The Greatest Break-Up Video Ever

Today, my sister brought to my attention the most hilarious video I've seen in a while and the greatest break-up video ever.

Justine (username "jpmetz") mostly posts makeup tutorial videos - making yourself look tan, making yourself look like some actress from a movie I didn't see, etc. There are also videos of her ranting and making funny faces. In most of her videos, Justine is pretty angry. But in "how to look like ANGELA," she takes the anger to another level. And there are amusing results.

It's not necessary to be an expert in makeup application in order to understand this video. The sarcasm is delivered well enough to help even the most clueless male get the difference between classy and cheap looks.

I don't feel too bad about laughing at this. Mostly because it's funny, but also because this woman's [I'm hoping ex-]boyfriend sounds like a loser. Enjoy.

A Legalized Form of Torture Worse than Waterboarding

[Whiny southern accent] "I'm a spoiled brat, y'all!"

This Tuesday, I went with a couple friends to Port Washington to watch Hannah Montana: The Movie. We chose that day because one of my friends gets free movie tickets every Tuesday, and there's no way I was paying to see that piece of trash. Actually, trash does not do this movie justice. It's one of those atrocities you have to see to believe. So to help you steer clear of the theater, I'm going to give you as clear a mental image as possible.

First, there's a bratty girl who always has a sour look on her face. Seriously, have you ever actually looked at Miley Cyrus for a prolonged period? She forces a smile, a furrowed brow or a goofy face to badly match her words, but her face's rest state is always a nasty pucker. And her teeth are enormous. Just looking at her for the entire movie alone made it horrifically bad. But she had to make it worse by opening that scowled mouth to yell out some poorly written lines and sing off key.

Then there's a father who is a failed southern version of Danny Tanner on Full House. Billy Ray Cyrus is clearly trapped in a time when he thought his hair and personality were considered cool, but not in the same way as an average father. It's as if he is caught in a time warp, and he becomes more deluded because he mistakes his daughter pulling him to the top for people actually liking him.

And he can't even play himself on screen. I guess the different name of the character really had him struggling, even though it nearly rhymed with his own. Or he is a great actor and just a bad father in real life. In that case, he was dead-on. Miley is a brat, so he has her blow off her responsibilities to go to Tennessee. She acts like a nut at a dinner with the mayor, so he breaks up with his girlfriend. The logic here is hard to follow (a.k.a. ignore) if you're not eight years old.

The rest of the cast is equally as stupid. There's a bumbling English tabloid reporter whose only purpose is cheap laughs similar to what you can find in a Wayans Brothers movie. And don't forget the townspeople who desperately need eyeglasses. Hannah Montana takes off a blonde wig and everyone is shocked that she’s actually Miley. I think I would be more inclined to go along with the Clark Kent-esque disguise if she had superpowers. But everything else is some ridiculous version of reality, so why should it be suspended for that one aspect?

This movie is dreadful. The script, the acting and the music are all horrendous. I realize that I'm looking at this from the perspective of someone older than the target audience, but I don't think that matters. Kids' movies used to make more sense, be mildly entertaining for the adults who were dragged along (check out a Pee Wee movie if you don't believe me. There are jokes aimed at the parents), and have some sort of lesson to be learned. There’s no real lesson in this movie. They push that whole "it's not the destination, it's the journey" garbage down everyone's throats, but that’s less of a moral and more of something they got off an inspirational cubicle poster with a cat on it.

I laughed a lot during those two hours I will never get back, but that was mostly due to my friends and I fighting over a pair of 3D glasses (the movie is not in 3D, we just brought them along) and making jokes amongst ourselves about how stupid a scene was (Miley goes around in a revolving door about 12 times, but it was supposed to be dramatic).

Don't see this movie unless it's free, a funny friend is on hand and you have a high threshold for pain.

He Gone

MTV made its greatest contribution to the world a couple years ago, but the effort went largely unnoticed thanks to the network burying this fantastic content underneath hours upon hours of trash TV.

Room 401 was a short-lived "reality" show that can only be described as a cross between Candid Camera and Scare Tactics. Except, instead of Shannen Doherty's messed-up eye hosting the show, Jared Padalecki (who played 'Dean' in Gilmore Girls) delivered terrible one-liners that likely had Mitch Hedberg rolling over in his grave. The series on the whole wasn't very good, although the special effects were amazing for a supposedly live show, and it was canceled after about ten episodes.

But a clip from one of the episodes has defied all odds and remained in circulation on the Internet. It is the only good segment from that entire series. And it is hilarious. Watch this exhumed hilarious clip and laugh your butt off like 'Date My Mom' never happened.

The buildup is a bit slow, but stick with it. You will see later why it was important. And the anticipation only makes the end even more hysterical.

