A couple of neat J&Bs later, my phone rang.

"Do you want to come to my hotel room at the Marriott," Dustin Diamond asked.

"What? No."

There was a long pause on the other end of the line and a lot of heavy breathing. Then Dustin asked where we were having drinks and if he could still meet up.

"Whatever, weirdo," I said. And then I told him where we were.

This is a video of a monkey making out with a cat. So if you don't want to see a monkey making out with a cat, then don't watch this video. Or if you think, "surely he is kidding and this video is something other than a monkey making out with a cat," or even, "maybe there's a monkey making out with a cat for a little, but probably eventually the monkey stops making out with a cat and this becomes something else," you are mistaken. I am not kidding. The monkey does not stop. This does not become something else.

YIIIIIIIIKES. Obviously we should all be so lucky to still have an exciting and passionate sex life with our spouse after 10 years of marriage, but if we're really lucky, said spouse will not feel the need to Twitter about our taint in the middle of the fucking day. Seriously unbelievable. He went on a few minutes later to apologize for "the mush." Um, that's not mush, guy! Baby talk is mush! Cloying sentimentality is mush! THERE ARE CHILDREN IN HERE (here=Internet) (some of the children=yours). This makes Clerks 2 the second most important thing that Kevin Smith needs to apologize to the world for, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back barely even makes the list now!

Doo Doo. Perfect. She probably wrote this one herself because she didn't trust her ghostwriter to get the tone right. Nailed it.

I'm not entirely clear on the difference between Gwyneth Paltrow's "relax and enjoy life" phases and her "be in a movie for a few days and do a cleanse for fun on the way to the gym in the middle of the day because what else am I going to do with all this time and money and relax and enjoy life" phases, but I guess that is the purpose of her lifestyle newsletter: to let us know which phase she is in! The good news is that she feels pure! Like the freshly glazed porcelain of the perfect mid-century sink for one's summer castle! And lighter (I heard that she lost 10 pounds of grease from her legs)!

Gwyneth Paltrow is a crap.

Wait, whuuuuuuuut? I don't even know what he is talking about, but AY-AY-AY! Take back Nah Right!

Man, this is better than when we got our first Cease and Desist letter. OK, own horn thoroughly tooted. Back to the trampoline fart trenches to continue the good fight. (Thanks for the tip, Matt Tobey.)

Yesterday, Fangoria (Fangoria still exists? Nice. A round of applause for Fangoria, everybody!) released a new picture of Megan Fox looking like a demon from the upcoming movie from Diablo Cody's mind, Jennifer's Body. OK! She looks much creepier than usual! Usually she is only mildly creepy! "Hello, I am a Weird Science Sex Robot from Planet Teen Nerd Dreams." Now she's got vagina dentata of the mouth! In any case, it's just nice to see the visual effects team from The X-Files getting work again.

But I don't understand how this picture went online yesterday and an entire night has gone by (that is when the nerds arise to work their nerd magic) and no one has even bothered to make the most obvious and stupid Megan Fox Photoshop joke. Hello? Is this thing on?

Music Video Director: So, Beyonce, do you have any ideas for your new music video?
Beyonce: Yes. How about me and two other women doing a choreographed dance in black and white.
Music Video Director: That sounds an awful lot like the "Single Ladies" music video.
Beyonce: Yes, I want to make the "Single Ladies" video again, exactly the same. That video did very well.
Music Video Director: You can't just make the "Single Ladies" video again.
Beyonce: They parodied that video on Saturday Night Live.
Music Video Director: I know that, but you have to make a new video.
Beyonce: Fat people danced to that video in their living rooms and put it up on YouTube.
Music Video Director: Yes. That was almost a year ago. Any new ideas?
Beyonce: What if we made the "Single Ladies" video but it was in color instead of in black and white.
Music Video Director: Now you are talking!
Beyonce: Do you know anyone who is terrible at Photoshop?
Music Video Director: I do!
Beyonce: So we make the "Single Ladies" video but in color, and we put in a really awful, just dreadful Photoshopped landscape in the background.
Music Video Director: Keep going! You're on ideas fire!

