Tee hee! We're all a-titter over this week's Observer cover, although we can imagine Anna Wintour has an enormous bee buzzing in her bonnet right about now. Oh my!

Here is this April's cover of Vogue, featuring LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen. It was shot by Annie Leibovitz: click for what might have been her "inspiration." As you might imagine, its been causing quite the stir!



Weeee! Here's the Observer's silly little spoof, conveniently timed to their magazine-themed issue. Doesn't Si Newhouse look ever so dainty?

4/2/2008 3:32:32 PM by Sharon Steel | Comments [0] |  

This is real. Or at least, at the video's end, seventy-year old Jack Nicholson, in stunning pair of tinted eyeglasses, appears as himself and says, "I'm Jack Nicholson and I approve this message."

3/3/2008 5:26:33 PM by Ellee Dean | Comments [0] |  

We've been waiting about eight months for this.

1/31/2008 4:19:27 PM by Ryan Stewart | Comments [0] |  

TOUGH LOVE
5 years ago
January 31, 2003 | Michael Bronski remembered the tough-as-nails, gay journalist Sarah Pettit.
“I DON’T KNOW that I’d say I enjoyed working with Sarah Pettit. One of my first dealings with her was in 1993, when she was the arts editor for Out magazine. She called me on a Monday to ask for revisions on a piece I’d written. She needed the rewrite by Wednesday. I told her that I’d do my best but that my lover, Walta, was having brain surgery on Tuesday. A shunt was being placed in his cranium to drain fluid that was building up because of an AIDS-related infection...When I was finished, she paused and said, ‘Well, that excuse might work in Boston, but it won’t fly here in New York.’

“I love telling this story — which always shocks people — because it epitomizes Sarah’s complexity. While some might have found her remark insensitive, I took it as she intended: a form of humor that people — mostly gay men — use in an attempt to make the horror of AIDS emotionally manageable.” read full article

INDOCTRINATION STATION
10 years ago
January 30, 1998 | Lucky duck Mark Bazer scored a free ticket to the movie, Orientation, playing at the Church of Scientology.
“After a complete tour and a brief conversation with an L. Ron expert..., the Guy [film’s narrator] laid it on the line. ‘You stand at the threshold of your next trillion years. You can either live them in shivering darkness or in the light. The choice is up to you.’ Then we met some happy Scientologists. A plumber, a lawyer, an accountant and . . . an actor. It was Vinnie Barbarino himself. ‘What has Scientology helped me with?’ Travolta asked, grinning. ‘A better question is what it hasn't helped me with.’ Next up: Kirstie Alley. ‘Without Scientology, I can honestly say I would be dead.’ In other words, we have Scientology to thank for Veronica's Closet.” read full article

A.I. GORE
20 years ago
January 29, 1988 | In the weekly column “Spurious,” the Phoenix concluded that then-inconsequential presidential candidate Al Gore might be part cyborg.
“Beginning to end, the performance of Al Gore, who is acting more and more like the Manchurian candidate. Take it from me, when an extemporaneous speaker says that he has ‘10 reasons’ for supporting or opposing anything, and then ticks off all 10, he has either been uploaded with data or else he is just making everything up, a good bullshitter, and could keep on adding to the list all day long. In Gore’s case, however, there remains another disturbing possibility — that his wife, Tripper, or whatever her name is, is actually controlling him with the same high technology she uses to decipher rock lyrics. My vote is that he’s programmed. When Gephardt joked that Gore was acting ‘more like Al Haig than Al Gore,’ it took a full five seconds — a full ‘five Mississippis’ — for Gore to smile. The only explanation is that there was some system malfunction, or that he was on tape delay.”

LITTLE DEVIL
25 years ago
February 1, 1983 | Alfons Heck described what it was like growing up a member of the Hitler Youth.
“My days in the Hitler Youth were happy ones...: I was young, and I was becoming a fanatic. My grandparents, who raised me, were apolitical people whose farm was better off under the Nazis. My father...and my mother had moved away from the farm to run a family business...Once...when he visited and saw me preening in my uniform, he told me I looked like a little clown. Certainly he never had my blind faith in the Fuhrer. For my part, I thought his point of view was simplistic, out of touch with the truth about the Reich: after all, he had never been to high school...He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944...but was released...He lived to tell me what a fool I had been.” read full article

 

1/31/2008 1:07:21 PM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

I just discovered this handy, helpful chart on the Project Runway Season 4 wiki page, whilst dreamily envisioning what fashion challenges our beloved contestents might encounter on tonight's episode. (Who needs writers when we've still got the two best shows on television, Proj Run and History Detectives?). [Ed. note - You're a writer.] Oh, right. Nevermind. I <3 writers. Anyway, here's the chart:

