I was out of town all last week and didn’t read the newspaper or turn on my computer or TV. What’d I miss? Oh, the new, friendlier-looking prison-guard robots are being field tested in South Korea. I was hoping they’d look that friendly! And they are equipped with a human-emotion monitoring system, to help prevent suicides so as to enable longer-term flesh harvesting. Good!

by Jeff Johnson

Thus far into Kraftwerk’s week-long residency at MoMA, not many individuals have popped up on Craigslist offering up their +1 for sale. Maybe it’s because people who were lucky enough to purchase two tickets for one of the eight shows during the online sale/debacle must present an ID bearing the same name as the purchaser’s to gain entry into the concert. It’s a really big deal! So presumably they’re taking someone who is equally passionate about the music, or dragging a loved one who they’re trying to convert. (Which is never quite as magical as we hope.)

Whatever the case, it seems that most ticket holders don’t want to go to such a monumental event and sit next to a stranger the whole time.

That said, the people who are selling their extras are kind souls simply looking for help paying their taxes, want to purchase a motorcycle, who like pancakes (?), would appreciate anyone who has a vagina to join them, are interested in hearing your offers — just don’t expect a dude to do, like dude-on-dude stuff, okay? — and/or just want straight up cash. A lot of it. Like this guy, with an extra Man Machine ticket for tonight:

400 dollars is the minimum I am willing to sell it for. Feel free to offer higher than this amount.

Or this deluded person who with his/her boyfriend has managed to land two extra tickets for the Tour de France night, and wants to sell to the highest bidder starting at $500 per ticket.

I always thought eBay was the auction site, and Craigslist was the site where you had the guts to just name a price and take it. There’s no transparency on Craigslist, obviously, so your potential purchaser doesn’t really know what the highest bid is, and so, when you’re asking them to bid, that’s douchey.

I don’t doubt that there are people out there willing to spend a lot of money on scalped tickets, but it’s off-putting to see these big Kraftwerk fans (they’re all claiming how awesome it’s going to be) be such opportunists about it. It’s an extra ticket, not the polio vaccine. No one is going to restore a vintage Airstream for you, asswipe.

So my proposal is this: we should pool some cash together to send someone to this concert. With a scalper. A seller who would like to get $1000 for their extra $25 ticket, should, but the person they sell it to should then get the right to stare Marina Abramovic-style at the person that sold them the ticket for the entire concert.

Basically, I want the person who gets $1000 for their extra Kraftwerk ticket to get stared at by a stranger for the entire concert. This is extremely stupid. But entirely appropriate.

Jeff Johnson is ready to hear from people who “obviously would let someone stare at me for $1000, silly.”

Last night on Court Street I overheard a man and a pregnant lady bemoan the bazillion hours they’ve spent looking for something decent to buy in Brooklyn (at least, in white people Brooklyn). They just can’t give up their Manhattan place until they find that magical Brooklyn apartment!

They will be waiting a while. Or perhaps they’ll panic when the deadline of their second baby comes, and just buy something cruddy. But it’s not any better for renters, according to this week’s figures from the hilariously named RentJuice (ew). The average rent in the East Village is $3,859, now almost exactly tied with the average rent in Park Slope, at $3,547. Who knew!

Here’s the real price point we never thought would come: the average rent in Greenpoint is now $3,424. The first quarter of 2012 has Greenpoint up 10% over the last quarter of 2011. WHAT A WORLD.

