My son and I are watching a TV commercial for the Resident Evil 5 video game.
“Rated M for Mature,” the commercial says.
“Is anyone who plays video games really ‘mature,’” I ask, using finger quotes to emphasize “mature.”
No reaction from the boy, a video game player himself.
“You see what I mean?” I ask him.
“No,” he says.
I posted something on Twitter about helping my son with The Great Gatsby and got what you might call a spam reply from this girl, who said “have u tried http://shmoop.com for The Great Gatsby?”
Evidently Shmoop, which I’d never heard of, has people hanging out on Twitter waiting for someone to mention a book, at which point they send back a “have u tried …” reply.
Lest you think that’s a totally ineffective thing to do, I actually did click over to the Shmoop entry on The Great Gatsby, which starts off like this:
The Great Gatsby is a delightful concoction of MTV Cribs, VH1’s The Fabulous Life Of…, and HBO’s Sopranos. Shake over ice, add a twist of jazz, a spritz of adultery, and the little pink umbrella that completes this long island iced tea and you’ve got yourself a 5 o’clock beverage that, given the 1920’s setting, you wouldn’t be allowed to drink.
So it’s a little bit more hip than Cliffs Notes. I haven’t seen enough of it yet to know if I really like it, but I like it . . .
Prime Minister of Zimbabwe Morgan Tsvangirai and that guy from the Miller High Life commercials . . .
TORONTO (AP) — Howie Mandel has been hospitalized in Canada with an irregular heartbeat, his publicist said.
OH GOD NO! WHAT WILL BECOME OF “HOWIE DO IT!” THE NEW HIDDEN-CAMERA PRANK SHOW?!
Who CARES about this? Just let me know when he’s dead . . .
The first storm of the season is rolling through Southern California, which means it’s time to bring back the time-honored tradition of sending female TV reporters out to do live weather remotes.
I saw a woman on TV this morning standing in a blizzard to tell me that it’s snowing in the Cajon Pass.
Really?! It always snows in the Cajon Pass. She could have told me the same thing from inside a heated studio.
Some day, one of these women is going to get pneumonia or frostbite and sue this whole sadistic practice out of existence . . .
BOSTON (AP) — Paul Benedict, the actor who played the English neighbor Harry Bentley on the sitcom “The Jeffersons,” has died. He was 70.
It would be like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, but the twist is that instead of fixing people’s homes, we’d sneak around under cover of darkness and give homes an extreme makeover by burning them down, blowing them up, felling large trees on top of them, etc.
For added poignancy, the victims will be cripples, retards, members of minority groups, impoverished people with way too many kids, or some combination of the above.
Now that’s great television!
As my kid and I were watching Beverly Hills Cop on VH1 last night, we kept seeing ads for a show called I Love Money, in which fat, unattractive people are having a spitting contest for distance.
Two questions: What is the target market for this — fat, ugly spitters and the people who love them? And a question I wonder about a lot: Were people this stupid before television?
Have you seen this program? My son clicked it on last weekend. The host asked a woman if she knew what a right triangle was.
“Yes,” she said. “The triangle on the right.”
I had to leave the room immediately. I felt like I was losing IQ points just watching it . . .
In memory of Heath Ledger, here’s a list of 79 more stars killed by drugs . . .
Welcome to EppsNet, where the writers are not on strike!
Striking writers are stupid. Pretend you’re a TV executive and your writers are on strike.
Oh dear! What will I do? I’ll have to show reruns and only get 90 percent of the dimbulb audience I’d get showing new episodes. Boo hoo hoo! 
Television is the opiate of the masses, man! People will watch it no matter what’s on. They can’t live without it.
We’ve got TVs in restaurants, health clubs, cars, you name it. They’re ubiquitous!
The number of people like me — who think that if you want to eat dinner in front of a TV set you should stay the hell at home — is very small compared to the number of people who will not leave their homes if it means being separated from a television.