This is the squinty, mini version, of course. For the real thing, look here. So, let's get out our pointers and consult the cold hard facts of the chart, shall we? Judging solely on wins, Christian, Jillian, Rami and Victorya seem to be the top contenders, although Kevin ranked high scores for four out of seven challenges - but now he's out. My money for winner is on Jillian or Christian, even though he's ranked low on two challenges - the judges just don't understand sometimes, ya know? I mean, Nina Garcia never changes her effing hairstyle! Does anyone else notice this? Why is it always down? Never a casual ponytail, or maybe a Chanel scarf. Nope, nothing - totally boring. And Heidi flops between dramatic hairstyles like they're sticks of Juicy Fruit. Nina, it's a show about fashion, live it up a little! How can we trust you in that repetitive, vanilla 'do? I digress, back to investigating the chart. The next one out, according to lowest scores, should be Rami (Rami! He's so complex), Sweet P (but I'd miss her funny commentary!), and Ricky. Ah, Ricky. How has he possibly made it this far? Is he bribing someone at Bravo? Does nobody notice these horrible mesh, male escortish police hats he wears every day? I'll bet you $15 worth of Mode fabrics that he'll be out tonight. I miss Kit already.

1/23/2008 11:42:00 AM by Caitlin | Comments [0] |  

Apparently, the "way to happiness" isn't a Project Runway marathon or a really good, healthy relationship or a nice vacation or your dream job. It's Scientology, 'course! And Tommy Cruise is here to explain it all to you over the eerie strains of the Mission Impossible soundtrack. Gawker is currently hosting an exclusive Cruise Scientology Indoctrination video, and we urge you to go watch the entire thing. The ending is almost as good as the crazy meat-and-potatoes of the first 9 or so minutes. Also, if you're confused about some of the terms Cruise uses (SP, PTSP, etc.) head over to this Fresh Intelligence post over at Radar, where a helpful former-Scientologist gives us a little abbreviation lesson in the comments section. If you want to make yourself feel even scared-ier after watching the video, read Dana Goodyear's account of what it's like to eat a meal in the Scientology Celebrity Center. L. Ron Hubbard's minions are buying up Hollywood Blvd. faster than Harvard is signing the leases to every building in Lower Allston.

By the way, what the fug happened to Katie Holmes? She used to be witty. And now she doesn't even have the heart to move the stupid piece of hair that's stuck in her lipgloss during a Letterman interview. Dark times, these.

1/15/2008 1:17:57 PM by Sharon Steel | Comments [0] |  

Holday cheer!

CBS is rolling out the super sexiest/weirdest Chistmas/Holiday(??) schedule ever (see below). A Ricky-Martin-meets-Rudolph-under-the-push-up-bra sort of thing... 

A spinning spiral of pouty models, The Bumble, and The Island of Misfit Toys. Who looks better in faux fur? Who is Heidi? Who is Seal? Are they characters? Are they real? Are they Santa's TV elves? Haphazardly scheduled bring us holiday cheer and loathing.

Tuesday, December 4th (8:00-9:00 PM, ET/PT): Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Tuesday, December 4th (10:00-11:00 PM, ET/PT): The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show
Friday, December 7th (8:00-8:30 PM, ET/PT): Frosty the Snowman
Friday, December 7th (8:30-9:00 PM, ET/PT): Frosty Returns
Friday, December 7th (9:00-11:00 PM, ET/PT): Movies that Rock (a celebration of music and film!)
Friday, December 21st (8:00-9:00 PM, ET/PT): 9th Annual A Home for the Holiday with Sheryl Crow
Saturday, December 22nd (8:00-10:00 PM, ET/PT): Elf

11/20/2007 11:24:27 AM by Ellee Dean | Comments [0] |  

Friend: ... are you for real? you’re really going to a UFO convention?

Me: yeah

Friend: you’re going willingly?

Me: yeah

Friend: with people?

 

It’s been a secret dream of mine to attend a UFO event. I have long been intrigued by the paranormal. When I was a kid I would spy ghouls in the windows of silent houses on a regular basis. I’d pore through stories of UFO sightings in books and on the internet. I could get lost in the stuff for an entire day. Suffice to say, I was looking forward to the Mass UFO show.

 

So why did I make a run for the door after 30 minutes on Friday night, feeling like an ass after John Horrigan, the event organizer, was kind enough to get me in? Because it was spectacularly boring. Arriving at Hibernian Hall in Watertown, I walked into a dark room, where a woman was giving a slide show presentation. She was telling us in her crusty monotone about her stay at a young man’s farm house and the weird things that happened to her there. Something like 40 people were sitting around in neat little rows listening to this. Off to the side, there were about 6 or 7 men and women — presenters, most likely — all of them dapper in suits. From where I was sitting, the "exhibits" surrounding the room looked like the sort elementary school science students might craft to adorn the school gymnasium come science fair. The woman continued on about how she and this man went out to the fields one night to take pictures/inspect a crop circle. All of the photos taken of the man, she announced with newfound excitement, came out blurry. Someone gasped at this. I looked down at the program I’d been given at the door on which we were instructed not to talk to any of our fellow attendees during the presentations. Not until the 15 minute or so intermissions, which looked to be scattered around presentations much like this woman's, throughout the program. After the woman finished, a man was readying his own presentation. It was then that I jetted, not wanting to spend my Friday night in such a setting.

