"This winter, the kitchens of the Middle East took to the streets. In Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen, men demonstrated wearing frying-pan basinets. Tin-pot cervellieres. Water-bucket shakos. The green, plastic chain mail of a wastebasket. A young man trussed a rumpled trio of empty water bottles to his head with a swatch of torn bed linen. A protester in Sanaa taped two baguettes and an unleavened pancake of chapati to his skull. None of these impromptu helmets would have stopped a bullet. Few would have softened the vicious blow of a rock hurled in anger. They were not so much body armor as expressions of grassroots desperation. Yet there was nothing laughable about men who had dressed for combat in their sculleries and, taking a page from a Palestinian cookbook, dabbed their keffiyehs in table vinegar and sniffed onions to counter tear gas. Their ad-lib battle-rattle bespoke a kind of sincerity, an innocence of purpose. And it was apropos: The high cost of food was one reason people protested in the Middle East and Maghreb." (ForeignPolicy)
"Speaking of gentlemen, Sir Tom Stoppard dropped in for a visit in New York a couple of years ago. He’s erudite, friendly to all and sundry, and never shows off his vast knowledge outside his plays. His son Ed Stoppard plays a lead part in yet another British triumph which recently arrived in these shores, the new version of Upstairs Downstairs. Fans of the British aristocracy will like this one as much as the 70s oldie which ran for years in Blighty. I remember it well. All England would stay home to watch the weekly dish, and the characters became part of the language—so much so, that someone took the actor who played Lord Bellamy to White’s Club, introduced him at the bar as Bellamy, and for a while got away with it. The story was told to me by the actor’s son, Andy Langton, who eventually became a member of White’s. Upstairs Downstairs appears on Sundays on PBS. The other British gem is Downton Abbey, whose creator has just been knighted by the Queen for making the aristocracy look so good for a change." (Taki)
"A film’s success rises or falls on the smallest of details. And so it was that the director of this month’s medieval stoner comedy Your Highness found himself in a boardroom with the suits at Universal Studios, discussing every last facet of his minotaur’s manhood. How to light the half-man/half-bull’s prosthetic appendage? How large should the dimensions be? And what would the anatomy suggest about the beast’s religious leanings? 'We took the leap, culturally, and we circumcised him,' the director, David Gordon Green, explains. Yes, much has changed in Hollywood since Clark Gable pushed the boundaries of taste by appearing without an undershirt in 1934’s It Happened One Night. For decades the dividing line between an R and an X rating was decidedly phallic-shaped. Not anymore. Male genitalia are getting unprecedented screen time at the multiplex and all over premium cable. 'Male nudity has a humorous value because it’s taboo,' says Green, whose film garnered an R. 'There’s a gracefulness to the female form that’s subject to this Last Tango in Paris, Jayne Mansfield–type of adoration. Where guys just don’t get the same shot. So that, for me, is where it’s ripe to come in and pull the pants down.' Full-frontal dude-ity isn’t limited to visual punchlines in comedies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and this summer’s The Hangover Part II. Male genitals (or, to use the now popular Hollywood vernacular, 'peens') are cropping up across the cultural grid, on cable shows like Starz’s Spartacus: Blood and Sand and HBO’s Game of Thrones, and in blue-chip Broadway fare like Equus, where Daniel Radcliffe showed he’s more than just Harry Potter. Over the years, A-list actors like Richard Gere, Tom Cruise, and Ewan McGregor have also played the full-monty card to establish their dramatic bona fides, but the full-frontal shots were fleeting. Now nude guys get much more hang time." (TheDailyBeast)
"Howard (Stern) asked if (Gilbert Gottfried) was trying to hold on to that Aflac gig. Gilbert said he was in a daze and he's not sure what he was doing. He said he was shocked that of all the things he's said in his career that it was this thing that got him in trouble. He said none of them had apparently heard of Howard's show. Howard said it wouldn't have been anything if 75 percent of Aflac's business wasn't in Japan ... Howard asked how he got fired. Gilbert said he found out through his agent. Howard asked if the agent told him to do damage control. Gilbert said he did. He said the media was reporting that it was comments and remarks that he made and not 'jokes.' He said if they had said 'jokes' then it wouldn't have been a big deal. Gilbert said the two first days on Twitter were like psycho emails saying that they were going to kill him and his family. He said after that it was an overflowing of fans saying that he was just joking and that's what he does. Howard asked if he composed the apology himself. Gilbert said that came out of a machine like 'Apology 176, okay, lets use that.' Howard said that Gilbert is all about himself and he's not thinking about other people. The apology was obviously not written by him. Howard said Gilbert has been Tweeting other jokes about the Tsunami since then. Howard said his income must have been cut down by a lot. Gilbert said of course it was. Howard asked if he'll be able to get more commercial work now. Gilbert said it's a funny thing. He said he realized that the tsunami was on the news every minute but then one day he woke up and Chris Brown throwing a chair had taken over." (Marksfriggin)
"Haley Barbour had his presidential announcement plan lined up: A May 2 launch, followed by a fly-around to Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada and Florida, before winding up in in Jackson on Saturday the 7th for a big home-state fundraising bash ... For weeks, the insider betting had been that he was a lock to get in the race. One of his closest advisers said that after talking to the governor following his trips earlier this month to South Carolina and New Hampshire, it seemed clear that a declaration was only a matter of when. With next week’s announcement tour in the works and the New Hampshire leg of the trip already disclosed, his presidential campaign seemed a go. But even as he was taking all the usual steps – calling donors, visiting early states, hiring operatives – there were signs that the Mississippian wasn’t all in. As he traveled the country testing the waters over the last few months he had begun privately using the same phrase to describe his intense exploratory schedule: he called it his 'death march,' a Republican who heard Barbour use the term recalled." (Politico)
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