Take note that at the end of this video, nobody informs the victims that it was just an elaborate prank. These people went home thinking that everything they saw actually happened.

Thriller Killers

Great thrillers are great movies. But everybody knows what it's like to sit through a thriller that's so awful it's not even campy. So what makes a good thriller? Is it in the special effects or the story? Is it in the music or the suspense? Well, I'm not entirely sure. But after watching too many of these bad movies, what I do know is what is sure to kill a thriller.

1. Prank phone calls, especially when the villain is just breathing heavily on the other line. Not only is something like this totally overplayed, it's just not scary. If the person on the other end doesn't respond right away, normal people just assume it's a telemarketer and hang up. Nobody stays on the line just to see what will happen, especially if the caller is being creepy. So if there's a prank call in a movie, not only is the audience angry that the actress (because in a movie, it's always a woman who's afraid of a telephone) picked up the phone time and time again, but they are also thinking that she is a total idiot for flipping out.

Also overplayed and not scary: getting the sheriff involved. There's always a point where the actress has had enough and calls the local sheriff, telling him that someone keeps pranking her, probably as an innocent joke. He gets back to her much later in the movie, after she has been terrorized a lot more. And the conversation goes like this:

Ring. Ring.
"Stop calling me, you freak!"
"Jenny! Jenny, I traced the call."
"Sheriff Average?"
"Jenny, I traced the call. It's coming from inside the house."
Jenny drops the phone and backs up. The audience sees the bad guy's shadow behind her.
"Did you hear me? I said it's coming from inside the house. Get out-"

Click. That was the sound of both the phone call ending and my TV turning off. I hope the character dies.

2. Many bad thrillers also have a point in the movie where the stalked person runs into someone they know, screams, and explains what is going on. That person mocks them, only to become the next victim. If your friend Jenny was screaming that somebody was after her and she was crying and worked up, would you really laugh? No, and especially not in today's world. But what really bothers me is the death of the friend.

Jenny thinks the killer is behind her. She runs into another room. She sees the back of Josh (because he always has some playful-sounding name), her friend from before who laughed at her when she cried that she was being stalked. A wave of relief passes through her. She calls his name but he doesn't respond. She reaches out and grabs his arm. When he spins around, she sees that an axe is in his forehead. She screams and runs away.

Wow, talk about irony. The disbeliever gets brutally murdered. Way to be original, Hollywood. This totally justifies your huge salaries.

3. Another classic mistake: Jenny somehow finds her inner strength and defeats the villain. It's one thing if Jenny survives by running away, or locking herself in a room until the police arrive, or finding a gun and shooting him. But it is so ridiculous when this puny girl is wrestling with a humongous man, overpowers him and then hatches a brilliant plan to stop him and get away. I'm not saying that women can't be strong or anything like that, but there's only a certain type of beefy, trained woman who can physically crush a 200-pound man who clearly has a background in disfiguring people with his bare hands.

The stalker has Jenny in a full body lock, but she somehow frees one of her hands and hits him in the face. Even though she could never wind up enough at this distance to make a dent, the stalker is taken aback and lets go of the body lock. He starts choking her, and then she head-butts him or pokes him in the eye just as she is about to suffocate. This throws the stalker completely away from her and she has a chance to get up and run away. He grabs at one of her feet and trips her, and pulls on her leg as she tries to flee. She kicks him off, because he is still on the ground, injured from her fists of fury.

After she gets away, she'll set up a trap so the stalker thinks she's in the bedroom, and then when he goes in there, she'll come up from behind and hit him over the head with a frying pan or something. Ludicrous! How can a girl, who can't even learn how to hang up a phone, figure out how to defeat a man twice her size with her own brute strength and a little pizzazz? I guess that’s just the magic of Hollywood.

Please, movie studios, I know it's been awhile, but maybe you should try writing a new story. There are only so many times you can use the same script before people catch on.

More Than Just a Prosthetic Limb

Half-man, half-machine. That's how Bradley Rhodes likes to think of himself.

Rhodes, a computer scientist at MIT at the time this article was written, is one of a small group of people who are pioneering the "smart outfit." This basically means that Rhodes wears a computer and uses it to help navigate his everyday life. People like him tend to call themselves "borgs," a shortening of "cyborgs."

I understand that eventually everyone will be wearing computers and Rhodes is just ahead of the curve. But calling yourself a "borg" and dressing up like a machine is the equivalent of stamping the word "nerd" across your forehead. And these few people wear their computers all day, every day. What must their lives be like?