 

I’m not sure what I was expecting — at the very least, I thought I’d be entertained. It was a UFO show for fuck sakes. Where was the hysteria, the color, the fun?!?

10/15/2007 3:29:48 PM by Ian Sands | Comments [2] |  

One of the traditions at The New Yorker that has continued unabated by tables of contents, photographs, bylined Talks of the Town, and other heady incursions of late-20th-century magazining is the "newsbreak" -- the wry, lightly condescending filler blurbs at the tail end of select New Yorker stories in which the magazine's copy-editing staff, having plowed through its 3,000-word feature for the afternoon and availed of no better way to entertain itself, takes to excerpting the copy-editing malapropisms of lesser publications. E.B. White once said, "I still regard newsbreaks as the thing I came to earth for." White even edited a book-length collection of newsbreaks; in later years, the tradition spawned an entire genre of shitty late-night comedy bits (see "Jaywalking").

The newsbreak is such a New Yorker hallmark that, when we came across page 63 of frequent New Yorker contributor Jeffrey Toobin's Supreme Court tome The Nine, we wondered whether Toobin hadn't edited in a newsbreak just to get another mention of the book wedged into his magazine's hallowed pages. If so, it would be the meta-est newsbreak of all time: a New Yorker writer caught in a malaprop involving The New Yorker. (Remember, all, that italics are reserved for publication names, albums, and the titles of creative works.) In the style, then, of a New Yorker newsbreak, we give you the Newsbreak of the Century:

HOOPLA DEPT.

"[In picking a list of potential Supreme Court nominees] the names of several nonjudges came up, but it quickly became clear that [Bill] Clinton was most interested in one of them -- Mario Cuomo, then governor of New York.

Clinton and Cuomo had a complicated relationship. Clinton admired The New Yorker's way with words but found his indecisiveness maddening."

We never liked him either, Bill.

For all you bookworms, Toobin discusses The Nine on Wednesday evening at the Brattle Theater, in conversation with local lega-eagle Alan Dershowitz. Tickets available through Harvard Book Store.

10/8/2007 3:05:03 PM by Carly Carioli | Comments [0] |  

Tickets for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s dual Boston shows in November went on sale this morning at 10 A.M., and at about 10:01 A.M., they were sold out.

Normally, I wouldn’t be shocked and appalled, but when I’m one of the huddled, sleep-deprived masses who pulls himself out of bed 10 minutes early to pay my economic tribute to The Boss, you think the gods would smile on me a bit.

I talked myself into the success of this plan a few weeks ago, pretending that Boston was too far north to attract any E Street Band fans, that two shows at the TD Banknorth Garden were more than enough to house the few Springsteen aficionados in the New England area, that MY Internet connection was that much faster than everyone else’s.

Turns out I’m just another of the disillusioned losers who has been slayed by Ticketmaster yet again.  My only hope is that scalping will be made legal in the next one-and-a-half months, allowing me a safe, secure route into The Boss’s lair.  Otherwise, a night spent in a paddywagon would be the icing on the cake of my ticket-less life.

And to think, all I wanted to do was rock.  Something tells me Bruce would understand.

9/24/2007 4:00:32 PM by phloggist | Comments [1] |  

Those of you who have seen the Transformers movie may recall seeing this trailer: it's shot on digital video and seems to be focused on a going-away party for some guy named "Rob." Suddenly the lights go out and the ground starts to shake and everyone runs outside. As the crowd is trying to figure out what the hell is going on, the head of the Statue of Liberty comes flying into the frame. There's no indication of what exactly everyone's looking at, only that it is "alive" and "huge." The camera cuts out, and then a graphic identifies what we're watching as coming from producer J. J. Abrams. It also gives us a date, January 18, 2008.

As one might imagine, particularly when the co-creator of one of the most-analyzed cult TV hits ever is involved, the internet has been going nuts with speculation. A few things were figured out pretty quickly: the project (code name: "Cloverfield") is some kind of verite-style monster movie, and the "official" site is 1-18-08.com. The imdb has a brief cast list up; the biggest name is probably Lizzy Caplan (Janis from Mean Girls and Nick Andopolis's girlfriend on the last episode of Freaks and Geeks). Also, A spy report published various places spoke of something called "Slusho," which is another code name related to this project.

Here's where it gets interesting: there was a report that there were these two sites that were related to the bizarre viral marketing campaign, EthanHaaswaswrong.blogspot.com which was a blog (obviously) about this one dude and Ethanhaaswasright.com, which had these puzzles you could solve. Well, scratch that: J. J. Abrams e-mailed Harry Knowles to say that none of that stuff had anything to do with his project.

But, um... why exactly should we believe him?

7/10/2007 10:53:06 AM by Ryan Stewart | Comments [0] |