Sounds a little unfair to the moon, if you ask me. The moon has generally been a friend of love. Not to mention werewolves. Sometimes love and werewolves together.
Unlike an increasing number of characters on Mad Men who deserve to be fed to werewolves. Seriously, why’s it getting so rapey over there? That Don Draper sure is “enduringly captivating“!
[Pic: Buzzfeed via The Daily Dish]
[picapp src=”7/6/a/d/US_President_Obama_811b.JPG?adImageId=4928008&imageId=6752517″ width=”500″ height=”333″ /]
Q. How much did Europe hate George W. Bush?
A. They just gave Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize for not being him.
Snerk. So now we know a few things:
In related news, that giant boom you heard in the middle of the night was not a thunderclap – it was the sound of rightwing heads exploding across America.
I’m a few days late with this story – mainly because I can’t believe it is a story. Something about Shashi Tharoor using metaphors while tweeting. Yup, it’s as stupid as it sounds.
Twitter: bringing down governments in Iran, playing havoc with the box office in America and making politicians sweat in India. 140 characters at a time.
One of the more disorienting things for us as children, was to watch our parents have a humongous marital spat on this side of the front door and then, the moment that door opened, turn into these Stepford characters who were so harmoniously put together, they might as well have plastic genitalia and be called Barbie and Ken. Nor were they content to participate in this strange drama for an unknown public’s benefit by themselves: they insisted we learn how to duplicate their success too.
The first day of kindergarten, for example, I felt just as bad as all the other little children screaming their angry, frightened, red-faced heads off. But I don’t remember making a single peep all day. I just stood there in the middle of this new, terrifying world of strange, yelly toddlers with snot running down their faces and waited for the world to end without uttering a sound.
People can hardly believe it when I tell them this. “You must have cried a little?” is the usual response.
Of course I did. A lot, in fact. In private. With my ayah. A couple of weeks later when I’d finally settled in and gotten comfortable with the idea of school. It felt really good. In retrospect, I wish I’d joined the mass hysteria in kindergarten and let it all out – I might have liked school better.
So it always touches a chord when I come across someone like Azeb Mesfin – controversial and award-winning AIDS and women’s rights activist, businesswoman, Member of Parliament, knockout, mother of three and wife to Ethiopia’s Prime Minister. From the pool report of the arrivals at the G20 dinner hosted by the Obamas:
Next arrives Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi, who clearly did something in the car to anger his wife because she glares at him, Mr. Obama, Mrs. Obama, and anyone unfortunate enough to cross her line of vision.
The Obama’s both look slightly taken aback by her. Wonder what happened in the car? The Ethiopian First Couple are quickly dispatched inside.
Clearly, she doesn’t have my mother’s voice echoing in her head. 
I’m all for this new model of political wife who lets it all out.
"Does it want to eat me?"
This baby noms you!
So a woman in Indonesia gave birth to a 19 lb baby. That’s 8.6 kgs to those on the metric system.
Happily, the mother had a C-section unlike this other lady from 1913 who (presumably) delivered her 19 lb infant the old fashioned way. But the New York Times says that lady was a fatty fat married to a fattier fat so… um, it didn’t matter? I don’t know what the NYT is trying to get at here – what does her weight have to do with her birthing apparatus?
Hm.
Excuse me for keeping things short, but my lady parts are trying to run away.
It’s not nice to laugh at aunties shrieking with fear, but I can’t help myself: this video of Jaya Prada, Member of Parliament from Rampur, is probably the greatest thing ever.
Not only is she squealing like a toddler confronted with a giant needle at the pediatrician’s, but the best part is that the geniuses at the TV channel handed the clip over to what appears to be a bunch of Youtube-struck fifteen-year-olds to edit. The end result is like graffiti art for the video crowd.
She screams on a loop as a random crowd of men hasten to reassure her while little word balloons float next to her head, imploring her to stop – “Madam, you don’t cry!” it says. Meanwhile, above the footage of her weepy face, a vaguely accusatory headline wants to know: “Tears in the eyes of Jaya Prada! Why did Jaya Prada cry?”
