Author Archive
Carla Bruni’s Sex-Life and Why America’s Female Politicians Remain Mysteriously Unsexy
September 2nd, 2010 by Carmel Lobello
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is the hottest first lady in the world — a title that comes with obvious benefits, but embarrassing downsides.
Paris publishers, Flammarion, have announced a book deal with Besma Lahouri about Bruni-Sarkozy that promises expose all the dirt on her personal character and private sex-life. Bruni-Sarkozy’s history of being a party girl — she dated Mick Jagger in her younger years — has her lawyers bracing themselves for the book’s release.
“The principal story is about a fast-living adventuress with an obsession with wealth and fame,” says a publishing source.
This comes only one week after an Iranian newspaper called Bruni-Sarkozy “a prostitute” for writing an open letter to Sakineh Muhammed Ashtiani, the Iranian woman who was sentenced to death by stoning earlier this summer.
“Why shed your blood and deprive your children of their mother?” Bruni-Sarkozy asked in the letter. “Because you have lived, because you have loved, because you’re a woman, and because you’re an Iranian? Everything within me refuses to accept this.”
Bruni-Sarkozy has clearly “lived and loved” quite a bit herself.
It’s hard not to compare this French political sex-scandal with our own. In the U.S., our politicians make headlines on almost a daily basis for cheating on their wives, fucking prostitutes, and prepositioning young White House aides. We hear about the sex-lives of gay senators, straight presidents, state governors, and so forth. But they’re all males.
What we do not hear about is the sex-lives of Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Sarah Palin.
I’m afraid I’m underinformed to make a real feminist argument here. But I do have some humble observations for why this asymmetry exists.
First, there are fewer women in politics. While true, this accounts for very little since every year more and more women enter American politics, and the headlines about their sexual lives stay at nil.
The second reason, in my opinion, is that most women are quieter cheaters.
Hillary Clinton would not have come all over her intern’s outfit unless she knew she could control him enough to keep his mouth shut. Condolizza Rice’s cell phone would never have contained nasty sexts that could be leaked because she’d have erased them the moment they made her hot.
Sexual nature is just as powerful in men and women, but women have avoided the reputation of diabolical cheaters. I’m not entirely sure why, but I will say that most of my female friends seem to possess an awareness of consequence that verges on paranoia when it comes to their personal lives — something that nearly all of my male friends lack.
The other reason is similar, but more public. Culturally, our perception of successful men is that they’re hornier, aggressive, and more likely to cheat than their female counterparts.
I don’t know the origin of this stereotype, but I hypothesize that it has something to do with men being stronger. They’ve always been able to get away with brazenly acting out their sexual urges without getting hurt. It makes sense that being weaker caused the female gender to evolve in a Darwinian manner: generally, women seem to be better secret-keepers and more emotionally manipulative than men.
Back to Bruni-Sarkozy:
France and the U.S. share some things in common, but how we view women is not one of them. France famously loves its women. Powerful female leaders in arts and politics have graced France’s media headlines for centuries longer than America.
Just this year, the French parliament motioned to ban burqas in public, a garment that President Nicolas Sarkozy is emphatically against. “In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity,” he said at the time.
French men have always seemed to understand women’s evolved emotional capacities. Mata Hari, the Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan who became famous in Paris also served the French military as a spy during WW1. Women’s suffrage originated in France in the 1780s and 1790s almost 150 years before it made its way to the U.S.
Then why does America only harpoon its male leaders for their sex-lives? Was Bruni-Sarkozy just less discrete about her sex-life than most women? Or is there more to it?
I think that greater respect for female leaders also comes with greater consequence. Marie Antoinette’s fate was one of the most famous political deaths in Western history. When Mata Hari was found to be a double agent, she was assassinated by a French firing squad.
Assassination of character is another of these consequences.
Female American politicians stay mysteriously clear of sex-scandal headlines. I think we should take a moment to agree that it’s not because they’re sexless, unscandelous people. I think they have evolved to become better secret-keepers, and I also think that the public doesn’t look for their discretions the way we seek out political scandal in men. We almost don’t believe that Hillary Clinton gets laid at all.
If we insist on making our political figures’ private lives our business, maybe we’ll be able to gauge our acceptance of women as leaders (be they Palin, Clinton or whoever), by how willing we are to expose their sex lives.
