“Standing inside a warehouse that makes fluid sealing products for the petrochemical industry, Perry said the Texas program for permitting pollutants from petrochemical plants has helped improve air quality.”
-Texas governor Rick Perry, objecting to a threat by the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the state’s regulatory authority over air quality due to the state’s continuing noncompliance with the Clean Air Act, is defiant in his-wait a second, does that really say, “Standing inside a warehouse that makes fluid sealing products for the petrochemical industry”? Yes, yes it does. Sigh. Texas. It’s like a whole other country.

There’s a whole bunch I could tell you about this video, but the whole idea of describing Troy Hurtubise and explaining that this is not he and getting into a discussion about body armor built so that its wearer can survive a bear attack is just too depressing on a day like this one where, clearly, nothing else is happening. So just watch. Because what else are you doing?

“The French capacity for indignation is in decline.”
–Arielle Schwab, president of the Union of French Jewish Students, is upset by the results of a recent survey which shows that 15% of her countrymen consider themselves “rather or a bit racist,” and a third of those who do not think they might be even a little racist won’t say anything when the racists around them spout racism. Also among the survey’s findings: “Almost half of respondents, 49 per cent, thought that immigrants are better able to exploit the social welfare system than are the native French, and 12 per cent said homosexuals were more obsessed by sex than others. Meanwhile 28 per cent said they regarded blacks as more physically powerful than other groups.”

When a story opens with, “For adults who were children when their parents died, the question is hypothetical but heartbreaking: ‘Would you give up a year of your life to have one more day with your late mother or father?,” you know you’re in for a pretty rough ride. I’d still suggest reading it, but be aware that you might have to pretend there’s something in your eye by the end of it. Also, if your parents are still alive, you will probably want to give them a call.

Good news, everybody: George W. Bush is on Facebook! Insert your own privacy policy joke here.

This very special installment of “Old Jews Telling Jokes” lasts a solid 2-plus minutes, but stick with it. Then click through and let’s discuss it, shall we?

Okay, what did you think? You either loved it or hated it, right? “Jews” producer Eric Spiegelman had an interesting reaction.

I need someone to explain why this makes me laugh. Calling it “absurdist humor” isn’t quite sufficient. There are all these comics who treat comedy like a science — something akin to psychology, I imagine — constantly looking for predictable and consistent ways to incite laughter in another person. I need one of those funnymen of letters to speak up here.

In person, hearing this joke was an experience. After the punchline (that word deserves to be in quotes here), there was a long, silent pause. Then the audience exploded. Nobody understood why.

There was a similar long pause following Daniel Okrent’s “Schmuck,” but that was due, I suspect, to the sophistication of the punchline, the long cognitive jump you had to make to realize its brilliance. The pause for this one was longer, and it was not followed by any great epiphany. It doesn’t make any sense.

You will obviously have your own explanation. My enjoyment of the joke, and explanation for same, is due to the combination of its absurdity and its length. I’m certainly on record as being a fan of the long joke, but John Pleshette’s bit here is something more than the lengthy joke just referenced, which does, at least, conform to certain standards. The absurdity of Pleshette’s punchline only works because of the length: You are literally set up by the set-up to expect some sort of humorous, affirmative stopping point. When you reach the end and the joke collapses in on itself, your response is a reaction to, yes, the absurdity, but also the way in which you’ve registered that absurdity. You’ve been taken for a long walk around the barn only to end up at the place where you’ve started, technically no wiser but still jarred by the recognition that you’re back at the front of the barn, and not only was the trip pointless, that pointlessness was the point of the trip.

Or maybe it’s just that the word “fuck” is funny. I don’t know. This is probably we shouldn’t try to explain jokes. They just are, like light or air.

“Glee”: Hand Me My Bullhorn, William

by Halle Kiefer

Remember last week when Kurt’s dad kicked Finn out of his house, and Rachel found her biological mother only to lose her again? Well, this week’s episode resolves these tragic dilemmas when-oh, I’m kidding. They dropped those storylines like the hottest potato. But there’s no time for such concerns now. To the auditorium!

During practice, our kids discover that Vocal Adrenaline has invaded their stage. Now, maybe it’s just been a while, but Jesse was looking smoking hot in this episode. Like, hickory-smoked hot in a blue windbreaker. Jesse announces to the group that not only is he quitting New Directions (duh), but he is transferring back to Carmel (duh, yum) because he never got the appreciation from his new Glee club mates that he felt he deserved.

Which, sure, I’m not going to say how anyone how should or should not feel in glee club, but it was probably difficult for his new classmates to get to know him considering he has spring break 4 months out of the semester. Or maybe it’s one month on, one month off? Oh, also he hates Rachel now for some reason. Anyway, Vocal Adrenaline proceeds to deliver a very tepid Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” as a means to psyche out the New Ds, pushing them into a funk and kicking off the season’s funk episode. Alllllllllright. Okay, fine, sure. Two episodes left in the season, I’m willing to swallow any premise at this point.

