THE "RED STAIN" SPEAKETH...
Okay, I'll admit, those of us who had pretty much the same opinion as Mark Steyn, that Osama bin Laden has been a red stain on a cave wall somewhere in Tora Bora since about November or December of 2001 and the American government was just operating on the premise that he was still alive because of lack of evidence to the contrary or, perhaps, to avoid making him too much of a martyr, were wrong, but it's not like he had really given us any easily-datable "proof of life" until this week. That one clip of him in the mountains could have been shot at any time, and any tape recordings could just be from an Arab Rich Little.
Friday's hottest new release wasn't in theatres but rather a video from Osama bin Laden, who, like Wes Anderson, is content to make one film every three years.
You can get a five-minute portion of the video
from this site.
"We did not find it difficult to deal with Bush and his administration, because it is similar to regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half are ruled by the sons of kings and presidents. We have a long experience with them. Both types include many who are full of arrogance and greed.
This resemblance became clear in the Bush the father's visits to the region. ... He wound up being impressed by the royal and military regimes and envied them for staying decades in their positions and embezzling the nation's money with no supervision.
He passed on tyranny and oppression to his son, and they called it the Patriot Act, under the pretext of fighting terror. Bush the father did well in placing his sons as governors and did not forget to pass on the expertise in fraud from the leaders of the (Mideast) region to Florida to use it in critical moments.
We had agreed with the general emir Mohammed Atta, God bless his soul, to carry out all operations within 20 minutes before Bush and his administration noticed. It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American armed forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone.
It appeared to him (Bush) that a little girl's talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God."
See, this is just hilarious. I can imagine, or I don't really need to imagine because I know someone like this, a 13-year old boy breathlessly taking everything Michael Moore put forth in
Fahrenheit 9/11 as received wisdom because a 13-year old boy, even a very bright one like the one I know, probably hasn't paid too much attention to politics until some point within Junior's first term and he just doesn't have the life experience to recognize
spin, distortion, and outright fabrications, and, as such, he takes everything Moore says at face value, but it's just so damn insane to hear an international terrorist mastermind recycle many of the talking points of Moore's "documentary" in lieu of any real creativity. He's repeating what Moore says like it's his own opinion and comes across almost like an Arab-speaking version of the Janeane Garofalo puppet from
Team America: World Police: "As actors, it is our responsibility to read the newspaper and then repeat what we read on television like it's our own opinion."
Damnit, at least
"Assam the American" (a.k.a.
Adam Gadahn) was a little creative, coming across almost like
Beavis-as-Cornholio ("The streets will flow with the blood of the non-believers!")!
Anyway, it's actually quite cathartic hearing pretty much the exact same claims made by the hysterical Bush-haters coming from Osama's lips, like Osama is the image in the mirror the anti-Bush folks can't stand to face. And, while it's certainly a disappointment that Osama is not the red stain I thought him to be, if he can only manage one video every couple of years, it does indicate that the guy's so far underground that he can't effectively manage his terrorist organization, and I hope that the tape gives the Americans, the British, or the Australians enough visual clues to figure out where he is so they can find him and, preferably, since I agree with
George Jonas that justice is perverted when you give true scoundrels "due process", splatter his brains across that backdrop.
APPARENTLY, YOU HAVEN'T HEARD OF MY "VOTE OR DIE" CAMPAIGN.
"'Vote or die'? What the hell does that even mean?"
"What you think it means, bitch!"
On Wednesday, Comedy Central aired the first new
South Park episode since April,
"Douche and Turd". Now, being in Canada, where I can't watch Comedy Central since Canadians aren't allowed to subscribe to American satellite TV providers... oh, this just in,
a Quebec judge has struck down restrictions prohibiting Canadians from subscribing to American digital satellite services due to it infringing on Canadians' freedom of expression. Let me get this straight... a ruling in
favour of freedom of expression (and consumer choice) and
against government-enforced cultural protectionism from a judge in
Quebec? Yep, something like that could only happen the same week that the Boston Red Sox win the World Series. But I'm skeptical that the Supreme Court will let a good idea go unchallenged for too long.
Well, even if it is, for the time being, kind of a legal grey area as to whether or not Canadians can watch Comedy Central off American satellite, we can't afford it right now, and, since I don't want to wait months for the new episodes of
South Park to show up on the Comedy Network, where the lag time after the American airing is ridiculous, I did the obvious thing a guy with a cable Internet connection can do: I once again asked "my American friend" to describe the episode in lots of detail, though "my American friend" had to tell me about the episode three times because the first couple of times he tried telling me about it, he... umm... couldn't tell me about the last five minutes because his... umm... "recollections" about the episode were corrupted and he also couldn't "scrub" his memories and tell me about things in the episode starting at any point, he always had to start over at the beginning.
