Senator Larry Craig on oil:

In other news, Larry “wide stance” Craig is still a Senator.

HT Wonkette

I thought this was funny, only because of my extreme disdain for the entire “Bratz” doll franchise, which is so whorish (I call them “Horz”) that Barbie is a nun by comparison.

A California court ruled that the creator of Bratz dolls, Carter Bryant, came up with the idea while he was working for Mattel.

It means that Mattel could be awarded millions of dollars when the jury comes to consider damages.

MGA Entertainment could even be stopped from selling the popular large-headed, multi-ethnic, urban fashion dolls.

Mattel had claimed that the name and design of Bratz dolls were based on drawings done by Carter Bryant while he was under a contract that entitled the world’s biggest toymaker to his designs.

Mattel shares rose 4.4% in after-hours trading.

(With thanks to Eliz. for the idea)

Found here. His website is here.

And he’s earned 4 million theoretical internet dollars.

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for buffalopundit@gmail.com; Tue, 08 Jul 2008 07:06:03 -0500
To: buffalopundit@gmail.com
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From: Mrs. Elena Morris
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Hello Dear

My name is Mrs. Elena Morris; I am a dying woman who has decided to
donate what I have to you and the charity organization around your community. I am 62 years old and I was diagnosed for cancer for about 2 years ago immediately after the death of my husband who has left me everything he worked for and because the doctors told me I will not live longer than some weeks because of my health i decided to WILL/donate the sum of $5.700.000.00 to you.

Here is the Contact information of my Attorney below:
VAN DER JOEL ADVOCATEN
ANTWOORD 1070 AM PARNASSUSWEG BOULEVARD
AMSTERDAM NETHERLANDS

Email: advocatevanjoe@aol.com
Email: advocatejol08@yahoo.com

Barr: Van Der Joel Advocaten

and tell him that I have WILLED $5.700.000.00 to you I know I don’t know you but I have been directed to do this.

Best Regards,

From Mrs. Elena Morris.

————————————–

If you decide to bait them, let me know how it goes.

At Buffalo’s Central Terminal. July 26th.

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

List from Channel 4:

JULY 3rd

East Aurora: Hamlin Park 10pm

Blasdell: Fireman¹s Park 10pm

Dunn Tire Park: After games

Town of Evans: Stroh¹s Tavern at Lake Erie Beach Park - dusk

Little Valley: After derby

Newstead: Newstead Town Park 10pm

Silver Creek: George Borello Park dusk

Niagara Falls: Seneca Niagara Casino: 9:45pm (Rain date July 4th)

JULY 4th

Amherst: UB North Campus 10pm

Seneca Allegany Casino: 9:45pm (Rain date July 5th)

Batavia: Dwyer Stadium after game

Buffalo: Riverside Park

Cheektowaga: Town Park dusk

Darien Center: Darien Lake Theme Park 10:10pm

Dunkirk: Memorial Park 10pm

Grand Island: Dusk

Hamburg: Brierwood Country Club 10pm

Hamburg: Wanakah Country Club dusk

Lewiston: Lewiston Plateau dusk

Mayville: Lakeside Park 10pm

Niagara Falls: Hyde Park: Dusk

Orchard Park: Pavilion behind Orchard Park Middle School 9:45pm

Pendleton: Pendleton Town Park dusk

Little Valley: After race

Niagara Falls, Ontario: Queen Victoria Park 10pm

North Tonawanda: Tonawanda Island dusk

Tonawanda: Niawanda Park dusk

Wheatfield: Oppenheim Park dusk

Lancaster: Central Ave. from Broadway to Brookfield and West Main 10pm

Lyndonville: Lyndonville Central School grounds dusk

JULY 5th

Buffalo: Riverside Park- Friendship Festival dusk

Lockport: Outwater Park after concert

Clarence: Main St. Town Park dusk

JULY 6th

Dunn Tire Park: After games

Sardinia: Sardinia Town Park 10 or 10:30pm

Niagara Falls, Ontario: Queen Victoria Park 10pm

Although I’m loath to hold up and worship Buffalo’s “good old days”, I stumbled upon a fascinating and beautiful set of photographs on Flickr.

Evidently, Flickr user Vielles Annonces purchased a set of old Kodachrome slides from somewhere, depicting the travels of a Southern California family she doesn’t know. There is a small description of factoids that she was able to decipher through looking at the photos, but other than that, they’re just random color snaps from the 1950s and 60s.

Included in the set are several pictures of a snowy Buffalo in 1963.

