Schadenfreude

Is it just me or has the word schadenfreude become unusually popular recently? I hadn't heard of it, not consciously anyway, before October of this year in an interview the AVClub had with Simon Pegg, and since then I must have seen it pop up in half a dozen different contexts online and elsewhere (Slate, The Stranger, NYTimes, for example).

I've heard it related to the economy, the election season, the holidays, interpersonal internet cruelty. Schadenfreude the term seems to have become as commonplace as schadenfreude the practice. So use it while it's hot!

A Message from Your King

I was reading an article on Slate.com about the waning popularity of NASCAR when I came across these ads in the middle of the text. I now understand that they are advertisements for the TV show Kings, but initially I misread them as messages from the King of Georgia (rather than the fictitious "Gilboa").

I was at first surprised that Georgian royalty had bought ad space on Slate, and then secondly surprised that this Eastern European democratic state had a king. The point of this story is that advertising has finally beaten me (I'm not counting the time Geico's "Tiny House" tricked me, that got everyone).

Soothing Voice

On a night like the one that's just ended, when I've gone to sleep at 3, been woken up by the cat at 5:30 and been unable to resume natural slumber behavior, it'd be nice to have somebody like this around:

Betsey Johnson

This is a design that Betsey Johnson put forward for Michelle Obama to consider for the Inaugural Ball. Dang.




I love how she appears to have drawn herself but black. That hair! And the notes! You're a nutter, Betsey.

No words

Little Dizzle Goes to Sundance

It was announced Thursday that The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, a film I've been working on (as post-production coordinator, assistant editor, volunteer coordinator, etc) for the past few months, will be part of the noncompetitive slate at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. I'm pretty excited about it.

The Grand Guignol

"The Grand Guignol theatre closed its doors in 1962. 'We could never equal Buchenwald,' said its final director, Charles Nonon, on the theatre's decline and fall. 'Before the war, everyone felt that what was happening onstage was impossible. Now we know that these things, and worse, are possible in reality.'"

Sure, blame your theater's closing on the Holocaust. Hack.

Wishlist!

December means wishlists!