Oh no, why won't we let them leave? We should let them leave! But first we should buy tickets to this movie. "Hold on, aliens, we will let you go just as soon as Fandango has finished loading."

I will tell you this, though: the race riots of the late '60s that transformed the American social landscape forever would have been a lot different if there had been more mecha. For one thing, Jeffrey Eugenides's Pulitzer Prize winning novel would have been called Mechasex. And Alex Haley would have helped to co-write The Autobiography of Mecha X. And, of course, years later, as a powerful reminder of how far we still had to go as a country, the Million Mecha March. Well this has taken an awful turn! This guy knows what I'm talking about. Once you start in with the terrible pun jokes you can't stop, and the next thing you know you've got your own Page-A-Day calendar.

First of all, you obviously met him while he was WORKING at Disneyland. That is fine, you have to meet your boyfriends somewhere*. But he can relax with the whole "back to the exact spot where we first met" stuff. "Back to the exact spot where I took off my Minnie Mouse head to have a quick cigarette and we first met." Better. Second of all, large, extravagant, romantic gestures are charming and memorable TO A POINT. You want to propose on the Jumbotron? Propose on the Jumbotron. No one will say anything about it. "He proposed on the Jumbotron." "OK!" But this is terrifying. Some middle aged lady dragging you around by the arm, another middle aged lady straight chasing you on her rascal scooter. No thanks.

"Not only do I not want to marry you, I don't even want to see the rest of this play."

But the real problems are much more deeply rooted. Like, he obviously loves musical theater so there's going to be a lot more of whatever this is wherever this came from. And you should at least recognize that his apparent obsession with Disneyland has lasted well past the age where an obsession with Disneyland would be acceptable or appropriate. And also, well, I will just say it: your boyfriend seems really gay? Maybe he's not gay! But you should just be aware that he seems very gay if you are going to spend all those Disney Dollars on a wedding! But the worst part: he clearly loves Improv Everywhere. Yikes. (Thanks for the tip, Chris.)

*"You have to meet your boyfriends somewhere." -- Confucius.

While it is true that this trailer did not actually tell us anything about the movie other than that it was written by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, and that it features Ralph Fiennes, basic facts we could have gotten from IMDB (Joan Schneider as Unit Production Manager!), the truth of the matter is that I would pay $11.50 to watch the two of them shit on Ralph Fiennes (or as he will come to be known from here on, Chuckles Fiennes) for an hour and a half, so same diff. BABY ON BOARD. (Thanks for the tip, Samir.)

All week long, a rumor has been circulating on the Internet that somewhere on the world is a home video of Megan Fox washing Michael Bay's Ferrari. The story would have it that before he cast her in the first Transformers movie, Bay insisted that she wash his Ferrari as part of her audition, and he taped the whole thing. You know, ACTING! (Man, Michael Bay has an entire kitchen cupboard full of World's #1 Asshole coffee mugs.) In any case, people have been speculating on the whereabouts of this sad and demeaning but undoubtedly hot footage. UNTIL NOW. After the jump, EXCLUSIVE footage of Megan Fox washing Michael Bay's Ferrari.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra looks terrible. So the movie's best bet is to go after a potential audience of people who think terrible things look great. A Latino Review reader sent in an eye-witness report of a bit of viral stunt marketing over the weekend:

I was sitting on the beach in Ocean Grove, NJ yesterday when a Black helicopter stopped to hover just off shore about 35 feet in the air. All of the fourth of July revelers hoarding the beach ran towards the water to see what was going on.

Then as it slowly approached shore, a rope ladder rolled out and what appeared to be a diver climbed to the bottom of the rope ladder. As I approached the water's edge, the helicopter the gleaming black helicopter turned only to reveal the G.I. Joe Movie logo as the diver began to wave. The helicopter the proceeded to hover south down the shore with the diver hanging on just over the water for as far south as we could see.

It was very cool as it felt like GI Joe had come to life for me and [it was] effective as EVERYONE I ran into on the Jersey Shore was talking about it.

