At the World Pun Championships, Victory Is Easier Said Than Punned
A profile of a 38-year-old ‘world pun champion’:
At one point Gruber helps lead a discussion of favorite puns. One competitor says, “What’s The Onion newspaper’s biggest competitor?” Ziek quips, “Is it Wiki-Leeks?” The punster seems embarrassed as he reveals his passable but inferior answer, the Garlic Press.
As the night wears on, the punsters form teams to play Schmovie, a board game in which players try to create the best punny movie titles. One round calls for a movie about a constipated basketball player.
A member of Ziek’s team comes up with Scottie Poopin’, but Ziek overrules him in favor of the more on-point LeBrown Jams. It’s a tough round, but his pick ultimately triumphs over another team’s Poop Dreams.
How YouTube and Internet Journalism Destroyed Tom Cruise, Our Last Real Movie Star
A look back at 2005, the year YouTube, Perez Hilton and Oprah’s couch changed how we looked at celebrity:
Hilton had already nicknamed Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie “Brangelina” (“It was just such a long time ago that people don’t remember,” he sighs). When Cruise coupled with Katie Holmes, Hilton was thrilled to have another massive romance to flog. TomKat went public on April 27, and PerezHilton.com embraced their relationship with exuberant cynicism. Wrote Hilton, “We can’t get enough of the TomKat show because eventually the paint will start to chip and we will hopefully see all the ugliness as openly as we’ve been shoved the lovey-dovey bullshit.”
Michael Hastings’ Dangerous Mind
On the life and death of a haunted journalist. The tragic death of Michael Hastings also gave birth to a number of conspiracy theories:
“Hastings never identified himself in his writing as someone suffering from PTSD. The closest he came to such an admission was in May, when he retweeted an article about using pot to treat PTSD. In fact, according to the coroner’s report, that is exactly what he was doing.
“Still, PTSD was not something he discussed even with his close friends. Matt Farwell, a freelance writer and Army veteran, worked with Hastings on two stories for Rolling Stone. The second involved a CIA station chief with PTSD, but even then Hastings did not open up on the subject, Farwell says.
“The death of Hastings’ fiancée clearly had a traumatic effect on him. When asked a few years later on C-SPAN what it was like writing the memoir, he answered, ‘I wrote it in — I was so screwed up when I wrote that book.'”
The Man Who Smelled Too Much
Was William Nowell’s odor strong enough that he deserved to be evicted from his home?
“If only he’d taken a bath. Barefoot and miserable, the defendant, William Nowell, watched the jurors laughing and chatting as they filed out of the courtroom. Like they were at a cocktail party, he thought. Never mind that his life had just come apart. He started to cry. The verdict was in. He’d been evicted for smelling bad.
“Nowell does smell. Even he admits it. But precisely how bad is a matter of debate. In August, it became a matter of legal debate, when the owners of the luxury loft building Nowell lived in took him to court in an effort to kick him out of the very apartment they’d let him into.”
“Nowell had been living on the streets for the past two decades, and he looks it. He owns one outfit, which he wears every single day: too-big, ragged black sweatpants wadded up into a ball at the waist, and black hoodie sweatshirt. No socks. No shoes. Fierce blue eyes peek out from beneath a large, scruffy dreadlock of hair, which clings to the back of his head like some crazy animal.”
L.A. Woman Was the Doors’ Bluesy Masterpiece, and Jim Morrison’s Kiss-Off to L.A.
The making of the album, on its 40th anniversary:
“This is not a blues city. L.A. is about the concealment of appearance, but the blues is about its unraveling. The blues is the opposite of bullshit. And the psychic unrest of L.A. Woman is prominently placed on the album cover, which drops in April ’71. Jim Morrison is shunted off to the side like a dwarf Russian woodcutter or an American werewolf about to ruin Paris. The border is blood red; the faces of the band, choleric yellow.
“‘Jim was seduced by the luxury and indulgences of fame,’ Manzarek says now. Always bespoke and bespectacled, he has a voice as smooth as soy milk. In 1971, he splits time between a two-bedroom near the Whisky and a small penthouse on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. ‘The more boorish the behavior, the more Morrison’s crew liked it. We confronted him, and he said he was trying to quit drinking. But he was a guy who would say, “I feel lousy. I need a drink.” Conversely, “I feel great, I need a drink.” ’ “
Kevin Smith: ‘I Am So, Like, Sick of Movies and Shit’
Smith now says self-distribution was the goal as far back as the first week of production on “Red State.” “Day four, I was sitting on the set and I realized that it felt like the Little Rascals — everybody was doing it for love, we weren’t gonna get paid. And I thought, We’re gonna pull this off for 4 million bucks. And then we’re gonna sell it, get paid probably $4 million, if we’re lucky, and based on all my previous experiences in this business, that would be the last money we would ever see. I know what happens next. If I sell to Lionsgate, that’s $20 million [in marketing budget] tacked on top of my movie, and I have to make $24 million back. But then we know that’s not the case, because we know [the studio] doesn’t keep all the money, they only make 50 percent. So now my horror movie that cost $4 million to make has to make $48 million to break even? I’ve never made a movie that’s made $48 million, and it’s certainly not gonna be this one.”
Whatever Happened to NWA’s Posse?
The cover of the 1987 album N.W.A and the Posse does not look like something released by one of the most important rap groups of all time. … Stare for a moment and you can see a myth about to be born. That myth, gangsta rap, enabled four guys in this picture — Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren and Eazy-E — to titillate and terrify America as Compton-based rap group Niggaz With Attitude.