One of their incredibly fatigued-looking divas calls their auditorium “quaint” before they all stalk off to pick their kids up from soccer practice and pay their mortgages, because that team has an average age of 38, for reals. Now in my opinion, Vocal Adrenaline seems to be completely identical to the New Directions in every way (costuming, dance moves, hollow searching eyes), but I have to hand it to them for having the wherewithal to toilet paper the glee practice room while they were performing on stage. Their spouses will be so proud! Since the kids’ entire sense of self-worth revolves around glee club, they all fall into a deep horrible depression…and, and right before Regionals! Argh!

Meanwhile, Will Schuester is signing the papers to finalize his divorce from his wife, Insane Terri. Terri kisses him a gentle good-bye before going home to take care of a turkey carcass wearing a onesie or a cat in a footie pajamas or god knows what else she has waiting for her, because lest we forget, she crazy. So Schue has now also been plunged into a funk too! That’s some funky-tasting funk! Schue challenges the kids to sing away their many, many regrets in order to de-funkify before competition. Rachel bemoans letting Jesse rip her heart out of her sweater vest; Quinn laments “thinking ‘trust me’ was a sensible birth control option,’” which, LOL. Mercedes’ left eyebrow has last been seen entering the ionosphere after Quinn asserts that being a pregnant white girl gives her the rage and soul to be appropriately funky. By the way, Quinn is eight months pregnant all of a sudden?!? She is huge! I smell a season finale trip the hospitaaaaal! Somewhere Terri’s hands are itching faintly.

Then, like a thinner, scarier Darth Vader in a poly-cotton blend, Sue Sylvester triumphantly stalks back into our lives, resuming her role as HBIC of Lima, Ohio, and of my heart. Within seconds, Sue smugly admits that she allowed Vocal Adrenaline into the auditorium for a sound check/big fuck-you to Schue, as well as plans to install the Cheerios’ newest first place trophy in the glee practice room when she wins it at Nationals that weekend. In a great, horrible moment, Schue examines one of the numerous trophies Sue is toting around, before smashing it against the wall. Hoo hoo! Danger! High Voltage! Now, I understand why he would be fed up with Sue ragging on him all the time (I’m certainly not, but I get why he would be), but you really have to wonder how these kids make it through the week with every single educator they have acting like a complete psychopath all the time.

Enraged at Sue, Schue consults with Sandy, the former glee club coach, who again, just to remind you, was fired for groping kids and now sells weed to children, presumably because he can’t find a legitimate workplace that is a sufficient number of feet away from a school or playground. I think Principal Figs should institute some sort of Scared Straight program where they just have the kids walk by Sandy and point at him, because, damn. They are straight-up conspiring behind a Dumpster, which is where I’m assuming Sandy lives now that he is outside the bounds of normal society.

A short time later Schue attempts to console a hysterical Rachel, who’s SUPER FUNKED UP about how Jesse blew her off, even though one might gently point out that everyone told her this was going to happen from the second that she dance-met him at the library-book store. Based on the advice of a child-molesting drug dealer, and influenced by the tear-soaked rant of a teenage drama queen, Schue manages to come up with the best idea he has or will have in his life: he is going to seduce Sue Sylvester in order to destroy her. I would like to officially propose marriage to the writer who thought this up, because yes. A million, trillion times yes. In Schue’s effort to sleep with every woman over the age of 18 in Ohio send Sue into a funk of her own, he slips on his wrinkliest leather jacket and his Paige jeans and lures Sue in with the one thing we know with any certainty that she enjoys: a tight ass gyrating inches from her face. Will dry-humps the baby grand to Chaka Khan’s “Tell Me Something Good,” and if there is only thing “Glee” gets right is that seduction is 90% lighting, 10% back-arching.

Sue seems implacable while watching Schue’s hip joints click and whir in front of her, but soon we see her confessing her feelings to her one true friend, an inanimate object. “Dear Journal,” Sue writes next to a graphically rendered pen drawing of Schue’s decapitated head, “Something strange happened yesterday: I felt something below the neck.” Awwww, it’s Sue’s first time! Isn’t it every girl’s dream to feel “sexy, non-murdering” feelings toward a man? Perhaps next year when Papa has secured me a dowry I will be permitted to feel them! Schue suddenly slinks into her office like an emaciated panther, and asks Sue out for that night. “You know what Wednesday is, right?” he purrs, all cheekbones and pheromones, “Hump day.” Woooeee! Man, can you imagine them humping? It would look like two scarecrows caught in a tornado! I’m definitely feeling something below the neck now, that’s for sure. Oh wait, no, it’s just this letter opener I’m stabbing into my leg to stay awake while writing this. False alarm!