You Still Won’t Like The Three Stooges

If you know who The Three Stooges are, and you already know you don’t like The Three Stooges, then you don’t care about this. If you don’t know who the Three Stooges are, you probably don’t like them either. Their stuff got a lot of replay on television for years, but originally they were three guys in these low-budget black & white “short subjects” shown in the olden days at movie theaters when there would be a “newsreel” with news on it (this was before the Miracle of Television), and a cartoon, and a little film of a popular musician or band doing a song, and a “short subject,” and a “B-Picture,” and then the Feature Presentation. The Three Stooges were straight out of The Great Depression, and they did a lot of corny jokes, and wacky singing and dancing, and they existed inside just enough of a plotline to support 20 minutes of delivering ice, or being inept plumbers, or fashion designers, or pretty much anyone except cops, but what they really had fun doing was messing around with rich people, society folk and “stuffed shirts.” Explaining the Three Stooges just creates all this other stuff that has to be explained. Basically, The Three Stooges are goofballs who perform antics and hijinx in order to get you to laugh. They are ridiculously violent. They bop each other with hammers and poke each other (and themselves) in the eye, and they fall off ladders, and they are greedy and shifty but usually they’re just looking for a meal, or to maybe “strike it rich” with a “harebrained scheme” because Times Are Tough. Nobody learns a Valuable Lesson, there’s very little Justice, and a lot of times the film ends with the Stooges running away or getting blown up, or getting hit in the face with a bunch of pies by a dowager, circa 1930. The End.

OK, so they (and you know who They are) have been talking about this stupid The Three Stooges movie for like ten years now, seriously. I remember I read once that Sean Penn was gonna be “Larry” (the Stooge who has the frizzy clown hair), and that Mel Gibson was in charge of it somehow, but that was probably a long time before the recent unpleasantness. You can Google it. I swear in one of the Lethal Weapon movies Mel Gibson did some Three Stooges schtick, wiping his face with his hands repeatedly in a downward motion before doing some violence on somebody. I can’t look it up on Youtube to confirm it because I bought a discount “remanufactured” iMac from Apple, and any time I even get near a Youtube video on the Internet — I’m not even saying I’m trying to play one — the whole computer just freezes, and then this grey curtain comes down on the screen and a message appears, in different Languages of the World, saying something like “you need to restart your computer.” I’m not kidding. Thanks, Apple.

Anyway, by the time there really was a The Three Stooges movie to see, I already forgot who I read was supposed to be making it, and hey, as long as it’s not Ang Lee directing this thing, it’s not gonna make any difference, right? I know, that’s not fair to Ang Lee, he wasn’t the only guy who made a crappy The Hulk movie, right? There was one with Eric Bana, who was in that crazy flick Hannah, where a nine-year old girl kicks everybody’s ass, and there was one with Edward Norton, who was in Death to Smoochy, which I thought was an entertaining film, but I think it was a big flop, box-office-wise, and now did you see who The Hulk is? It’s Mark Ruffalo, who was in Zodiac, and Shelter Island, and Eternal Sunshine of the Mind or whatever, and now he is The Hulk in the new The Avengers movie, I mean he is the “before” part of The Hulk at least, before he The Hulks-up, but I’m not sure how the Avengers movie is gonna handle the The Hulked-up part of The Hulk, like with a computer deal like they did with Jeff Bridges in that Tron: Legacy movie? Maybe taking Mark Ruffalo’s head and putting it on a different person or something? I’m just saying it might not be the same person all the time being The Hulk, but everybody’s cool with that, right? I mean, they made two shitty The Hulk movies and insteada being Box Office Poison, The Hulk is one of the stars of the next Summer Blockbuster, right? Even though I wouldn’t be able to look at it on my lemon of an Apple computer, I hope somebody does a thing on Youtube where they take the three The Hulks and have them be The Three Stooges.

So for some reason people have been wondering about this The Three Stooges movie, mostly in a not-nice way, like basically that this movie is gonna be stupid, and suck, and then I saw on the Internet that the people from that Lowest Common Denominator “Jersey Shore” reality show were in the movie, and Larry David was gonna be in it, and it really was starting to sound like a piece of shit, this film. I mean, Larry David is a horrible actor, you know? He’s only good at being Larry David.

I kinda didn’t want to go to this movie, but it’s a movie, you know? I like movies. I go to a lot of “preview screenings” of movies, and usually the only thing I take notice of in a free-movie crowd is if there are a lot of children at the movie, so I can make sure I’m not sitting in front of a little nosepicker who will kick the back of my goddamn seat for 90 minutes. Sometimes there are people dressed up for the event, like for a Science Fiction movie, people will dress up in a costume, or there will be a lotta people wearing t-shirts with comic book characters on ’em and stuff when there’s a comic-book movie like Green Lantern or, I dunno, 90% of all the “preview screenings” I went to last year.