Meghan McCain Rips Sarah Palin While Gripping A Huge Phallic Elephant Trunk
September 2nd, 2010 by Carmel Lobello
Meghan McCain and Sarah Palin, America’s two hottest female Republicans, are finally dishing on each other. McCain’s new book, “Dirty, Sexy Politics,” finally gives us her take on Palin, who despite her political party, bust size, and relationship with Daddy McCain, she shares very little in common with.
In her book, McCain diplomatically describes her feelings about Palin as “mixed,” only to follow with pretty acidic criticism. Reviewers from “Forbes,” “Daily Beast,” and “Washington Post” all provided different, Palin-bashing quotes.
Here are our favorites:
“(Palin was) the most beautiful politician I had ever seen” but “rather than joining us, and our campaign, she seemed only to begin her own.”
“The Palins were nice and down-to-earth. I’ve said that before. And I mean no disrespect to them when I say this, but when they arrived from Alaska and unpacked their bags, they brought dramas, stress, complications, panic, and loads of uncertainty. And they brought a tabloid-attention-getting quality my family has never had–and God willing, never will.”
“She wasn’t much of a team player, was she? The more I saw of her the more perplexed and fascinated I was. And it was only the beginning of a very long roller coaster ride as I tried to make up my mind about her, and never could.”
“I was waiting for her to explode. There was a fine line between genius and insanity, they say, and choosing her as the running mate was starting to seem like the definition of that line.”
Although the book seems to have some juicy quotes, don’t let the title fool you– the dirtiest aspect is probably the cover image which shows her gripping a massive phallic elephant trunk across her lap.
Regardless, Meghan McCain is the only cool(ish) thing about about Republican party right now. She’s pro-gay marriage, anti-immigration reform, and keeps the party entertaining in a way that isn’t entirely nauseating.
Check out her interview with Snooki for “The Daily Beast,” and her discussing her book on “Good Morning America”:
Texas Bans Gay Divorce
September 1st, 2010 by Carmel Lobello
Now this is just getting confusing. The 5th Texas Court of Appeals in Dallas ruled yesterday that it’s illegal for gay couples who were married in other states to get divorced in Texas.
In an effort to deny homosexuals any rights whatsoever in the realm of marriage, Texas has passed a law that forces gay couples to stay together against their will.
The purpose of the ruling was to overturn an October decision by District Judge Tena Callahan, who said two men legally married in another state could divorce in Texas.
Preventing gays from becoming unmarried appears to be a passion project for Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is not only applauding the decision, but actively trying to invalidate Callahan’s ruling along with one other gay divorce by sending them back to the court for dismissal.
By invalidating gay divorces, isn’t he in some sense forcing gay marriage?
The irony is more delicious than a Texas-raised fillet mignon, but the ruling itself is disturbing. The strength of Texas’s homophobia is cringe-inducing on several levels.
Not being allowed to marry a partner would be maddening indeed, but nothing would feel more infuriating than being forced to stay married to someone I was over.
The Barbie and Mexico’s Other Girly-Ass Druglords
August 31st, 2010 by Carmel Lobello
Edgar Valdez Villarreal, the tall, blond, blue-eyed druglord nicknamed “The Barbie” was apprehended today. It turns out that most of Mexico’s top players in the drug war have pretty girl-ass nicknames.
His crimes, aside from smuggling tons (literally) of cocaine into the US, include a gruesome list of murders by decapatation and hanging and causing the line for the girls room at New York clubs to be intolerably long.
Besides his height and hair color, the handle “Barbie” really doesn’t make sense for such a diabolical dude. Barbie liked to pursue various careers, hang out with her little sister, Skipper, and go on dates with Ken, not cut off heads.
Though, from an anatomical perspective, Barbie must have done a lot of coke to stay that skinny, so perhaps the homage is, in some small way, justifiable.
The handle “The Barbie” is actually part of a much larger trend among Mexican drug lords where they pick inappropriately cute nicknames for each other. I guess you have to keep a sense of humor if your entire life is devoted to killing people to making money off something that kills people.
Here are a few of our favorite druglord nicknames:
El Guero (“Blondie”):
In “Youth Nabbed as Sniper,” Debbie Harry sang, “I would like to kill for love, but I don’t know how.”
Hector Luis Palma Salazar, the ex-leader to the Sinaloa clan who was nicknamed “Blondie” did know how to kill. And he made a lot of cash doing it before he was finally arrested after surviving a plane crash in ‘95.
