Friday, January 25, 2008
YouTube Clip Of The Day
4:22PM Jess McGuire | This is nothing short of brilliant. And charmingly dark, too!
From the folks at The Onion via the folks at Holy Moly. More » 
Our Slightly Disarming Charlie Brooker Appreciationfest Continues
11:33AM Jess McGuire | As a continuation from this morning’s hideously long and rambling post in which we virtually put our still-beating heart on a platter and offered it up to The Gods Of Funny Brains in rapturous thanks for the creation of Charlie Brooker bon mot-filled mind, we wish to convince you we’re onto something here by reproducing the following tale from his Wikipedia entry,
On October 24, 2004, he wrote a column on George W. Bush and the forthcoming 2004 US Presidential Election which concluded: “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley, Jr. – where are you now that we need you?”
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TV Commercial Proves You Don’t Have To Be A Rich Hollywood Actor To Turn Heads With Your Disconcerting Enthusiasm, Just A Scientologist
10:14AM Jess McGuire | It’s not often we write about ads we’ve seen on the telly, but last night we were sitting on the couch and casually wasting away our life when a couple of people badly in need of sedatives suddenly began screaming at us about “Trendy Purple Splash Grass TM” and other things we never knew existed .
We were intrigued. Intrigued enough to actually go to the website mentioned at the end of the ad (hellohello.com.au, incidentally – a tribute to the Cat Empire?) to find out about Chris (a shouty man in a tutu) and Marie (telling us to call Chris “a fool”, but either way youse can all go and get stuffed cos he’s tripled plant production during a drought!) and the strange men in boxer shorts dancing around holding pot plants.
Seriously.The ad frightened us a little. You can watch it yourself right here.
Unsurprisingly, the website reveals that Chris and Marie produce their television commercials “in house”.
Chris’ pink tu tu’s and wands have been lovingly made by our staff and our scripts, costuming and movement ideas to a large degree have been dreamed up by Chris (business founder) with the help of his staff to refine these ideas into some of the most kooky & memorable ads! Chris says he’s like an empty ute, on his travels he gathers information & ideas that people tell him and he rolls these in together to create some very humorous and fun ads.
And there we were thinking Spielberg knocked it up for you while he’s been Down Under!
Anyway, our mildly entertaining evening wasting time online with Chris and Marie wouldn’t have been worthy of a blog post except for an ad we noticed appearing on the site, gently and quietly slipping itself between talk of outdoor palms and mosaic lanterns… More » Heath Ledger Update: Palm Reader Comes Forward To Say She Warned Heath About The ‘Many Cross Hatches’ On His Lifeline…
10:13AM Jess McGuire | In the wake of the sudden death of Aussie actor Heath Ledger on Wednesday, it’s not surprising to see people coming out of the woodwork to proclaim they saw it coming. “Close friends” are chatting to the media left, right and centre, talking about drug problems and Heath’s increasingly reclusive behaviour since his split from Michelle Williams. And now even palm readers are getting in on the act.
A Los Angeles based palm reader claims she told Brokeback Mountain star Heath Ledger, who was found dead in his Manhattan apartment, that he was going to have a short troubled life.
The Australian actor, who died Tuesday of suspected overdose of sleeping pills, called on psychic Dame Darcy to read his fortune while he was staying at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont hotel and he asked her to tell him everything about his love life, contactmusic.com reports.
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Intense Brain Crush Alert! Readers, Meet Charlie Brooker
10:03AM Jess McGuire | There’s nothing that makes the Defamer Australia crew happier than falling in mental lust with the brain of a particularly side-splitting type. We’ve made our feelings about Never Mind The Buzzcocks host Simon Amstell abundantly clear in the past (on another website, but the abridged version of our romantic rant would pretty much be “MARRY US SIMON AMSTELL, LET US HAVE YOUR BABIES, WE’LL TREAT YOU GOOD WE PROMISE”) and proudly showed off his genius in a YouTube Clip Of The Day, but he is a homosexual and unlikely to take us up on our offer of a fertile womb and an easy heart.
We have quietly pined from a distance for New York blogger Worker #3116 (by the by, his latest post about George W Bush and Heath Ledger almost had us whoring ourselves out on the streets to pay for a plane ticket to the States) but his latest posts indicate the presence of a ladyfriend (at least we didn’t lose him to our rival Ms Fits), and so we must put all hopes of a blossoming international love affair on ice for the present time.
But praise be to the good interweb lords, because we just stumbled across the writing of The Guardian’s Charlie Brooker thanks to a piece republished in the Brisbane Times, and we’re in love. It’s real this time. We want you to be a part of it.
WELL HELLO, WELCOME TO MY HOME HEART.
Here’s the bit in the article about technophobes which particularly “tickled” our “fancy”.
