Category — teevee

god dammit.

I liked this dude. Old school, cigar-chomping, media hack. But smart. Sigh. Pour it out.

What is this strange feeling we’re experiencing? Is it… respect? …for Chris Matthews??

Last week while speaking to the Israeli Knesset, Dear Leader made a typically retarded statement in which he compared Obama’s desire to talk with Iran before we resort to invasion and carpet-bombing to Neville Chamberlain turning over Austria and the Sudentenland to Hitler. If we may cram a little English in with the history: That’s “diplomacy”. “Appeasement” is giving a dictator half of Czechoslovakia so he won’t invade Poland. You’re welcome!

Ignorance of both recent history and basic language skills didn’t stop the usual right-wing water-carriers from taking up the meme of appeasement and regurgitating it all over the airwaves. Bush gave them their talking points and they have a job to do, damn it!

In this recent clip from Hardball, watch Chris Matthews take time out from asking Hill if her vagina would keep her from being an effective Commander-in-Chief to nail Kevin James but good. He hammers away at him for several minutes while James hysterically splutters the same ineffective non-answers ad nauseum (”It all goes back to appeasement! It’s the exact same thing! It legitimized and energized!”), before he finally cracks and admits he has no idea what he’s talking about.

The worst thing about Kevin James is how patently manufactured his “conservative outrage” is. It’s obvious he doesn’t give a fuck about politics; being a right-wing talking head is the closest thing to huckstering snake oil to local rubes from the back of a covered wagon as you can get in the 21st century. We’ve seen better acting on infomercials for “painless” hair-removal systems playing at 3 o’clock in the morning.

Yesterday the internets exploded with this clip of Insider Edition-era Bill O’Reilly–beloved pundit, writer of both terrible non-fiction and terrible fiction, and noted pervert–having a meltdown over what appears to be ignorance of the phrase “play us out”. Apparently Bill was alseep when they taught that phrase in journalism school, and also has never watched any television journalism, including his own show, ever.

Watch Bill’s hair at 1:06, where it seems to become so frightened at his violent tirade that it appears to be attempting to crawl off his scalp and go hide.

Poor Bill. It’s not easy living your life on teevee, warts and all. Let’s send him a conciliatory falafel basket.

This army of Guy Fawkes clones was breastfed

Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, advised against breastfeeding, saying that most modern women didn’t have a good enough diet to form nutritious breastmilk. Instead he advised his adherents to feed their infants a noxious sludge–which he claimed to have gotten the recipe for in Ancient Rome–of barley water, milk, and honey. Honey is, as any first-year medical student or someone who’s watched a couple of seasons of ER can tell you, not recommended for children under two, as it’s an excellent way to kill your baby with infant botulism. Some modern practitioners have replaced the honey with corn syrup, leading to rotted baby teeth and scurvy. Scurvy. A disease that illiterate, cannibal sailors don’t even get any more.

What makes this speculation all the more amusing is a recently-released survey which found that children who were breastfed have, on average, IQs 5% higher than children who weren’t. (Thanks, Mom!) So maybe Hubbard was crazy like a fox?

1. Instruct your followers to raise their children to be too dimwitted to realize they belong to a cult that exists soley to siphon their money away.
2. Make sure they grow up dumb enough to think statements like “Mental illnesses are caused by the ‘essences’ of followers of a galactic dictator who were brought to Earth billions of years ago and blown up with hydrogen bombs!” make perfect sense.
3. Sit back and watch generations of progressively obtuse morons bulk up church membership.
4. PROFIT.

P.S. If you’d like to contribute to the legal defense fund that will no doubt be needed when we’re sued by the Church of Scientology, please email the author at sarah@heybeus.com.

Bonus: Ripped from the headlines! Check out this clip from a recent episode of Law & Order: Original Flava in which a Totally Not Scientology cult called “Systemotics” kills its members babies with steam baths and wheatgrass juice and throws its critics off of rooftops.

This graphic escaped from bondage, taught itslef to read, and wrote its memoirs

The graphic at left was thrown onto the screen, requesting viewer opinions. I can tell you what the average Fox and Friends viewer opinion is:  HILLARY KILLED VINCE FOSTER AND OBAMA IS A SECRET MUSLIM. Anyway, that’s not the point.

The point is that the Douglas in the Lincoln/Douglas debates was Stephen Douglas, noted slavery enthusiast and historical footnote. The debates, of which there were seven in all, were largely about slavery. But Fox seems to have confused him with Frederick Douglass, who was an escaped slave and prominent abolitionist. We’re pretty sure he was on the same side of the issue as The Great Emancipator.

Fox News has a long and storied history of having graphics that make as much sense as Chinese instructions for flying the Space Shuttle that have been run through Babelfish, like that time they said page-stalking Mark Foley was a Democrat. In the interests of giving their PAs more time to go out back and smoke blunts, here are some other Douglases they might want to use for future graphics:

• Michael Douglas. He’s not the President, but he played one on the teevee!
• James Douglas, Governor of Vancouver Island.
• Archibald Douglas, 5th Duke of Douglas.
• Buster Douglas, American heavyweight boxer.
• The Douglas Squirrel, why the hell not, it makes as much sense as Frederick fucking Douglass.

serves you right for voting off team fat chris!

