in the 70s, 80s, 90s and
right through to the present day. Nice jab at Busey. That poor fuck
probably thinks that making millions as an international movie star
constituted having a career. But a couple of semi-literate trouser
snake spittoons know better! Is David Gest, your mailman?

46. Leif Garrett

47. Andy Dick: It’s a trap!

48. Scott Stapp

49. Lyle Lovett

You could vastly improve this section by changing your Andy Dick comment to match the other three.

50. Ric Ocasek: Yes, we know who his wife is. And no, we don’t care.

51. Bill Wyman

52. Danny DeVito

53. Peter Jackson

54. Drew Carey

55. Newt Gingrich

56. Rob Schneider

This is just so fucking boring. I guess the lazier you get, the
sooner it ends but, I can’t believe you got paid for this. And that it
took the two of you to not write anything for half of your choices.

57. Ed O’Neil: We love ya, Ed, but sorry. There was a reason you never waited on any really hot girls at that shoe store.

You done crossed the line. Das my boy. Though cursed with unshakable
heterosexuality, I would fuck Al Bundy after half a glass of beer.
Also, shoe salesmen don’t “wait” on people.

58. Bill O’Reilly

How can you draw a blank when it comes to O’Reilly and sex? Just write the word “falafel” or quote something from his novel.

Ashley felt two large hands wrap themselves around her breasts and
hot breathe on the back of her neck. She opened her eyes wide and
giggled, “I thought you drowned out there snorkel man.”

Tommy O’Malley was naked and at attention. “Drowning is not an option”,
he said, “unless of course you beg me to perform unnatural acts –
right here in this shower.” -Those Who Trespass, Bill O’Reilly

You fucking hacks.

59. Clay Aiken: This feels like a cheap shot, but even leaving aside
the rumors about his personal life, he still looks like someone’s
bratty little brother.

Of all the people on this list, you feel guilty about taking a shot
at Clay Aiken? And two men making a list of unsexy men are going to go
after him for being gay? If you ever read this piece and feel
insulted, take solace in knowing how truly painful it was for me to
read your entire article. My monitor is starting to give off a
sulfurous odor.

60. Joe Lieberman

61. Jim Gaffigan: Pasty, goofy-looking comedians abound on this list.
62. Bill Maher: . . . Especially ones with poodle hair.

63. John Popper

64. Dennis Miller

I have this terrifying vision of you lurching through a thesaurus to
come up with the word ‘abound.’ Your comment for Maher could not
possibly have been written by a native English speaker.

65. John Madden: Those massive hands seem more frightening than anything. Boom!

Again, you’ve missed the joke that would be obvious to even most of
your fellow hacks: years of openly gay commentary in Madden football
games.

66. Robert Englund: Seriously, try lying in bed next to him without thinking about Freddy Krueger.

67. Robert Patrick: Seriously, try lying in bed next to him without thinking about the T-1000

Not funny either time. Neither makes sense. They’re unsexy because
they played their roles convincingly and you can’t tell the difference
between movies and reality? Does that make Roberto Benigni sexy for you
because of his role in Pinocchio?

68. John Ashcroft

69. Joe Gannascolli

Again, Ashcroft seems to be a pretty easy target. “We’d sooner bone
Mel Carnahan.” I assumed that Joe Gannascoli was an organ grinder who
worked your block, until I Googled him and discovered that you
misspelled his name.

70. Kevin James: His TV marriage to Leah Remini on King of Queens is less believable than anything on Lost.

Not really, because, based on the four minutes of the show that I’ve
seen, she’s an annoying bitch and a better looking guy would not
tolerate her. I’m sort of beating a dead horse here, but I really
cannot believe how poorly written this fucking thing is. It’s
stupefying. In editions of Hackwatch five years from now, I’ll
still be saying “of course, it’s not as bad as 100 Unsexiest Men or
anything, but I’d still rather wander a nursing home, chugging
colostomy bags than read it again.”

