• Cam-Cam vs. Rayford Steele. Fierce competition in the Razzies this year — the 35th Annual Golden Raspberry Awards marking the year’s “worst achievements in film.” The Left Behind reboot is up for worst picture along with Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas. And Cameron himself is up for worst actor “honors,” in a category that also includes Left Behind star Nicolas Cage. (The two films also square off in the worst screenplay category.)
• Another Southern Baptist bigwig is trying to make “erotic liberty” a thing. Sad. As a right-wing bogeyman and a slogan for anti-gay culture warriors, “erotic liberty” is pretty dumb. But if I were browsing in a used record store and came across something called “Erotic Liberty” — I’m picturing either an early-’80s Prince bootleg or a 1974 live double-album by George Clinton and the Parliament Funkadelic — I would absolutely buy it.
I’m sure that opposition to net neutrality will be a short-term winner for Republican fundraisers hitting up huge telecom companies, but I rather doubt that sucking up to Comcast, Verizon and Time-Warner Cable is really doing to endear the GOP to most voters. If you set out to make people love you just as much as they love Time-Warner Cable, you’ll probably succeed.
• “Cleveland named as host city for 2016 Republican National Convention.” I guess Ferguson just didn’t have enough available hotel rooms.
• At Pacific Standard, Max Ufberg looks at the science behind Aziz Ansari shredding Rupert Murdoch on Twitter. Ufberg cites a 2009 study on “the effect of Internet humor on political opinion.” You can read an abstract of that study from GeoJournal: “This paper utilizes disposition theory, with its emphasis on social context, to link humor and geopolitical analyses of humor. The analysis of two Jeff Dunham comedy skits centering on the character Achmed the Dead Terrorist demonstrates the utility of disposition theory as a construct to situate humor in the context of its original production and as a fluid, global phenomenon that is shared through various social networks via the Internet.”
Study hard and stay in school, kids, and one day you too may be able to publish academic papers analyzing the sociopolitical effects of ventriloquists and prop comics.
I’d mention that I thought J.K. Rowling’s responses to Murdoch were funnier than Ansari’s, but seeing as the poor guy was just implicitly equated with Jeff Dunham, I don’t want to seem like I’m piling on.
• “I’ll admit that the real feat there was probably training the grocer to give cigarettes to a dog.”
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