Perfect. It makes sense that G.I. Joe came to life for this person insofar as G.I. Joe has always been a story about a guy riding a rope ladder five feet from the Jersey Shore on a holiday weekend. "Yo Joe!" It just makes sense.

The thing about G.I. Joe that I don't understand is why did they waste all of those millions of dollars on a piece of garbage when for much less money they could have just made a feature length movie about pork chop sandwiches. Then I would be all, "ONE ADULT, PLEASE."

Previously: Inglourious Basterds Being Directly Marketed To Assholes

It continues!

Perhaps the most pernicious thing about fake rap is its ability to turn every fake rapper into the Fake Rap Poster Boy. (How do we kill it?!) There has never been a single fake rap that has been so bad as to eclipse all previous and future fake rap (despite what the Super Bowl Shuffle would have you think). They are all equally bad in their own terrible right. Fake rap, like some kind of tone deaf phoenix, rises from the ashes with each new "song," reborn in all of its miserable, borderline-racist glory shame. And, of course, each new Fake Rap Poster Boy looks almost uncannily like YOUR BOYFRIEND. Spooky.

Take for example this local radio DJ's fake rapping about getting a speeding ticket, set to "Jiggy With It."

"The thing about college is that it takes minds into space like a rocket."
--UCLA's Tombstone

Ryan Gosling is going to record an album? Like a musical album? Someone's becoming a regular Leighton Meester over here. From People:

Ryan Gosling already moonlights as a deejay - and now the actor is taking another step toward a music career. He's releasing an album.

Just don't expect him to go pop.

Uh, I won't?

"What is this album, I was expecting him to go pop." "Well you shouldn't have expected that, didn't you read People magazine." "Valuable lesson learned." That is you talking to your dad about the new Ryan Gosling album. Your dad is a real People Magazine Head.

Pitchfork has an interview with Gosling and he describes his artistic vision this way:

"You know when you're a kid and you get crayons and papers and just draw whatever you want and it's just a bunch of messy lines, but to you it makes sense, and then they put it on the fridge? From that point on, you're always trying to get back on the fridge, you start drawing things that look like something, like, the more it looks like a horse, the more chance you have of getting it on the fridge. We wanted to get back to that place before we were trying to make the fridge. We wanted to work with people who hadn't been affected in that way yet."

OK, guys, the search is over. We have found our white Terrence Howard. (Finally. You know, that search we were all on.) Ryan Gosling, put down that guitar/bong and move my couch!

Entertainment Weekly points out that there are kind of a lot of taglines on the Orphan poster. It's true! Usually a poster only has one tagline, something catchy and half-clever to give you the vaguest sense of what the movie is about and to entice you to see the movie. But this thing is all over the place. There is something wrong with Esther. Yes. Like, you mean that her face was Photoshopped by someone taking a night course in Photoshop at the local technical institute's Graphic Arts program? But also can I keep a secret? Like the secret about her Photoshop face? Is the secret that something is wrong with her? Because that's not a secret. You just told us that. Is the movie about how Esther is really bad at keeping secrets? There is something wrong with Esther's ability to keep secrets, so can you do it?

As far as I'm concerned, though, this poster doesn't have ENOUGH taglines. Waitress, more taglines please!

A rare look at the very niiiiice man behind the moustache/bangs/gray suit/hot pants. Furry bull suits with felt dicks are great, but sometimes it's nice when someone can just sit down in a chair like a human being and talk about stuff regular. (Meanwhile, Vulture has a great rundown of all the funny but very repetitiiiive Bruno press junket jokes.)

The show opens with PC talking to Jessie and some other girl in either Jessie or that other girl's living room and PC is talking about how he can't wait to go to Cancun to just get away from it all, whatever "it" is when you're an 18-year-old faineant who's "really picky about" his "shirts." But there is something odd about this scene: the arrangement of everyone's bodies, and I am quite sure their clothing as well, is exactly how they were in a scene in a previous episode. The scene in which PC told Jessie that he was going to have dinner with the girls that they met at the art/fashion/whatever opening and she pretended to care because how else is anyone going to land a job "acting" when this thing ends and all the colleges say "no"? It's probably cut from the very same scene, Hollywood magic style. Because it's all a big blur, their dull-but-expensive lives. Besides, the timeline on this episode is fucked anyway.