Recently I was on a plane, sitting beside an 80-year-old woman who couldn’t comprehend how the in-flight entertainment system worked. It had a touch-screen monitor and an additional set of controls in the armrest. Thing is, she didn’t understand the difference between my armrest and hers. There I was, watching a movie in a bid to distract myself from the terror of being 30,000 feet up in the sky, when she patted cluelessly at my controls and switched it off. I started it again. Then she hit my fast-forward button.
At this point, I politely explained what was going on and attempted to help her operate her system. She nodded and went “ooh” and “ahh”, but try as I might, she just didn’t get it. Ten minutes later, she stopped my film again, and kept doing so intermittently throughout the flight, sometimes switching my overhead light on for good measure, just to annoy me. Her screen, meanwhile, displayed nothing but the synopsis for an episode of Everybody Hates Chris, which she’d selected by accident but never played.
Shamefully, I found myself starting to genuinely hate her – her doddering incompetence somehow rendered her less than human. Reverse the situation – put me in a 1940s household, say, and ask me to operate a mangle, and the chances are I’d earn her contempt with an equal display of ineptitude. But it isn’t the 1940s. It’s now. So snap out of it. Hit the right buttons or get left behind, you medieval dunce. Do you want the robots to take over? Because that’s what’ll happen if we don’t all keep up. How dare you jeopardise the human race like that.
So, somewhat predictably, we Googlestalked him. Turns out he’s been around for ages! He was behind the brilliant website TVGoHome! How did this razor sharp mind, this glorious man with a frightening ability to pen deliciously snappy works of Great Journalism, slip under our radar for so long?
NO MORE. We’ve got our eye on you, Charlie Brooker. We plan on worshipping at the altar of your gargantuan wit on a disturbingly regular basis. More » 
Paparazzi Blog Sources Claim Angelina Jolie Has Two White Blobs In The Oven
9:53AM Seth | Reluctant as we are to fall headlong into the gurgling, powder-scented embrace of any celebrity baby news delivered to us Xclusively by the suspicious-item blogging arm of international paparazzi outfit X17, their report that globe-traipsing orphanologist Angelina Jolie is heavy with not one but two biological offspring (Brad Pitt’s two-headed fish can swim!) seemed to us almost too exciting a possibly-true story not to pass along to our readers: X17online inside source confirms that she’s not only pregnant, she’s expecting twins! More »
Warner Bros. Left With A Major ‘Dark Knight’ Marketing Problem
7:57AM Seth | And so, with two days to let the devastating news sink in, Variety now asks the inevitable question of what’s to be done with Heath Ledger’s final projects–the wrapped The Dark Knight, and Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Morbidly running through the history of productions faced with surprise cast deaths during shooting (apparently CGI has now taken over for stunt doubles and very low lighting as the re-animating technique of choice), the report then addresses the issue of how such misfortune might cast marketing campaigns in an unpleasant new light. As we pointed out on Tuesday, The Dark Knight’s focuses squarely and gruesomely on Ledger’s chillingly effective performance as The Joker, providing an unwelcome creative predicament for WB’s marketing czar: [WB marketing head Sue] Kroll will likely have to move quickly to rejigger the studio’s current phase of the marketing campaign for “Dark Knight,” focusing on Ledger’s Joker character. This phase of the campaign had been set to run until March. More »
7:44AM Mark Graham | We finally got news today that husky-voiced and healthy-racked Scarlett Johansson’s debut album will drop in May. The album will feature ten covers from the Tom Waits canon, in addition to one other song that we’re REALLY hoping isn’t “Just Like Honey.” Unfortch for Camp ScarJo, the results of a recent United States Weekly poll seem to indicate the general public is even less interested in buying this record than they were about electing Fred Thompson to the presidency. Sounds like someone could use some of that James Carville magic right about now … CAJUN STYLE! [US Magazine] More »
Frantic Masseuse Tells NYPD That Mary-Kate Olsen and Heath Were in ‘Mutual Relationship’
7:32AM Defamer Hollywood | Does merely knowing the same masseuse mean you’re dating? That’s what breathless stories in both the New York Post and Us Weekly are claiming. The Post is reporting that Heath Ledger’s masseuse, Diane Lee Wolozin, made her first phone call to Mary-Kate Olsen immediately after discovering Ledger’s lifeless body at 2:45pm on Tuesday (fifteen minutes before her scheduled appointment with him). Wolozin, a possible felon, allegedly told NY police that the two had a “mutual relationship,” and that she’d called Olsen using Ledger’s phone, where it was programmed in. Added to erroneous early reports that Olsen owned the apartment where Ledger was found and more recently, news that Olsen’s bodyguard called the two “an item,” we’re starting to wonder if all this hubbub is a whole lot of sound and fury, without any real substance.