71. George Steinbrenner: Come on, we live in Boston, you knew it was coming.

OK, you can be forgiven this single instance of predictability and
triteness. After all, I’m still fucking rolling about Danny DeVito
making the list! Danny DeVito is ugly!! Woo hoo, that was just gold. I
might have to sue you guys for splitting my sides.

72. Grady Little: Come on, we live in Boston, you knew it was coming.

If I got all of the Red Sox to sign a petition asking you to take a toaster bath, would you do it?

73. Harvey Pekar

74. DJ Qualls: What’s he weigh, like, 70 pounds? How much of that is grease?

75. Joey Buttafuoco

76. Garry Shandling

77. Meat Loaf Aday

78. Joe Walsh

Christ on a cock… Joey Buttafuoco? That was tired and hackneyed by
the standards of Jay Leno like 15 years ago. Just stop. Please, never
write anything again. Sign your checks with a fucking stamp. Get
stickers with your return address on them.

79. Tom from Myspace: As a friend of mine said, why does he have to be
everyone’s friend? Isn’t that a little needy? Not hot at all.

Right, because Tom actually sits down at the computer all day,
personally asking each member of MySpace to be his friend. It’s not
just a way to help people with new accounts get started, it’s an
alternative to the tedium of fucking four strippers at a time on top of
a pile of Honus Wagner cards, bond certificates and pure cocaine that
he snorts through the Magna Carta. Do you two wear matching helmets?
Wait, of course you do.

80. Art Garfunkel

81. Brian Posehn

82. Howie Mandel

83. Barry Bonds If what his mistress told the authors of Game of Shadows is true, then no, you don’t want any part of that.

What, does he force women to read The Boston Phoenix while he fucks them?

84. Dick Vitale Call it a hunch, but we have a feeling that sex with Dickie V. would be anything but “awesome, baby.”

Burned!!

85. Richie “La Bamba” Rosenberg

86. Jeff Van Gundy

87. Jimmy Johnson: It’s the hair

Three selections and you come up with, “It’s the hair.” I really hate you guys. Like, if I were Osama, you’d be Bay Watch dubbed into Yiddish.

88. John Clayton: How is this ESPN’s top football guy?

“Call it a hunch,” but maybe because he knows a fucking lot about
football? If I ever meet you two, I want to go on record as saying that
the ensuing violence will be hack-bashing, which is not technically a
hate crime. I might bring a gay guy to help with the beating, just to
insure prison time is minimized. As if any jury would convict me.

89. Don Vito: I suppose we were never really supposed to know what Bam
Margera’s uncle looks like, but since we do, he has to be included.

90. Lemmy Kilmister: Sadly, the ravages of time have not been kind to him.

91. Hideki Matsui

91. Jose Canseco: “Every time I have tried to help a woman, I’ve been incarcerated,” he famously said on The Surreal Life. You old charmer, you.

92. Bill Parcells: Especially when you see the photos of him in shorts at training camp

93. Ric Flair: To be the man WOO! you got to… do something about those man boobs!

Doesn’t the government provide you with some kind of aid or caretaker? Shouldn’t they have written this?

94. Ralph Nader

95. Dennis Kucinich: Something about those progressives.

Two gay men: You want us to have the same rights as everyone else?
Ewwwww. Cheney is hot! That’s more repugnant than hackneyed, I suppose,
but I’d still laugh at you if you caught the HIV.

96. Horatio Sanz: Laughing at your own jokes is not sexy

97. Dom DeLuise

98. Emeril Lagasse

99. Kevin Federline: Mooching hicks aren’t so hot these days.

Just fucking agonizing. I’m running towards the light.

100.Brad Pitt: He may look good, but if the rumors about his hygiene and BO issues are true, then he’s probably not worth it.

Only a gay man could write this. The entire point of looking like
Brad Pitt is that you have the luxury of neglecting hygiene completely,
while still pulling preposterous tail. Also, if you were crawling
through the desert and saw an oasis with a pool of fresh, clean water
in one direction, and a petri dish with a drop of Pitt’s semen in the
other direction, you know perfectly well that you’d die happy and
dehydrated. Including him in the list is does not make you original or
creative.