Why, God, WHY?!
There are a number of competing theories for this: according to the reporter on site, it’s because she’s a namby-pamby movie star and a female one at that and you know what those are like. The uterus did it! According to the lady herself, it’s because she can’t swim and the sight of waist-high muddy water made her feel all weepy in her courage area.
But it was Azam Khan, the man who formerly represented Rampur but got kicked off when Jaya Prada wanted a seat at the table, who brought his A-game to the question du jour. In the kind of interview the English-language newspeople would kill to obtain, he mocks her as a movie star who can’t walk 100 meters (328 feet) without getting blisters on her itsy bitsy footsies, accuses her of election fraud, corruption and then, for an encore, pretty much calls her a whore.
Of course, some enterprising reporter then asked Jaya Prada what she thought of Azam Khan in return and she responded by calling him an old, defeated man who’s quite possibly senile. She kind of attempts to leave it at that before the guy helpfully fills her in on what exactly Azam Khan thinks of her (sadly, they edited this part out but the way she goes from zero to sixty on the rage-o-meter tells its own tale), which leads her to drop all the fake “ji”s and promise to trash talk him if he continues to call her names. And even with her shaky Hindi she managed to implicitly call him a behenchod, so you know she means business.
Somewhere in Los Angeles, Harry Levin weeps as Hindi cable news flaunts the limitations of his empire of sleaze.
Please note, no tears were shed at any point by anybody at all for the people who incidentally provided the context for this drama: the flood-struck population of Rampur.
It is an outrage! Brinda Karat said so!
It is one of several television commercials aimed at men in Pakistan and India. In the end the darker skin actor is shown several shades lighter and he gets the girl he was after. Most of the ads end up that way.
The commercials are sending a not-so-subtle message to men in Asia: Get whiter skin, and you’ll get the girl and the job of your dreams. Or at the very least you’ll be noticed.
Oh noes! Fair & Handsome will be the death of us all! Thanks to depression, low self-esteem and general pastiness.
Meanwhile, no word yet on what Fair & Lovely will do to us. It’s only been on the market three times as long.
one for Papa
one for Mummy
one for Baby
[via Gawker]
YSR Reddy, the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, is currently missing. His helicopter vanished in the heavily forested district of Kurnool during what appears to have been a routine flight. There has been no contact with anybody onboard since 9.35 a.m. and weather conditions are dismal due to heavy rains, which means search and rescue operations are going to be seriously hampered.
I can only hope they all make it back safe and sound.
What really caught my attention, however, in the continuing coverage of this incident are the details pertaining to the helicopter. Talk about a bad news chopper:
The 10-year-old aircraft is not only missing its (mandatory, yearly) Certificate of Airworthiness, but its full list foibles is mind-boggling. For example, the Dalai Lama did a test run for Reddy a while back as the same chopper developed unspecified technical difficulties in midair when he was a passenger. Then there was a windshield that cracked and had to be replaced. And a couple of times in between, the pilot ended up hovering over the landing site, searching for a helipad or alternative space to park his machine because the chopper was fed the wrong coordinates.
This, by the way, is in a state with a serious Naxalite problem. If this is the kind of care and attention V.I.P.s get in Andhra Pradesh, the Naxals must be dumber than a trainload of bricks not to have run the place over by now. Reddy would have been better off in a helicopter he built in his backyard and piloted himself.
And if you’re wondering why this wonderful machine hadn’t been packed off to the junkyard (or wherever it is bad helicopters go to die) a long time ago, the answer is very simple: it was being used to train pilots. Because, you know, the best place for a pilot-in-training is in the cockpit of a machine that’s falling apart and hasn’t followed safety or security regulations in years. Who cares?
Until, of course, somebody important hops onboard one day and things hit the fan.
However, we can all rejoice in the knowledge that the chopper in question is also “equipped with at least two radio systems, weather radar and emergency locator transmitter, among other sophisticated equipment, and is certified for day and night operations.” It’s another matter that none of these is currently working, during the day or night.
