Sarah Palin's Gradual Descent Into Incoherency
Remember how Sarah Palin graduated from her fiftieth college with a degree in communications? What the hell happened to addle this woman's mind so much that she can no longer form logical sentences? We went to the tapes to investigate. Here's the classic clip of Sarah Heath delivering the sports report on the local news back in the late '80s. She reads the Teleprompter with admirable competency, stumbling noticeably only once or twice. (Also: LOTS OF DOGS!) Was it when she decided to enter politics, in the '90s, that Sarah lost her words? Here she is in 2006 running for governor, skillfully dodging a question on abortion. She speaks in brief sentences that quickly get to the point, and then she stops talking. There is one worrying extraneous "also" thrown in there. A sign of dangling connectors yet to come! Hey, this old guy selected the feisty young lady to be his Vice President. What does she have to say for herself, as she's introduced to the nation? She certainly seems to like the attention. But there she is, just reading a coherent series of statements, from a Teleprompter, without deviating into odd non-sequiturs. Here, at Palin's first big McCain rally, she trips over some shitty writing. Profiles in courage usually come in books, but we are about to elect one...? But she skillfully segues to the lady-pandering, ignoring the boos Hillary's name elicits. Oh, Palin's greatest public moment. Her vile, scummy RNC speech. It was not quite as "masterfully delivered" as everyone thought at the time, but she got the sneering contempt down pat, and didn't stumble over any of the prepared slurs. Listen to her feed on the seething hate of the crowd! It only made her stronger! Here's where the wheels came off the wagon. Katie Couric's interview with Sarah Palin was so embarrassing that mocking it is impossible. She can't handle simple questions, she speaks in vague generalities, and for some reason Couric keeps asking her mean questions even when Sarah gets all defensively folksy. This is when Palin went from a pro who was remarkably polished for a small state politician to a jumbled ball of nerves. She never recovered, either politically or cognitively. Expectations were so low for Sarah by the time the VP debate came around that it would've been considered a success if she didn't suddenly erupt in a stream of racial slurs or something. But it was just weird. "Can I call you Joe?" "Doggone it." And the winking! This is when working from prepared material stopped working for Sarah, because she was rebelling against her handlers, or because she forgot how to read, or something. Oh, her thing on the SNL. They didn't ask much of her, and she didn't deliver, having Amy Poehler do the funny rap thing. And then the election ended, and Palin was free to let her freak flag fly. When Greta Van Susteren met Sarah Palin it was like a ramble-off. Greta lobbed softballs and Sarah Palin responded with her new brand of dark, vague paranoia about "bloggers" and "the... MORE >>
Which Thirty Minutes of Funny People Did Universal Want to Cut?
Today The Wrap henpecks at the troubled Universal, citing flagging box office returns and office infighting. But the most interesting tidbit is that the studio tried to cut 30 minutes off of Judd Apatow's two-and-a-half-hour Funny People, but failed. Why? Um, probably because Judd Apatow is like the god of all comedy of all time. He's basically had a hand in every other major comedy hit in the past five years, people lurve his short-lived (don't they have to be short-lived to have even more mythic status?) TV series Freaks & Geeks and Undeclared, and his two writer-director efforts at the cinema, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, have been critical and box office darlings. So you will have a hard time saying no to that. But might you have an even harder time saying no to him when the back six of his latest auteur effort, a mopey Adam Sandler flick about the comedy of the heart, features, front and center, his acidic cherub of a wife, Leslie Mann? The early reviews, while mostly positive, do seem to find nagging flaw in the long last third of his movie, which deals with Mann's character and her marital strife. We have nothing to base this on except pure speculation, but could it be that Apatow's dive into the serious side of his actress wife prickled a bit with Universal execs? Not that they wouldn't love Mann! Everyone loves Mann! But they love her as the spritely, mean supporting lady, not as the star of her very own late-summer dramatic arc. Plus can't poor Universal please just have a regular bros-'n'-dick-jokes August comedy to rely on, not some itchy junior Importance film ("The third film from...") by comedy's reigning rabbi? No, they can't. Because Judd said so. It's his wife's big moment! Now that he's a big deal, it's gonna be one for you, one for him, etc forever. Next one's yours, Universal. No worries. We think? Er, it's always possible that Universal just wanted some of the funny stand-up parts cut, right? MORE >>
Ben Silverman, We Will Miss You
That NBC chair Ben Silverman is flying/being pushed out of the peacock coop isn't really all that surprising. He's always been kind of a disaster. A blowhard (in more ways than one) party boy with streaks of ego and irresponsibility. Other than his professional failures—taking big, sloppy risks and never learning from his mistakes—there were myriad personality "quirks" that just didn't bode well for a long network career in these depressed, skittish times. First off, he was always saying dumb things. Like the time he called striking writers who refused to participate in the meaningless Golden Globes ugly nerds who were trying to ruin the cool kids' prom. Or when he basically admitted that he thinks he's the funnest guy he knows. Or hows about that time he called a bunch of his colleagues "D-Girls", the Hollywood equivalent of calling them ineffectual pussies. And who can forget when he declared himself "the perfect storm for making a television executive." (Very destructive storm being an unwittingly apt metaphor, Ben!) That he said whatever he wanted was brave! But it was also dumb. There was also the youthfully irksome "rockstar" shtick. Silverman's partying has been called "voracious." Because, you know, he came to NBC from the relatively devil-may-care enclaves of producerdom. Those stuffy NBC suits just couldn't handle his wildin'! Wildin' like rescheduling morning meetings to the more hangover-friendly afternoon and hugging executives and signing emails, drunkenly probably, "Love U!" Or maybe they couldn't handle his gangsta freestyle? Likely, though, it was that Ben never showed up for work. He was too busy yachting and yukking it up (flirting?) with Ryan Seacrest. Basically if you're curious about what it takes to rise from nothing, find fleeting fame and fortune, then collapse and vanish under the weight of your own expectations, just start here and keep on reading. It reads like pretty much any overly-cocky post-college narrative, only with a bunch more money involved. He gave us so much to write about! And now, like dreams abruptly ended by alarm clocks, it's gone. MORE >>