Why I believe in Creation

by

Joseph Farah, worldnetdaily.com CEO

I was stunned the other day when I asked evolution-believing listeners to my nationally syndicated radio show to call in and tell me why they believed. Just give me one reason why you accept the theory, I said. Just give me the strongest argument. You don’t have to give me mountains of evidence. Just tell me why I should accept it.
Not one evolutionist called in.

I had a similar experience with my radio show, “The People with Downs Syndrome are the Master Race Hour.” I asked callers who believe in standardized testing to phone in and make their case. Not one testalutionist called in.

Meanwhile, the phone banks lit up with dozens of evolution skeptics.

Meanwhile, my phone banks lit up with calls about how the best class in school is picking up recyclable litter on campus with a pointy stick.

Go figure. For more than 40 years, evolution has been taught as fact in government schools to generations of children, yet there is still widespread skepticism, if not cynicism, about the theory across the country. But, because of political correctness and the fear of ostracism, most people are afraid to admit what they believe about our origins. That’s why I wrote my last column – I believe in Creation.

Seven out of eight ditzy chicks believe in astrology, and Chinese
people think that snorting powdered monkey penis makes you taller. Who gives a fuck?

The reaction to it has been unprecedented. While I expected mostly negative fallout, most letters have been quite positive.

Do you know the meaning of the word, ‘unprecedented?’ A potentially controversial article that gets mostly positive support is not unprecedented. It happens all the time on your site. It would be unprecedented for worldnut to hire a writer who did not look more inbred than a Hawaiian monarch. You (pictured above) look like a child molesting
magician.

The other times I’ve been on your site, I was greeted by Ann Coulter and “her” Adam’s grapefruit and the guy pictured above, who I imagined scrimping and saving for five years so that he could rent a helicopter for his tenth highschool reunion, only to have everyone immediately see through the ruse because they remember what a defective person he was, and because his clothes don’t fit.

So, I decided to take this issue a step further. Since the evolutionists don’t want to tell me why they believe in their theory, I figured I would explain why I believe in mine.

You act like you’re trying to learn the fundamental beliefs of Scientology. This shit is not secret. If you really want to know why people believe in evolution, then you could always, say, get a highschool education from teachers at a real school. Not from your mom in the storm cellar.

The primary reason I believe, of course, is because the Bible tells me so. That’s good enough for me, because I haven’t found the Bible to be wrong about anything else.

Agonizing. I think the bible is wrong about the giant invisible, all powerful, all loving man in the sky who created the entire universe so that he could send people to hell forever because they were born into a Hindu community.

But what about the worldly evidence?
The evolutionists insist the dinosaurs lived millions and millions of years ago and became extinct long before man walked the planet.

I hate the word ‘evolutionist.’ Every respected scientist in the world believes in evolution and gravity. There’s no such thing as a ‘gravitationist.’ If you got bone cancer, I would like it and have a
party.

I don’t believe that for a minute. I don’t believe there is a shred of scientific evidence to suggest it. I am 100 percent certain man and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time. In fact, I’m not at all sure dinosaurs are even extinct

Ok this is getting ery. This is another topic I brought up on “The People with Downs Syndrom are the Master Race Hour.” Maybe you weren’t  listening because this time the switch boards lit up with callers who disagreed with me when I said that Dinosaurs currently roam the earth. Maybe you and I can team up for a show that caters to a more discerning audience.


Think of all the world’s legends about dragons. Look at those images. What were those folks seeing? They were clearly seeing dinosaurs. You can see them etched in cave drawings. You can see them in ancient literature. You can see them described in the Bible. You can see them in virtually every culture in every corner of the world.

Note that this is the man who started the largest right wing site on the web and he just said that he believes in dragons.

Did the human race have a collective common nightmare? Or did these people actually see dragons? I believe they saw dragons – what we now call dinosaurs.

