2 Idiots Debate: The End of the World as We Know It?

What happens when David Simon Cowell and I emerged from our recent hibernation to discuss the lazy abomination that is Grantland’s obituary for the very much alive David Bowie?

Some misunderstandings!

Some fighting!

Some laffs!

Some navel-gazing!

One person who adores David Bowie and one person who doesn’t really have a dog in that race!

We use the word “inarguable” a surprisingly high number of times, given that we are in the midst of an argument!

And David Simon Cowell writes more words for this blog than he has in the last year combined! Who can fucking resist that?

The Top 20 PCHA Comments of 2012

Pop Culture Has AIDS isn’t a lecture. It isn’t a monologue. It’s not a polemic or a soliloquy. It’s a conversation.

This blog is as much yours as it is ours, and you guys are what makes this a great place to live, work and write. You are the reason we do this. David Simon Cowell and I like to say that we have the best commenters on the Internet, and we often spend our limited time together poring through the comments section, letting you spark discussions and ideas and the best kind of intellectual fulfillment.

This is your time to shine. We turn the spotlight to you for the very best comments of the year on Pop Culture Has AIDS. Take a bow, you beautiful creatures. You’ve earned it.

The Return Of The Grievous D.S.C.

Hey, y’all, what’s up? Has it really been three months? Wow, time flies when you’re… well, we’ll get to that.

I know that P.C.H.A. nation has been in an uproar since my unannounced disappearance. Don’t worry… the long national nightmare is over. Here’s what happened… The Dilemma came to me and said that he was a bit worried that I was shouldering a bit too much of the load (really, I think that he was worried that my productivity was making him look bad). So, he suggested (insisted, really) that I take a sabbatical to recharge my batteries. But now that the Fall Pop Culture High Season is in full effect, the time has come for P.C.H.A. to become whole again.

So, what have I been up to? Glad you asked.

Beware Of The Ides Of March

You’ve gotta give Julius Caesar some credit. Jesus may have outlasted the Roman Empire with Christianity, but more than two thousand years after the pagan warrior’s death, the date of his assassination is still well known enough for George Clooney to name a mediocre movie after it. While Caesar failed to treat the Ides of March with the kid gloves he was warned to, maybe we should in this Final Year of Civilization, especially given what’s already transpired in the first half of March (otherwise known as the annual David Simon Cowell sabbatical):

Christopher Dodd Will Have His Revenge on America

While Pop Culture Has AIDS didn’t quite go dark to protest SOPA this week, make no mistake that we’re on board with those that did. Instead, we’ll do what we do best: post an angry screed about somebody who’s just the worst.

Growing up in the fabled urban jungle of Connecticut, Christopher Dodd was often viewed as the “Good Senator,” with Joe Lieberman filling the role of the heavy. While we were obviously right about Lieberman — the guy’s a sad joke — we didn’t realize that Dodd was on Lieberman’s team of baddies all along.

Now, as “Hollywood’s chief lobbyist,” the head of the MPAA, Dodd is continuing a streak of corporate servitude that began in the Senate.

The Top 12 PCHA Comments of the Year

The Pop Culture Has AIDS commentariat is a lively, sophisticated bunch. They’re educated, they’re hyper-literate, and their arguments are typically well-reasoned and clearly explained. As a thank you to our loyal readers — and to show off the best commenters on the Internet — we proudly present the top twelve Pop Culture Has AIDS comments of 2011. Remember, PCHA is not a one-way street. It’s all about discussion and communication — and we love to hear from you!

The Seven Most Oppressive Sentences From Grantland’s First 24 Hours

Bill Simmons’s long-awaited Grantland project limped into existence yesterday, and the Internet responded with a disappointed shrug. Common complaints: the lackluster design, the dearth of content, and the Wallace-aping footnotes. To me, what stands out so far is the terrible fucking writing.

I was a little excited for Grantland because, while I’ve come to hate most of Simmons’s written output (and God knows Klosterman’s a clown), he did put together an intriguing stable of writers and contributors: Ken Tremendous, Dave Eggers, Chris Jones, Katie Baker, the Masked Man, Bill Barnwell, and more.

But the evidence so far shows that throwing off the censoring yoke of ESPN’s corporate overlords hasn’t freed Grantland’s writers to express personality, profanity and subversion, as hoped. Rather, they’re apparently now free to write the most pretentious sentences and passages since the O.G. (Original Grantland) was vomiting all over newsprint.

To wit:

We Are All Arnold

Definitely a good, thoughtful, normal sentence on CNN Health today, in an article about negotiating monogamy (?):

With the demise of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver’s 25-year marriage making headlines, it’s hard not to wonder if long-term monogamy is possible or even practical.

