Ben Dewey’s Things Could Be Worse illustrations are an absurd and morose series of life lessons that Edward Gorey would be awfully proud of. He creates them ” … for purposes of instruction; so that one may avoid similar missteps.” Each scenario is delightfully old timey and sets up its characters for a piteous, dismal situation like, “Friendly flag waves all day; nobody waves back.” If the dank darkness of your danky doom hasn’t left you feeling hopeless, click through to witness Dewey’s tragic picture show.
Read More »
If you’ve ever lamented to someone about not having enough time to read, there’s a cure for what ails you. While nothing can replace the feel of a good novel in your hands — and the eau de stink of the used bookstore you found it in — the Book-A-Minute website aims to catch you up on all the classics you’ve been meaning to read since … forever. “When even the CliffsNotes are just too long, come here. Covers everything from Shakespeare to Steinbeck,” the site teases. They’ve taken fine literature, science-fiction/fantasy, and children’s bedtime stories and condensed them into amusing one-minute reads. Interestingly enough, you’ll find that many of them are dead-on descriptions of the actual works. Skip through ten classic books below and check a few to-dos off your bucket list.
Read More »
The George Foreman grill. Lady Gaga for Polaroid. Bob Dylan’s Victoria’s Secret commercial. Celebrity product endorsements are ubiquitous, and sometimes bizarre. What makes Seriously Bleak’s Celebrity Endorsed series, which we found via Dangerous Minds, so hilarious is its aptness — in fact, the goods being advertised are more absurd than the idea that actors like Alan Thicke (who reps the Bread Buoy) and Delta Burke (Turtleneck Pants) would accept money to endorse them. Check out the faux ads after the jump.
Read More »
Remember what TLC was like when we were kids? No, not the rappers, the cable channel. In the ’80s and ’90s, the network was home to all sorts of educational shows; you could learn how to do DIY home repair, whip up a restaurant-quality meal, and understand obscure scientific topics in a single afternoon. These days, though, it’s pretty much all reality freak shows: Jon & Kate Plus 8! Toddlers & Tiaras! The literally nauseating My Strange Addiction! Basically, if you have a weird life, they want to put it on TV. This laugh-out-loud funny fake promo takes the network’s formula to its logical extreme. Get ready for Dwarf Hoarders, Uterus Cannon, and Dr. Drew’s Second Chance, Bad Odds – all on TLC, “The Learning Channel, for some reason.”
Read More »
It just so happens that a little birdie (the Internet) told us that the 2011 International Translation of the Bible is now gender-neutral! According to The Daily Beast (also on the Internet), “In instances where ‘he’ or ‘man’ is used to mean all people, some gender-neutral pronouns have been swapped in.” Okay, then. But, wait a minute — how do we know that this ends here? What will become of Mary and Joseph? What about David and Goliath? Will “The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit” now be “The Parent Figure, The Child, and The Holy Spirit?” We simply have too many questions.
Progressive (and ridiculous) souls that we are, we decided to see how it would work to give some of our favorite classic books the gender-neutral treatment. Things, uh, didn’t go so well. See for yourself below and add your own in the comments if you have them.
Read More »
Last Saturday’s SAT featured an essay question which is causing a storm of self-loathing among high-achieving teens because — gasp! — it was about the value of reality television. Essentially, it asked if the reality TV medium helps or hurts society, given the way it bills itself as authentic but has come to be very falsified. According to test-takers on the discussion boards at admissions-freakout website College Confidential, it’s totally unfair because American high schoolers are too intellectual to watch TV and, like, their SAT prep courses totally didn’t cover a question like this.
Originally, we thought it was a pretty manageable question, especially since students didn’t have to give reality TV more than a hat tip to flesh out the problem of authenticity in art if they didn’t want to. But then, an SAT grader leaked us* the scoring rubric for this Very Special Episode — er, Essay — and we’re now sympathizing with those poor kids! Check out what they’re up against after the jump.
Read More »
Everyone’s favorite overly ambitious Aussie filmmaker has made a startling claim about his most recent project. At a consumer electronics conference last week, Baz Luhrmann suggested that his new screen adaptation of The Great Gatsby might be best suited for 3D. Indeed: That would mean that Daisy Buchanan, Nick Carraway, Gatsby, and the rest of the gang would explode out from the screen in more than just brilliant literary prowess and symbolic resonance.
While Luhrmann hasn’t decided whether to go forth and conquer this chestnut of an idea, we dove deeply into the pages of Fitzgerald’s masterwork, and discovered passages that suggest that the author — no stranger to Hollywood’s whims — may have had his eyes on a 3D film adaptation when he first wrote Gatsby. You know, even though such a thing didn’t exist yet. Click through to examine the evidence, along with a few of our production notes to ensure a healthy box office.
Read More »
As you’ve certainly heard by now, the wise, forward-thinking folks at NewSouth books are issuing a new edition of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Adventures of Tom Sawyer that helpfully replaces all instances of the word “nigger” with “slave,” because then racism never happened and people never used that word and we all live happily ever after THE END. According to publisher Suzanne La Rosa, this was borne out of the notion that “there was a market for a book in which the n-word was switched out for something less hurtful, less controversial.” And she’s right — that’s the trouble with words, always running around in books, being all hurtful and controversial. Change ’em out! Nothing fixes great literature like a little switcheroo.
This got us thinking — you know, there are so many banned books out there, and surely at least a few of them could benefit from this kind of ingenious use of the Find+Replace function. Here are just a few books that NewSouth and like-minded connoisseurs of great literature might want to consider “revising” for us.
Read More »
Music writers have long amused themselves inventing new genre names – it’s one of the perks of the job, along with CDs to review (less relevant today, sadly), guest list spots, and dismal per-word rates. However, with the “invention” of chillwave, a blog dedicated to satirizing hipster culture (while also embracing it, really) coined a silly genre name that was then adopted by said hipsters and thus brought into actual real existence. It’s all too postmodern for words. One day, future generations will look at our culture with a mixture of amusement and bewilderment. So let’s give them some more genres to scratch their heads over in 2011.
Read More »
As a follow-up to his bestselling America (The Book), Jon Stewart offers a less-than-hard-hitting but endlessly amusing overview of our world in Earth (The Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race.
The Daily Show anchor adopts a deadpan, textbook-style approach to that most peculiar of species, the human, and the planet on which it resides. Stewart and his team examine the origins of life (featuring a recipe for Emeril’s “Fiery Cajun-Style Primordial Gumbo”) and human reproduction (in which Alfred Hitchcock’s portly silhouette represents the climax of pregnancy), as well as providing explanations of political systems, commerce, and religion. The seemingly familiar has never seemed so hilariously foreign.
Read More »