So does the Samsquanch prove evolution? This cannot possibly get any crazier.

Furthermore, many of the dinosaur fossils discovered in various parts of the world were found right along human footprints and remains. How did that happen?
And what about the not-so-unusual sightings of contemporary sea monsters? Some of them have actually been captured.

WHAT?
I mean I’ve listened to hours of Art Bell and nobody has ever called in claiming that there are sea monsters in captivity. This cannot possibly get any crazier.

There are also countless contemporary sightings of what appear to be pterodactyls in Asia and Africa.

OK…
Sea monsters would at least be hidden from view. But fucking
pterodactyls? You do realize that the reason most of us are afraid to go to bus stations and urban YMCAs is that we think someone who smells like urine will come up to us and say something slightly less crazy than, “pterodactyls are flying about Asia and Africa even as we speak ”

You know what I think? I think we’ve been sold a bill of goods about the dinosaurs. I don’t believe they died off millions and millions of years ago. In fact, I’m not at all convinced they’ve died off completely.

We have nuts on the left too. But I think it says a lot that they imagine that the most powerful men in the world engage in backroom 9-11 conspiracies, whereas the nuts on the right think that college professors conceal the fact that there are dinosaurs flying above our heads.

Evolutionists have put the cart before the horse. They start out with a theory, then ignore all the facts that contradict the theory. Any observation that might call into question their assumptions is discounted, ridiculed and covered up. That’s not science.

You are saying that: If you operate on the belief that dragons did not exist, then you are not doing science? I think that, by those
standards, you might be the only scientist over the age of five in the entire world.

How could all the thousands of historical records of dragons and behemoths throughout mankind’s time on earth be ignored? Let’s admit it. At least some of these observations and records indicate dinosaurs were walking the earth fairly recently – if not still walking it today.
If I’m right about that – which I am – then the whole evolutionary house of cards comes tumbling down.
This is the evidence about which the evolutionists dare not speak.

Thank you. You’ve done so much already that I hate to impose, but I wonder if you could employ your rhetorical skills to try and convince this Korean girl I used to work with to not sleep with me.

There have always been marriages in the world of celebrity that cause
people to say “What the hell was she thinking?!” We have compiled a
list of 10 hot women who married 10 ugly men, some of which are also
total losers. The list is by no means difinitive, so if you have
suggestions – e-mail them along. It is also interesting to note that
fully half of these marriages ended in divorce.

I didn’t happen to notice anybody associating their name with this
dated and painfully unfunny list, so I will assume, given the
material, that it was penned by an unattractive woman or a flamingly
gay, wannabe-famous man. I cannot divorce myself from the idea that
some Bush League Joan Rivers or Mr. Blackwell concocted this list as
another insecurity-fueled attempt to elevate themselves above the more
successful, or at the very least, the more successful at manipulating
their way into fortune. The biggest offense, other than the mere
existence of this list that was doubtlessly and inexplicably validated
by some number of higher-ups, is that it fails miserably. It is not
funny. It is not insightful. It’s meant to get laughs at the expense of
others, but all it does is draw the eye behind the curtain where some
smug tard is pecking away thinking to themselves “Take that Steadman!”

To the Author: In your efforts to dogpile obvious targets, you have
only succeeded in exposing that you, yourself, are totally deficient
in your chosen discipline. Please stop, because you’ve somehow made
K-Fed walk taller in my mind.

1. The crown jewel – Britney Spears and Kevin Federline. He is not
only a total loser, but since they got married he has managed to drag
Britney down with him.

Few pop culture occurrences have pleased me more than this head-on
double-wide trailer wreck, but to blame a talentless man for
exploiting the bottomless wealth of an equally talentless tramp?
Whatever hypocritical queen wrote this would turn his ass into a
Boeing hangar just to play an extra on Stargate SG-1. Moreover, while
stylistically unconscious, K-Fed is far from ugly. You just mentioned him cause sub-mental fools are obsessed with this modern remake of the Beverly Hillbillies.

