Issue 121

News/ Review of the Day: The Bratz Cult. (This issue may or may not have been guest authored by James Lipton.)
When I first discovered this movie in the trailers leading up to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, I assumed that it would either be a classic on par with ...if, or the biggest bomb dropped since they stopped bomb testing in Nevada. Little did I know that it would be both. It would only be a matter of a few months before I would be able to watch it when I got the DVD (since my usual channels of gaining such films had failed me), shocking my mother even more than the purchase of Natural Born Killers I had announced to her only moments before. What I saw astounded me. With its blatantly obviously failed attempts at satire (from the school-enforced cliques [including, bizarrely, students who "liked to dress like dinosaurs", which meant putting dinosaur paraphernalia on standard clothes] to blatantly obvious homages to other current fixtures of teenage culture, like High School Musical and Super Sweet Sixteen) and completely outlandish sights treated as if they were completely normal (including several of the aforementioned cliques, a girl undergoing her second Sweet Sixteen on a whim, and contortionist-violinists), I am surprised that there aren't more people who share opinions of this film as I do: It's so bad, it's good (or, in a neologism one student creates, "awesomeful"), on par with virtually everything of note that Ed Wood has done or Manos: The Hands of Fate. It's as if the makers of the film were playing an elaborate joke, hoping that the barely-pubescent teenyboppers this film seemed to be marked towards would get the story of friendship, but that everybody else would notice what I did, but they clearly didn't, if most of the reviews of this movie I've seen are any note. It's about time that people started noticing this movie for what it is; a trainwreck so bad, it somehow turns out good. Maybe in a few years, this movie will end up undergoing a second birth, with another run in theaters, people dressing up as and quoting characters in the movie, and possibly even a drinking game where the viewer must drink a shot of vodka whenever something absurd happens, and double whenever the characters make note of it. Of course, this may be too much, especially the drinking game, but it could happen. In fact, if this manages to become common enough, I would be quite pleasantly surprised.

Band Name of the day: Awesomeful. From the above movie I just reviewed/borderline hagiographied.

Film Idea of the Day: A Teenager rises to fame, his parents manipulate him for his money and fame, sometimes blackmailing him, and he ends up defiantly exiting it all, only to end up like Lemuel Pitkin in A Cool Million post-mortem.

Quote of the Day: "My South Will Rise Again"
_______Robert E. Lee, Squidbillies, this is the worst double endendre ever in what may possibly be the most bizarre Adult Swim ever.

Link of the Day: A short listing of some of the most evil sections of The Bible.

Issue 120

News: Lewis' Trilemma: Mad, Bad, or Flawed?
On Newspeak Dictionary, I am currently debating a person who is arguing about my views on religion. One of the arguments he has made (in addition to the Pascal's Wager I dissected earlier) is a famous argument which, far from being the supplementary argument that Pascal's Wager was, is said to be the major foundation of Christian Apologetics itself. As the argument goes, since Jesus claimed to be God, he must have either been on the level, insane, or one of the biggest cons in history. However, the argument is flawed on many levels. First, the fact is that Jesus himself does not seem to advertise his divinity to the same degree as his biographers. Indeed, the term "son of God" inextricably linked to him never, in its original form, implied Divine Paternity, but was a term for an especially holy man (as people like Billy Graham or the Pope may be to many Christians). Second, the Gospel accounts may not be entirely accurate. This is the most obvious of the counter-claims to me, since, as Bart Ehrman showed in his book, even if there was a divinely inspired text, what we've got by now has been messed up so that the original would most likely be unrecognizable. Third, even if we do accept Lewis' claim but conclude that Jesus was insane (indeed, in Mark, one of Jesus' relatives excuses his behavior by claiming him to be crazy), it should be obvious that mental illness and mental ability are not mutually exclusive by any means. One need only look at Glenn Gould, Kurt Godel, Howard Hughes, or Albert Einstein to see what I mean. Fourth, even if Jesus is to be disregarded as a con, many of his teachings were not originally his; even the Golden Rule dated back three millenia before Jesus' birth.

Band Name of the Day: The Black Dahlia Avengers, from the book to be reviewed below.

Review and Movie Idea of the Day: The Black Dahlia Avenger. An ex-cop, after going through his father's possessions, discovers that he was, in fact, the Black Dahlia murderer. He even manages to compile his case to an LA DA, who admits that his case is solid. Of course, his theory has yet to be accepted, but I still believe that his story is pretty solid, as opposed to many other theories (including those who claimed that Woody Guthrie and Orson Welles did it). I am planning to make a film version of the father's life story in the visual tradition of Love is the Devil and Natural Born Killers and the narrative tradition of Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence.

Quote of the Day: "I'm not a paranoid deranged millionaire. Damnit, I'm a billionaire."
_______________Howard Hughes.

Link of the Day: Turn Yourself into a South Park Character