I Love Lady Gaga's New Back-Up Dancers

I have now been forwarded the Lady Gaga in a lab coat video enough times that I just have to go ahead and archive it here.  It doesn't hurt that no matter how many times I receive the "You have to watch this" e-mail, I can't help but do just that.  It is addictive.  It is hilarious.  It is the lab rats of the world taking something cool and dorking it up for their own amusement.  The fact that those who haven't done time in a lab can only shake there head at is they say, "Why would anyone make this" only makes it that much better in my mind.  Best use of NIH grant dollars yet.

This blog post is sponsored by Veidt Enterprises.

Big ... Meh

You would think that if a show you watched every episode of a television show over the course of five years, you might actually care.  But when it comes to "Big Love", the best I can do is a big shoulder shrug.  It was a soapy sudsy tail of family.  A psuedo-Morman, polygamous family but still if fashioned itself as a story of family.  Unfortunately, it was an extremely hatable, stunted family that was almost impossible to route for.  In fact, it was the kind of family that could only exist on television, regardless of marital status.  The middle wife of the group, Nicolette Grant, is shrewish individual that noone would stand to have as a college roommate let alone a life partner.  Yet, the horrendous, self-centered, navel-gazing characters were not the worst part of the show.  The writing was.

There so many nonsensical turns and unbelievable happenings on the show but instead of listing them all, let's just stick to escape from Mexico by dismemberment as the best of the worst.  Somehow a whole army of armed goons can't both shoot the people who just chopped up their prophet and make a phone call for an ambulance.  I guess crazy polygamous sects are multitaskers.  As bad as this was though, smaller but much more regular failures by the show runners were much more annoying.  The characters never grew during the entire five year period.  Despite everything that happened, they never changed.  Their character defects at the beginning of the show where the same at the end.  An episode would end with the wives reconciling, bonding, and vowing to be BBF's only to return to the exact same argument the very next episode.  Groundhog's day, everyday.

Well, it is over now.  Likely to quickly be forgotten and buried in the TV graveyard next to Evening Shade and Amen.  And how did it die.  Like it lived.  Illogical and irrational behavior on the part of the family members, the wives hurling insults at each other and doing things to deliberately get at each other, and a trying to hard to be shocking ending that somehow left the wives living happily ever after with no real income to speak of.   At least bug-eyes got to come back for a 5 second cameo before it ended.  And at least it wasn't the Lost finale.

This blog post is sponsored by Hendrickson's Home Plus.

We Will Live Forever Through our Cartoons

One (of the many) great thing about pop culture is that it gives us a common language. Something that we can bring up at your local church, school, gin joint, malt shop, or disco and everyone immediately recognizes, identifies with, or at least as an opinion on. And it sure beats talking about the weather again. But pop culture has always carried the black eye of being the snack food of society. Eat it up your Ho-Ho but ten minutes later your hungry again and go in search of some deep-fried Oreos. That just isn't the case anymore. Pop culture has transcended it mortal confines and now lives eternal within our greater cultural gestalt. We no longer sit around the fireplace listening to grandfathers tales of his days of ducking the draft or hear about how our grandmother's grandmother ventured out on the Oregon Trail, got dysentery, and died. Now, instead of handing down stories of Paul Bunyan and John Henry, we revel in the chance to expose our kids to the Transformers, Strawberry Shortcake, and Scooby Doo. This is our new oral tradition. These our generational touchstones that will be referred back to again and again. As a result our media and art are changing to reflect the entrainment of these characters on our permanent consciousness. Where art used to center on religious imagery because it was a nearly universal reference point. But our pop culture heroes are now replacing the Madonna inside the gilded frame. We decorate our walls with pictures of them. They cover our children's bedrooms. And mark the cubicles of every IT worker. Take for instance the Disney Princesses I discussed yesterday. Because everyone, young and old, knows these characters, knows their history, their backstory, one can give new significance to their visages by layering on top of it any popular trope. Or one can attempt to engage in societal commentary by placing the Princesses into modern environs. Luckily enough I have examples of both. One giving the Princesses a nice zombie make-over and another giving the Princesses a less than happily ever after.

This blog post is sponsored by Mario Brothers Plumbing Services.

Every Girls Wants to be a Princess (trademarked)

Royalty as viewed in modern culture is not based in reality. With the faux-excitement of the commemorative plate buying set for the William/Kate pairing excepted, the monarchy has lost all romanticism and exist only as a useless burden on the European tax payers. Instead, in today's world, there is only one royal title that has any real value and it is branded. Unless you wear the crown of a Disney Princess, your run of the mill king or queen can expect about the same level of respect from the general populace as guy who tries to predict the college basketball teams that will make the NCAA tournament for a living. But if you happened to spring from the loins of the Lord of Atlantis or utilize rodents as your clothing designers, you will have a good portion of the XX individuals in this country spending the first 10 years of their life ready to sacrifice their brother for the chance to be you. That's were the cache is. Forget Princess Grace. The only princesses that most generations from here on out will know by name are Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Cinderella, and Rapunzel. Most times I have a complete detachment from reality in favor of world view shaped by primary colored animations. Yet are these really the role models our daughters should have. Airheaded nymphs that believe what ever they are told. 16 year-olds ready to run off and marry the first man they meet in the woods. Disney does many things well but providing positive role models for young girls. Maybe not.

This blog post is sponsored by Vandelay Industries.