I was really tired at the movie because I had a late night of work, until like 11, and I didn’t get to bed until 1, and then I got up at 7 the next day and did my morning walk and then I worked all day and went to the screening, and I’m no good without eight or nine hours of sleep, so when I go to a screening tired, I have to be careful not to fall asleep and get mad at the movie, because I have noticed I don’t like movies while my body is trying to fall asleep while I’m watching, especially in a theater.

This movie was directed by the Farrelly Brothers, who made a highly successful movie with a celebrated gag involving a woman inadvertently using a gentlemen’s ejaculate as a hair styling product, but they keep it pretty clean, and they do a clever thing — assuming you’re familiar with the format of a typical The Three Stooges short — and break the movie up into three “shorts,” but they’re all connected to the larger story, about saving an Orphanage, bleah, because that’s what the Farrelly Brothers do, they even said so on the CBS Morning Show, which I think is called “CBS This Morning,” which I watch now instead of the “Today” show because I just couldn’t take it anymore, all of them talking at once, Jesus Christ, shut the fuck up, but anyway, the Farrelly Brothers like to make their protagonists likeable, so that’s already a problem for me as somebody who enjoys the venal, brutal, historical The Three Stooges.

In my weakened state, I began to get angry at the first act of the movie because it was kinda sappy, what with the children and the Orphanage, plus there were nuns. I hate nuns, and I do not think anything involving nuns is good. I went to Catholic School, man. I could tell you some stories about nuns. But one of the nuns is a dude, and that was kinda funny, no explanation, just a dude. I won’t spoiler alert it. Anyway, by the second act, all these guys were doing was acting like The Three Stooges, mimicking all the old gags and catchphrases and making noises and whacking each other and injuring people around them with their ineptitudes. The guys who pretend to be the Stooges do a pretty good job, though, of being The Three Stooges, all three of ’em. The Moe character is Chris Diamantopoulos, who has been on “24” and a lot of TV shows; Curly is Will Sasso, who was on “Mad TV” and lots of other TV; and Larry — who in my opinion, is the Greatest Stooge, because he is the glue that holds the Stooges together by keeping the ultra-violent Moe away from the ultra-stupid Curly — is played by Sean Hayes, the guy who, along with Megan Mullally, made the show “Will & Grace” way funnier than it had any right to be with those other two loads being the stars. Anyway, he’s really good as Larry, and Craig Bierko, who has done lots of stuff, but in 1996 he shoulda won an Oscar for being such a heartless piece of shit in that bad-good movie The Long Kiss Goodnight, gets laffs as a heartless piece of shit. Sofía Vergara from that award-winning, overrated “Arrested Development” ripoff “Modern Family” is along for the ride as a mean version of herself, I think. She has really big boobs in this movie, and she’s like nine feet tall.

I dunno, maybe it’s because I woke up from being drowsy and that put me in a better mood, but the pace really picked up in the third act and the stupidity-momentum of it all started to be like a real The Three Stooges movie, and it made me laugh, and the “Jersey Shore” stuff really pays off, and it has the best lighting-a-fart gag of all time. Spoiler alert. And a lion gets hit in the nuts with a peanut. I told you, you don’t like The Three Stooges.

Related: A Raw Transcript Of My 20 Minutes With ’21 Jump Street’ Stars Channing Tatum And Jonah Hill

Joe MacLeod enjoys movies and napping. Photo by Peter Iovino, courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

“As the number of obese Germans rises, the funeral industry is scrambling to make adjustments in how larger bodies with more fat can be safely incinerated. A number of crematoriums have suffered severe damage when burning fat overwhelmed their emergency measures.” Meanwhile, in Britain: “Five firemen from a single Yorkshire town have injured their backs and muscles while trying to manoeuvre overweight people in the past two years, a report found. It resulted in a total of 13 working days being lost as the injured officers recovered. Now crews in Rotherham, one of Britain’s fattest towns, are using forklift trucks and hydrolic platforms to rescue fat people from fires and falls and to help the ambulance service move bariatric patients to hospital.” And here at home: “Obese workers have even higher health costs than smokers, a new study finds.” Obese smokers, you win.

“Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin says he was chased and nearly caught by four bears that were raiding his birdfeeders. Shumlin says he was in bed in his rented Montpelier home late Wednesday night when he heard what turned out to be four bears in the backyard. He says he looked out and saw the bears, including two cubs. He tried to chase the bears away, but they kept coming back. Shumlin says he ran out barefoot in an attempt to rescue his birdfeeders. He says one of the bears charged him on the porch.”

by Stacey Vanek Smith

Wells Fargo Fraud Specialist: Hello, ma’am.

Me: Hi, how are you?

WFFS: There were some false charges on your card?

Me: Yes, that’s right.

WFFS: Okay, I am going to go through the previous week of charges with you to make sure that everything is legitimate. I’ll read off the charges and you just tell me yes if the charge was yours or no if it wasn’t.

Me: Okay… Well, I was on vacation the week before, so there are probably some weird charges.

WFFS: I’m showing a $750 dollar charge at a Hotel Tiz… ano in Rome on March 20th.

Me: Yes! Right. It’s a hotel in Rome and I was there for five days. That sounds expensive, I know. But the location was really amazing and breakfast was included.

WFFS: A $25 charge at Farma-cia Roma, also on March 20th.

Me: Yeah, I got a little sick on the plane… You know you have to go to a pharmacy to even just get cough drops in Europe? Not that I paid $25 for cough drops! I got these zinc tablets…

WFFS: I’m also showing a $200 charge at Leather World on March 21st.

Me: Oh wow. Right! Yes. I know that must sound so strange, but it’s a shoe store. Just normal shoes. Not… It’s just that they don’t understand how creepy that sounds. I mean, not creepy, but just like a weird sex store… which it wasn’t! Totally was not that. Just a shoe store.

WFFS: I’m showing another $200 charge at Leather World, also on the 21st.

Me: That’s a funny story. I tried on two pairs of boots. Everything was on, like, super sale. One I loved and bought right away because there weren’t many sizes left, but one I wanted to think about it a little bit because they were suede and I was worried about suede being too high maintenance… Do you own any suede shoes?

WFFS: I’m showing a $20 charge to iTunes, also on the 21st.

Me: Oh right. I bought Gladiator and Eat Pray Love. Oh my God, you must think I have the worst taste ever! I was going to see the Coliseum and I figured that I should watch Gladiator, you know? Not that I think that movie is accurate! At all! God, no! I was a Comparative Literature major in college and I have read real books about ancient Rome. I wrote a paper on the role of the gods in The Iliad — I decided they were how those cultures thought of luck and natural skill, you know? Which is… not in Rome, I realize, but… I just thought it would be fun to see what the Coliseum might have looked like back then. And that’s really the reason I bought Eat Pray Love, too. I really just wanted to see the shots of Italy. In a fun way… I would never read that book. All of that spiritual finding-the-goddess-within stuff is really not my thing.

WFFS: (Pause) A $45 charge at Il… Chi… anti on the 23rd.

Me: Yes.

WFFS: A $15 charge at Tutti Gelati on the 23rd.

Me: Yes.

WFFS: A $20 dollar charge at Tutti Gelati, also on the 23rd.

Me: Jeez, that probably totally looks like fraud, right? Because who eats $35 worth of gelato in a day? But you have to try that gelato! They have more than 40 flavors, including whiskey, which was actually really delicious…

WFFS: An $80 dollar charge at Leather World on the 22nd?