Posing in Niagara Square:

In front of the Statler Hilton on a snowy 1963 day:

In front of the Statler Hilton on a sunny 1959 day:

At City Hall in 1959:

The Hotel Statler and Niagara Square from the site of the current execrable City Court building:

The Falls 1963:

HT Albany Project

The Love Guru just might be one of the worst movies ever, apparently. I thought that the Buffalo News’ Jeff Simon must have had a wonderful time writing this:

It’s crude, crass, stupid and ugly to look at, besides. Not only that, it sounded awful and its mother dressed it funny.

Myers plays Guru Pitka, a freelance, mass-market spiritual adviser who’s sick of being No. 2 to Deepak Chopra. Why can’t he get the Oprah gigs? His chance comes when a black hockey star with the Toronto Maple Leafs loses his wife to the goalie of the Los Angeles Kings, a moron with a prodigious sexual endowment that is a legend in the NHL. He’s played by Justin Timberlake, only one of many willing people hoodwinked into being in this rubbish.

The Leafs owner calls in Pitka to cure the team’s star player of his nerves. Buffalo’s recent run of bad luck at the movies (see “Evan Almighty”) continues here when we learn that the hockey player’s mother in “The Love Guru” leads a church choir on a mythical “Tonawanda Street” in Buffalo. (Myers obviously thought “Tonawanda” a funny sounding word, which I suppose it is.)

The cliche about movies like this is that they’re six-minute “Saturday Night Live” skits stretched out to 90 minutes. The truth about this crude and painfully awful innocent torture (the opposite of a guilty pleasure) is that its thin premise wouldn’t have made much of a six-minute bit on SNL either. It’s too specialized and all the professional comedy and vulgarity in the world couldn’t, in the immortal line from the movie “Nothing Sacred,” reach down into the mire and lift it up into the depths of perdition.

Here, nevertheless, is a list of people besides Timberlake who either have major parts or cameos in “The Love Guru”: Jessica Alba, Oprah Winfrey, Jessica Simpson, Stephen Colbert, Jim Gaffigan, Verne Troyer, Val Kilmer, Celine Dion (by voice) and Mariska Hargitay (whose name provides one of the movie’s few smirkworthy jokes, whereupon it is run into the ground).

Remember every one of those names. Optimistic, generous, big-hearted people, all. And all hoping to do a good friendly turn for Myers in a wacky summertime comedy. None of them deserved the result.

Next time you see one of them doing something you’re not mad about, give them a pass. Be as generous to them as they were to Myers here.

They earned some kindness for being associated with “The Love Guru.”

The New York Times:

Which might sum up “The Love Guru” in its entirety but only at the risk of grievously understating the movie’s awfulness. A whole new vocabulary seems to be required. To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious. The word “unfunny” surely applies to Mr. Myers’s obnoxious attempts to find mirth in physical and cultural differences but does not quite capture the strenuous unpleasantness of his performance. No, “The Love Guru” is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again.

Filmcritic.com:

Somewhere, sitting in a room cluttered with Mr. Pibb cans and half-consumed bags of Funyuns is the adolescent writing staff responsible for The Love Guru.

Ebert:

Myers has made some funny movies, but this film could have been written on toilet walls by callow adolescents. Every reference to a human sex organ or process of defecation is not automatically funny simply because it is naughty, but Myers seems to labor under that delusion. He acts as if he’s getting away with something, but in fact all he’s getting away with is selling tickets to a dreary experience.

It’s sorta kinda back, but it’s hard to mock now, given that this is so much better. And I don’t mean to be didactic or facetious in any way.

What the pretty blond women are saying to the older gentleman:

…Cellino & Barnes airs its first “if you’re hurt while riding a motorcycle” ads.

All 14 episodes of the “Vice Guide to North Korea“. It’s simply indescribable.

(The embedded video is from episode 3 - Welcome to Pyongyang)

UPDATE: I want to promote this a little more because I’m simply fascinated by it, and because I gave it short shrift yesterday when in a hurry to post it.

Any sort of hermit kingdom/crazy nation always fascinates me, as does the prospect of travel to a country to which travel is prohibited. When I was a kid, I’d spend summers in Yugoslavia and wish I could go to then-forbidden Albania, just to see what a Stalinist paranoid kingdom looked like. I’d love to go to Cuba to see what Marxism-Leninism looks like in the 21st century. Are there resorts on Iran’s shore of the Caspian Sea?

North Korea, however, is the ne plus ultra of crazy, strange, paranoid, passive-aggressive Stalinist hermit kingdoms. I have scoured the internet for travelogues and photographs. I recall distinctly how East and West Germany progressed differently in the post-war era, but the difference was that most East Germans could get Western TV and radio, so they knew exactly what they were missing. Not so North Koreans, who are kept dirt-poor and ignorant. TVs show nothing but propaganda, and an errant aerial probably gets you thrown in jail. Radios get only official stations. Tourism is tightly controlled or non-existent. Journalists are let in sporadically.

