American Blog

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Millions of Americans are feeling shocked and awed today, as their country becomes a banana republic. We hear about this all over the media, all too late of course. But another festering wound of betrayal and loss lingers in the American psyche, adding to the misery. The inside job, controlled demolition of Indiana Jones as an American hero, a man of action, a raider of other peoples’ fortunes, instead of his nation’s own.

It has been left up to South Park to help heal some of those wounds :

A friend who idolised Indiana Jones as a kid supplied the best review I heard of the last Indy Jones move, as he stumbled from the cinema : “It’s like eating a truly great pizza and then finding a few fingernails in the cheesy crust.”

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

In the video below, not only do you get to watch an extremely coherent, and witty, Ozzy Osbourne cooking breakfast, but he supplies one of the best commentaries on the pitfalls of becoming a rock star ever uttered :

Back in my rock journalist days, in the early 1990s, I had the absolute honour of sitting down with Ozzy for an hour long interview in Sydney. Here’s a bit of it :

“The funny thing about Black Sabbath being a part of history,” Ozzy says, “is we never knew what the fuck we were about. I never, ever thought we were very good, to be honest. I mean Iron Man and Paranoid were good riffs, but we weren’t a great band. We were always fucked up on drugs and booze. The whole thing is actually a hit of a haze to me….Anything bad that happened we never took seriously because we just went off to the pub and got pissed again….”

Another big sigh, a shrug.

“We missed out on a lot of reality.”

But look at the music you made. That stuff rocked the lives of millions of people. It still does. You gave millions of kids a rocking soundtrack for their youth.

“Yeah, I suppose.”

But Ozzy doesn’t want you to get him wrong on his opposition to alcohol and drugs. It’s for a reason related more to his work, the upcoming world tour, than to a looming tower of regrets for having had so many good times when he was younger.

He’s not anti-drugs, and he doesn’t want to be a role model for anybody.

“Do whatever the fuck you like.”

Ozzy considers this statement for a moment.

“Do what you wanna do as long as you’re enjoying it. If it becomes a problem, then go and get some fuckin’ help. There’s a ton of help.”

Ozzy raises a hand to scratch his face. He misses. He fingers tremble.

“This is where I kinda get pissed off in the respect that just because I was an alcoholic drug addict and I cleaned up my act…” Ozzy is starting to shout now, “what gives me the right to tell you not to do it? You are you and I am me. If I worked in a steel mill, and I went up the foreman and told him he shouldn’t drink, he’d tell me to go and fuck myself.”

You can read the full Ozzy Osbourne interview here

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Everyone has a price, even old punks. Then again, at least it’s a funny ad, kind of :

Meanwhile, in other corporate-punk news, the repackaging, re-flogging of a few dozen original songs by The Clash continues, with gusto :

This Monday sees a tri-partite Clash release: the illustrated autobiography The Clash (selling for £30), the live compilation DVD Revolution Rock (£12.99), and the CD Live at Shea Stadium (£11.99).

By the end of last year, posthumous releases included two double-CD best-ofs, two single CD singles collections (both called The Singles), an expanded B-sides compilation, two triple-CD box-set overviews, an A- and B-sides singles box set, an extravagantly extended 25th Anniversary special edition of London Calling, a programme of remastered CD reissues of the band’s entire album back catalogue (including the compilations), a singles video collection, and a DVD reprising and expanding upon that.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Obama is safe, says Oliver Stone :

“In those days, with Kennedy, you could kill somebody and that was more palatable because we’d done that abroad with many people: it was in vogue, it was part of the James Bond thing. Now you don’t need to kill – the media can kill for you.“And I don’t think Obama could [frighten] the Pentagon in the same way. Kennedy was shaking things up: with Cuba he was ready to sign a deal, with Vietnam he was pulling out, with Khrushchev he was signing a deal.”

It’s interesting Stone mentions The Pentagon. He was asked in the late 1990s, by the UK’s Neon Magazine if there was a subject he would never make a movie about. He cited the War Industry, and said he knew better than to ever fuck with them.

Fascinating it will be to see how Stone deals with the issue of President George W. Bush’s ramping up of defence budgets to Cold War spending levels in his new Bush biopic, W.

Perhaps Stone doesn’t fear the War Industry as much as he once did.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

So it was murder, after all :

Russia’s Supreme Court has ruled Tsar Nicholas II, who was shot dead by Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1918, had been unlawfully killed and was entitled to legal rehabilitation…

A Bolshevik firing squad shot Nicholas, his wife and their five children without a trial in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg…

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

“Is this movie going to get us into trouble?” Leonardo DiCaprio asks director Ridley Scott, of their new movie, Body Of Lies, in this LA Times story.