“Nacho”:
“Nacho” actually isn’t an entirely innocuous nickname, what with the obesity epidemic and everything. Technically they can kill you, but only after many embarrassing decades of smelling like cheese and not having a girlfriend.
Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel, one of the most powerful players in the Sinaloa Cartel, would rather murder you with a machine gun or a machete than force feed you cheese and sour cream over time. Thankfully, he was killed by the Mexican army during a drug raid in June.
El Fresa (“The Strawberry”):
“Strawberry” is a cumbersome word for anyone’s nickname although it worked really well as a proper first name for the magical Ms. Shortcake.
Alberto Espinoza “The Strawberry” Barron ran the Michoacan Family Cartel. He was arrested in 2008 after setting off two grenades at a public festiva killing 8 and wounding over 100.
The greatest shame of the event is for the guys who were wounded. Surviving a grenade wound makes you seem badass. Being hurt by a guy called Strawberry washes all of that away and makes you a bit of pussy.
El Chapo (“Shorty”):
Like all culturally aware people know, “Shorty” means girlfriend. Jay-Z and R. Kelly have a song called “Shorty,” and it’s goes “Shorty, I got something for you, Wouldn’t give a chick a dime before, but now I wanna spoil you.” (slant the word “spoil” for best effect).
Saying “Shorty” is a supper affectionate, flirty way to refer to your girl.
That’s why it’s weird that Joaquín Guzmán Loera, leader of the biggest drug clan in Mexico, and the only drug dealer to make “Forbes”’s “Most Powerful People in the World” list is called the same thing. When I hear “Shorty” I want to see Beyonce, not a maniacal, billionaire killing machine.
This Week in Obesity
August 31st, 2010 by Carmel Lobello
America’s most embarrassing features make headlines on such a constant basis that it’s hard to keep up. With one in four adults clinically obese, it’s easy to get lost in the flood of headlines about our gargantuan waistlines. We made a round-up of our country’s recent obesity-related news to help you navigate:
The U.S. Army is changing its training regimen to accommodate an increase in fat recruits.
The “New York Times” reports that one of the most pressing issues facing the U.S. military is how overweight the new recruits are.
How are they responding? By training the trainees for training. The new programs are easing the fatties into Pilates and yoga exercises instead of the usual pushups/sit ups/obstacle course routine we know from the movies.
It turns out that it’s tough to climb a wall if you’re too chubby to touch your toes, and doing pushups requires a reasonable body weight.
They’re also overhauling the mess halls, offering our soldiers more veggies, less soda.
Texas man figures out how to deep-fry beer.
As if beer on its own isn’t fattening enough—a Texas man named Mark Zable spent the last three years trying to figure out how to deep-fry the stuff. He succeeded. The final product looks like ravioli, but is actually dee-fried, beer-filled pretzel pockets.
They’re fried for a short enough time to remain alcoholic, and you have to show an I.D. to purchase them. That said, it’s unclear how many you’ll need to down to actually catch a buzz.
Man robs Arby’s with a Samurai Sword.
Okay, so the man actually robbed the Arby’s in Killeen, Texas for cash, but it says something about obesity that he knew the cash would be at a fast food restaurant and not a gym.
Dunkin’ Donuts opens 338 new locations in the first half of 2010.
The donut retailer founded in 1950 is still growing rapidly, presumably due to high demand. Donuts are cheap, but consider: There are 470 calories in a blueberry crumb donut, 510 calories and 30g of fat in their famous ham, egg and cheese croissant, and 800 calories and 86g of sugar in a large Coffee Coolatta. Gross.
“WSJ” writes about a European fat tax.
Two weeks ago, German parliamentarian Marco Wanderwitz told the German tabloid “Blid” that fat people should be taxed to pay for the cost they impose on the healthcare system. The “Wall Street Journal” published a story on it, and the idea has garnered support across the U.S.
While in some ways Wanderwitz is missing the point by suggesting the victims of a systemic, often socioeconomic problem pay for it, he has a point. Cigarettes in New York are taxed up to $6.02, over 100% of the price of the pack, often dissuading three-packs-a-day smokers. A major Twinkie tax may be the only way to get people to stop stuffing their mouths with them.
Manure and rodents caused salmonella outbreak.