Meanwhile, having given into the rage boners they’d had following the TP incident, Puck and Finn have to come up with a way to pay for the tires they slashed on Vocal Adrenaline’s 28 matching Range Rovers. “We have an active booster club,” rival coach Shelby sniffs. DO YOU EVEN REMEMBER THAT YOU HAVE A DAUGHTER AT THIS SCHOOL? I know it was a whole week ago, but jeez. All you care about are those damn beautiful cars! What a slap in the face, though, that the rival team has so much money to spare and New Directions is being constantly threatened with budget cuts. You just know that Principal Figgins pulled that toilet paper out of the garbage and painstakingly re-rolled it onto the tube. Every little bit counts!

Luckily Nutterbutter Terri has some positions open at Sheets ‘N’ Things for the boys to work off the many thousands of dollars they need to come up with in order to not leave the glee club bankrupt. “Can I go shirtless under this apron?” asks Puck, just saying what we were all thinking. The one nice thing about this episode is that they are starting to directly address a lot of the awkward moments that this show is always filled with. Mercedes instantly rolled her eyes at the funk theme because white people + funk = KC and the Sunshine Band. Very true! When the boys see Sandy browsing at Sheets for pink ceramic barf containers to complete his Bathroom of Unholy Desires, Puck wearily asks, “You aren’t going to fondle us, are you?” Actually, yes, he might very well try to! I as a viewer appreciate that. If this show is going to be deeply off, at least let’s just put it all the way out there.

Speaking of glassy-eyed predators, we all knew as soon as Terri Schuester (formerly of the Hell House Schuesters) smelled fresh meat she was going to try to sink her spurting fangs into one or more of the Gleenises available to her. So far it looks like she’s taken a shine to Finn, which seems fair considering he is only a few years older than her. Puck fantasies a straight-faced rendition of Beck’s “Loser”, filled with soap dispensers and quiet desperation, which as a former employee of a big box store I can attest was appropriately depressing, and just the right environment for affairs like Terri and Finn’s to get started. It also helps if the adult in the relationship is complete out of her skull. Later at practice, Quinn belts out James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World”, backed by the Unwed Mothership Connection (I assume Puck’s birth control patent has since been denied). Quinn hasn’t been on the scene in a few million episodes, so it was nice to see her baby-bumping around, but I just wasn’t feeling it. It was too sweet and writhing. I want tears, girl! Sing like that baby’s head is squeezing past your cervix!

The image of Sue sitting in a booth at what looked like a godforsaken Shoney’s, clad in her dress tracksuit and double strand of pearls, murdered me. Remember seeing her in her zoot suit as she was being blown off by that guy Rod? I’m assuming we haven’t seen his character in a while because the earth opened up and demons dragged him to Hell where he belongs. The Meanest Waitress in The World snarls that Sue’s date clearly has stood her up (let’s hope that waitress lives within sprinting distance from Shoney’s!). Sue shows up in a rage at Will’s house, begging the completely relevant question: what the hell was Will thinking? But when Will begins to list the dozens of ways Sue has tried to destroy him personally and professionally this school year alone, you start to realize that maybe turn-around is fair play.

OR IS IT? It is. But sadly that doesn’t matter, because Sue can dish it out but cannot take it. After her humiliation Sue takes to bed, unwilling to prepare for Nationals and sending the cheerleaders into a downward spiral (Brittany puts her cheerleading outfit on backward and tries to bone that one nerd! Santana brings a Kleenex box to school! ). The glee kids aren’t any better. Mercedes makes me fall in love all over again with her rendition of Marky Mark and the..ugh…Funky Bunch’s “Good Vibrations,” but as Schue immediately points out, that ain’t funk, girl! Her embarrassment aside, Mercedes invites a distraught Quinn to live with her family rather than at Puck’s house (because his mom sucks? Apparently?), and Quinn tearfully accepts. I look forward to Mercedes’ new spin-off “Diagnosis: Angel” where she flies around with Quinn in a gold-plated hovercraft saving pregnant girls from shitty situations and generally doing good deeds.

Schue decides to eat shit like he always does and at least save the cheerleaders from failure by apologizing to Sue. The Sylvester residence is exactly as I had seen it in my dreams, covered in trophies and attended to by a foreign-born maid. OH THAT’S RIGHT, Schue speaks Spanish. Thanks for reminding us, you guys. As Sue explains to him, lying in bed clutching a trophy like a fabulous wounded animal, “Though I loathe you, you would make a good trophy husband.” She can glue Schue to a frame and put him on top of her bureau, right next to her tracksuit mannequin, which I suspect holds Sue’s exact measurements, which not coincidentally form a Golden Rectangle. This scene with Sue was actually sort of touching, as she discussed having flashes of a life she could have had, and wonders if being the best was worth it. Well, OF COURSE it is, and with Sue back on top, we watch on TV as the Cheerios take Nationals with a 14-and-a-half-minute-long Celine Dion medley delivered by our boy Kurt. Dear producers of Glee: please, please actually record and release this, as I will pay upwards of all my money to see it.