The 911 Call That Got Henry Louis Gates Busted
The Cambridge Police Department has released the 911 call that led to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates. The caller didn't say the men were black, and she said they could have just been having trouble with their keys. Lucia Whalen, the Harvard Magazine fundraiser who called in the report of a break-in at Gates' house after she saw two men forcing the door open, makes it very clear that she wasn't sure a crime was being committed—she apparently had been urged to call the police by another neighbor she passed on the street, and didn't seem to want to be involved at all. From the call: Whalen: I noticed two suitcases, so I'm not sure if these were individuals who work there—I mean, live there. 911: You think they might have been breaking in? Whalen: I don't know, because I have no idea... I don't know if they live there and they just had a hard time with their key, but I did notice that they kind of used their shoulder to barge in. 911: Were they white, black, or hispanic? Whalen: Well, there were two larger men. One looked kind of hispanic, but I'm not really sure. And the other one entered, and I didn't see what he looked like at all. So the possibility—even likelihood—that Gates was just trying to get into his own home was present at the very inception of this whole kerfuffle, and somehow he still wound up getting hauled off to jail. We're sure that the absence of a racial description in the call will be played as race-blindness on Crowley's part—if he didn't even know the suspects were black going in, how could he be stereotyping?—but we'd remind observers that his police report made reference to "what appeared to be two black males" entering Gates' home. Crowley sources that information to Whalen, whom he met standing outside the residence when he arrived. But if Whalen refused to answer that question to the 911 dispatcher, we wonder how she came to change her mind only minutes later, when Crowley arrived. Or did Crowley try to put a thumb on the scale when he wrote the report by IDing the suspects as black, so that his initial suspicion of Gates would seem more justified? One thing is clear: We owe Whalen an apology. Relying on Crowley's report, we called her a racist for dialing 911 just because she saw two black men struggling to open a front door. It's obvious from the call that she didn't know that they were black, that she was calling out of an excess of caution, and that she expected that if it was their home, then a police officer would simply check their ID and be on his way. Which is what should have happened. MORE >>
AT&T: We Blocked 4Chan for Criminality, Not Offensiveness
Everyone got upset earlier because it looked like AT&T had banned notorious website 4chan for hosting tasteless content and maybe for inventing annoying memes. But no! The site was blocked for a purported hack attack against AT&T. AT&T spokesman Michael Cole sent us the following statement, saying AT&T's network was swamped with attacks from the server that hosts 4chan's infamous "/b/" forum, so AT&T blocked 4chan for a while: Beginning Friday, an AT&T customer was impacted by a denial-of-service attack stemming from IP addresses connected to img.4chan.org. To prevent this attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T customer, and to prevent the attack from spreading to impact our other customers, AT&T temporarily blocked access to the IP addresses in question for our customers. This action was in no way related to the content at img.4chan.org; our focus was on protecting our customers from malicious traffic. Overnight Sunday, after we determined the denial-of-service threat no longer existed, AT&T removed the block on the IP addresses in question. We will continue to monitor for denial-of-service activity and any malicious traffic to protect our customers. 4chan itself has come under denial of service attack recently; if the site's online enemies actually managed to gain access to the site's servers (via a different type of attack), they could have used it as a proxy to hit AT&T. Or maybe someone figured out how to trick /b/'s bulletin board software into doing the same thing; lord knows the online hangout is popular with plenty of crafty script kiddies. (Pic via) MORE >>
We Predict More Lawsuits in Dov Charney's Future
Here's a shocker: According to a tipster, American Apparel's pervy madman CEO, Dov Charney, is demanding the firing of employees he deems unattractive and thus detrimental to the "AA aesthetic," as he feels they may be hurting his bottom line. Here's the text of an email we received tonight from a pissed-off American Apparel store manager: Our company holds weekly conference calls that every store manager world/nation wide are required to tune into. We discuss sales, which stores need displays, which items are doing well, etc. Summer is supposed to be a great sales season for AA. Needless to say, with the state of the economy, sales haven't been going so well. Dov usually gets on the conference calls and talks to people, but one week, he went on a huge tirade and made stores that weren't doing well send in group photos. Why, you ask? He made store managers across the country take group photos of their employees so that he could personally judge people based on looks. He is tightening the AA 'aesthetic,' and anyone that he deems not good-looking enough to work there, is encouraged to be fired. This is blatant discrimination based on looks. Dov personally judged each person in group photos that were sent in, and if you weren't to his liking, then boy... watch out. The comments that he made were raging from childish ones to insulting ones. Managers that don't comply with these new standards are afraid of losing their jobs. Employees who aren't up to Dov's "look" and whose work ethic is "just ok" are being targeted and scrutinized and the minute they make small mistakes, they are being fired. But it's only because Dov wants to weed out the "ugly people." It's ironic that he would rather have gorgeous slackers who don't move the product [or lift a finger] working there than normal looking people who are really aren't that bad looking, but are A+ sellers and great at customer service. The real irony here is that he is no [looker], himself. He's asking for a class-action lawsuit and i hope that when it rains, it rains hard. Worst place to work, ever. This is happening at many stores across the country. Yep, this all sounds like par for the proverbial course for Dov Charney and American Apparel. Let the lawsuits begin! MORE >>
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