After 500 million eggs were recalled due to a Salmonella outbreak, the FDA decided to investigate.
What they found should give pause to bacon, egg and cheese lovers. The hen houses contained piles of manure up to eight feet tall, live mice, pigeons, and maggots. Wright County Egg and Hillendale farms were the two inspected so far.
On the upside, a run-in with Salmonella can shave off as much as five pounds of body fat in just a couple days.
Why Your Deadbeat Dad, Mel Gibson, and the Cast of ‘Jersey Shore’ Will all Outlive You
August 30th, 2010 by Carmel Lobello
As if The Situation making $5 million this year wasn’t annoying enough, there’s even more good news for the cast of “Jersey Shore.”
John Cloud from “Time” published an article this morning proving that heavy drinkers outlive abstainers.
The story sited a study from a journal called “Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research” that followed 1,824 people from age 55 to 65 for 20 years to see who’d kick the bucket first. The findings: just over 69% of the never-drinkers died, 60% of the heavy drinkers died, and only 41% of moderate drinkers died.
And it’s not as though the “non-drinkers” are without healthcare or AA survivors:
“Even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables — socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on — the researchers found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who had never been drinkers, second-highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.”
Cloud postulates why even heavy drinking, which is known to cause cirrhosis and several types of cancer, is healthier than the dry life. His most interesting point is that alcohol, when combined with human nature, acts as a social lubricant, and social interactions have been proven to have a direct, positive effect on mental and physical health.
It’s a theory that begs the question: If a behavior that’s been proven to be healthy for us is categorized as a vice, then why do vices exist?
We can all agree that the concept of “vice” exists so that we don’t act like Maryann the minotaur’s minions (“True Blood” reference). We can also agree that in most ways, human nature is animal nature, i.e. the point of everything is getting laid.
But thanks to our brain size and thumb placement, there’s a little more to it for us. The desire (and ability) to control our most primal behaviors seems to belong uniquely to human nature, although it’s not without its Darwinian benefits: to feed our families and protect ourselves, we need to have friends. To have friends, we have to control the instincts that cause us drool uncontrollably and get in bar fights.
Thus, vice, as we understand it, stems from our need to control our instincts. But what we naturally want still drives us. The “Time” story has 20,401 Facebook likes for a reason. Maybe we could all benefit from making our “guilty pleasures” a little less guilty and more transparent.
Here, I’ll start. My three favorite vices:
- Vanity: I’m a stylist and personal shopper. Vanity pays my rent. I also enjoy “The Rachel Zoe Project”, reading about plastic surgery, and the resilience of cosmetics sales in our most recent recession.
- Lying: When I first found out about lying I was so overjoyed I proudly asked my mother, “Did you know that you can tell anybody anything you want and they’ll believe you?” This obviously didn’t turn out to be true, but on the Proust Questionnaire, I still choose “honesty” as the most overrated virtue.
- Cheating: I’m a sap and I’ve never cheated, but there’s a reason the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy should have been applied to French marriages, not the U.S. Army. (Read “The Examiner“‘s story entitled “In France: Why Cheating Husbands are good for Marriage.”)
The evidence that vice is in our DNA is everywhere. Vice is our choice cut for entertainment. We crave it so deeply that we spend more cash and time on it than almost anything else. “The Jersey Shore,” “The Rachel Zoe Project” and Don Draper are culturally beloved because they speak to our most primal nature.
The Situation is making $5 million this year because we’re rewarding him for living out our trashiest, most embarrassing impulses, not because life ain’t fair.
To me the most salient point of the “Time” article is that even healthier than the heavy drinkers observed in the study were the moderate drinkers.
I spent Friday night at Coney Island gorging myself with cheese fries and then Saturday night sneaking a six-pack of Bud Light into “Piranha 3D.”
If I did that every night I’d be an unemployed, valueless space-leach. But if I never did it, I’d be deeply depressed and on my way to an early death.
Why do heavy drinkers live longer than abstainers? Because they’re living closer to their natures. They’re less repressed, and they get laid more.
Most Strippers Are Smarter Than Their Clients
August 27th, 2010 by Carmel Lobello
Next time you’re getting a lap dance, be to sure to inquire into graph theory or perhaps even the origins of philosophical ethics; Jazzmine or Candy just might have some answers.
The Independent published some surprising information about lap dancers this morning. A study conducted by the University of Leeds shows that one in every four strippers has a college degree, and one in three are grinding up on nasty drunk dudes to fund their education.