Hey scribes! People are going to turn off their flat-panel LCD high-def TVs — and do what? Read a book? Interact with their families?
Fat fucking chance!
Writers can stay on strike forever for all anybody cares.
That’s why TV shows are so stupid. They’re written by stupid people.
Stars Won’t Attend Golden Globe Awards
Golden Globe-nominated actors and presenters won’t attend the televised award show Jan. 13 because of the writers’ strike, the Screen Actors Guild announced Friday.
Well then . . . that casts things in a whole new light! Actors will not attend the Golden Globes because they’d have to cross a picket line of angry wordsmiths and ink slingers.
OMG! I hope the earth doesn’t stop revolving on its axis and fling us all into space because actors are boycotting the Golden Globes telecast!
What are the Golden Globes anyway? Another excuse for actors to get together and suck each other’s dicks?
Rot in hell, thespians!
The dog is sitting attentively watching my son eat a chili dog.
“You’re not going to get any of that,” I explain to the dog. “He’s greedy. He makes Jack Welch look like Good King Wenceslas.”
“And you,” the boy says, “make Donnie ‘We Found Him’ look like one of the Three Wise Men.”
The boy going deep in the archives to pull out a Wild Thornberrys reference, in which Donnie — seen here hanging from a tree limb — was a feral boy raised by orangutans.
My son and I are watching a Citibank commercial in which a woman in Japan drops her son off for his first day of school.
As his mom starts to walk away, the boy looks back anxiously . . .
“What’s the Asian kid nervous about?” my son says. “He’s going to get better grades than the rest of the kids anyway. Oh wait, all the other kids are Asian too. Ouch.”
Forgettable . . . although this Doritos ad was notable for the fact that it was made on a budget of $12.97.
As my son said after one particularly unmemorable spot (I can’t remember which one):
“They paid a trillion dollars to put that on my TV?”
A friend of mine’s 13-year-old daughter will be appearing as an extra in an episode of My Name is Earl airing in a couple of months.
I told my son, also 13, he should try to hook up with her before she gets too famous and the competiton heats up. He just made throat-cutting gestures and gagging noises, as he always does when the subject of the ladies comes up.
Naturally, she’ll dump him as soon as she hits the big time, but that’s okay . . . I’ve got to believe that all these starlets put a lot more into pleasing their boyfriends before they were famous than they do now that a guy is lucky just to be with them in the first place . . .
When 8th grade vocabulary words come out on the same day that Mr. T’s new show is on the TV, you may find your kid saying things like this:
“I pity the fool who’s a debacle like you.”
If there’s any justice, David Letterman will one day be recognized as the father of our era.
Like other great men, Letterman knew that Americans were dumb as rocks but still had their pride, so if you were going to feed them the intellectual equivalent of hogslop, you had better flatter their intelligence at the same time. . . .
Let the rubes in on the gag. Call the pet tricks “stupid,” make the showbiz flash-and-rattle even stupider than it needed to be, and cheerfully represent yourself as the hollowest of hollow men, and the suckers would applaud not only your twaddle, but the label on the twaddle that said it was twaddle.
Ed Bradley died today following a lengthy illness. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Ed a few years ago:
I’ve heard the words “compassionate listener,” “soft-spoken,” “instinctive,” “intelligent,” “maverick,” and “trailblazer” used to describe you. How do you define Ed Bradley?
I guess all of those things fit.
How about “untalented and unaware of it” or “surprisingly full of himself”?
I’d have liked to buy him for what he was worth, sell him for what he thought he was worth and pocket the difference, which would have been quite a tidy sum.
Ruby Jones, 67, worked in the hospice unit at Lindy Boggs Medical Center in New Orleans. Last August, as Hurricane Katrina was zeroing in on the city, she elected not to evacuate, but to stay with the eight dying patients under her care.
She has been recognized by Newsweek as one of “15 People Who Make America Great”:
. . . we don’t need some great lurch to the right or lurch to the left or redefinition of the Democratic Party.