Me: Right. But just back to the gelato for a second. It’s supposed to be the best gelato place in Rome — I did tons of Yelp research… not that I’m one of those people who lives and dies by what “everybody else” thinks, but I really find the recommendations on Yelp are usually pretty solid. And I really just wanted to experience Rome and enjoy myself and really just soak up… Jeez, how Eat Pray Love do I sound?? I mean… OK. Truth? I totally read the book. Twice. I just tell people I haven’t read it because I’m a really serious reader and I don’t want them to get the wrong idea. I’m reading Moby-Dick right now. I know a lot of really, really smart people who can’t get through that book! Anyway, the Eat part is the best — and it’s mostly just about food in Rome… and she eats a ton of gelato and I thought: ‘I need to do that!’ I mean the Pray part kind of weirded me out. I’m not a meditator, really.

WFFS: A $25 charge at Cul de Sac, also on the 22nd.

Me: Yes… I’m sorry, can I just take two seconds to tell you why I went back to Leather World? I must sound like some kind of crazy sex…

WFFS: We have a lot of charges to get through, ma’am.

Me: Sorry, I know. Go ahead.

WFFS: I’m showing a $12 charge at Il Colosseo, Palatino… on the 22nd?

Me: Yes! I had mostly been paying for museum tickets with cash — that’s why they’re not showing up! You must think I just went to Rome to go SHOPPING! But I’m not a shopper at all. In fact, I only went back to Leather World because I realized they had cute wallets for gifts and I hadn’t been on vacation in, like, two years — I forgot you have to constantly be looking for gifts and that sale really was pretty amazing. Also, when I’m at a place like a museum, I don’t really like to be in a commerce mind-set, you know? I like to just soak up the art and really breathe it in and not be like, ‘Whatever, Mona Lisa, I can only stand here for five seconds and look at you because I have to run to the gift shop so I can buy my mom a Mona Lisa oven mitt!’ Not the Mona Lisa… I mean, I know that’s in Paris. But it was painted by Leonardo da Vinci, who was Italian!

WFFS: I’m showing a $20 charge at the Vatican gift shop on the 23rd.

Me: Well, right. They won’t let you take pictures of the Sistine Chapel, so my hands were pretty much tied. And I did need postcards. Okay… sorry, what is your name?

WFFS: Alice.

Me: Can I just level with you, Alice? I was in kind of a weird place. I mean, I had always wanted to go to Italy, but I always thought I would go there on my honeymoon or something, you know? But all of the sudden, I’m like, ‘Holy crap, I’m 35 and maybe I’m never going to get married!’ Not that I want to put that kind of negative energy out there and I’m not one of those crazy obsessed women. But it crosses my mind, especially since it feels weird to even try and date in your mid-30s, because everyone seems to see you as some kind of ticking fertility time bomb. And I know that’s insane, because there’s so much they can do these days. Not that I want to be one of those people having babies at 50, that are all scary and translucent because of the bizarro cocktail of fertility drugs I had to take. Anyway, I can have kids on my own, right? I mean, it’s not ideal, but it’s possible! That was kind of my thing in going to Italy. I’m like, ‘I am through waiting, you know? I am a professional woman who pays her own rent and makes her own way… Do I really, really want to put off a trip to Italy because of a stupid guy? Or a lack of stupid guy?’ Anyway, I just decided I was going to go!… Actually, it’s funny, I decided to go after reading Eat Pray Love, but that’s not why I decided to go. And it’s not like I don’t have friends! I do! It’s just that when you get to a certain age, you can’t really travel with your friends, because they’re mostly coupled off, you know? And then everybody’s financial situation is different and they’re having some baby or another and it’s really hard for some people to get time off… I just don’t want my life to be on hold anymore, you know?

WFFS: I’m showing a $70 charge at the Vatican gift shop, also on the 23rd?

Me: Oh right. That was a scarf. And I’m so glad I went. I was just like, ‘I want to see Rome! And I am not going to wait for some perfect moment!’ You know? Because if I waited for the perfect moment, I might never see Rome! So, I was like, ‘Screw this! I’m going to Rome and I’m staying in a nice hotel!’ Breakfast was not included, by the way. I just made that up because it sounded expensive. But I was like, ‘I’m going to treat myself! I’m going to eat pasta and gelato all day! I’m going to buy beautiful scarves and 200 dollar boots!’ It’s so funny… those boots weren’t even on sale. Leather World was having a sale — it’s why I went in, in the first place. But none of the boots I got was one sale. I hate that about sales, you know? The cute stuff is never marked down.

