Yeah. This chick.
Remember this chick? Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO thing Girls (which I’ve never seen) and that unbearably cute ad equating voting for the first time to sex. Oh, here’s a passage from her Wikipedia entry, in case she doesn’t make your teeth hurt yet:
Dunham was born in New York City. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter of “overtly sexualised pop art”, and her mother, Laurie Simmons, is a photographer and designer who creates “disquieting domestic tableaux” with dolls. Dunham’s father is Protestant, and according to Dunham, a Mayflower descendant; Dunham’s mother is Jewish. She has a younger sister, Grace, who is a model and student at Brown University and who starred in Dunham’s first film Tiny Furniture. As children, both Lena and Grace were babysat by photographers Sherri Zuckerman and Catherine McGann. Dunham attended Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York, where she met Tiny Furniture actress and Girls co-star Jemima Kirke. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2008, where she studied creative writing.
What’s that? Not irritated enough yet? She just sold a book idea to Random House for $3.7 million on the strength of a 66 page outline illustrated with Instagram pictures.
Stick with me. It’ll get funny in a mo.
The whole 66 page proposal somehow got leaked to Gawker, and they ran with it in its entirety. Which caused Mzzz Dunham’s lawyer to get all up in they face.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t link to Gawker, but their sanitized-for-the-lawyer version is a thing of beauty.
Streisand Effect — learn it, live it, don’t stick your finger in that thing.
December 12, 2012 — 11:30 pm
Comments: 22
Five years ago today…
…I posted this nude pic of my mother.
No, I look like my dad. Why do people always ask me that?
December 11, 2012 — 11:24 pm
Comments: 34
I miss him already
Oh, now this one I’ll miss. Patrick Moore died yesterday. We weren’t regular watchers of The Sky at Night. It was the sort of thing we’d hit by accident, channel flipping, and then have to watch to the end. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
He is believed to be the only man to have met Orville Wright (the first man to fly) and Yuri Gagarin (first man in space) and Neil Armstrong (first man on the moon).
Also, he loved cats, played the xylophone and always wore a monocle. What’s not to love?
December 10, 2012 — 11:14 pm
Comments: 12
Rainy tonight, with a chance of gray balls
Well, that’s a new one. I’m not sure what gray balls in our weather forecast stand for. It’s cold tonight, so I’m guessing sleet or hail. Dirty sleet or hail.
Snow is a little white snowflake, rain is a little blue raindrop. We had a forecast the other day that had an icon for cloudy-sunny-rainy-snow, which is about as much weather as one icon can hold.
December 6, 2012 — 8:24 pm
Comments: 21
Ho Ho Ho
I’m still doing my best to ignore the news completely, and now with the holidays coming at us like an onrushing sleigh ride of terror, I’m finding it harder than usual to pull posts out of my ass. You probably noticed. So I’m hanging out the light blogging flag until the New Year.
Oh, I’ll still squeeze something out five days a week. I’ll probably do a little post recycling. I’m green like that.
Do please drop by and chat anyway. I worry when I short the blog too much. Neglected blogs bleed readers.
December 5, 2012 — 11:19 pm
Comments: 24
Pretty princess pukes plenty
You’ve probably heard Princess Kate has a royal bun in the oven. We’ve heard little else. Man, I thought news from America was annoying lately. Yesterday, we had reporters giving hourly updates — not kidding — standing outside the hospital where she’s been taken for “extreme morning sickness.”
Which means Her Royal Highness is puking her guts out, I guess. I wonder if the toilet has a coat of arms. I wonder if princesses puke rainbows. I wonder if she has a Lady in charge of Holding the Royal Hair Back.
I’ll probably get deported for this.
December 4, 2012 — 11:26 pm
Comments: 34
Amanda Holden’s World of Ham
The Brits are a contradictory lot. In some ways, privacy obsessed. In others, right up in each others’ bidness.
Take the Planning Notice. If you want to make changes to your property, you have to file an application. That info then goes into the local paper, and on a printed notice, which is stuck up on a light pole or something near the scene of the proposed change. And then your neighbors can complain about it and try to get it blocked, if they like.
It’s more intrusive than building permits in the States. You see Planning Notices for things like replacing a broken gate or changing the sign over a shop. And the process applies to rural areas, too. I’m not entirely agin’ it — a lot of the charm of this charming place we live depends on keeping things just exactly the way they are forever — but it does make my libertarian bone itch.
Anyhow, in an “I wish I’d thought of that” sort of stunt, this guy has been stapling funny fake planning notices all over Brighton. Do check it out. And the rest of his blog; he’s got some funny going on.
December 3, 2012 — 9:18 pm
Comments: 25
Hey, it’s working!
Yes, I look exactly like this, h8rs!
I’ve decided to stay unconscious until the worst of this is over. So far, it’s working. I’ve slept 40 out of the last 48 hours, like a Serengeti lioness. And it only took one dose of Night Nurse, two doses of alcohol and a serving of ibuprofen with codeine, spread over a two day period.
Oops, gotta go…I seem to be waking up.
I’ll set the Dead Pool up now, so it’ll autopost tomorrow, 6 sharp, WBT, whether I’m conscious or not. Be here!
November 29, 2012 — 11:52 pm
Comments: 20
uuuuuhhhhhhh
Uncle B brought home a special holiday cold from London last week, and I thought just maaaaaaybe I’d avoided catching it.
Nope.
How bad is it? My skin hurts.
How bad is it? I couldn’t even be arsed to take my own picture of wadded up tissues; I pinched this one off the internet. Not that we’re posh enough to use actual tissues — it’s store brand paper towels for our plebian snouts.
Brits call paper towels “kitchen roll.” They call Nyquil “Night Nurse.” See? Even in agony, I impart unto you secret expatriate knowledge.
Also, we’ve invented a thing we call a snot log. We take the empty paper towel tube, stuff it with all the used bits and throw it on the fire. One roll’s worth per tube — the finished log weighs about two pounds and burns with a merry light.
Oof. Can y’all make your own fart jokes without me for a while? Ta.
November 28, 2012 — 10:54 pm
Comments: 30
The Butler’s Song
‘Nother YouTube. This is The Butler’s Song. The performance (happily caught on phone cam, looks like) was in 2010, singer is nonagenarian actor George S. Irving (he was also the narrator for Underdog — there’s trivia for you!). The song is from the short-lived Broadway play So Long, 174th Street, which was an adaptation of the long-lived play Enter Laughing, based on Carl Reiner’s semi-autobiography.
Dolores del Río, by the way, was a Mexican actress, one of the lucky ones who successfully made the transition from Silents to Talkies. She was also the One Great Love of Orson Welles’ life.
And you’re a better man than I if you don’t get at least that first line badly stuck in your head. Which — am I wrong? — more or less shares its tune with I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy and She Was an Acrobat’s Daughter (at 4:23, but give yourself a treat and watch the whole damn thing).
And that there is a metric buttload of ancient pop culture references. If you got them all without following the links, you a) are old, b) American and c) wasted your youth sat open-mouthed in front of a television set. Like me.
November 27, 2012 — 11:43 pm
Comments: 17