“Indeed.” – Omar

If those two crazy kids can’t make it a quarter century without someone fucking a plump domestic staffer, what hope is there for the rest of us? What hope is there for marriage as a concept? Fuck. Depressing day.

Another good sentence:

My patients have taught me that sex – or a lack of it – is one of the major contributors to marital strife between longtime couples.

A sex therapist needed his patients to teach him that sex is important to a marriage? Can someone get me that sex therapist’s number pronto? I’m sure he’s the best in the biz. I hope my insurance covers him.

In Case You Weren’t Already Clear that Dilbert is Abject Hackery

Do you guys remember the ’90s? A simpler time. The world’s destruction via global warming was still solidly three or four decades away. Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick were both lovable SportsCenter anchors. Barack Obama was still in Kenya, plotting his eventual hostile takeover of America. Fewer of our dreams were dead.

And Scott Adams? He was just the punchline on a Newsradio episode.

Now, in this decade for which we still have no name, Adams is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Let’s be fair — he was always irrelevant, except to the blandest of office workers: people who own Successories, or cat-of-the-month calendars. Dilbert was a repetitive, unimaginative Peanuts rip-off disguised as irreverent workplace farce.

But now that Dilbert, and his good friend Dogbert (that’s a thing, right?), have become mere cultural footnotes, Adams has gone off his rocker.

We Got Beat By Freakin’ Canada?

This link came from the Lanky Hippy, who has more interest in penises than is normal for a man who’s had both a Common-Law and a Bona-Fide wife.

Seems that the folks at Men’s Health paused in their manic crusade to find the best way to maintain washboard abs long enough to estimate the average penis size for every nation on earth. Now, there may be very few things I would trust Jann Wenner about, but penis size is one of them (the other things are the best poetic analyses of Mick Jagger solo albums and ways in which 1967 was awesome).

This being the Internet, somebody took the time to put the info into easy-to-read map form.

What does the data tell us?

Mr. Consistant

He may be one of the most annoying actors ever (he single-handedly ruined classics like The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, Look Who’s Talking Too and Problem Child 3: Junior in Love), but Gilbert Gottfried has proven himself to be the stand-up standard when it comes to finding where the outer limit of tastelessness lies.

He’s legendary for the joke he made during a roast at the NYC Friar’s Club, a few weeks after 9/11:

I couldn’t get a direct flight because they said they have to connect with the Empire State Building first.

And now, he’s brought his tragedy insult schtick into the social media age. Here are the tweets from RealGilbert from the past two days:

I just split up with my girlfriend, but like the Japanese say, “They’ll be another one floating by any minute now.”

My Japanese doctor advised me to stay healthy I need 50 million gallons of water a day.

I was talking to my Japanese real estate agent. I said “is there a school in this area.” She said “not now, but just wait.”

What do Japanese Jews like to eat? Hebrew National Tsunami.

I asked a girl in Japan to have sex with me. She said “okay, but you’ll have to sleep in the wet spot.”

What does every Japanese person have in their apartment? Flood lights.

My book #rubberBallsAndLiquor was released in japan. It’s making quite a splash.

I fucked a girl in japan. She screamed “I feel the earth move and I’m getting wet.”

Japan called me. They said “maybe those jokes are a hit in the US, but over here, they’re all sinking.

Japan had put out this urgent plea….” PLEASE SEND US A FEW BIlLION RUBBER DUCKIES!!!!!”

What do the japanese have in common with @howardstern? They’re both radio active.

Japan is really advanced. They don’t go to the beach. The beach comes to them.

It obviously takes a man with no soul and no chance of getting laid to make such publicly gleeful jokes about a still-unfolding tragedy that involves tens of thousands of corpses. At the same time, I first learned how funny jokes could be from the Challenger disaster (the 10-year-old D.S.C.’s favorite: What were Christina McAuliffe’s last words to her husband? “You feed the kids, I’ll feed the fish”; runner-up: Did you hear NASA has replaced Tang with Ocean Spray… it was their second choice because they couldn’t get 7-Up.”) As much as we might pretend to care about each and every one of god’s creatures, the constant onslaught of fake televised tragedy becomes numbing… when it’s replaced by honest-to-god horror, horror that cannot be stopped or helped in any way but only witnessed hour after hour on our HD TV’s from the comfort of our warm, safe, comfortable living rooms, humor becomes not only inevitable, but also necessary. While he may not be for everyone, I’m glad Gilbert is around to remind me that I’m not the worst person on earth.