WFFS: A $30 charge at the Farmacia Roma on the 23rd.

Me: God, I’m really not that sickly. Just I was having some digestive issues from all of rich food, I think. But, you know, I had been getting sick a ton. That was part of what made me think, ‘I am going on this vacation,’ you know? I got sick five times last year. Five times! I have gotten to the point where I’m too embarrassed to call in sick! And I’m not one of those people who gets sick all the time. I have to tell you, Alice, just going on vacation felt amazing. I’m not saying it was easy. There were moments when it was really weird, but for the most part, it was amazing. And, honestly, I really like Eat Pray Love. It’s pretty great. Not, you know, GREAT great — like you need to read it with the necessary irony. It’s not Macbeth, right? But it’s really funny in parts, and I think it has a lot to say!

WFFS: Then a $45 charge at Pane e Vino on the 24th?

Me: What? Oh, yeah. And really, Alice, everything has gotten better since my trip. My feelings about work, my family relationships. I finally am starting to feel back to my old self, you know? I moved to New York from LA last year and it was a really… I’m a Capricorn. Are you into astrology at all? I’m actually not, but sometimes it’s fun to think about and I am such a Capricorn in certain ways. Like I tend to be so work focused that other parts of my life can slip by the way-side. And I know that work is not the most important thing, but sometimes it feels like the easiest thing to focus on for me.

WFFS: And finally, a $102 dollar charge at the Lancome duty-free store in Roma.

Me: Oh yeah. My plane was delayed and I went a little crazy. Seriously though, I’m not much of a shopper normally. The make-up deals were pretty amazing, though, and there’s this great part in Eat Pray when Elizabeth Gilbert buys herself $1000 worth of lingerie….

WFFS: Okay, ma’am, those are all of the charges in question. We’ll be sending you an affidavit through the mail. You’ll need to sign that and send it back to us. Please feel free to call us if you have any more questions.

Me: So, Alice… where are you based? Are you near New York? Maybe we could meet for coffee? I could show you my boots?

Stacey Vanek Smith is a reporter for the public radio show “Marketplace.” She grew up in Idaho and currently lives in Brooklyn. She is not obsessed with shopping. Photo by brianandjaclyn.

“A suspicious girlfriend’s plot to catch out her lover backfired spectacularly when the honeytrap she hired ended up running off with him herself.” Expect to see The Honeytrap in theaters next summer.

“A team at Cornell University has created a computer program to break down the formula behind some of cinema’s most enduring lines, from Dirty Harry’s ‘Do you feel lucky, punk?’ to Casablanca’s ‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’… The researchers found that the more memorable quotes were made up of word combinations unlikely to appear elsewhere in the film. Yet the grammatical structures of the quotes tended to be ordinary. Other interesting quirks of the memorable quotes included more of a use of the indefinite article rather than the definite article, verbs in the past tense and the use of pronouns other than ‘you’.”

The National Conference of the American Copy Editors Society has announced its headline contest winners and it is now clear who is destroying the media. Among the many talented, hard-working winners — and you know we love our copy editors! — we find a batch of puns so foul, so egregious, that it’s difficult to not feel pranked.

First place for individuals at newspapers with circulation under 80,001 goes to a staffer at the Wichita Eagle, whose winning entries include this… one.

Here’s one among the contributions for second place?

AT LEAST IT’S NOT A PUN.

For newspapers that were bigger than that but under 160,000, here’s a winner from the Providence Journal.

Does it get better in the 160,001 to 240,000 category??? Let’s ask the first-place winner, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette!

Huh. To be fair, a couple of them are pretty good.

Fun fact: the second-place winner in this category actually also had good work! Kudos, Matthew Craowley of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Okay and at the big boy papers? Andy Webster at the NY Times took third, and, well, sure! Deserved.

The Los Angeles Times took second…

… and first place as well. WHICH….

If you think these are pretty AW SHUCKS, then you should see the student and online category winners.