Moreover, the Independent reported that girls aren’t taking the jobs because they’re drug addicts or being coerced by skeevey club-owners; they’re seeking stripper employment on their own to earn a beautiful dollar in a shitty economy—many of them making $40,000 a year and controlling their own schedules.
I can’t tell if intelligent girls are going to waste, or our voyeristic, share-everything culture is outing getting naked as a legit way to get by. As weird (and nauseating) as the Montana Fishburn sex tape is, she’s certainly made a point to vocalize what she’s observed to be the truth: showing your pussy to the world is an act of ambition.
Pole dancing would have left me without the $50,000 student-loan debt that I’m currently straddling (metaphorically straddling– come on).
The study makes me cringe, but not for prudish reasons. I’m paying for my Sallie Mae bill working as a stylist and personal shopper, a career that in some ways is less degrading than exotic dancing—I don’t need body gaurds to protect my person, and I don’t really ever worry about being raped.
But in some ways my job is just as degrading as lap dancers’. I wear heels to work sometimes even though they fuck my back up. And my career most certainly benefits from flattering people who I think are overly sexualized idiots (usually PR girls), and feigning playfulness on days when my job is pure, painful physical labor.
Sometimes I think styling is even more degrading. I work for free with the hopes of future opportunities. Even the most driven strippers wouldn’t dream of that.
I’ve also experienced dry spells (metaphorical ones), especially in the last year and a half, that stretch out for weeks on end. Meanwhile, strippers have been working consistently this whole time.
I’m not going to quit styling and blogging and show up to audition at Crazy Girlz tomorrow. I just don’t have the balls (zing). And on top of that, I’m notoriously clutzy, my hips are really tight and my breast-reduction scars are painfully visible.
But not having stripping on my list of possible careers doesn’t stop me from peeking over at those girls with envy as opposed to pity.
Today’s stripper might be tomorrow’s CEO, or even more likely tomorrow’s writers, designers and producers as the majority of these girls have art degrees. Diablo Cody is the modern stripper, not that slutty girl with three bellybutton rings from your redneck high school.
When I think back to Ms. Fishburn, somehow exploiting human nature to win the role of “socialite” isn’t as cool to me as dancing naked to go to film school.
We went through the Great Depression, garnering a few bits of useful knowledge, one of them being that the entertainment industry is recession proof. But our current recession, which is coinciding with massive shifts in technology, is proving otherwise. It looks like the only thing that’s really recession proof is sexiness, and it’s getting harder to categorize the girls who capitalize on it as bimbos and sluts.
Levi Johnston, on the other hand, who posed for Playgirl is a bimbo and a slut. No question.
Jim Carey’s First (of Hopefully Many) Gay Sex Scenes Will Finally See The Light Of Day
August 26th, 2010 by Carmel Lobello
The long awaited Jim Carey/Ewan McGregor gay dramedy, “I Love You Phillip Morris” has another release date. A real one this time (we hope). Roadside Attraction plans to release this film on December 3rd, almost two years after it premiered at Sundance Film Festival.
“I Love You Phillip Morris” is the true tale of Steven Jay Russell (Jim Carey), an incarcerated con artist who falls in love with his cellmate, Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor), and breaks out of prison four times after Morris’s release.
Although the movie is classified as a “comedy/drama” on various sites, it’s one of those rare movies that seem to evade genre: It could be a comedy, a prison movie, a gay movie, or a romance. And while it’s hard to picture the Cable Guy butt fucking without cracking a middle school giggle, by most accounts it’s going to be awesome, and well worth the wait.
The delayed release is due to the film’s rights holder, EuropaCorp, suing the American distributor, Consolidated Pictures Group. Roadside stepped in when Consolidated lost, and are reporting that the December 3rd release date is for real this time.
Check out a sex scene and the trailer below.
New Jersey is Covering Its Landfill Stench in True Jersey Style: With Cheap Perfume
August 25th, 2010 by Carmel Lobello
Everyone knows that New Jersey smells like shit.
Jersey is New York’s famously tacky neighbor—the kind that decorates every inch of its lawn in 20-year-old plastic Christmas ornaments and leaves them up until mid-June. But of all the reasons New Jersey is unworthy of the nickname “Garden State,” the way it smells is by far the most ironic.