In this episode, PETA wackos ambush South Park elementary, forcing the school to change its football team's name from the "Cows" to anything else, as long as it's not animal-related, a nickname which the students will suggest and vote upon. As a joke, Kyle wants to submit the name "Giant Douche" while Cartman thinks "Turd Sandwich" would be funnier, and, sure enough, those are the only two suggestions on the final vote. But Stan doesn't care much for either choice and doesn't want to vote, to the horror of his parents, and P.Diddy comes to visit him to spread his "Vote or Die" campaign, a campaign where he takes both verbs quite literally. While Kyle eventually convinces Stan to vote, he is dismayed to see Stan voting for "Turd Sandwich", and Stan realizes that, while Kyle pretended that he just wanted to see Stan vote, his efforts to get out the vote were really only to get out the vote for his own side, "Giant Douche", and Stan decided not to bother voting at all, which led to him being exiled from town and forced to make an unlikely alliance with someone who teaches him a valuable lesson about voting.
As usual, I thought the satire in the episode was almost entirely on target in so many ways, from portraying the ways
PETA activists frighten children without that much exaggeration to basically admitting that all the celebrity-endorsed "Rock the Vote" sort of campaigns really only care about your vote if you vote Democrat, with "Giant Douche" being a thinly-veiled jab at Kerry (and, yes, that makes George W. Bush the "Turd Sandwich", which was especially obvious since Cartman's giant banner for "Turd Sandwich" uses the same font and flag icon as the Bush campaign, but they have to take shots at both sides; in any event, spoofing the Kerry and Bush campaigns was only a tiny part of the episode). The one aspect of the episode that disappointed me just a tad was that it didn't really address my main problem with the "Rock the Vote" kind of campaigns, something that bothers me more than the dubious claims of non-partisanship, and that is that, if someone's so uninformed or apathetic or immature that they wouldn't take the time to get themselves registered without the nice
celebrities on television telling them to, I really honestly would rather that they not vote.
I've always viewed voting as a civic duty and I got myself on the electoral roll within a few days of my turning 18 in 1992 (though I couldn't really procrastinate that year since I turned 18 the same month as the nationwide
Charlottetown Referendum), and, even at the times when I was the most depressed, I still went out and voted. I understand that it's a little more complicated to register to vote in the United States than it is here in Canada, where I don't think I even had to formally register but rather just show some identification and proof of residency and maybe my birth certificate and they just added my name to the voter list, so I realize that even civically-minded eighteeen-year old Americans will often procrastinate from registering until an election is imminent because filling out forms isn't too much "fun". But, still, the people who should be voting should take it upon themselves to register without being told to, and the people who need to be told to register are almost certainly on the lower end of the Bell curve in terms of intelligence and common sense; I have a couple of friends myself who don't vote, and they're nice enough people but they're no Ken Jennings and I don't consider their lack of voting to be any great loss to Canadian democracy. Quite the contrary; ideally, only smart, well-informed people should vote, not that I'd propose any type of intelligence test, but I don't wring my hands if the stupid don't vote.
But I understand that Matt Stone and Trey Parker can only fit so much "message" into twenty-two minutes and keep it funny, and Matt n' Trey have already made the point that
"uninformed people [should] just stay home" when promoting
Team America: World Police (which I really have to see again at some point), so I can easily declare that "I'm Steve Brandon and I approve of this message... er, episode!" It's not quite Season 6 "gold", but it's the best episode of the season so far, at least in terms of satire.
Anyway, since writing out the song lyrics makes my Google hits spike, here are both songs, first P.Diddy's "Vote or Die" rap:
(Vote or die, mother_, mother_er, vote or die!)
Rock the vote or else I'm gonna stick a knife through your eye.
(Democracy is founded on one simple rule!)
Get out there and vote or I will mother__ kill you.
Yeah.
I like it when you vote, bitch!
(bitch!)
Shake them titties when you vote, bitch!
(bitch!)
I slam my jimmy through your mouth roof
(mouth roof)
Now get your big ass in the pollin' booth.
I said vote, bitch, or I'll f_____ kill you!
(Vote or die, mother_,
mother_, vote or die!)
You can't run from a thirty-eight,
go ahead and try!
(Let your opinion be heard! You gotta make a choice!)
'Cause after I slit your throat you won't have a f____ voice
Vote or die! VOTE OR DIE!
