Mother, May I Sleep with Treacher?

24 (shed follicles per hour)

Man, Karl Rove only wishes he had a head of hair like Walt Cummings.

Weekly reminder

I post here.

Did you guys actually watch Oprah yesterday?

I've read about it and Tivo'd it, but I just can't bring myself to watch Oprah, even when she's getting all Cleopatra Jones on James "No, Really" Frey. Plus, I'm starting to feel bad for him, or at least as bad as I can feel for a chronic liar and a millionaire with the vocab skills of a 9th-grade dropout who has died. Apparently Oprah brought in Joel Stein, Frank Rich, and Maureen Dowd to help her pile on Frey. Like some kind of cosmic convergence of complete jagoffs. I'm amazed their gravitational fields didn't send them careening into each other and exploding into a... dare I say it?

Hey, I made the very last Black List

Cool.

James Frey's ass to star in remake of The Color Purple

After Oprah gets done kicking it, that is. Sounds like she changed her mind.

Kanye West doesn't care about religious people

That's the obvious joke, right? Apologies if anybody's already used it.

To everybody who's here for the Joel Stein thing:

I warned you people about this guy a looong time ago. Oh, and this is related too, sort of.

Just keep talking

I was worried that the previous post might be a little over the top, but then I read this.

Me, Myself, and I(raq)

Hi, Joel Stein here. You know me, I'm the guy from Time who wrote about himself pretty much all the, heh, time. That's my thing. And just so you know I'm aware that I write about myself all the time, I make sure to point it out at least once per column. Like I did just there. See, my whole career is a brilliant metacommentary on the solipsism and narcissism of my entire TV-addled, celebrity-obsessed generation. Get it? Also, my squinty quasi-smile would make Ghandi want to punch me in the face. Certain primitive cultures (like, oh, Red states) believe that the camera steals one's soul. Well, just looking at my picture steals a little bit of your soul. Go ahead, give it a try. Seriously, people, gaze upon my visage. I must drink of your souls to survive.

But enough about me.

Just kidding! It's never enough about me. That's the whole gag. Hey, guess what? I just wrote an awesome LA Times column about how I don't support the troops because I don't support the war. I hope the troops come home safely and everything, but I think the troop stuff they're doing is wrong, because war is wrong, and also bad. You know? And the ribbons and all that. Boy, my head is starting to hurt. Remember those old Excedrin commercials? I think this is Excedrin Headache #352! Man oh man, I sure do love things from the '70s. Well, except for Vietnam.

Vietnam... war... Okay, right. War, dude. I mean, how can you be pro-war? That's like being pro-bad. "I like bad, I think bad is right." That makes about as much sense as Horshack getting an "A" on his history test. Remember him?

So you can see my point. The main thing is that people are talking about me again, which means I'm important. Who's talking about you? Nobody, that's who. Well, your mom, maybe. Can your mom get you a meeting with Comedy Central? Uh, that would be a "no." She stinks, and so do you. Whaddaya think about that, Stinky? Mr. Stinky Stinklepants? Just kidding.

I've never subscribed to the idea that making people angry, in and of itself, is funny

But somehow the way Greg Gutfeld manages to do it, over and over, just gets funnier to me every time. I guess I'm just a bit of a rapscallion! :) :) :)

Good things come to those who blog

Congratulations to Matt Welch on his new job as Assistant Opinion Editor at the LA Times. A newspaper, incidentally, that once told him: "To be honest, you don't exactly fit into our little boxes." Well, now he does! Wait. I mean, glad they got bigger boxes!

I'm not sure what an assistant opinion is, but Matt's the guy to edit it. Break a leg, dude!

I post things at another blog more often than I do here

The other blog is here.

Oprah-Barbera

I wake to the tweeting of birds and the feeling of something warm dripping down my snout. I lift my paw to feel my face. My bowtie is askew, my whiskers are bent, and my eyes are X's. The X's are as black as my Heart and my Soul. I open my eyes and I look around and I'm on the Floor of the House and there's no one near me. I look at my fur and my fur is covered in a colorful Mixture of snot, blood, vomit, cheese crumbs, and plaster. The plaster is from the wall and the wall has a Hole in it and the Hole is in the shape of Me.
The meeces appear in the Doorway.
What's wrong, daddy-o? You takin' a nap?
Why'd you stop chasin' us? That lil' ol' wall get in your way?
They laugh.
Fuck you. I hate you. I hate you to motherfucking Pieces.
I can't stand it. I start to cry.
Softly.
I cry and I cry until the tears won't come anymore and still I cry and the music cues up and the Credits roll and I realize I have to do this again next Week and the Week after that and the Week after that and at a certain point blackness comes and it's time for Yogi.

Seaside Spectacle

(Oh, you think you can do better? Enter the contest here. Contest rules here.)

It's one thing to recognize the necessary cultural connections

It's another thing to do the work.

Sometimes reruns are fun

Neocon fascist running dingo Tim Blair is putting up his annual Quotes of the Year thing right now. Exult or seethe, depending on how much you like being reminded what these people said. (And before you ask, I've never been able to figure out who this "Margo Kingston" person is either. I smell hoax.)

What letter comes after Z?

Okay, so I didn't make any of these lists. But I'm comforted somewhat by the fact that even though I post here at a pace that would make Stephen Hawking blink in impatience, they still get less traffic than I do. (Is that bitchy enough? I'm no good at this.)

P.S. Poopie? I don't know anything and never have.

Letterman vs. O'Reilly: Tough Call

Dave obviously doesn't know as much as he thinks he knows about Cindy Sheehan, and Bill obviously doesn't know as much as he thinks he knows about anything. I'd give the slight edge to the Hoosier, with the caveat that the next installment of "Is This Anything?" should feature an x-ray of his skull.

This seemed to good to just leave in Steve Silver's comments

He pointed me to this LA Times column by the dependably purposeless Joel Stein. It seems that once upon a time he made a mean joke about Maureen Dowd in a Time column, drawing her ire. Instead of being happy that he'd fulfilled his humor quota for that year, he then made several futile efforts to apologize to the flame-haired frownie. When he sent her a case of California chardonnay as a peace offering, she sent it back with a note:

"Mr. Stein, keep the wine."

Is it any wonder she got the Pulitzer Prize for Words That Sound Similar? He kept trying to grovel to her even after that, but I would have just written back:

"Pardon the affront, you miserable--"

Hey

Over here.