From Jann Wenner’s tangled id and the camera of Robert Trachtenberg comes this portrait in Rolling Stone of young “Glee” star Chris Colfer surrounded by menacing homosexuals. How to say? Ah ha, this is how to say: “Ah, yes, the life cycle of the gay man, as the fresh-faced, impressionable polyp is transformed by the greasy, feral rut into his inevitably predatory leather daddy medusa form…. Because, of course, having a train run on you by hot guys in leather is NO ONE’S idea of a good time.” (via)

You’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning to out-stupid reality: “As of noon today all GameStop stores located on military bases will no longer be advertising or selling copies of Electronic Arts’ upcoming military shooter Medal of Honor because an aspect of the game includes playable Taliban characters, sources tell Kotaku.”

by Sean McTiernan

Sometimes videos go viral within the confines of a specific country and they never reach the wider world. Often, that’s a real shame. Lucky for you, Irishman (meaning born, raised and residing in actual Ireland) Sean McTiernan is going to give you a glimpse into the country’s already storied collection of viral gems. Yesterday, we covered Irish Rap, and now, well….

If the words “harmless” and “whatever” formed a band, it would sound like Irish indie band Ham Sandwich.

They even seem to have picked a name that reflects this commitment to “meh.” And although musically they strive for to approximate the color beige, they have discovered a new type of rock’n’roll outrageousness. Lou Reed may have had heroin, Joe Strummer may have had speed but only Ham Sandwich has a female lead singer who spent nine months pregnant without noticing. You won’t find anything like that in Hammer Of The Gods.

It seems slightly mean, it should be noted, to discuss this fairly private matter. However, they kind of opened themselves up for that when they sold their story to an America’s body shock TV show, “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant.” That, to me, says: “we are putting this out there.”

This is “real.” It may look like a spoof initially but as it goes on it’ll quickly become obvious this is far too perfect to be a spoof. No one could fake the American actors who, when they aren’t committing to serious silent-movie style gurning, speak in accents that are halfway between a laughable facsimile of a cartoon Scotsman and a distressed pirate. And amazing as these I-am-doing-their-serious-face histrionics, inexplicable Trainspotting impressions and props (her wig is a sentient being) are, they are all surpassed by their most glaring fault of all. These people are too attractive.

Even when Irish people are attractive, and I know several that are extremely so, they are attractive in odd and interesting ways. Like a lovely table with one leg slightly too short. Irish attractiveness has character; these people look like rigorously polished wood. That’s not our game.

Also worth noticing is now eagerly Ham Sandwich are to get as medical as possible. Even the guitarist delivers curious bursts of insight like “she seemed to gain weight but it didn’t really notice cause it wasn’t an awful lot of weight, it just kind of a slight bit more weight.” Imagine this man at 15, thinking, “One day my band will be so popular that footage of me speculating on my female band mate’s weight will be intercut with her explaining the intricacies of her period.”

I know I was mocking their music earlier, but whatever you like it listen is fine with me, honestly. I was just shocked by this weird cash grab that would rob anyone of their credibility as a human being let alone as a band. Anything else you might like to know about them can be found on Wikipedia, though it should be noted that this spring, a band member left due to an unspecified typographical error.

If you’re starting to feel protective of them, well, this should reel you back.

Also, in case you were terribly captivated by the reenactment footage above, here is The Stunning Conclusion.

Spoiler: she has a baby.

Anyway. This is all a real shame (though, congratulations on the child! All’s well that ends well!) and a bad reflection on the Irish music scene, which is having a wildly amazing renaissance at the moment.

For instance, the most exciting rock band in the world currently comes from Ireland, get into them instead.

Their new album sounds like it was recorded in space and is very cheap, you know how to proceed.

Next week: Adventures with the Gardaí!

Sean McTiernan is 21, his favorite rapper is E40 and he only smokes when he’s drinking. He has a blog and a Twitter. So does everyone though. He also has a podcast on which he has a nervous breakdown once an episode, minimum. In other words: it’s great for the gym.

This is loud and sweary, so headphones up. I can pretty much predict what you’re going to do, so let me warn you in advance that “fellates” is a non-starter. Enjoy. [Via]

I have spent the morning in a shameful frenzy over the state of Ellen Pompeo’s feet. I cannot explain why — toes don’t really do it for me, and I’m sure Ellen Pompeo is a very nice person who is very good on her show, but she doesn’t really do it for me either — except to blame it on the fever trance of the Internet. The cause of my ruination was this Daily Mail article, which suggests that all is not as it should be in Pompeo’s pumps.

Grey’s Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo was out and about in Los Feliz, California yesterday and her open toe sandals showed off her rather unique feet. The 40-year-old actress appears to have a little extra than the regular person when it comes to the toe department — with six toes on either foot.

The article is accompanied by a photograph of Pompeo perambulating, along with two blurry, enlarged shots of her feet which, viewed from a certain light, do suggest that perhaps she’s packing an extra piggy. But could that really be that case? I was deeply suspicious. I consulted several colleagues, who were less skeptical.

“I don’t know, I’m seeing six in the pic on the right for sure,” said one.

“Count ’em up, dude, six toes,” said another.

“You’re still on the toe thing? asfklaslfhasf JUST WRITE THIS POST ALREADY!” an exasperated third replied.

But my research was nowhere near done. A troubling note of doubt came in when it was pointed out that Pompeo’s footular oddity was referenced on her Wikipedia page. Was it true? Was this more than just a Daily Mail hack job? I clicked over to her entry on the site and there it was, a plain as the toes on your feet:

Pompeo has polydactyly, having six toes on each foot.[5]

The journey was over. The Mail was right. Ellen Pompeo has six toes on each foot.

Or does she?