The reason it smells so atrocious is because its ratio of landfill to regular space on a square-footage basis is strikingly high—a problem that makes the 90-plus degree summer months particularly rancid.
How are the landfills dealing with this embarrassing nastiness? The same way the state’s ladies do: by covering it with cheap, fruity perfume.
This morning, giant flatbed trucks carrying giant tanks of air freshener drove through the Middlesex County landfill, squirting a citrusy eau du toilette over the 300 acres of rotting garbage.
The effectiveness of this practice is yet to be determined, but I know I can usually still smell B.O. after it’s covered with Old Spice.
In honor of this morning’s deodorizing effort, we’ve compiled a list of cultural and political New Jersians who should be thrown onto the Middlesex landfill for a spray-down:
My Chemical Romance
While it’s rude to make fun of My Chemical Romance for being so cringingly emo (wouldn’t you be, if you came from NJ?), “I’m Not Okay” isn’t enough of a guilty pleasure to make up for three full albums of trash.
Plus Gerard Way spent enough years soaked in alcohol, his hair caked with vomit, that we’re sure he could still benefit from a good spraying.
Corrupt Politicians
It’s not entirely fair to say that political corruption is a “Jersey” thing—it’s actually more of a “politics” thing. That said, New Jersey does seem to host a disproportionate number of scandalous national headlines.
The Frank Hague story is an unbeatable example. The midcentury Democratic National Committeeman was worth $10 million at his death, but never made more than $8,500 per year in politics and had no other sources of legitimate income.
His desk, which is still at City Hall, has a specially designed lap drawer which could be pushed outward towards the person with whom he was meeting—perfect for giving and receiving bribes. Talk about getting paid under the table.
Highway Trash
Tunnel trash refers to meatheads in skintight t-shirts who grab your ass outside Club Icon in Manhattan. Highway trash is the actual litter that infamously peppers New Jersey’s roads.
The most notorious New Jersey highway trash incident occurred in 1989 when 25-foot-high mounds of trash under I-78 (the road connecting New Jersey to NYC) caught fire and headed up to 1,500 degrees, melting steel side rails and cracking the pavement.
Given all the roadside trash, Jersey might want to consider having their perfume trucks spray en route to the landfill. Sure all those gallons of air freshener are highly flammable, but it’s probably worth the risk.
Danielle Staub
TV personality (on a bad show), author (of a terrible book), singer (of horrifying songs), and whore; the “Real Housewives of New Jersey” star manages to link “trashy” with “tragic” without inspiring the tiniest bit of sympathy.
The downside: she’s probably already hyper-saturated in crappy perfume, so this treatment might be ineffective on her.
The Situation
This one is too obvious. The whole point of The Situation is that he’s trashy. Male stripper turned reality star? And now he’s coming out with a workout video and a line of muscle building supplements.
While The Situation is not actually from New Jersey and a new Quinnipeac University poll reveals that most New Jersey residents are irritated by the image that he has bestowed upon them. Anyone who has actually been to the Jersey Shore knows that the show’s characters are a dime a dozen. Jersians doth protest too much, methinks.
Body Organ Traffickers
This is some action movie-worthy trash. Earlier this year, 44 people, including three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis were arrested in a money-laundering ring and charged with a variety of crimes including bank fraud and the underground sale of human body organs. Yep, human body organs.
The FBI informant was Solomon Dwek, who was arrested in 2006 for passing a bad $25 million dollar check at a bank in Monmouth County, N.J. If that’s not trashy, nothing is.
CollegeHumor’s Busted Tees has a great take on Jersey Trash.
Darwin’s Evolution Questioned by Actual Scientists
August 25th, 2010 by Carmel Lobello
A new theory of evolution proves what Sarah Palin and her fans have always known: Darwin was a retard.
“Survival of the fittest,” the Darwinian theory that the whole world has treated as scientific fact for the last 150 years, has finally been disproven. A new study published in the highly respected journal “Biology Letters” has proved that creationism and immaculate conception are not only scientifically valid, but true beyond any reasonable doubt.
Just kidding. But new, rational research contradicts Darwin’s most important work, albeit to a lesser extent. The article by Sarda Sahney, Michael Benton and Paul Ferry of Bristol University supposes that the greatest evolutionary leaps in biodiversity were caused by species moving into previously unoccupied living space—not competition.