I imagine this would be a diary entry on an average day:

8:00 a.m. – Wake up. Take a shower. Electrocuted, again.
9:30 a.m. – Weird looks on the subway. A little girl screams.
11:00 a.m. – Boss catches me playing solitaire during a boring board meeting.
12:30 p.m. – Eat lunch alone.
2:00 p.m. – Chat with other borgs online. I hate my life.
3:30 p.m. – Juice box Mom packed me spilled on my hard drive. To the repair shop in the garage! *Superman pose!*
5:00 p.m. – Watch Star Trek and ogle Uhura.
6:30 p.m. – Watch Star Wars and ogle Princess Leia.
8:00 p.m. – Eat dinner with Mom. Talk about a borg meeting next week. She cries.
9:30 p.m. – Try to sleep despite sound from Mom's kegger in the basement.

A True Coward

In the March 11 issue of the Stony Brook Press, the editors ran an anti-Semitic cartoon that calls the New York Times the "Jew York Times" (ha ha very original) and puts symbols of Judaism on its masthead. The two headlines on this cartoon paper are "Kikes Rule, Muslims Drool" and "Ham Sucks," and they are followed by a picture of an orthodox Jew with his eyes censored.

After the shock wears off from seeing this intensely offensive cartoon in print, many questions come to mind. Why would the Press run it? Why are they allowed to print these words and images using money from the school? Using money that each student, including Jews, contributes as part of school fees? And who the hell is John Tucker?

Oh, wait. I know who John Tucker is. He's a character from a movie about a guy who has a lot of girlfriends at once, and then the girls want to get even with him when they find out about each other.

In case this is just a coincidence, I emailed the Press at the address provided at the bottom of the cartoon page. I asked if John Tucker was a normal contributor or if it was a fake name. All they had to say was, "He is a good man." The person who responded did not even bother signing his or her name.

So whoever drew this cartoon is too much of a coward to take credit for his work, and the Press didn't feel it was necessary to make the "artist" stand behind his racist garbage. I guess the editors feel that the theme of accountability, which is drilled into the head of every journalism student, doesn't apply in this case. This issue of the Press is a really sad example of journalism, and I hope that it will come back to bite them.

Some people may say that the creator of the cartoon is just someone trying to make a point using shock value. But that's no excuse. A smart person can work within the system to make their point, without offending others. Whoever this "John Tucker" is, he is not one of those smart people. He is just a Jew-hater. A Jew-hater who is too scared to give his real name and face criticism.

Women Who Don't Need a Man

Erika La Tour Eiffel. Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer. Amy Wolfe. If you didn’t know these names before, you’ll never be able to forget them.

La Tour Eiffel, Berliner-Mauer and Wolfe are three of 39 women who are declared objectum sexuals. Each of these women believes she is in a loving relationship with at least one inanimate object. They believe that the objects have souls and love them as much as they love the objects. They visit them and show their affection in public, and have scale models and pictures for intimacy at home.

Now let’s get to the gory details.

The documentary about these women starts out with La Tour Eiffel talking about her love for the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. She has a piece of it- two metal beams in the shape of an “X”- and she carries it with her to the bridge, where she kisses, hugs, fondles, and whispers sweet nothings in its girders. Although this is all shocking and confusing, my main question is this: when she drives to visit her Golden Gate Love, does she put the beams in the passenger seat and strap them in? She obviously can’t put them in the trunk or just toss them in the back seat. That would be rude for a woman to do to her boyfriend.

Later in the documentary we learn that the Berlin Wall is a total chick magnet. Not only is La Tour Eiffel in a relationship with the wall (which makes this her third relationship after the Golden Gate Bridge and her marriage to the Eiffel Tower), but Berliner-Mauer (which literally means ‘Berlin Wall’ in German- she took its name) is also “married” to “him.” The women explain that polygamy is not a big deal to objectum sexuals and they have an understanding with one another. So here’s what I want to know: do they each pick a side, or do they make love to the whole thing? And what happens when someone tags it? Because the Wall is full of graffiti already. Do they ignore it, or are they outraged?

I would think they would mind based upon this statement from Berliner-Mauer about her relationship with the Wall: “Like every married couple, we have our ups and downs. We even made it through the terrible disaster of 9 November 1989, when my husband was subjected to frenzied attacks by a mob,” (credit- The Independent). She is, of course, referring to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the unification of East and West Germany.

Although I could not stop laughing when I read that quote, it is not the most disturbing thing about objectum sexuality in the article or the documentary. The unsettling prize actually goes to Amy Wolfe. Among other things such as a rail in a church, Wolfe is in love with a carnival ride called “1001 Nacht.” In the documentary, she goes into painful detail about her thoughts and words while she is being intimate with the machine at her home (by way of pictures) and she talks about the machine’s “fluids.” The viewer is then scarred forever by a clip of Wolfe lying down under the carnival ride in New York and rubbing its filthy grease all over her face.

If you have a strong stomach and a high tolerance for other people's embarrassments, check out the documentary.