Which is why the government is now asking locals in the area to keep their eyes open for any loud, unexplained noises or sights because that might be a helicopter crashing into trees rather than the annual meeting of the elephant fight club or whatever scandal goes on in those parts.
Too bad Kurnool doesn’t have Streetview.
Update: YS Rajasekhara Reddy 1949-2009
I love letters. I can’t be bothered to write them anymore, of course, and nobody ever writes me any. But the few that I received back in my childhood when my aunts took the trouble to send them in a bid to teach me what my family believed was an important part of civilized living, remain fond possessions. These days it’s usually a one-line email asking me to forward this wonderful cash-making opportunity offered by a Nigerian businessman.
It seems to me that other than scammers, the only people who can be bothered to write letters these days are the nutters. For example:
Yesterday, Wonkette posted this tidbit about some Crazy Lady who wrote an article about President Obama’s mother-in-law, Marian Robinson, in which she alleged that Robinson was literally the in-law from hell because she was practicing witchcraft at the White House.
That’s right – it’s centuries later, and witchcraft is still the go-to accusation when you want to attack a woman apparently! Progress! Yay?
I thought then that the Crazy Lady ought to try her hand at writing melodramas for Lifetime or something because her tale of Marian Robinson’s sad descent to the bowels of Satan-worship is about as mawkish a story as I ever read. It’s like she’s reporting gossip from 17th century Salem live! You know – driven out of her mind by the grief of her husband’s impending death, woeful widow-to-be struggles against fate by selling her soul to the devil despite her family’s pleas… oh, well, as long as you’re going to use a stereotype, you might as well commit to it, eh?
But wait! the story gets better. Because after Wonkette published their take on it, Crazy Lady wrote in! Her letter is… remarkable to say the least. Seriously. You have to read it.
It makes me wonder if someone’s doing an excellent job punking the blogosphere.
Of all the blowhards that populate tinseltown, I always enjoy reading what Ram Gopal Verma has to say. When Amitabh Bachchan starts ventilating about the myriad ways he’s been done wrong, I think yawnsies. When Salman Khan starts rips the fragile filter off his mouth and gives you a guided tour of the Inner Mind of Khan, I roll my eyes. But when RGV starts ranting about how he feels persecuted and doles out his frank thoughts on the film industry at large, I find it highly entertaining.
For example, his latest movie, Agyaat, a movie I have neither seen nor wish to see, apparently came a cropper at every reviewer’s table, so he unleashed this fantastic screed:
Some Peppermint Tejpal wrote a review in Mumbai Mirror, that is if it can be called a review, posing as if he is the world expert on cinema. If the only qualification of a reviewer is to just have an opinion then I would really like to know the process of a paper choosing and employing a reviewer out of millions of opinion makers. If it’s not about his opinion and it’s about expertise then what is peppermint’s expertise. It would be nothing but him being in love with himself the way he can rip apart a film much more than even his actual hatred for the film…..Also I have no problem in getting one star from sweetie cutie Anupama who thinks “Eklavya” is a classic and the lesser said about the Buffalo Bumzai the better.
Heh. RGV in fury mode absolutely kills me. But somebody needs to tell poor RGV that he’ll never get any traction in this snark business unless he learns to lay off the vitriol. Angry snark is not snark, it’s just a pissed off guy employing sarcasm when what he really wants is to egg the other guy’s house.
Wait a minute – did I just review his rant against reviews?
Levity aside, I found the premise of his argument rather astonishing in a man of his background. Maybe it makes sense in the context of the people he calls out by name – I don’t know, I never read any of them – but a few points really made me think.
First off, do reviews really matter that much to the bottomline? Although I’ve often come across people who’ll murmur as an aside that the reviews have been scathing about such-and-such film, never have I found someone deterred from watching a movie they were genuinely interested in by negative reviews. And generally speaking, people seem to rely more on word-of-mouth than anything else. Added to this, certain movies, directors and actors are always going to be what they call “review-proof” – a term that RGV ought to be familiar with because he’s certainly worked hard to become one of those people.