I dejectedly clicked through the citation to find the ultimate proof that would shatter my belief that we live in a world where Ellen Pompeo has the normal allotment of podial appendages. As it happens, the source for the six-toed assertion turned out to be… wait for it… the very Daily Mail piece that suggested her extravagance of foot fingers in the first place.

Someone out there wanted me to think that Ellen Pompeo had six toes, but they didn’t understand that I wasn’t going to give up that easy. Not with Google on my side.

I’ve been to some dark places in my time, and I’ve learned some things that no man should ever know, but what I found when I started searching for “ellen pompeo barefoot toes” rocked me to my core. I’ve seen images that even the filthiest fetishists would vomit at. If the government ever searches my computer I’m sure there are now pictures in it that will get me sent to prison. For life.

But I also found wikiFeet, “a free collaborative site featuring Celebrity-Feet pictures. It is Probably the largest celebrity feet database EVER!!”

(I’ll give you a moment.)

Did wikiFeet have an Ellen Pompeo page? Did it ever. And among the photos was the proof I had been searching for. Ellen Pompeo has five toes on each foot.

Or does she?

Photos, as we all know, can be altered. Nothing you see in this world, particularly on the Internet, is exactly what it seems. And that leaves me stuck in a state of uncertainty about the feet of woman in whom I would otherwise have no interest. I am unsure how I will ever resolve this. (Maybe someone can put me in touch with the guy who made Jen Aniston’s vagina? He seems to know what he’s doing.) My life has been changed forever, all because of a spare toe. I feel defeated.

It’s funny because it’s so horribly true: “In addition, 3 million New Yorkers reportedly left the city because they realized the phrase ‘Only in New York’ is actually just a defense mechanism used to convince themselves that seeing a naked man take a shit on a park bench is somehow endearing, or part of some shared cultural experience.”

“The Coast Guard is saying that a mile-long oil sheen is spreading from the site off an offshore petroleum platform that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana,” says the AP now. Whatever. Why should we care? We all know that oil apparently just goes away. Just like Gulf War I prepared us for Gulf War II, so has Gulf Spill I inured me to this latest.

Also I don’t really need to think about the fact that Mariner Energy, which owns the blown-up oil rig, has at least two top executives who worked at Enron, right?

Here is a secret thing I do sometimes, when I’m feeling old: I search for school fight videos on YouTube, and revel in not being in school. Because school is awful, just like this video from Los Banos High School, in beautiful Merced, clearly shows. High school was always a pretty terrible place, with violence and math, the two worst things ever. Just now it’s online. Which is very disturbing.

Is it “news”? Is it citizen journalism? Is it entertainment? Is it just (“just”) diaristic? It’s sort of all of these. Basically I think of these kind of videos as barely-seen docu-diary entries. (And the truth is, usually no one does see them. They get like eight or eighteen views.)

The “most interesting” (by which I mean, most upsetting) ones are the videos where they’re just fighting each other for fun (???) and literally everyone’s videoing it.

But pretty much there’s videos of children beating up other children being put online every single day.

Everyone enjoys a fight!

Othertimes, not so much.

Colton High School, a winner is you.

I guess this was the Internet we signed up for.

It’s good to remember-for reasons both depressing and, in the misery-loves-company way, oddly comforting-that other countries struggle with the same issues America struggles with. Take Sweden, for instance, where a television station’s refusal to air a clearly racist television ad promoting an anti-immigrant political party has raised an interesting debate over censorship-and calls from neighboring Denmark for international election observers to monitor the September 19th vote. Here’s the ad, from the Sweden Democrats party.

It’s tricky. You want all political parties to have equal access to airtime in the run-up to an election. The Sweden Democrats, a right-wing conservative party, are open in their stance against Muslim immigrants. Regardless of whether or not you agree with them, shouldn’t they have a chance to argue for their position, and try to drum up votes, over the airwaves?

The television station, TV4, opted not to run the spot because they feared it would be in violation of Sweden’s laws against hate-speech. Political leaders on the left support the decision. Says Mona Sahlin, of Sweden’s Social Democrats party:

“The difference between freedom of speech and incitement to hatred against an ethnic group must be understood. What I saw in (the SD’s) attempt at a TV ad was incitement to hatred against an ethnic group.”

Per HultmangÃ¥rd, a lawyer at the Swedish Media Publishers’ Association, disagrees. He says:

“I cannot see how this would be hate speech. This is an election ad. The scope is wide for what one can say. They simply play on people’s fears. Legally, it is within the allowable framework.”

I don’t know whether I agree that election monitors are in order. (Maybe we should just INVADE SWEDEN!) And TV4 is a private company.

But I think I might come down on the side of the racists on this one. Not for their racism. And that ad is despicable. There’s a problem when a television station rejects political content in a preemptive attempt to interpret hate-speech laws, especially when those laws, like Swedens, are constituted as vaguely as “forbidding disrespect.” Hateful bigots should be able to say and display their hateful bigoted feelings about things, and the government should find ways of combating the potential harmful effect other than criminalizing words or images. As a theoretical position, I think societies have more to lose by squelching freedom of expression than we do by letting the crazies incite the other crazies. (What’s more? “For as long as I’ll live, I’ll never understand how people want to vest in the Government the power to criminalize particular viewpoints it dislikes,” is how Glenn Greenwald once put it.) I may disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it and all. Well, maybe not to the death. But, you know, I’ll definitely write a blog post about it.

“The segregation of public washrooms is one of the most basic ways that the male-female binary is upheld and reinforced. As such, washroom signs are very telling of the way societies construct gender. They identify the male as the universal and the female as the variation. They express expectations of gender performance. And they conflate gender with sex. I present here for your perusal, a typology and analysis of various washroom signs.” She sure does!