The 20 Most Insufferable Uses of #Winning

Charlie Sheen has given us a plethora of gifts. He’s entertained us. He’s distracted us from the world falling apart around us in Wisconsin, Libya and Japan. He’s lifted our blog traffic. Thank you, Charlie.

But Charlie giveth and Charlie taketh. He’s been spouting catchphrases both natural and forced since this whole mess began, with “Winning!” being the simplest, best and most pervasive. I’ll admit it was a fun little gag for a couple days, to use “Winning!” in places both appropriate and inappropriate. “My 2:00 meeting was cancelled. Winning!” Ho ho ho. Droll.

But like many catchphrases, it’s worn out it’s welcome quickly, helped into obsolescence by overuse. And nothing kills the comedy golden goose more quickly than Twitter.

In that spirit, the 20 most insufferable, douchey, unfunny uses of the #Winning hashtag.

The End Of The End

Nearly 45 years ago, a 21-year-old publishing wunderkind and a 50-year-old Bay Area jazz critic decided that the world needed a magazine about rock n’ roll that was also about “the things and attitude that music embraces.” In addition to publishing landmark articles about and interviews with generations of rock stars, their magazine also contributed greatly to the cultural canon. They supported/tolerated the excesses of Hunter S. Thompson, publishing “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” as a two-part article. They nurtured the growth of Tom Wolfe, assigning the article that eventually became “The Right Stuff” and serializing the first draft of “The Bonfire of the Vanities” over nearly 30 issues. They hired a 15-year-old Cameron Crowe, allowing him the experiences that eventually inspired “Almost Famous”. They published the best work of a host of talented contributors, such as P.J. O’Rourke, Griel Marcus, Joe Klein, and William Grieder. They broke a number of journalistic stories, including the truths behind the Patty Hearst kidnapping and the Karen Silkwood death. They discovered the all-time best pop culture photographer, Annie Leibowitz, as 21-year-old college student.

It isn’t as if there hasn’t been a steady and serious decline along the way. In 1977, they moved from their counterculture home in San Francisco to the capitalist/bad journalism capital of New York. They ignored hip-hop and alternative music during the last musical heyday of the ’90s to the extent that they allowed Spin to nearly relegate them to irrelevance. They’ve propagated a fetishism of the Baby Boom generation that has made them a consistent laughingstock (Five Stars for Magic by Bruce Springsteen and Goddess In The Doorway by Mick Jagger, anyone?). They hired a former FHM editor in 2002 to further dumb down the magazine. Perhaps most troublingly, in 2006, the 60-year-old former wunderkind turned a minority stake in US Weekly into full ownership… he’s now the controlling force behind the magazine that epitomizes the worst of the post-millenial celebrity obsession (Just Like Us and Who Wore It Best, anyone?).

There is always that moment though, when one has to realize that any residual respect/nostalgia is not only comical, but also pathetic. The final nail in the coffin came last week.

The Internet: Giver of Life, Taker of Souls

Today, the Internet showed itself for both the caressing, maternal goddess of light and the vengeful, acidic demon that it is.

First, a new unofficial video emerged for LCD Soundsystem’s “Dance Yrself Clean,” featuring the Muppets in a loving homage to overblown ’80s music videos.

The video is a follow up to the one James Murphy participated in a few years ago for “New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down,” and collectively, the two videos may be the greatest things that have ever happened to an undeserving human race.

(proof that we’re undeserving comes in the form of this comment for the YouTube clip of “New York” — “I feel like crying too. Ever since I witnessed James Murphy commit the cardinal sin of exposing kermit with someone’s hand up his ass. I feel he has broken the unwritten rule of puppetry and because of this he is now dead to me. It’s a shame because I loved LCD, but some things are inexcusible, and this is one of them. C**T…”)

LCD Soundsystem. The Cookie Monster. Kermit. Literally all the good things in the world are in that video. So thank you, Internet, for your grace and generosity.

But curse you, you evil, back-stabbing motherfucker, for your dark side, which you present when you decide we most need to feel our spirits torn from our bodies.

You give us: the latest issue of GOOP, in which Gwyneth Paltrow talks about reflexology (stay tuned for the next issue of GOOP when Jenny McCarthy tells Gwyneth all about the causes of autism). Most dreadfully, Gwynnie lets us know that:

I have always had very painful menstrual cramps.

The eternal wailing of 5 billion dead souls cannot express the horror I feel right now. My eyes can never un-see that sentence.

Deadspin in the Days of Daulerio

Deadspin‘s A.J. Daulerio has garnered all kinds of publicity lately, much of it focused on his site’s turn toward a sleazy, TMZ-esque style of investigative journalism since Daulerio succeeded Deadspin founder Will Leitch in 2008.