Fashion maven, ruthless judge, arbiter of all things “expensive looking” Neeenaa Garsseea (per Hiedi’s pronunciation) has been fired from Elle and has officially vacated the Hearst building. I don’t even know which magazine lady mag Elle is : whether its aimed at lizard-necked cougars or pre-menstrual dry hump happy tweens. Regardless, I hope she Nina manages to keep her slot on project runway for no other reason than I think she’s a blathering bitch who makes Micheal Korrs sound like fucking Heidegger.

Rumor is she’s going to Harper’s Bazaar. One of the Hills’ feminists interns there, right?

I’ve always liked Leibowitz. I like her for the same reason I like David LaChapelle. I’m a fan of celebrities, I’m seduced by their personas, and I get kick from seeing beautiful portraits of those personas perfectly captured or creatively re-imagined.

But this? This is all she could come up with for Miley Cyrus? Tarted up, tussled, and topless? This is a tween star who has built her career being squeaky clean goofy girl—-not on on implicit sexuality like Britney or Chrisitina did (that’s why the Rolling Stone spread wasn’t nearly as appalling because, right or wrong, initially Britney was about being a coquettish Lolita.)

Sexualizing young girls ain’t nothing new, but for Leibowitz and the increasingly irrelevant Vanity Fair to justify this boring, uninspired, tawdry, and exploitive image as “unintentional” and “misunderstood” is outrageous. Her bare breasts wrapped in a virginal white satin sheet was just an spontaneous decision by a particularly keen eyed prop dude on the set? Are you fucking kidding me? Don’t bullshit. It was clear what all parties we’re trying to do, sell more issues, create more buzz by stripping down a teenager and making it looked like she just emerged from some sexual encounter. Simply put : it’s unnecessary, deeply cynical, and totally uncreative.

Gawd, I love when women we already adore say brilliant things.

The rise and romanticisation of Geek culture has been well documented. Ira Glass has his own show on Showtime. Conan O’Brien is infinitely fuckable. Two words: HARRY POTTER. Our veritable reservoir of inspirational cleverness Doree Shafrir caught on to a new trend wherein hot, pasty, twitchy nerds are working out and destroying their concave Elvis Costello-esques pigeon chests. This is sending all of us into an identity crisis:

The only way for the buff nerd to participate publicly in physical fitness is in some sort of vaguely ironic organized sports effort, like the weekly football game in Prospect Park played by an assortment of Brooklyn literary types. Also acceptable: kickball, dodgeball (particularly at free McCarren Pool indie rock concerts), croquet, pétanque, bocce, ping-pong, four-square or potato sack races. But to take any of these games too seriously is to reveal one’s latent competitiveness, which is seemingly at odds with the values of this cohort; those are jock values!

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Hiedi straddles the gender divide. In heels.!

Hey New York Times, your creditability is just skyrocketing right now, huh? 

New York Times ReporterGinia Bellafante, who just 10 years ago declared that feminism is dead in a Time Magazine cover story, has apparently changed her mind in the face of a new feminist heroine for our age, someone up there with Susan B. Anthony, Gloria Steinem, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (I don’t include Betty Friedan, because she had a little problem with girl-on-girl action and referred to lesbians as “the lavender menace“, which wouldbe an awesome name for a Batman villainess, btw): Heidi Montag of The Hills!

…wait, what?

Defying our expectations, Heidi has emerged as a kind of feminist hero this season, climbing her way to a bigger position at the event-planning company where she orchestrates NASCAR parties, and refusing to acquiesce to the demands of her fiancé, Spencer, that she get herself home on time. Her career-mindedness sets their relationship off course. Heidi identifies the problem with no name: a boyfriend who sits around an apartment decorated to look like an ’80s video arcade while trying to deny Heidi a real wedding with the glory of registering. Her groundswell of self-assertion begins when he insists on eloping, prompting Heidi to declare, “This isn’t, like, Spencer’s relationship and you decide what we do.”

People, this is what our beloved leader Dubya called the THE TYRANNY OF LOW EXPECTATIONS . Well, in all fairness, such behaviour would have gotten you set on fire just 400 years ago. Baby steps!

You can read moar about Wall Street Journal’s hard-on for Lauren Conrad and why we are soaking wet for RADAR at our newest web-crush Buzzfeed.

go here. praise allah. best episode: The Jeffersons. Season 8.
do I even to explain to you why south park is entirely relevant and ridiculously smart?

via geekness

What makes ‘The Wire’ so relevant is that it’s largely true. The Atlantic ran some bullshit piece about how Simon holds a unhealthy obsessions/ grudges and so we should all take his storylines with a fuck-ton grain of salt But he was wrong. So much of The Wire is based on fact. As my buddy Rahim wrote:

“The Wire will remain relevant because each episode was so enormously dense. One of the staples of the show was that nothing substantial happened for 80% of each season, and then in the last two episodes all hell would break loose.Well, in that first 80% there were so many references to Baltimore, to crime and drug policy topics, and to historical facts long forgotten by anyone else that unless you were taking notes, you’d completely miss a significant portion of the show’s intricacies...

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