So, but, PC goes to Cancun, and Oh Jesus, I'm pretty sure that the producers of this show can stop pretending like they pitched it as a "real life Gossip Girl" and start admitting that they pitched it as "a series about how PC is gay" because YIIIIIIIIKES. That is all that this is!

We can argue all week about whether or not the media's reaction to Michael Jackson's death has been overly sensationalized and deeply disingenuous, and I'm sure that if the media has its way we will, but one thing we cannot argue about, because there is no argument, is that Michael Jackson had a lot of fans. So many fans, in fact, that you are bound to get a few crazies. It's just statistics. His sampling pool of humanity was too large not to include just so many crazies that if, for example, just a random example picked for no reason, he were to be put on trial for child molestation, enough fervent supporters would leave WHATEVER THEY WERE DOING IN THEIR LIVES, and go to support him outside of the courthouse, and there would be enough of them there that you could make a whole feature-length documentary about them.

Man, remember malls, you guys? They were really popular a billion years ago, before the Earth was covered in water. Remember when the Earth wasn't covered in water? Well, back then, there were these places where everyone used to come and shop, and also just hang out. You could grab a Cinnabon and wait for your friends by the fountain in the center of the mall. Teenagers would spend all day there! In the morning, old people came to the mall, and they did power-walks through the quiet corridors before the stores opened.

Before the Earth was covered in water, people even made movies about the mall because the mall was so interesting to people that they wanted to see a story take place there. There was Scenes from a Mall, and Mallrats, and Chopping Mall. Eventually, of course, people stopped going to the mall so much, and they stopped thinking about the mall. Then everyone spent most of their time trying to get on one of the governmental rescue "A.R.K.S." because we needed to preserve at least some of humanity from all this water everywhere.

Anyway, here is a time-lapse video of an ancient shopping mall.

Dear Corey Feldman,

I need your help. Can you please make this whole Michael Jackson thing be over now?

Obviously, Michael Jackson meant a lot to millions of people. But the media frenzy over his death seems both hyperbolic and deeply disingenuous. For one, he was a human being, and human beings die in the thousands every single day. He was a "special" human being, I suppose, but surely we could have reminded ourselves of the specialness of him in about 1/10th of the time and fanfare that we took to do so. Which would still be more than the media spends on most actual issues that affect real people's on-going lives. And the pageantry! Dude was buried in a solid gold coffin? Come on, guys. The media didn't put him in that solid gold coffin, but they certainly put in him in a solid gold coffin of WORDS. And the fact of the matter is that while the man's musical legacy will live on for decades (or at least until the world is covered in water, in 2011), he was deeply troubled, and wasting away in a personal hell for the past 20 years. That has been briefly mentioned but quickly hidden away. Which is fine. Except if you aren't going to deal with HALF of his life, then what has TAKEN SO LONG. This memorial feels like it's been going on forever.

YIKES. PLEASE STOP CLIMBING UP ON STAGE AND GUTTING FISH WHILE THEY ARE STRIPPING. IT IS INHUMANE TO THE FISH AND ALSO HORRIFYING AND VERY SURPRISING WHEN YOU ARE NOT EXPECTING IT. INSTEAD, PLEASE SMASH THE FISH STRIPPER'S HEADS AGAINST THE EDGE OF THE STAGE TO KILL THEM, AND THEN GUT THEM. BETTER.

It seems like the whole world has stopped. And sure, the speeches are over, and Andy Milonakis has already performed, but they are only just wheeling the solid gold coffin out of the Staples Center now, so it doesn't feel like things are going to pick up anytime soon.

Leave your thoughts here, if you have them. I know that you were watching. Michael Jackson Memorial Service post-mortem. (Sorry.)