There’s no doubt that Deadspin looks a lot different today than it did during Leitch’s watch, just as there’s no doubt it pulls in more page views.

But is the site fundamentally changed? Does Leitch secretly blanche at Daulerio’s style, as Jason Whitlock claimed (and which Leitch denied)? What is Deadspin, exactly, under the reign of this new enfant terrible? And if it has changed, is it for the worse?

Your Saturday Antivirals

The two weeks between the Grammys and the Oscars is as interminable as the two week break before the Super Bowl, amirite guys? The Grammys just get us all hopped up on awards show energy, like a double dose of meth, and then the next weekend….nothing.

Well, not nothing. The antivirals are here!

The Daily: The Review

Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad newspaper, The Daily, debuted last week amid a choking dust cloud of hype and expectation.

“Finally,” media analysts exclaimed, “A new journalism model for the 21st century. We’re all saved!” And yes, the 99-cent per week subscription model is reasonable and appealing for an intelligent and easy-to-read daily iPad newspaper.

But…not so fast on the intelligent part.

Why Facebook Matters

I thought it would happen when he died, but the fool outlived himself.

About five years ago, I spent a week in Egypt. Of all the countries that I’ve been to, it was without a doubt the most unhappy and tense. In the streets you could feel the pressure building, but Hosni Mubarak had been in power for so long that it seemed unthinkable that it would boil over until his ineffectual son took over.

Before I actually experienced Egypt, I had always thought of it as an island of moderation in a Middle East overrun by extremists. My time there taught me otherwise. Some examples:

Adios America

The rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated (OK, that line would have worked better if I hadn’t done that post about the Bears loss).

Breathe regular, P.C.H.A. fans… my extended holiday sabbatical has finally come to an end. I could make up a story about all the exciting things that have kept me away from my appointed posts, but unless you consider drinking with The Dilemma or smoking weed with the Musky Canadian exciting, I’d be lying. But all good things must come to an end.

As must all mediocre things… such as my life in Los Estados Unidos

Your Saturday Antivirals

I think it’s only right that we let a drunken, Twittering Danny DeVito have the last say on the unrest in Egypt:

democracy human rights jobs fair Egypt Non Violence only way Unity No Violence find peace HM off ballot true elections only way to unite

Says it all, don’t it?

More Antivirals, on the way:

Your Saturday Antivirals

Rick Fuckin’ Reilly. Riles. Double R. He’s still got it, you guys. Check out this mind-blowingly original piece of sportswriting. The concept: Reilly uses two different voices (one in italics!) to illustrate that the Jets are a love-them-or-hate-them team. See, Reilly both loves the Jets and hates them! He can see both points of view! Really creative stuff. Never been done before.

Now a few baseball links to get you through until pitchers and catchers…

Your Saturday Antivirals

So Tom Hanks has a son other than Colin, and this other son is an aspiring rapper. Oh, God. This is shameful for so many reasons. The Hanks name has been disgraced. Worst of all, young “Chet Haze” shares an alma mater with David Simon Cowell and me. His “song” “White and Purple (Northwestern Remix” includes lines like: “White kicks/ Purple kush/ This is college, hittin’ blunts after hittin’ books.” There are no winners here.

The rest of your antivirals, made to order and coming right up:

Your Saturday Antivirals

Let’s delve a little deeper into baseball’s just-completed Hall of Fame voting with an all-Hall edition of the Antivirals.

Follow me into the fray, ladies and gentlemen.

The Year In Technology

Sure, music and movies are fun diversions, but what our children will really be taught about 2010 are all the technological advancements that will shape the world they grow up in. The iPad was the latest Apple device to send its acolytes into spasms of delirium. 3-D television promises to let us watch horrible Hollywood movies in surround vision on our own couches. Internet television technology matured to the point that the path to the long-promised combining of computing and home entertainment became apparent. However, all of these will be merely footnotes to the great leap forward that occurred in 2010.

Your Saturday Antivirals

It’s two weeks until Christmas, you guys. So, in the spirit of the holidays, allow me to complain about something I hate: people who celebrate Festivus.

On Seinfeld, Festivus was a hilarious conceit, and it should have been left at that. But people celebrate this fake holiday in real life, and I fucking hate those people. They are ruining Seinfeld for all of us, and they’re no better than people who dress up in Lord of the Rings costumes. They air their grievances, and they put up their Festivus poles and they have their feats of strength, and it all needs to stop. You don’t need to prove to the world that you really “get” that episode of Seinfeld. We all know you’re a Seinfeld fan. We all are. It was a great show.

But please, let’s stick to celebrating Christmas, the original fake holiday of our culture. Thanks.