Tom Hanks is continuing what can only be described as an “apology tour” after blowing up ABC’s spot with a big F-bomb on Good Morning America while promoting Cloud Atlas last week. First he showed up on Saturday Night Live for two segments, and last night he appeared on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon to perform some slam poetry about Full House. No, we don’t know why, either. Read More
Congrats to Felix Baumgartner, who made it to Earth safely this weekend after jumping from 24 miles off the ground. It was the highest altitude anyone has ever attempted skydiving, as it put him almost out of the planet’s atmosphere. (He had to wear a spacesuit and everything!)
Aside from a suicidal Ray Bradbury fan with a flair for the dramatic, who, you may ask, would attempt to free-fall from space? Someone who wants to be in the Guinness Book of World records super-bad, or who wants that sweet, sweet Red Bull Stratos money. Read More
Jason Russell, the director whose “Kony 2012″ video went viral this spring prior to Mr. Russell’s arrest for alleged public masturbation and vandalism, is to re-emerge with an interview on the October 7 episode of OWN’s Oprah’s Next Chapter. It’s a next chapter for Mr. Russell, too, whose alleged that he had a breakdown Read More
If you’re one of those ancients who still remembers the internet of yesteryear, you’ll be excited to learn that the blog-cum-book The Great Cock Hunt is getting its own web series. And, as the PR person for the series put it at the very top of an email, Hunting Season will be interesting to us because “it’s partly filmed in the Gawker offices.”
Also because “The content is definitely adult, but very NYC, as I recall from my own misspent youth.”
Sounds exciting! Remind us what this was again? Read More
“Normal guy” Brett Cohen punked a bunch of Times Square tourists recently when he hired a crew of cameramen, bodyguards and assistants to follow him around 42nd Street and pretend like he was somebody special. It totally worked! People thought he was famous and tried to get his autograph or have him pose for a picture while pretending to know who he was or why they should care about him. Because, you know … sheeple.
Except, here’s the thing. Well, here’s the video, and then here’s the thing. Read More
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It’s been approximately seven days since the Internet had a flame war with itself over Lena Dunham’s (somewhat inexplicably) polarizing Girls. We guess everyone got tired of complaining about how the show doesn’t realistically portray each viewer’s special-little-snowflake life experience…you know, the way that every other television show does? (God, do we long for the days of those great realistic docudramas about single, successful friends of various ethnic backgrounds and class, like Seinfeld, or Friends, or Sex and the City, or Breaking Bad.)
Luckily, our drought of Girls criticism is over, thanks to comedians Peter Moses and Frank Cappello. These young men were brave enough to create Boys; a parody of very smart, well-written comedy, which–no joke–is not an easy thing to do. So rats off to ‘ya, boys. Here’s Boys. Read More
Kudos to PBS for getting on the ball with this whole Internet/meme fad. Unlike some stations owned by the billionaires over at Viacom, the Public Broadcasting Service doesn’t have the money to go after every copyright infringement on YouTube. Instead, they’ve creatively solved the problem of people re-appropriating old clips of their shows by doing it themselves at PBS Digital Studios: where they turn out impressively self-aware videos auto-tuning the syndicated stars of the network.
It’s all for the LOLs, of course, but it’s also ingenious viral marketing for a network that’s biggest draw is a guy who paints “Happy Little Clouds.” Read More
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If you’ve seen the Academy Award-winning Dreamworks feature Rango, then you know that the movie isn’t really for children. In fact, we’re not sure who the movie is for, except maybe adults on drugs who like their references to Chinatown to have a lot of lizards in it.
But just in case you were willing to give the man behind the Johnny Depp vehicle a pass on the Electric Kool-Aid Acid test, check out designer Eugeniy Yelchin‘s latest video, Super Doggies. It’s a music video about a girl in Johannesburg, puppies, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and hip-hop dancing dogs. Read More
When earlier this week, the New York Daily News reported that Park Slope resident and mother Susan Fox was looking to the listserv ParkSlopeParents.com for material on her own “Shit ___ Say” spinoff, the subsection of the Internet devoted to hipsters living off the F-line of the borough collectively rolled its eyes. Read More
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When we think of how the housing bubble almost wrecked the U.S. economy, we think in terms of those sneaky Wall Street bond traders and insurance companies like AIG; the type of people Michael Lewis writes about in The Big Short as greedy and oblivious to the apocalyptic scenario they were creating when they bundled all those subprime mortgage loans as CDOs and authorized credit default swaps.
And there’s a reason for this: we don’t like to think of the average American who took out those teaser-rate mortgages as being stupid or greedy themselves; they were just duped by a system that was either lying to them or too complicated to understand.
But that’s not entirely true. The human instinct, when presented with an option too good to be true, doesn’t necessarily act in his or her own best interest. Because this is America bitches, and if you’ve just won $7,500 in your office’s Super Bowl pool, the first thing you do is videotape yourself screaming about how you should be put on “IRS YouTube! Yeah!“ Read More