Had RGV been a no-name director scrambling for funds who found his debut movie trashed beyond repair by a vengeful cabal of all-powerful critics, I might have understood it better. But while it can’t be pleasant to wake up one morning and find the newspapers full of terrible reviews of your work, as RGV points out himself, his bottomline is perfectly fine. Perhaps more people might have flocked to see Agyaat if it had cornered better notices but nothing anybody had to say ultimately mattered to its core audience of RGV- and horror-fans.
And yet, it’s always the review-proof directors who really get their knickers in a twist over the bad reviews. Look at Stephen Sommers, a man who routinely makes movies that cost tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to produce and market because the studios know he’ll bring in that kind of revenue even in the middle of a recession and he might well be RGV’s twin:
On the most popular movies of the last decade, the reviews have gotten more vicious, more personal. These critics have become a dying breed, and part of it is how much more vicious and personal they’ve become. They attack the directors, personally.
So much for “Indian” reviewers then. The whole rotten tribe of them is evil! They live to persecute poor little directors who only wish to bring joy to the deprived masses.
When RGV, a man who famously began making movies because he couldn’t stop sampling the merchandise in his video lending library, writes:
“The purpose of a review could be to warn a viewer of how a film is and probably to prepare a mindset. But does anybody believe that this alone would be the intention of any of the reviewers.”
it really strikes me as odd that he doesn’t for one minute believe that perhaps the reason why reviewers review movies is for the same reason that he used to once watch movies in his store – because they like them.
“It’s not a critic’s job to reflect box office taste,” writes Roger Ebert in a post that reads as though it might have been written explicitly as a reply to RGV and his brethren. “The job is to describe my reaction to a film, to account for it, and evoke it for others. The job of the reader is not to find his opinion applauded or seconded, but to evaluate another opinion against his own.”
That said, since I don’t actually know any of the people RGV targets for his ire, I could well be mistaken. Perhaps the majority of movie-reviewers out there really hate the movies and want people to stop watching them and are cursing every day the cruelty of a fate that condemns them to watch cinema for a living. Perhaps their job truly is to “warn” others and “prepare” them for what lies in wait.
But for argument’s sake let’s say there are at least a couple of them out there who enjoy what they do. So why then do they write a “bad review”?
Maybe, just maybe, because the movie sucked. As simple as that.
And really, if RGV wants to see what truly excoriating reviews look like, he should call up Michael Bay. Here’s sample of the kind of things he had to hear about his latest moneyspinner: “Michael Bay has once again transformed garbage into something resembling a film, at least in the loosest sense: it can be run through a projector and used to sell millions of tickets.”
[PS: This whole brouhaha actually reminded me of that goodbye note Stu VanAirsdale penned for Defamer, in which he talked about the limitations of snark:
It also made me lazy. “If I talk to you,” John Cusack began an interview last May, “will you stop writing nasty shit about me?” I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, but I learned soon enough, rediscovering some tossed-off, machine-feeding item about his upcoming film 2012. Just stupid. And there were others like it — maybe even hundreds of them, too embarrassing to exhume now, but apparently not too awful to stop, you know, doing. They continued unabated, in fact, until a couple weeks ago, when one of the less egregious examples prompted a commenter to ask sincerely, “Do you like anything?”
It was a piece that resonated with me because I’d had a similar sort of epiphany myself not long before he wrote it. About a year or so into writing Hindi film music reviews for this blog, I arrived at a point where I began to actively dislike even the thought of writing them because they were fast making me hate everything my eye fell upon. I stand by every single one of them but at a certain point, when you’ve eagerly plugged in to the latest album only to find it as ridiculous as the last one, you start to wonder if your life is just going to be one long stretch of horrible. Which is why, to those who still ask, I no longer write music reviews. There’s plenty of snark-worthy stuff out there, it just wearies me to point it out when there’s so many other things I could snark about to better effect.]
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Masala Zindabad
INDIEQUILL 