“Two young raccoons saved from a Pepsi machine in Tulsa, Oklahoma by the ‘Skunk Whisperer’”!

Similar to what’s going on with the New York Times in the Bay Area, where j-school students provide news stories for the paper, the Times has now partnered with the CUNY Grad School of Journalism, giving the J-School control over The Local, which covers some neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The Times says this “could be a model for expanding hyper-local coverage to many communities at minimal cost.” That is great news! Experience and bylines for journalism students; “minimal” cost news for the New York Times. I wonder how “minimal”!

This guy is really afraid of cats and his friend is trying to help him with his fears! That is so helpful and nice.

Horror Chick, With Melissa Lafsky: Daybreakers Will Suck Out Your Brain Cells and Smear You With Blood (And Not in a Good Way)

I like gore. It’s a good equalizer. At the end of the day, we all exist in the same corporeal bodies that can be sliced, hacked, carved, and eviscerated in any number of creative ways. (Oh, I’m sick, you say? Well you’ve been reading Tila Tequlia’s Twitter feed for the past week-so judge me not.) The only problem is that somewhere along the line between The Little Mermaid and Hostel, gore became the new black. Mainstream Hollywood now relies on it, mostly to compensate for garbage scripts and awful acting. “Sorry, no decent concepts or plot lines on the menu today, but we do have a grisly melange of shofar-shaped organs in a bloody reduction, sprinkled with bush-league dialogue.” Which is a shame, because good gore really shouldn’t be wasted on crap movies-it’s like having an Oscar-worthy performance in Cheaper By the Dozen 2.

So yeah, Daybreakers. It spackles on the gore, because without it, the awfulness of this movie can barely be restrained from seeping into your retinas and slurping out your myelin and gutting your soul and OH GOD MY EYES IT BURNS!!! Which is a shame, since the concept was interesting. What if everyone in modern society turned into a vampire? We’d all put blood in our Starbucks! And have sexy LED-lit eyes! And drive “day-proof” Cadillacs! Ohhand look we’d even have Ethan Hawke at his Reality Bites-palest (albeit a bit doughier around the edges) except he’d be even paler ‘cause HE’S a vampire too! And Sam Neill as the evil vampire corporate overlord! Isn’t this cool! Aaaand then it all tumbles off the precipice into a teeming pit of rampant idiocy.

Just how bad? Jesus, people. It’s like the Spierig brothers (who directed this putrescence-fest) challenged the Wachowski siblings to a Thunderdome cage match on 12 bottles of rat poison. Sam Neill is terrifying even in The Piano, and somehow you put him in a horror movie and manage to turn him into Pauly Shore? You DANGLE HIS SEVERED HEAD in front of the camera? Did his agent not object to this shit? And while we’ve gotten used to seeing the great Elias reduced to a dickless (literally) B-movie special, for God’s sake show some mercy-if you’re gonna make him say lines like “Being human in a world full of vampires is about as safe as barebacking a $5 whore,” then at least spare him the random-quoted Elvis lyrics. And the stovepipe jeans. Christ, this man did Shadow of the Vampire-show some fucking respect.

Oh lord and don’t get me started on the Soylent Green-esque “evil corporate overlords exploiting the last dredges of humanity” theme. Hey guys, get it?! Corporations are out to squeeze out every last drop of our blood! Haha check out our clever metaphor! We’re so much cleverer than the fucking Wachowskis! Oh, so you think it’s hackneyed and cliché? Okay then, here’s a human-vampire bloodbath in the lobby of a highrise! Top that bitches! What’s this, you say? The scene looks like an interpretive dance by Monty Python? Well fuck you, you Luddite.

But worst of all was the pseudo-spiritual faux-Confucian bullshit about the dangers of immortality. Which was insulting, not to mention nonsensical. How can an entire population be immortal? It eliminates birth and death, and thus the presence of life itself-it’s an existential paradox (though just think how much we’d save on healthcare costs-and forget about the whole obesity epidemic). As a post-cancer Steve Jobs said, “Death is the single best invention of life-without it, we think we have something to lose.” Somehow I doubt he meant to solicit thoughts on the topic from Troy Dyer.

Still, there wasn’t a single ounce of pulsating vampire lust. So at least there’s that.

Melissa Lafksy usually really likes horror movies.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8616405&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

You wanna talk about enjoying awesome things? Let’s talk about this trailer for The A-Team. Rather than bitch about there being no new ideas or complaining that Bradley Cooper is in no way fit to fill the shoes of whoever it was played the pretty boy in the original show, I am giving in to my inner nine-year-old and declaring that I am going to watch the fuck out of this movie. [You should probably click the clip as soon as you can; the odds are fairly good that it will be pulled at some point.]

“We need to make Freemasonry more contemporary, to make it reflect 2010, not 1910-or 1810.” That’s Tom Sturgeon, newly installed Right Worshipful Grand Master for the Pennsylvania chapter of Freemasons, to the Times’ Holly Brubach. And, since he’s not talking about, say, marshaling a network of laser equipped satellites to work in connection with a fleet of telepathic dolphins to better secure control over an invisible matrix emanating from a golden pyramid hidden inside a mountain in Roswell, New Mexico, it’s pretty disappointing. A Right Worshipful Grand Master opens his induction ceremony to the public, holds it in a convention center, and grants newspaper interviews about it? What kind of secret society is this guy running? No wonder everyone wants to believe Jay-Z is in a Satanic cult and the president is a Manchurian double agent for an Islamist sleeper cell. We need the mystery, the intrigue. Paranoia needs an outlet.