The report cites the move from water to land and then land to sky as examples of new living space leading to changes in DNA.
On the one hand, this fascinating study explains why all the scrawny, tattooed hipsters crammed into the Bedford stretch of Williamsburg are indistinguishable from one another. On the other hand, the ease with which Jersey douche bags can get laid at Club Exit in Manhattan remains a staggering mystery — one that may be beyond the scope of modern science to explain.
Featured image illustration from Hornet magazine.
Balloon Animals Now on the Endangered Species List
August 25th, 2010 by Carmel Lobello
The oil spill, global warming and energy shortages have been hogging the spotlight for too long. By 2040 we could be living a helium-free existence.
The U.S. Government has been selling off the largest supply of helium so quickly and cheaply that we may only have a few years left of the delightfully squeaky, but non-renewable element. A policy passed in 1996 requires the government to actively sell off the supply, located in Amarillo, Texas, due to the high cost of capturing and storing the gas.
He (helium’s symbol on the periodic table) is formed from slowly decaying radioactive thorium and uranium elements deep inside the planet, and cannot be synthetically produced. This growing problem has inspired great concern among clowns, child molesters and young children.
The secondary group that will suffer from our world’s imminent Helium shortage is nerds. Medical scanners, microchips, pressurized rocket fuel tanks, and infra-red sensors on spacecraft all use Helium to operate.
Nobel prize-winning scientist Robert Richardson (nerd) has made the genius suggestion of relinquishing the supply to the free market, which could lead to balloons that cost as much as $134, but would more closely reflect the actual value of the element in supply-and-demand terms. Currently, oil and gas companies don’t bother capturing helium because of its low sale price.
Chinese Fire Drill: For Real This Time
August 24th, 2010 by Carmel Lobello
Today marks the tenth day of a traffic jam outside of Beijing that goes on for more than 60 miles.
Officials believe that the jam could last over a month. I don’t know about you, but just picturing the plight of the thousands of people made prisoner in their own vehicles makes me nauseous and sweaty.
In 2007, my old boss got in a traffic jam on the 405 in L.A. once that lasted for five hours. Long story short, she had a mental breakdown and required me to walk up the Ventura Blvd exit ramp and then a mile up the road (totally against the law) to deliver her a bottle of Klonopin and a bag of Doritos.
People were getting out of their cars, cursing motorcyclists who were “sharing lanes”, yelling into their cell phones– one girl in a BMW SUV was complaining to the guy in the next car that she was about to pee her pants. He offered her an empty water bottle. When I finally got to my boss’s car, she popped two Xanex and uttered “I love you like a sister,” or something like that — it was incredibly awkward.
That L.A. traffic jam was caused by a giant crane crashing across the 405, blocking it entirely, and destroying several cars and one guy’s ribs and back on the way down. If a disruption that extreme only caused five hours of congestion, then what causes a traffic jam that lasts for ten days?
Like most disasters, a perfect storm is at play on the Beijing freeway.
The first factor is roadwork, which is a common, every day irritation that anyone who owns a car in a city knows well. The second factor is that some vehicles crashed at the beginning of a jam, causing the flow to slow to a point where other vehicles started breaking down because there wasn’t enough fuel in their tanks to keep their engines running for hours and hours on end.
The final cause of the jam is the most systemic, and hardest to correct: increased traffic. Massive trucks filled with Chinese products like coal, produce and textiles have increasingly clogged the freeways around Beijing.
China’s stupendous growth is old news. The New York Times reported earlier this year that the country’s exports are up 46% — a staggering number. To deal with the incessant increase in production, the country needs to reach its efforts beyond products like crude oil, motorcycles, and textiles and start specializing in manufacturing an array of Benzodiazepines.
One of China’s popular imports is traditional Chinese medicines (TCM) — herbal formulas that when combined with massage and acupuncture help keep the Qi flowing. TCM is the world’s darling of alternative medicine. Unironically, two of the world’s most popular TCM herbs are Bupleurum and Danggui, which are used to cleanse the liver and relieve stress.
I’ve never used the stuff, but here’s my hypothesis: When a country’s people are producing enough products to create ten-day traffic jams, it’s time to throw the acupuncture needles out the window of your unmoving vehicle and step it up to benzos. Imagine if just one of those trucks was filled with thousands and thousands of tiny blue Klonopins. Suddenly picturing the traffic jam seems almost manageable.
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