Cab ride of note

I hopped in a cab this afternoon after brunching with the always entertaining Eliina. My driver was an older man of substantial, um, girth. Say, of the 350 pound variety.

Driver: I've lived in Chicago my entire life, except for some time in Cedar Rapids, Iowa during the Reagan and Bush years.
Me: What did you do there?
Driver: Oh, a bunch of things... I was a bouncer at a club, a cashier at a gas station, a bartender... Oh, and I was a stripper.
Me [totally startled]: Uh, what?
Driver: I did a couple of shows a week. Most of the shows I took my clothes off, but I also did a special bit every so often where I put my clothes back on.
Me: [blank stare] I bet you got a lot of chicks that way.
Driver: Oh yeah.

No, he did not strip for me.

You Say It's Your Birthday

Because nothing says "Happy Birthday!" to a friend quite like a photo of said friend participating in Silly Hat Night at Friar Tuck's:


Happy birthday, Cleo!

And if you don't want to use your birthday as an excuse to drink, there are always other things to celebrate.

Further Brokebackerry

A trailer that reframes Top Gun and unveils what a massive gayfest it actually is:


Brokeback Squadron.

Courtesy Defamer.

American Gothic, 2006

I present to you Mr. and Mrs. John Thomas:

Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back Into The Bathroom...

...they go and do this:


I'm a big gadget nerd, but even for me this classifies as Technology Run Amok.

The Tech News via Dave Barry's Blog

THE Cinema Event of 2006

Courtesy of Wired

Seriously, how AWESOME is this? "Snakes on a Plane" has to be the best movie title I've ever heard. God bless Samuel motherfucking Jackson for not letting the studio change the title.

More info.

Media Reaction to James Frey's Outing As A Liar And A Fraud, Distilled Into A Single Sentence

"If you can't trust a criminal drug addict, who can you trust?!"

The escapist literary world I love is nothing but a cheap illusion

So, say you were a woman who was looking to break into the literary world by pretending you were an abused transgendered teenage male prostitute who solicited himself at truck stops and somehow, along the way, learned how to write deliriously good prose? Who also claimed to have HIV and won the esteem of musicians, artists, and fellow writers alike? Who had people dress up pretending to be him at parties and other events? And you did this for more than 10 years? Then you'd be JT Leroy.

I don't know how anyone could buy the hustle for so long. If the whole HIV thing wasn't brought into it, I'd say that it was actually quite an experiment in persona as art. Or something.

I think it's a drop in the bucket compared to what Jame Frey of "A Million Little Pieces" fame is alleged to have done.

Now, should we have assumed that these writers were fluffing their work all along? Is this just the dark side of what really should only be entertainment? In Frey's scenario, I'm not sure why I didn't ask questions sooner.

Is Mark The New Philip Seymour Hoffman?

First, there was This post here at Unfocus. Then, there was this post over at Defamer.

The resemblence is uncanny:


If only I had some prop horn-rimmed glasses and some extra blonde hair dye...

The Genius of Andy Towle

from Towleroad...

Jon, the one man band

 
 

Mark = Crazy Delicious

 


Feast your eyes on this New Year's treat ladies! (And, erm, gentlemen...) 

Ah, how I love coming from white trash roots

Tonight my stepmother told me that there had been a bit of news after I left at Christmas. Apparently, my aunt's ex-husband has gotten engaged to his girlfriend. "But Joel, that's not really news," you say? Ah, but the venue is: he did it at the cemetery while visiting the grave of the girlfriend's ex-husband.

Classy, no?