And the short "Get out the Vote" song from the end of the episode:
Let's get out the vote!
Let's make our voices heard!
We've been given the right to choose
between a douche and a turd.
It's democracy in action!
Put your freedom to the test.
A big fat turd or a stupid douche.
Which do you like best?
Some variations for Google: "Vote or die, motherfucker, motherfucker, vote or die." "Get out there and vote or I will motherfucking kill you!" "Cause after I slit your throat you won't have a fucking voice." "You can't run from a .38, go ahead and try."
CONAN O'BRIEN PREDICTED THE FUTURE?
In a "In the year 2000" sketch?
Nope.
This is a rerun week for
Late Night with Conan O'Brien just prior to "November Sweeps", so, last night, NBC showed an episode from July with Will Ferrell, and one of the monologue items was about the
New York Post's gaffe when they jumped the gun and
published a cover with the headline "KERRY'S CHOICE: Dem Picks Gephardt as VP Candidate" when Kerry picked John Edward as his Vice-Presidential candidate the next day.
Conan showed some other possible
New York Post covers, doctored in Photoshop, about seemingly unlikely events including (paraphrasing from memory),
COMPLETELY HETEROSEXUAL CONAN O'BRIEN CELEBRATES BOSTON RED SOX'S WORLD SERIES VICTORY
Well,
the Red Sox are one win away...
I wonder if the
Post will use that headline?
TALKING ABOUT SHIT I DON'T REALLY CARE ABOUT BECAUSE I'M TROLLING FOR GOOGLE HITS...
So, how about
Ashlee Simpson's performance on last night's
Saturday Night Live, huh?
What does it say about how much I am out of touch with today's popular music when I didn't notice anything wrong with this performance until
after people started talking about it? Not that I was paying much attention to the screen when she's on because I was busy writing very important message board posts of great gravitas like the one about
the time I was in an elevator in Copenhagen and two middle-aged Japanese women noticed I was wearing a Ranma ½ t-shirt and also because I didn't really know who the fuck Ashlee Simpson, or, for the Google people who can't spell properly, "Ashley Simpson", "Ashly Simpson", "Ashely Simpson", "Ashlee Sipmson", and "Ashley
Fhqwhgads", is. Didn't she have a reality TV show on once somewhere? Or was that her sister, Jessica Simpson, a.k.a. "Jesica Simpson", "Jessicca Simpson", "Jesscia Simpson", or, most famously, "naked Jessica Simpson naked xxx nude Ashlee Simpson Jessica Simpson lesbian incest video three-way Paris Hilton Halo 2 beta download"?
Let's see... host Jude Law says "Once again, Ashlee Simpson", and the band starts playing some bassline with the stage illuminated by a bunch of red and blue flashing lights and then Ashlee Simpson starts gyrating and you hear her disembodied voice singing "On a Monday, I am waiting, Tuesday, I am fading..." from "Pieces of Me", which is the song they played earlier, but Ashlee was planning on singing, or at least lip-synching, "Autobiography", and the music does indeed start fading rigth on cue pretty much when the previously-recorded Ashlee sang "fading", and you hear the guitarist try to save the day by playing a few chords from some other song while Ashlee starts dancing a little jig and then walks off stage while the electric and acoustic guitarists play for another 20 seconds or so and then they cut to a
Saturday Night Live title card with a black-and-white photo of Jude Law. At the end of the show, Jude Law says "What can I say? Live TV.", and then Ashlee pipes in, saying, ""Exactly, I feel so bad. My band started playing the wrong song. I didn't know what to do so I thought I'd do a hoe-down." Maybe so, but what a proper performer has got to improvise a little should things go awry, either stopping the band to get them to play the right song or continue singing the song that's playing.
To use a
Saturday Night Live analogy for what happened, Ashlee Simpson's total incompetence in being able to improvise reminds me very much of
the "Wake Up and Smile" sketch where Will Ferrell and Nancy Walls played two hosts of a typical morning show who are bright and chirpy until their teleprompter fails and then, at first, they can't string together a coherent thought, but soon everyone starts going nuts ("We must use the furniture to build a barricade!") and then resorts to cannibalism and primitive savagery ("The Order of the Hand will rule! The animals of the Zoo guy, Danny Usher, will sustain us.")
And
the pre-recorded voice gaffe has pretty much revealed that, yes, Virginia, some of the musical guests on
Saturday Night Live do indeed lip-synch, not that I've never suspected anything before, but now we have proof.
Though it's not quite on the level of
Milli Vanilli's Grammy, since I presume, tape or not, that's still Ashlee's actual voice.
