If you live in say, Los Angeles, there are roughly 500,000 places you can expect to meet women. You could go to a coffee shop (rural Alabama counties have few), you could go to a club (rural Alabama has a few bars…until they’re closed down), you could go to a bookstore (none here), etc. In…
Interviews with the Invisible: The Newspaper Reporter
Today I interview Cliff McCollum, the former head of the Auburn College Democrats and all around sharp guy who is now a part of the ultimate shrinking, invisible profession: he’s a newspaper reporter. I sat down to talk with him about the state of newspapers, if reality TV’s “Anybody can be a star” mentality has…
R.I.P “Liberal” Media (or Why the Media Won’t Call Scott Walker a Fascist But Will Call Obama a Socialist)
It’s time to call a time of death on something that may never have existed in the first place: the liberal media. I’m not sure the exact date to put on the tombstone for either birth (of course at one time the media was as doctored and corporatized by big business as it is now) or…
Petty Issues Week 4
And they wonder why America is so fat: You can’t have a commercial with a Dr. Pepper, Doritos, McDonald’s, etc. commercial. When’s the last time you saw a fucking commercial for lettuce? I’ve lost a little weight since the beginning of the year through a diet of spontaneous vomitting after watching John Boehner cry about…
Now What? (Life Post-Grad): The Ocean of Promotion, How to Make a Drop in the Bucket in a Sea of Advertising
From the time you get up in the morning to the time your head hits the pillow that night, you have probably been exposed to (roughly) 1,000 different advertising messages. An exact count is impossible to determine as some Unibomber-ish nut living in a log cabin in Montana might not be exposed to any advertising…
Working Class Economist: The Hidden Cost of Denying Planned Parenthood Funding
I’ll keep this short as the one thing I know Republicans will come on here and comment about is abortion. The wealthy conservatives that actually control the Republican Party won’t really care enough to comment on millionaire tax breaks or will sidestep the drama of having to actually talk to a working class person. However,…
The Fast Food Critic: Meet the New Dominos, Same as the Old Dominoes
Note from last week: I now believe it was NOT subway that made me sick. So apologies Subway, but that sandwich was still disgusting and unhealthy. Anyway, this week is media issues week and there is no better food to cover than Dominos pizza which last year launched the rarest marketing campaign of all: commercials…
Red State vs. Blue State: AL vs. Anti-Union Andy, Round 1
Today I debate one of the wealthiest guys I know who’s always been vehemently anti-union. He’s also an all around fiscal conservative blowhard who routinely interrupts me whenever we have a conversation about economics (more theories to him than an actual impact on people’s lives), and usually to quote some Libertarian think tank or post…
Down & Out in Bumblefuck: The Rural News
Today is about crime and poverty. I’ll keep it short because nobody ever reads about it anyway. Recently US News published a list of the 11 most crime infested cities in the country and although you might expect to find perennial blue state hellholes like Baltimore and Detroit on the list, and even though they…
Gnomeo and Juliet, a Whole Different Kind of Survivor Story
[It might be in its 3rd week of release, but since this sucker just topped the box office, it’s gained a new relevance] If Sanctum is about survival under almost impossible odds then surely Gnomeo and Juliet is for myself. I survived one of the most bizarre children’s films in history while in a theater…
Sanctum, When Australia Tries to do it Big American Style, and Makes all the Same Mistakes
[I waited four weeks to put up this review because there are spoilers, and I figure after a month no one will care…if they ever did] The new movie Sanctum is about a team of Australian cave divers who get trapped in a cave during a monsoon and get picked off one by one by various…
Entertainment Editorial: If I See Anymore 3D Movies, I’m Going to Hang Myself in 4D
Alright so that headline doesn’t exactly make sense, but what does make sense to studio executives is that 3D movie tickets cost more, so they release as many 3D movies as possible. About a decade ago, the closest you got to a 3D movie is the god-awful Spy Kids 3D which asked you to wear…
TV Review: The Cape, NBC Flushes the Toilet Again
I’m not going to spend this whole review talking about NBC’s troubles (they’ve been well documented from everything to Conan O’Brien to 30 Rock making fun of their own network nearly every week), or even call them the worst broadcast network out there (that would actually be CBS, who are the top rated network through…