Why is DiCaprio so worried?

The film, starring DiCaprio and Russell Crowe as CIA operatives out to smash terror cells in the Middle East…

DiCaprio portrays Roger Ferris, an idealistic field agent operating out of Iraq and Jordan who resorts to elaborate subterfuge — concocting a fictitious sleeper cell and staging a mock bombing — to flush a terrorist mastermind out into the open.

American spies torture a suspect….innocent people’s lives are ruined via satellite downlink and foreign nationals who cooperate with the agents wind up being sacrificed in the name of homeland security.

DiCaprio :

“…the more we did the movie, the more we got involved with the day-to-day operations of the CIA — you realize what they’re undertaking. The thought of stopping this in one or two wars? In 10, 20 years? If there’s any moral message to the movie, it’s that we’ve bitten off so much more than we can chew.”

Here’s the trailer for Body Of Lies. It looks spectacular :

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

They don’t even pretend to be making this stuff for foreign wars anymore. We will see fast, darting mini-flying saucers, armed with tasers, chasing down suspects in our cities :

Flying saucers could potentially be used to support troops engaged in urban warfare. The military is to assess whether the alien-like aircraft, Moon buggies and miniature flying robots are capable of detecting roadside bombs and insurgents without putting troops in the line of fire.

The saucers, which are less than a metre (3ft) across, have optical and infra-red cameras and can fly over enemy positions without the need for a remote-control operator.

The unusual devices are among the entrants in a Ministry of Defence competition aimed at encouraging the development of urban warfare equipment.

Military analysts believe that street fighting will become an increasing part of armed conflict in the future and want to make sure that British troops have the edge.

Hence, the excitement over manmade mini-flying saucers.

The Stella system operates as a robotic team, with one unmanned aircraft mapping an enemy stronghold, and the second aircraft working with the ground vehicle to provide close inspections.

The devices, like others in the competition, are fitted with thermal and normal lens cameras linked to intelligent software that can interpret pictures to identify potential threats.

Readers of the London Times (in comments) appear to know that these robotic hunter (and eventually killer) flying surveillance systems will eventually be deployed in the skies and in the streets of London.

Just in time for the Olympics, in 2012.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

According to this story, China’s newspapers have already declared China the winner of the most gold medals in the 2008 Olympics. With 43 gold medals already bagged, Chinese media declares, the United States has been defeated.
Confused? China’s Dongguan Times is not. Headline : “China Is Not Confused.”
I’d have written more about the onslaught of totalitarian-tech that has been on display during the Beijing Olympics - the ultra-surveillance, the constant body scanning, the crushing of free protest in the streets and free speech online, the massive databases that suck up every online detail of everyone who enters the country and generates multiple profiles, the military vehicles roaming public events laden with yet more cameras and yet more scanners - if this was not the way cities in Australia, across the UK, the US, Europe, even New Zealand were already heading.

Surveillance, luggage and body scanning and profiling technology developed in Australia and the US, and elsewhere in the west, was marketed to China for the Beijing Olympics years ago. They brought at least a billion dollars worth of totalitarian-tech tested in the streets of cities like Sydney, London, Melbourne, New York, LA, specifically for the Games.

What worked here, was sold there. And what is perfected there, while our media shouts “Look! Look how unfree they are!”, will be sold back to our governments, and added to the arsenal of anti-privacy measures available to those we bless with control over us.

We may not be right there with China on the re-education camps, the many executions, the farming of organs from political prisoners, but the same attitude, the same unwarranted distrust of your own people, the same disturbing desire to digitally lock away their secrets while stealing yours, is there. Here.

For today at least, you will still be captured on surveillance cameras more times walking through the streets of London then you would were you in Beijing, attending the Olympics.

The next big marketing mecca for normalising the daily, often deeply personal intrusion of totalitarian-tech will be, of course, the London Olympics in 2012.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

American Jews Go On Nazi-Killing, Skull Smashing, Terror Spreading, Swastika-On-Forehead Carving Massacre

In a few weeks, Quentin Tarantino will begin shooting his long-awaited World War 2 revenge fantasy, ‘Inglorious Bastards’, starring Brad Pitt, Simon Pegg and Adam Sandler.

What’s it about? The short version is this : In 1941, a gang of American Jewish hillbillies are dropped into Nazi-occupied France on a simple, secret mission - kill as many Jew-hating Nazis as they can, and collect their scalps as mementos. The Jewish soldiers are vengeful, giggling terrorists, who mutilate the wounded and the dead, beating people to death with baseball bats and carving swastikas on foreheads.

For the ‘Basterds‘, this a suicide mission, with little connection to historical fact.

If you want to see Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds‘ (to use Tarantino’s spelling from the hand-written title of what is purported to be the last draft of the script) in mid-2009 knowing nothing more than the above, then stop reading right now. In fact, don’t visit this site in the next few weeks, because we’ll be coming back to look at more from the massive July, 2008 Tarantino script.

This is going to be a brutally violent, and extremely wordy movie. Nothing new there for Tarantino. QT addicts love his lengthy dialogue-rich scenes, and blood-splattering savagery.

But ‘Inglourious Basterds‘ is easily going to be the most controversial Tarantino movie, so far, and not solely because of the violence this time.

Basically, ‘Inglourious Basterds‘ is a very modern fantasy about how American Jews helped kill Adolph Hitler and thereby won World War 2, all before Japan attacked Pearl Harbour in December, 1941.

This is how Brad Pitt’s character, Lt. Aldo Raine, lays out the Nazi-killing mission for his new recruits (all typos from the script are Tarantino’s) :

LT ALDO
I’m putting together a special team. And I need me eight soldiers. Eight-Jewish-American-soldiers. Now y’all might of heard rumors about the armada happening soon. Well, we’ll be leaving a little earlier. We’re gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we’re in enemy territory, as a bushwackin, guerilla army, we’re gonna be doin one thing, and one thing only, Killin Nazi’s.
The members of the National Socialist Party, have conquered Europe through murder, torture, intimidation, and terror. And that’s exactly what we’re gonna do to them. Now I don’t know bout y’all? But I sure as hell, didn’t come down from the goddamn Smoky mountains, cross five thousand miles of water, fight my through half of Sicily, and then jump out of a fuckin air-o-plane, to teach the Nazi’s lessons in humanity. There the foot soldiers of a Jew hatin, mass murderin manic, and they need to be destroyed.
That’s why any and every son-of-a-bitch we find wearin a Nazi uniform, there gonna die.
We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty, they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty, in the disembodied, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us. And the Germans will not be able to help themselves from imagining the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, and our boot heels, and the edge of our knives.

Lt. Aldo then lays out the challenge.

LT. ALDO
…I got a word of warning to all would-be warriors. When you join my command, you take on debit. A debit you owe me, personally. Every man under my command, owes me, one hundred nazi scalps. And I want my scalps. And y’all will git me, one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred dead Nazi’s…..or you will die trying.

This won’t be a subtle movie. Adolph Hitler (Joe Pesci? We wish!), channeled through Tarantino, is the living embodiment of every cliched mad-ranting Hitler of 1940s American cinema. Historians will gag in horror when they see ‘Inglorious Bastards’, but then Tarantino’s not doing this to cement the historical record on a foundation of facts. This is his World War 2 revenge fantasy and, presumably, it’s supposed to be fun, funny and mostly fact-free.

Here’s some Tarantino dialogue for one of the table-pounding Hitler scenes from the July, 2008 screenplay :

HITLER
How much more of these Jew swine must I endure? They butcher my men like they were fish bait! This pack of filthy degenerates, are doing what the Russian army didn’t, and Patton’s army couldn’t. Turning soldiers of The Third Reich, into superstitious old women!

Hitler pounds furiously on the desk with his fist.

HITLER
No, no, no, no, no! I have heard the rumors myself! Soldiers of the Third Reich, who have brought the world to there knee’s, now pecking and clucking like chickens. Do you know the latest rumor they’ve conjured up, in their fear induced delirium? The one that beats my boys with a bat. The one they call “The Bear Jew”….is a Golem. A avenging Jew angel, conjured up by a vengeful rabbi, to smite the Aryans!

Some more of Tarantino’s Hitler.

HITLER
You want to prove their flesh and blood? Then BRING THEM TO ME! I will hang them naked, by their heels, from the eiffel tower! And then throw their bodies in the sewers, for the rats of Paris to feast!

I’m not convinced that this really is the ‘Final Draft’ of the script as Tarantino claims on its front page. A timed reading shows the movie, based on this script, will run more than four hours, most of it action-free dialogue, with one of the dumbest finales seen in any major movie in recent years. If the ending is filmed as the July 2008 script reads, cinemas will be pulsing with laughter. But the ending is not supposed to be funny.

And he wants to debut this at Cannes next June?

It’s hard to imagine actors of Brad Pitt’s calibre will do Tarantino’s dialogue exactly as it reads in this ‘Final Draft’ screenplay. A script doctor has probably been brought in for a bit of a polish, which may be why the rest of the cast (Adam Sandler, Simon Pegg) have not yet been 100% confirmed.

More Next Week….

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

From ABC News :

The world’s oldest recorded joke has been traced back to 1900 BC and suggests toilet humour was as popular with the ancients as it is today, British academics say.

The joke is a saying of the Sumerians, who lived in what is now southern Iraq, and goes:

“Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”

It heads the world’s Oldest Top 10 joke list published by the University of Wolverhampton.

A 1600 BC gag about a pharaoh, said to be King Snofru, comes second. “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.”

The oldest British joke dates back to the 10th century and reveals the bawdy face of the Anglo-Saxons. “What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before? A key.”

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Written by Michael Vass

It would seem that for some in the American ultra-liberal far left wing, otherwise defined as fanatics, it is not enough that Senator Obama stands a solid chance at winning the American Presidency. It is not enough that the major news media are fawning over Senator Obama – treating his recent trip overseas as if he were a sitting President, and refusing his opponent the opportunities they give him (ie. New York Times editorial). Even the fact that a movie highlighting the very liberal Democratic Presidential candidate is in post-production is not enough (and the film will be out just before the election – nice timing).

No for those like Oliver Stone something more must be done. Something over the top. Something insulting. Something that has never happened to a sitting President in any medium. Oliver Stone feels that now is the time to make up a movie about President Bush, while he is in office.

Why can’t Oliver Stone give up his citizenship, move to France (or Russia, or Iran), and make whatever slanted version of history he wants. I’m sure the Taliban, Al Quida and a few other “see an American, kill an American” hate groups will be more than happy to pack theaters for his biased derogatory slime on film.

Obviously I have a problem with the upcoming film W. My problem is not so much political as it is decency. I don’t care that Oliver Stone has a political agenda the size of the Empire State Building. I don’t care, as much, that he is seeking to portray historical fact in a manner more akin to a scifi movie about they year 300,000 A.D. I don’t care that he is going to get about as many people in the audience (stateside) as there are members of Moveon.org – I’m sure they will all go see it 2x.

What I care about is the power and prestige of the American Presidency and thus America. America is the President on an international level, whether we love or hate any particular President. And Oliver Stone is so obsessed with his personal hate that he doesn’t seem to care what damage he does. He seems willing to do anything to place a(nother) blemish on President Bush, even if it means hurting every American and every American President to come.

This film, a supposed biography of President Bush – that seems to be focused squarely on the past according to the trailer - looks dumb. What may be even more dumb is that it was greenlighted by a Hollywood studio, and that actors of ability have taken several prominent roles.

Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks, Ioann Gruffudd, Ellen, Burstyn, should all be embarrassed that they would do this to an American President. I really thing that James Cromwell, Richard Dreyfuss, and Scott Glenn should have known better. I mean they couldn’t wait until President Bush finished his term of office?

And as for Jeffery Wright and Thandie Newton I am at a loss. Do they believe that a movie built upon diminishing the office of the President of the United States is going to help their careers or in any way highlight African Americans (who are routinely seen and expected to be Democrats only) in a positive light? Colin Powell and Condelezza Rice have succeeded in becoming exceptional political figures, a fact that did not exist in any other Presidency before President Bush. And Wright and Newton believe that a film that insults America is the best way to immortalize these 2 accomplished, educated, Black figures? I think they deserve far better.

I will show this movie trailer clip. Because I do believe in Freedom of Speech and artistic expression. But I in no way suggest that anyone should see this film. I in no way support any actor’s portrayal in this film. I denounce what Oliver Stone has done, and am angry at Thandie Newton and Jeffery Wright.

Could I be wrong about the film? Until it is released sure, and it is mathematically probable that I can fly, piss on the sun and put it out, and/or suddenly have a stroke and thus believe that Code Pink and San Francisco know what they are doing. But back in the real world, Oliver Stone is doing a wretched thing.

Imagine if someone did a hatchet job on President Clinton and Hillary back when he was in office while doing Ms. Lewinsky with a cigar; the Democrats and Hollywood would be raging and the nation embarrassed. How is this different?

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

I truly believe those who think the upcoming Oliver Stone biopic of George W. Bush will be a polemic of hate and bile against the president are going to be very, very disappointed indeed.

Oliver Stone is one of the great American film-makers, and his new film ‘W.’ shows all the signs of being something remarkable : a movie about a sitting president that is not afraid to tell the truth about the good and the bad of the ‘fortunate son’.

Here’s the first trailer for ‘W’, due in cinemas in October :

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

There’s a remarkably large audience online for photo essays of abandoned cities and towns. Why do so many enjoy seeing the results of failed human endeavour? Why are we so drawn to ghosts towns as children? Why will we drive, as adults, so far out of our way on long road journeys to see a bunch of old buildings crumbling back into the earth?

There is a sad beauty to these uninhabited mementos of former society, where people, families, once lived their lives and tried to build their dreams. The people leave, but the buildings remain, sometimes for centuries, far longer than the humans who built them, lived in them, and then abandoned them.

What is the attraction? Do these places remind us, in a positive way, of just how temporary our time here is? Do we not so much draw satisfaction from the urban decreptitude as drink strength and inspiration that where others failed, we will not, cannot, do so?

In this photo essay, there are towns abandoned due to devastated economy, war, failed industry and the invasion of nature.

These two images from the essay are the more rare and unusual, and beautiful.

From WebUrbanist :

Kolmanskop is a small town located a few miles inland from the port of Lüderitz in Namibia. Windswept sand has made its way into nearly every building in the town, which was once a diamond mining town and abandoned in 1956 as diamond demand declined and richer sources of diamonds were discovered in other areas. Its only residents are now birds, hyenas and other animals.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Watch this video (again) the next time you think you might actually be getting stupider.

Le Lune! Le Lune! Christ, how did this guy manage to climb onto the stool?

How does the host manage to hold himself back from shouting obscenities? The audience were no help at all. Most of them were as wrong as the contestant on just what that round floaty thing in the night sky is actually doing up there. The girlfriend wasn’t exactly confident that The Moon revolved around The Earth. She took a while to nod assuredly that she knew the right answer, about the same time she appeared to realise her partner was actually a dim bulb in a vacant, dark warehouse.

(HT to Digg.com)

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

A lot of things made comedian George Carlin angry - censorship, religion, war, American ‘royalty’, poverty, injustice, racism - but the dumbing down of the country he loved infuriated him more than just about anything else. If you want to really fight back against the rich and powerful who you think are destroying your nation, Carlin once said, then get smart, get educated.

There are now more than 2300 George Carlin videos on YouTube, clocking up more than a million views a minute. Clearly, a lot of people want to know, and remember, what he had to say.

A brilliant mind has been lost.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Great idea for a story. Indiana Jones is a serial grave defiler and a tomb smasher, but he’s also helped make archeology one of the most apparently exciting profession in the world. So what do realarchaeologists think of Dr Jones’ methodology? Not much :

Real experts in antiquities acknowledge that the movies are pure fiction that present archaeology as blockbuster adventure, yet they cannot help but cringe at the way Indy manhandles the ancient world.

“There are codes of ethics in archaeology, and I don’t think he would be a member. Not in good standing, anyway,” said Mark Rose, online editorial director for the Archaeological Institute of America.

In a career spanning 27 years and three previous films, Indy has been both a blessing and curse for the musty world of archaeology, fanning interest in the field beyond academic circles but doing a Hollywood number on how the job actually works.

The reality of archaeological field work is not a lone hero dashing into hidden chambers with a bullwhip and a pistol and coming away with a priceless relic. It’s large groups of academics and students painstakingly sifting through grids to retrieve artifacts as mundane as pottery fragments.

“It is rather adventurous in a way, because for the most part, you’re going to some exotic country and delving into their past. But it’s not an adventure with a whip and chasing bad guys and looking for treasure,” said Bryant Wood, an archaeologist with Associates for Biblical Research.

“You’re working at one site tediously, probably for many, many years and spending more time processing the finds and writing reports than you do actually digging at the site.”

And no fighting Nazis either.

“To be honest, it’s a lot of drudge work. You can end up producing a 600-page Ph.D dissertation, and it’s important and useful and it’s good that someone has done it. But it’s not going to be made into a major motion picture anytime soon.”

But it’s not all drudgery and sifting sand for pottery shards. Archaeologists sure know how to have a good time. Particularly the younger ones :

On a dig in Iraq, one student dressed like Indy, minus the whip, and whenever the team made a notable find, they would play the “Indiana Jones” fanfare…

Wild times.

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

I’ve posted some thoughts on finishing the ED Day : Dead Sydney online novel over at the ED Day blog.

Go Here For That

The short version is that I’m rewriting Dead Sydney to include more of the plot elements that turned up when I was writing the last chapters and to more fully detail post-pandemic Sydney a bit more.

I’ve also decided to do an online book of short stories of how characters who turn up in Dead Sydney managed to survive the first waves of the bird flu pandemic that kills millions across the city. This book of short stories would then act as a prequel to Dead Sydney.

I’ve also started work on the first few chapters of the sequel to Dead Sydney, which follows the narrator, Paul, on his journey into the Blue Mountains after escaping the ‘invisible’ wall that surrounds the city centre, trapping pandemic survivors inside a few city blocks. I think it’s going to be great fun writing about city office workers and mountains locals joining together to fight, and survive.

Like Dead Sydney, the prequel and sequel will be free to read online.

I hope to have copies of the Dead Sydney for sale through this blog in a month or so. I’m toying with the idea of printing Dead Sydney with four or more different covers, for a bit of variety, and because not everyone will want to read a book in public that has a cover showing Sydney landmarks strewn with bodies. Some, however, won’t mind.

I’ll update here when the first short stories go online. The first chapters of the sequel are a few weeks away.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Fox News star nutter, Bill O’Reilly, has had a nasty blast from the past run wild online. It’s an old clip of O’Reilly completely freaking out and hurling abuse over some minor technical hitch while he’s trying to record some fake spontaneity.

This is something that really has to be seen to be believed :

Watch Bill O’Reilly Go Psycho

And note the calm, though tense, voice of the producer, counting the Rage King in. Obviously he’s dealt with prissy, temperamental and obviously disturbed ‘talent’ like Bill O’Reilly before.

Some background from Raw Story :

The bombastic Fox News host is known for taking the left to task for its bad language. In February, he played a montage of mostly-liberal celebrities cursing on television and complained, “If someone does that on my program? Believe me, they’d get scolded.” He added, “They’d never dare do it here. You know why? Because they’d be called on it. And they’d be humiliated in front of millions of people.”

In the newly revealed clip from Inside Edition, where he was a host before joining Fox News in 1995, O’Reilly runs into a problem with his teleprompter. “I can’t read it, there’s no words on it,” he complains. “I don’t know what that means, ‘to play us out.’”

After twice blowing the rehearsal of his closing line, O’Reilly finally erupts, screaming, “We’ll do it live. Fuck it! … Fucking thing sucks!”

What else can you say after viewing that clip?

What a total arsehole.

No wonder, then, Rupert Murdoch loves him so much.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Being paid to review video games would, for most guys under 40, be a dream job. But what’s it actually like to be a professional video game reviewer?

According to Charles Brooker, it was a pretty sweet gig. Until he told people what he did for a living :

As jobs go, it was a curate’s egg. On the one hand, I could legitimately sit around playing games until three in the morning without feeling guilty - even if I wasn’t specifically reviewing whatever I was currently playing, it all provided useful background knowledge. It never felt like work.

But on the other hand, whenever I told people what I did, they pulled pained, sympathetic expressions and automatically began treating me like some kind of adult baby, as though I’d suddenly started wheeling myself around the room on an undersized tricycle, gurgling and suckling on a dummy. Because games are for kids, right? So I was essentially a grown man reviewing Mr Men books, yeah?

And when I wasn’t viewed as a child, I was viewed as a nerd. How sad my little interests were. How dorky. It was bad enough enjoying the damn things but, being a games journalist, I took things one stage further by developing some understanding of how they were actually constructed. I might look at a new release and be impressed by the polygon count or the draw distance. Apparently this made me a tedious loser, because society decrees anyone who knows anything whatsoever about computers to be a boring idiot, while those possessing a similar level of nerd-knowledge of football or cinema or food are well-informed and sophisticated and sexually attractive and cool.

Exactly. Brooker’s thoughts on Grand Theft Auto IV are worth a read.

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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

A surreal video of Richard Pryor playing the barman of a gay star bar, that is, a gay bar populated by the aliens of the Star Wars cantina. The Star Wars cantina costumes were hauled out of storage, cleaned up and further detailed for the Richard Pryor Show in 1977 :

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