Who else was positive Jesse was going to get hit by a bus after asking Rachel to meet him in the parking lot? Rachel was sprinting toward him with a huge grin; a slight breeze rustled his mane. But what came next was even better! Vocal Adrenaline swarmed out from behind their Range Rovers and pelted Rachel with raw eggs. O the hilarity! I enjoyed this scene on every level, as it added a touch of realistic meanness to a high school populated by 40-yr-olds and Tony nominees. Their exhausted female leader taunts vegan Rachel about the souls of the baby chicks splattered all over her hair. As God as my witness, I’ll make sure those chickens peck out her tired eyes in hell.

Good thing I packed a snack, because I needed the bag to hyperventilate into for the next scene. Sue returns to Will’s apartment with the golden phallus of her Nationals trophy with an ultimatum: either Schue consents to an embarrassingly large, illuminated trophy-case to be installed in the glee practice room for the Cheerios trophy, or he has to kiss Sue…on the lips…with tongue. FROOOOOOOOM THIIIIIIIIIS MOMEEEEENT! Their tight, thin mouths edged closer and closer, and I edged closer and closer to my fainting coach, until Sue stops him with a snarl. “Even your breath reeks of mediocrity, and it’s making me sick.” From the look on his face, you could tell Will Schuester had never been harder in his life. O wait, no THAT WAS ME! I swooned so hard I fell unconscious and dreamed that I was making passionate love to Will Schuester and Sue Sylvester in a forest glen, only to awaken on top of a pile of brooms and steel wool in my super’s maintenance closet. I imagine the sound of their dry lips scraping together would sound like the pages of a book turning, and then when you look at the cover of the book you realize it’s the Bible, and the chapter you were reading was Song of Songs, because it was so damn romantic.

The New Directions decide to finally put the Vocal Adrenaline in their place by blasting them in the face with the only thing they do better: having soul. Really, guys? That’s the thing you have? The gleebians quiver and stomp through Parliament’s “Give Up The Funk.” As one of my viewing companions put it half-way through the routine,” Is this supposed to be good?” They cry for funk, but know not what they would do with it were they to receive it! Vocal Adrenaline certainly thought it was great though, as their jaws were in their laps the whole time. We can’t do that!, Sleepy Diva whispers, “because we are soulless automatons.” With age comes wisdom, I guess. At that moment the bags under her eyes could have held the whole world.

But hey, you guys, don’t get too down on yourself about it. We are all soulless automatons over here. Now, this wasn’t a bad episode, but here’s my take on things: you can’t bring the drams dot com last week with Kurt and Finn and the adoption plotline, and then literally not address it the next week. You just can’t! Speaking of things I have basically forgotten about by now, the previews for next week mark the season finale and return of Emma “Don’t Touch That; It Probably Has Poo Germs On It” Pillsbury. Where has that girl been? Remember when she was about to lose her virginity to Will? Barely! O my god, though, the thought of no Jane Lynch over the summer is starting to make my throat close up…sweet death take me now…

Halle Kiefer is both excited and upset.

by The Machines

YOU WERE WARNED. END COMMUNICATION.

“I wondered what my mom would say if she knew men were willing to pay up to $250 an hour to worship me.” Well, we may never discover what the mother of this fun young tale-telling dominatrix might say, but we sure know what anonymous Internet commenters will say: “You are a totally whore and God hates you. Creatures like you should just go kill yourselves. Your a prostitute and driving this country into the ground.” Why do Christians hate the free market?

Kanye West has been keeping a low profile since drunkenly embarrassing himself at the Video Music Awards last September. He went to an ashram in India, and a recording studio in Hawaii and put his Hollywood house up for sale. Now he has returned to rap. And very, very well.

His new song, “Power,” the first single from the forthcoming Good Ass Job, has none of the synth beats and Autotune-assisted singing that defined 2008’s 808s & Heartbreak. Which was not so terrible in itself, but played a major role in making hip-hop radio as shitty as it’s been since. (Drake, for example: Please stop.) With its military-march beat (a sample from King Crimson’s 1969 “21st Centruy Schizoid Man,” the great idea of Waco, Texas beatmaker S1) “Power” hearkens to one of his earliest hits, 2004’s “Jesus Walks”-still probably the hardest song he’s ever made. All in all, this provides a good lesson in how to recover from scandal: Disappear for a while, bury yourself in work, and come back with something your core-base fans will appreciate. “How’s Ye doing?” he asks in the third verse. “I’m survivin’/I was drinking earlier/Now I’m drivin’…”

Yay!