Dhoom 3

With the Success of ‘Dhoom 3,’ Should Hollywood Learn from Bollywood?

Other than switching cigarette brands from Marlboro Medium to Special Blend 27 for a richer, smoother smoking experience, my only New Year’s resolution is to forgo clickbait. I will no longer be enticed by HuffPo to find out what Sandra Bullock found out after she Googled herself. I refuse to be shocked by what fashion editors have photoshopped off a celebrity’s body. But that doesn’t stop me from trying to entice readers myself

Giancarlo Esposito and Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad

Is ‘Breaking Bad’ Bisexual?

The wonderful thing about Reddit, aside from introducing me to the wild ‘n wacky mind of the computer hacker (I mean, programmer), is that the threads often closely follow my own trains of thought, no matter how obscure or obvious.  And one of those trains was a post the other day comparing Breaking Bad to The Wire, the police procedural set in Baltimore that ran from 2002 until 2007.

If you haven’t seen it, I would urge you to watch at least one season of The Wire.  It is widely considered to be the best TV show ever, but that is assuming your tastes run towards hyper-realistic dramas, not campy fantasies riddled with vampires and the fairies who love them.  I see both as the equivalent of the opposite ends of a Kinsey-type scale of TV drama preferences.  When I visualize that scale, I see a petulant, girly Filipino twink wearing a Madonna t-shirt grabbing the remote and aiming it at an episode of The Wire, saying, “Enough of this shit.  So depressing.  I wanna watch True Blood.  Alexander Skarsgaard, he’s so hot.  SOOKIE!!! I love you!”

Sandusky Trial: The Silence of the Hyenas

This morning, The Daily Beast published one of the more cogent articles I’ve ever read on their site, Penn State Values: The System That Discourages Making Waves by Paul Campos.  An overview of the Sandusky trial, the essence of the piece is best summed up by the abbreviated headline on the site’s main page: “We Are All Penn State.”

The biggest flaw about the article is it’s too short.  I wanted a far more in-depth discussion about this phenomenon, this fear that people have of exposing deeds that are so manifestly evil rather than rock the boat.  Being the righteous bullhorn that I can be, I find this hard to understand, but perhaps that’s because I have rocked the boat often enough in my life that I know it ultimately doesn’t capsize, and that remorse for not having done the right thing has to be more painful than “suffering” the consequences of snitching.

Some Bottom Bitches Scream Too Loud

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

It’s been a while now since I’ve taken a potshot or two at my evil twin Andrew Sullivan.  In truth, I’ve become sort of ambivalent about him, as opposed to hostile; his position on cannabis usage—that making a plant which grows naturally illegal, but letting alcoholic beverages, which are manmade, be not only legal but socially acceptable and an integral part of many religious ceremonies is hypocritical—is a laudable one.  I take a further libertarian view towards all drugs: if you are old enough to know what you want and can make an informed decision, and provided you don’t harm others—i.e., by getting slaughtered on legal ethanol and causing a lethal traffic accident—then nobody should tell you what to do.  Let’s not go into the safety issues of having drugs manufactured in dodgy labs by pseudo-chemists with no regulation; hardcore drugs users are people too, and deserve FDA protection as much as any alcohol drinker or anxiety-riddled pill-popping suburban soccer mom.

Proto-douche Andrew Sullivan has some decent points, but they are wiped out by other nonsense he stands for and spews forth. And, Andrew, what is that shirt? Moiré? Snicker.

But the sensible cannabis stance is outweighed by Sullivan’s other more insensible positions, like his advocacy of unprotected sex, for himself in particular because he’s Poz; the AIDS crisis is apparently over, according to him.  Well, it would be, now that he has—forgive my French—taken so many infected loads up his ass that he has surrendered to the disease.  But that doesn’t make the crisis any where near over for the vast majority of people, especially the young ‘uns, people who don’t sit on a sanctimonious high horse during the day, only to get off it and behave like a total bottom pig slut at night.

My Mecca

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

As an Eastcoaster, the minute Labor Day ends, you think summer is finished.  Your mind prepares for siege mentality against the onslaught of that horrible cold and wet.  “Winter is coming,” is the Stark family motto in Game of Thrones.  That sense of doom is, of course, ridiculous if you’re living in Southern California.  We’ll get a light dip in temperature somewhere at the beginning of December, and it will rain a bit, maybe a total of twenty days between then and the end for February.  Winter will never really come.

"I know meth heads," states Jesse Pinkman from "Breaking Bad," played by Aaron Paul.

The LA equivalent of the February Blues, which make the winter-weary on the East Coast and in Europe suicidal with ‘seasonal affective disorder’ (an ailment invented by pharmaceutical companies if there ever was one, just as Valentines Day was conjured by Hallmark), is something called June Gloom, when this city is overcast until it burns off at midday.  I heard one buxom bunny say to another while they were heading into pilates class earlier this summer, “I’m just so totally bummed this morning.  Must be, like, June Gloom or something.”  Then it burns off by, like, 1 p.m., along with your death wish, and there’s just nothing left to be unhappy about.  La-la-la.

We Own You, Marcia Bachmann

It would appear that we have called it right and that there is something not quite straight about the Marcus “Marcia” Bachmann story.  The ex-gay therapist, who would appear to be ex-gay himself, is being hounded all over the media, from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show to the Daily Beast, for his—how do we put this discreetly?—underperformance of the American performance of masculinity.  To put it indiscreetly, Marcia behaves like a screaming queen.

Sign language for “I’m a raging homo”: The fabulous wrist action of Marcia Bachmann.

However much you want to scrub “barbarian” Gheys* from the face of the planet, or at least from this Godly country, and pack us back to England and France, we still own you, Marcia Bachmann; you are clearly one of us and always will be.  Your ex-gay clinics are the sort of movement that is indirectly responsible for the viral bullying gay children are suffering in school, the beatings to death of your own kind, which is the preferred way to murder us.  Never mind.  You are forgiven.  

So Sue Me, Seema

This will no doubt be the most post-modern ‘meta’ post I’ve ever written.  This is a comment to a comment left on Thursday by Seema Kalia, whose trials and tribulations I commented on in an earlier post.  The Daily Beast has also commented on this combustion of comments with two words: “No comment.”  This post itself will no doubt draw further comment, perhaps even some fire from Seema in the form of a frivolous lawsuit.

I should sue myself for not only having posted this image in an earlier story, but having Photoshopped it. However, I’m in America, snuggled under a blanket called the First Amendment, unlike John Galliano, who is facing prosecution in France for expressing himself.

Why frivolous?  Because the basis of Seema’s complaint against me, as well as The Daily Beast, is defamation, which as any TV legal drama will tell you is extremely difficult to prove in this country.  However, despite having a Juris Doctor degree that should teach her better, or perhaps because of it, Seema has limitless resources and seems to be keen to use them to tidy up her image.

As the old ad campaign goes, there are some things money cannot buy.