I’ve been let down in this regard before. A friend of mine from growing up was tapped to join a clandestine brotherhood with “Illuminatus” in the name that recruited members through his fraternity at college. He got a tattoo on his hip-a cool-looking numerological rune-and everything. I was very excited, demanding that he attend the gatherings and reveal to me the arcane rituals and secrets he learned: stuff about the Holy Grail, the shroud of Turin, who shot JFK, etc. He went to some dinners he had to dress up in a tie for, he said, where a bunch of stiff, stern blue-blood elders would look down on the younger dudes for drinking too much and not taking themselves seriously. “I think maybe some of those guys did actually think they were controlling the world,” he said. “But I don’t think they are.” (This doesn’t really prove anything, I guess. If you were controlling the world, or knew secrets about anything important at all, really, and you met my friend, or any of the guys in his fraternity, you wouldn’t tell them anything either.)

Another friend had his wedding reception in a Masonic Lodge. His wife grew up in a small town. Folks were friendly, everyone knew everyone, the local chapter rented out their space. It was nice building. Like an old church, tall spire. The party was in the main hall downstairs. After a few drinks, a few of us snuck up into the high-ceilinged grand chamber to look around. It was all dark wood, with lots of purple velvet and thirteen super-tall-backed chairs with little flags at the top built into the perimeter. There was an iron chandelier hanging from the rafters and medieval pikes mounted on the walls. With a little imagination, you could see a bunch of guys in hooded cloaks drinking blood from a skull goblet in there. But it also looked like kinda like an old library. And the room was unlocked. So…

“Some Masons may regret losing the mystique,” Brubach writes. “Though surely not as much as the conspiracy theorists…” I’ll say. Come on, secret societies, let us have our fantasies. If you really are just a bunch of regular old joe-schmoes that meet every other month to drink beer and talk about sports in Davy Crockett hats, if the coolest secrets you have are about how to do a handshake, or what color collar indicates a higher rank, or that Brad Paisley is a member (Brad Paisley?) please, keep it to yourself.

Sigh. At least we have the Jews.

What a cranky email! Why do people get so cranky? Gosh that is a cranky email from a person to another person, in this case, from a magazine publisher (or former magazine publisher, I can’t keep track) to a blogger. Why aren’t they on the same side of whatever they are arguing about? What are they arguing about-status? Respect? I’m not sure! What could possibly drive someone to send an email like that?

Yesterday’s defeat of a gay marriage bill in the New Jersey Senate is just one more disappointment in a string of bitter losses for those who seek equal justice under the law. Sure, other countries don’t seem to have a problem making fairness legal, but here at home, at the state level, we have apparently decided that we’re not going to play along. Many of the objections you hear center around religion, but the sorry undercurrent behind the unwillingness to grant the same rights to homosexuals that their fellow citizens already enjoy and frequently abuse is actually one concerning politics and economics, i.e., in These Troubled Times legislators are not willing to take a chance on equality while their constituents are more concerned about jobs and wages. Basically, gays are screwed until the economy picks up again and we all feel so prosperous that we don’t care whether or not two committed partners who happen to be of the same gender want the same benefits as everyone else. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the way it is. So let’s set some benchmarks!

I spoke with Reuters finance blogger Felix Salmon and asked him what economic indicators we should be looking at to determine the point at which we’ll be so caught up in the next boom that we’ll be ready to let gays marry. He suggested the following data points:

Unemployment: Unemployment is now at 10.2%. It was 5% back in November ’07, when this recession started. My personal feeling is that the number would have to drop down below 5% again before gay marriage gets another shot, but Salmon suggests that it would be better to focus on the NAIRU number, “the rate of unemployment below which inflation starts kicking in — or, to put it another way, the level of unemployment which the Fed should consider to constitute ‘full employment’.” Salmon believes the Fed won’t let unemployment go below 5%, because that would be too inflationary. He suggests 7% as an acceptable figure. I’m going to split the difference and call it 6%.

Dow Jones: Salmon thinks the Dow is already in vaguely “recovered” territory, but he’s a lot closer to the numbers than the rest of us, so I think we need something that seems a little more robust than the current 10.5k. I’m gonna say the Dow will need to be no lower than 12k for a sustained period of time.

Federal Budget Deficit: Salmon thinks we’ll need to see a government deficit that is less than 3% of GDP. I’ve spent the last half hour poring over CBO estimates for the next ten years, and, let me tell you, I have NO IDEA what they mean. So we’re gonna go with Salmon on this one.

And there you have it, gays! Write these figures down and stick ’em on your wall: Unemployment below 6%, Dow at 12000, and deficit less than 3% of GDP. When all of these numbers come up, so has yours! Time to call your legislators. Until then, sit back and enjoy the watered-down palliative that is “civil commitment.” See ya when everything’s good again.

This is a very nice story about a fun renegade weatherman who is free to oppose global warming! This weatherman is in good company with other weatherpeople, it turns out. “Twenty-nine percent of the 121 meteorologists who replied [to an Emory University study] agreed with [KUSI’s John] Coleman-not that global warming was unproven, or unlikely, but that it was a scam. Just 24 percent of them believed that humans were responsible for most of the change in climate over the past half century-half were sure this wasn’t true, and another quarter were ‘neutral” on the issue. “

What are you going to do this weekend? Catch up on your CSI? Some light cleaning? Or maybe you could polish off two chapters in your dusty old novel! Maybe it’s your first novel, the one that you would rather die before showing anyone? Or, as Michael Berger puts it today, “The one people will say, provided it ever gets published: oh that was just his first novel. That’s why it was so childish and so preoccupied with sex and werewolves and time travel.” (Um, yes please.) Anyway, that is what he is going to do this weekend and why don’t you join him? He is still hacking out the beginning of his, “which features a fire in an apartment complex, a food fight, a congregation of greaser bikers, fishnet stockings and a long walk to a haunted park.” Sure!