The tale of Shane Smith’s visit - and internet documentary of it - is unbelievable, and I really urge you to watch it. Someday North Korea will be no more, and it will somehow, someday rejoin its richer brother to the South. Hopefully someday the people of North Korea will know some semblance of freedom as we know it - freedom to, rather than freedom from.

What makes this so amazing is its irreverence. Smith gets threatened with jail a few times during the video for perceived or real slights against the regime and Dear Leader. He refers to the famous Arirang mass gymnastic display as an “eyefuck” - a better description I’ve never read. He is brought down to an elaborate banquet hall on his first night at the hotel, and is the only guest. Despite that fact, the waitresses bring food to all the tables, and then carefully remove it shortly thereafter. It is all a choreographed show - to prove that the western lies and propaganda about North Korea’s food shortages are just that. Smith calls the food inedible, fried “matter”, and comments after a few days that his tour is little more than “crazy food, politics, crazy food, politics.”

He dances with a lonely tea shop girl along an empty four-lane highway. He visits a school where kids put on creepy, robotic shows. He sees the desks with adjustable height that was invented by the Dear Leader. He visits the Panmunjon DMZ from both the South and North, and shows you the differences. He sings karaoke - first trying out a North Korean song, which he pokes fun at, deeply insulting his host. He calls his political minder “Speedy Gonzalez”. He sings karaoke on his last night there - Anarchy in the UK. Totally surreal.

If you think of North Korea in the abstract, or you know of it only as a caricature of its real self (I’m thinking Team America World Police), take the time to watch all 14 episodes of this unique, groundbreaking, funny, and heartbreaking documentary. Seriously, it should be shown on Frontline or sold on DVD. It’s that incredible.

Also, make sure to read the bit on the website about how, exactly, Smith finagled himself a visa to visit the North.

HT Ben Smith

Something funny onto this sign.

A new sports blog is up and running - the Dukes of Awesome - and I was alerted to it via a linkback. There, I found its 31 reasons to hate every NFL team that isn’t the Buffalo Bills. The post starts thusly:

In Buffalo we have a lot of things we’re good at: chicken wings, tailgates, shoveling, obesity, the National Lacrosse League, and not knocking down abandoned buildings. Oh, and bitterness. We are really good at bitterness.

Buffalonians thrive on bitterness. We’re bitter that all our jobs are moving out of town. We’re bitter that spring always starts late, but fall is seemingly always on time. We’re bitter that any public project we propose gets shot down by reasons with increased ludicrousness (yes, I’m talking about you Mr. Common Tern). Give us a topic, and I’m sure we’d have a reason to hate it. I’m not saying this is a bad thing - I love being bitter. To me, the only thing I enjoy more then being happy is being miserable.

With the season now a mere 110ish days away its time we all came together and celebrated our bitterness, our hatred, our unbridled passion of abhorrence. So, with this in mind I’ll present to you a reason to hate every other team in the league. 31 teams - 31 reasons to hate. Today we’ll tackle the AFC East and the AFC North.

Read the whole thing. They had me at “bitterness”.

I used to watch pretty regularly during seasons 2 and 3. Then I stopped. Because, for the most part, I stopped caring. Now, I only enjoy watching the sideshow audition shows that kick the season off in January. Once they hit Hollywood, I’m out of there.

But I did watch the finale.

That show last night was Exhibit A as to why I don’t watch anymore. It was the results show. Everyone wants to see who wins. It’s literally a 5 minte show that they streeeeeetch into a 2 hour infomercial extravaganza. Everything is an ad - Coke product placement, AT&T product placement, Mike Myers douching it up for his new movie, Jonas Brothers and a somewhat sad-looking and sounding George Michael promoting summer tours. There’s the 12 Idol finalists basically doing the bits they’ll do during the summer tour. There’s Bryan Adams who’s hawking a new CD that no one really cares about. There’s Carrie Underwood who, as a WaPo columnist put it,

dressed as a Wimbledon streetwalker with a hammock slung between her arms, singing her newest tune about hopping into the sack with a random guy and waking up married to him so she doesn’t even know her new “Last Name.”

A half-hour show would have been plenty. A one-hour show, I could have understood. But two solid hours of promotion? I don’t sit through infomercials for scam artist Kevin Trudeau, so it pained me to sit through this marketing-fest.

And that’s why, come next year, I’ll sit through the audition shows and then drop out when they reach Hollywood. Because it’s a show that is already somewhat of an insult to one’s intelligence. They don’t have to pile on.

There’s a website I check regul