2. Fellow, Mouseketeer, Christine Aguilera recently married the
hideously ugly-but-apparently-well-endowed Jordan Bratman.

This is incidentally funny because a guy with a huge cock is named
Brat-Man. It’d be like if Aguilera’s last name meant Blast-Crater-Cunt
in Spanish. These guys simply mention a big dick and expect laughs to
flow. Uncle Milty!!! And good for Jew-cock him.

3. The marriage recently went up in flames, but Richie Sambora was way
out of his depth with Heather Locklear anyway.

Men become rockstars to get laid. To impugn Richie Sambora for
reeling in some B-list actress that was already an A-list groupie for
Tommy Lee is barely an accomplishment and to single out semi-handsome
Richie when there are many older, more emaciated, more opiate-fueled
rockers out there is just lazy. Go nitpick at a gallery of Freddie
Mercury’s lover’s tombstones, you catty bitches.

4. Hilary Swank and Chad Lowe also recently split. But Chad got the
short end of the genetic stick, with his brother, Rob, winning out.

Hillary Swank is not that hot. Her bitewing X-rays must look like
they came from Amtrak prototype blueprints. These guys had a perfect
opportunity to make fun of the anonymous Chad Lowe just by asking
Hillary “How Lowe can you go?” and missed the lay-up. She does have
huge jugs, though. And he is (probably) not endowed.

5. Pete Sampras and his unbelievably attractive wife, actress
Bridgette Wilson seem like a happy couple, and I can certainly see why
- from his perspective.

Sure, Pete Sampras is as hairy as Greek Sasquatch, but Bridgette
Wilson was in Mortal Kombat. It’s a push. Dennis Miller Mime
Sez: And what’s the deal with Agassi dating Steffi Graf? Its like they
Cryo-Froze Lassie’s head, found a cure for canine brain cancer,
grafted it to the body of a guillotined hottie and then hung it out in
a lightning storm.

6. J. Lo and Mark Anthony – will you look at that sick, demented
looking creep? He looks like a vampire from a bad movie.

Mark Anthony is not that ugly if you adjust for J. Lo’s peerless
bitchiness. He’s the one slumming and he’s already third-world. If you
kiss J. Lo, don’t drink the water. Meow!

7. Felicity Huffman and William H. Macy also seem quite happy. But
while I like him as an actor, let’s face it, he looks like a troll.

I’m not sure who Felicity Huffman is, but haha, Macy looks like a
troll. At least he has talent in his field, unlike the wit-master who
dug deep into the comedy bag to find “troll” and presented it without
even an adjective garnish.

8. The first of our three ‘Ugly Husband Hall of Fame’ listings. Joe
Dimaggio and Marilyn Monroe. Just look at the picture people.

Gay men are obsessed with Monroe. No straight man thinks of her
outside of suggestive updrafts. I hope Joe treated her like the
bloated, lubed and luded-up bimbo that she was. Oh yeah, you’re doing
pretty well if you’re sharing pussy with the fuckin’
President–Clinton gets a mulligan, or two.

9. Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett are pretty much at the top of the
heap when it comes to ugly husbands. The man looks like he was pieced
together from spare parts.

Trying to discover novel ways to insult Lyle Lovett’s appearance is
a task well beyond the skill of whoever wrote this, although it did
result in their most original attempt which has still been heard
before.

10. And wrapping up the list, the ultra-hot and now Brad Pitt-loving
Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thorton. His name is ‘Billy Bob’…that’s
all you need to know.

Billy Bob, unlike the others on this list, is the fucking
man. Motherlovin’ Brad Pitt has to slurp up his sloppy seconds.
Whenever you can sit back and Horgh* that Brad Pitt has to tolerate her
body crumbling under motherhood and while your own head is still
filled with vivid memories of her spread for you in her peak, then you
are the man. Plus, B. Bob nailed Laura Dern in her prime and you know
he was tapping Halle Barry. And of course – he’s not ugly. He looks
like a straight man. Which is why he pulls so much primo-tail.

*Horgh: To laugh