PLEASE BE CAREFUL. There was a report in Variety this morning that you have been cast in an upcoming movie called Hungry Rabbit Jumps. Congratulations! If I had things my way, you would be cast in everything. You are good at acting and you are great at having a pretty face. They should print your face on pillowcases in hospitals so that sick people could hold the pillows and feel better. Is that weird? Let's move on, January Jones.
You need to be careful because while we are happy that you are getting more work, your Hungry Rabbit Jumps co-star is Nicolas Cage, who makes almost exclusively horrible movies. And it's directed by Roger Donaldson, who made Cocktail and Dante's Peak. I'm not saying that this is going to be a bad movie. Who knows! I don't know. I'm just saying PLEASE BE CAREFUL.
You've also signed up to star in another movie, called Unknown White Male.
Last night, of course, marked the finale of your second season, so in some senses this could have been goodbye for now. A temporary hiatus, as you all go back to your foreclosing McMansions and pour white wine into your wounds. Brush out your wigs. Take a few months to rest your scream-muscles and your refill your betrayal batteries. But I'm not saying goodbye "for now." I'm saying goodbye "forever."
I mean, honestly, we can't keep doing this, can we? Don't answer that.
You were a lot of fun last year, in season one. We were all on board with The Black Real Housewives. And Kim! What an American Treasure she turned out to be. Not only is she attentive and caring towards her children, a talented singer, and the definition of a housewife (in that she is married and lives in a house, not an ugly duplex), but she's also just really pleasant to look at. (THE REAL OPPOSITES OF THIS BLOG POST!) We have all been so lucky and to have been able to invite her into our homes every week.
Dear Celebrities Who Will Not Stop Doing Kanye Jokes,
During last night's Emmys, three separate references were made to Kanye West's interruption of Taylor Swift at last week's MTV Video Music Awards. That is actually fewer than one might have expected, but it is still at least three references too many. At least most of them were just spoken allusions to the nontroversey, but the worst was Justin Timberlake's self-satisfied improvisation:
Yuck. With his smirkface and his rude jokes. You know a joke is successful when it gets no laughs and you feel compelled to follow it up with "no, but seriously." The worst.
But he is not the only one! All kinds of you guys are doing this.
Needless to say (as if that is even an expression that makes any sense, since it precedes saying the thing. Sometimes people just like to use more words, I guess) I am not looking forward to your new show. I have never been looking forward to it. You were terrible on the Tonight Show, and it's not like the constrictions of the Tonight Show were the problem. It's not like a new show is going to prove you're not terrible. Same you. The Tonight Show was just a shell, and you were the pandering, hacky, middle-brow snail. And now you are getting a new shell, but the snail will be the sa--you get it.
When you announced details of your show, I was the same amount of unexcited. You won't have a desk? OK. Again, I never really thought the desk was the problem. That's like saying you're not going to wear a necktie on your new show, as a way to get people excited. Not exciting! You are going to have correspondents? That could be fine, but somehow I feel confident that you will ruin even that. And besides, you bristled at comparisons to the Daily Show, as if the Daily Show was a stupid, unfunny thing to be compared to. It's not. You know what is a stupid, unfunny thing to be compared to? You. And then there is the race track. Oh gosh. What are we even talking about here?
But, Jay Leno, who is reading this and taking this seriously, I would like you to understand that I have always been comfortable with admitting when something is just not for me.
As a 69-year-old man, I continue to be completely ignorant of what you're actually about. I mean, I know that you're about adolescent vampires, and I know that at some point you're also about adolescent CGI werewolves. But I haven't read the books, and I have not seen the movies, because reading the books and seeing the movies won't make my hands stop hurting when a storm is approaching.
But I have to admit that for as much hay as we all make of you (the amount of hay being roughly the equivalent of how much money you have made, which is in turn roughly equivalent to how loud teenage girls scream when there is anything that even remotely has anything to do with you going on, so lots of hay is what I'm saying), and for as derisive as we can all sometimes be towards this thing (you) that obviously appeals to millions of people in a way that probably nothing we ever do will even come close to--and, yes, maybe we are a little jealous even as we pretend that intellectually and also aesthetically you are beneath us, and in reality it's probably a defensive reaction to mask the fact that sometimes we just feel kind of alone in this world--OH MAN, Twilight Phenomenon, some of the unexpected third party creations inspired by you are killing us these days. We are dead!
Dear People Who Would Actually Go to a Saw-themed Haunted House,
So, I heard about your haunted house. It's going to be at the Circus Circus casino in Las Vegas this October as part of a promotional tie-in with Saw VI (Saw VI!). The idea is that the haunted house would recreate some of the classic "games" that the movies' victims "play." Spooky! Producers Mark Burg and Oren Koules of Twisted Pictures described your haunted house this way: "Visitors from around the world will be able to experience the terror of Jigsaw first hand."
Right. (Congratulations, world. The United Nations should organize an International High Five Council.)
But, Sawggalos, it would be much cheaper to just buy a bear trap and fasten it to your head with a timer switch so that it tears your face in half if you can't get the key out of your best friend's intestines fast enough.
I am writing to you from the summer of 2009. Do you remember it? What a summer it has been so far, and it is only July! For one thing, many people have died. Summer bummer! Ed McMahon, Billy Mays, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite, and Karl Malden have all died! (And Ron Silver, Bea Arthur and Dom Deluise died in the spring, which unless things have changed drastically in the past year, is very close to the summer!) There was also the whole Iranian political uprising. Remember? When Americans bravely changed their Twitter avatars green? Oh, and it rained a lot, at least in New York, which was kind of a drag. Has it rained a lot so far in the summer of 2010? Do people still write such boring letters in the summer of 2010? They probably write boring HOVER LETTERS, am I right?
From here, it is impossible to know what things are like where you are. Sure, it has only been a year, but a lot can happen in a year. The world is so different than it was 12 months ago (Barack Obama is president, the Black Eyed Peas are back) that I wouldn't even dare to guess what is in store for all of us. Predicting the future is a fool's game.
But I can tell you one thing that is happening where you are right now (spooky!). Unless the Earth is covered in water--and let's be honest, there's a more than decent chance that the Earth is covered in water--Wipeout is still on the air. I just read this morning (2009) that ABC has already ordered another season of Wipeout for next summer. Congratulations! You're probably sitting around on your hover chairs drinking your space juice and thinking, "they don't make rocketcars like they used to, but at least we still have Wipeout." You would think that a show like Wipeout wouldn't need to be ordered a year in advance, what with its hastily cobbled together Chuck-E-Cheese set and its campy sports announcers as if it was a real thing. You'd think you could just wait 10 months, see how things are going, and then put the production into place at the last minute and no one would be able to tell the difference. Although one of the show's producers said that they're building a new set for next summer (goosebumps) and that it will be "nothing like anybody has ever seen." Oh really? Do people get punched and bopped and knocked in the head with padded objects until they fall into a pool of mud? Because that is a lot like something that people have seen.
And will continue to keep seeing in 2010! Yay! (Yay?) Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get to the lake house to mail this.
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.
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