Michael Phelps is an American champion who has made sports history, and nothing can take that away from him. NOT THAT HE HASN'T BEEN TRYING. But in the case of his new Subway commercial, I'm not even sure what is going on. I mean, I definitely know that eating Subway sandwiches does not make anyone a champion. The closest they have made anyone to a champion is Jared (also featured), and I am pretty sure the words "champion" and "Jared from Subway" have never been used in a sentence together, unless it was "Jared from Subway is the champion of goofy looking slobs who love corporate shills everywhere." Besides everyone knows that all Michael Phelps eats is pancakes. This ad might as well be for Subway's $5 Gravity Bongs.

Which it turns out it kind of is?

Hollywood is hard at work on adapting Baywatch for the big screen, which only begs the question: Baywatch hasn't been adapted for the big screen yet? I guess I only assumed that they would have adapted Baywatch for the big screen 15 years ago, back when anyone might have been interested. BUT WHAT DO I KNOW? From Variety:

Hoping to add some giggle to the jiggle, Paramount Pictures has set Jeremy Garelick to rewrite and direct "Baywatch," a bigscreen comedy based on the syndicated series about buff lifeguards who patrol a beach in California.

DreamWorks paid seven figures for remake rights in 2005 and got a script by Jay Scherick and David Ronn that was heavy on action. Garelick was sent the script do a punch-up. Though he never saw the original TV show and its well-rounded cast, he saw an opportunity to turn it into broad comedy.

"It felt like the template to do a movie that was similar to 'Stripes' and 'Police Academy,' the comedies I loved growing up," Garelick said. "Rather than trying to pitch the tone, I figured it would be easier to write the first act to convey who these characters were," Garelick said.

Oh good, it's going to be a comedy now. Not the super serious drama that we've all come to associate with Baywatch. The thing is, sometimes you have to take projects in a new, comedic direction because the incredibly talented, very serious, and completely dramatic actors who were in the original did such a good job at just being so serious and good at acting that to make your new version also serious would just be farcical. So it just makes sense that they've decided to ADD SOME GIGGLE TO THE (SERIOUS, DRAMATIC) JIGGLE.

Ughggle.

If you missed last year's video, you can watch it here. (SPOILER ALERT, people say "I'm not here to make friends." A LOT.) This one is obviously the best, but I do feel like there are a couple of other reality TV supercuts waiting to be made, such as the "he/she needs to step up to the plate" supercut, and also the dude-called-"Macho"-with-a-giant-diamond-tattooed-on-his-face-crying-in-the-driveway-after-being-kicked-off-From-G's-To-Gents-because-he-wasn't-given-a-chance supercut. Oh wait!

There's a lot of defensiveness among Professional Entertainers about being "kept in a box." These guys are always complaining about it. "It's so hard to do something different." "Everyone wants to keep you within the limited confines of your pre-determined media image." "Just because I made Duets doesn't mean I shouldn't be allowed to have a lifestyles newsletter called Goop.com dedicated towards a self-satisfied life of bourgeois satisfaction!" And cetra. But all of that whining is missing the point. People aren't derisive of these Entertainers just because they're doing something new. They're derisive of these Entertainers because they're doing something new badly. It's not that it's just too weird to see a basketball player rapping so much as it's that you cannot rap, Shaquille O'Neal.

The point is that it's really easy to do something different if you do it well. Comedians, just as a totally random example picked for no reason at all, can take on serious dramatic roles if they are good in them. It's when you indulge yourself in some weird wish fulfillment that outclasses your actual talent that things become a failure pile in a sadness bowl. (Thanks for the tip, JCA.)

Oh jeez. One time, when I was in college (that's right, COLLEGE) I went to see John Waters talk about his career and answer audience questions. At one point, someone asked him a question about Edith Massey, who played Edie in Pink Flamingos. John Waters said that when you rode in the car with Massey, she would provide a manic, uninterrupted commentary of everything that she saw. "Blue car fire hydrant yellow house big dog wool skirt red car red car white car oak tree pretty bird white house." I feel like Hollywood is like that now, except every time they see something, they make it into a movie. How else to explain thinking that you could possibly pull a compelling and meaningful narrative out of a fucking VIEW-MASTER?

From the HollywoodReporter: