Many folks who fancy themselves individualistic iconoclasts like to imagine that there is some 80’s movie villain guy or some beautiful blonde debutante girl (with huge knockers) who is holding them back. The dismal reality is that counterculture fails to be stronger because, too often, it eats its own.

Comedian Chris Rock does a joke about how the reason women do not rule the world is because they hate each other i.e. when a man sees his buddy with a great girl, he thinks he wants one like that, and, when a woman sees her pal with a great guy, she thinks she wants that guy. Many disadvantaged groups, from Bohemians to Blacks, have to deal with some pushback from the overculture and undermining in their own culture. Black community leaders have addressed some of the issue within their community by political action, forging ahead, and coining phrases such as “hater” to describe sometime peers who seek to destroy those like them who find any success.

Counterculture community leaders deal with this cultural cannibalism by posting that they are totally going to stop tweeting on Twitter. Next time you feel like you just can’t get a break, take a look in the mirror and ask yourself when was the last time you said something supportive to or about someone in your community and when was the last …

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Some time ago, I wrote a piece about Secret Diary of a Call Girl, then airing on Showtime. This weekend, the writer of the book and blogs the show was based on came forward and unmasked herself. Rumor is that she decided to expose her true identity because some ex-boyfriend was shopping her story to the tabloids. She says she decided to out herself because it wasn’t much fun not being able to go to her own book release party for the recently released Belle De Jour’s Guide to Men.

Around this time last year, Belle wrote in her blog, “What I write about is something every depiction of prostitution in this country in recent years has not been permitted to say. There will be no comeuppance. There will be no guilt and shame. And most importantly, there will be no white goddamn knight . . . Myself, personally, I am enjoying life. Neither in spite of nor because of my past but because I choose to . . . because no one else wants to say these things, I can: I will. I am unrepentant. I make no apologies for my past or what I write. And my future will be no worse than yours as a result.”

It will be sociologically interesting to see how outing herself pans out …

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Olatunde Osunsanmi directs the beautiful Milla Jovovich in The Fourth Kind. Close Encounters was the third kind i.e. contact with extraterrestrials. The Fourth Kind is alien abduction. Apparently, there is a part of Alaska which has had an unusually high number of missing persons and an unusually high number of otherwise credible people who appear to truly believe they have been the victims of alien abductions.

The movie is part documentary and part reenactment, juxtaposing videotapes psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler made of patients with reenactments by Milla Jovovich. I may have a stronger opinion one way or the other, after seeing the movie, but I’m personally on the fence on what to think about alien life forms performing experiments on humans.

By the way, according to the alien interaction scale, the second kind is collecting evidence of aliens and the first kind is just sighting a UFO.

Perhaps Kids in the Hall can offer some insight:

Alien 1: So what’s bothering you?
Alien 2: Ah, lately I just keep wondering what’s the point?
Alien 1: The point?
Alien 2: Yeah. What’s the point of what we do?
Alien 1: Sorry, I don’t follow you
Alien 2: Well, I mean, we travel 250,000 light years across the universe, abduct humans, probe them anally and release them.
Alien 1: Yeah? And?
Alien 2: Well, doesn’t it seem kind of pointless?
Alien 1: I really don’t think about it.
Alien 2: Well don’t you think you should?
Alien 1: No, I don’t think I should. I don’t think I should question the …

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Gingerdead’s Calan Ree asks the important questions. Why is candy corn so emblematic of Halloween and why does candy corn taste so much less good than it looks like it should?

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In March of last year, Los Angeles was blanketed with some kinda misogynist-seeming billboards in promotion of a movie called Forgetting Sarah Marshall. You can check out a post April Flores wrote on the topic for an in-depth analysis of the ad campaign, but the gist of it was finding humor in being insanely hateful about an ex. Not insanely hateful with wit, just insanely hateful. I often find hostile humor funny, but this was just stuff on the cleverness level of “you suck” and “my mommy thinks you suck too”. So, at any rate, I didn’t bother to see the movie.

This weekend, I was feeling a little under the weather and I get free On-Demand, so I thought without much optimism that I’d give a comedy a few minutes to draw me in. I turned on Forgetting Sarah Marshall, fully expecting to turn it off within less than five minutes. Go figure.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall is actually a really nice romantic comedy. The humor is done with great humanity and one of the most notable aspects of the movie is precisely that nobody is the villain. Kristen Bell might be the sadistic Elle on Heroes, but, as the character of Sarah Marshall, she plays the role in a fully humanized sympathetic way. Writer and leading man Jason Segal’s jilted Peter Bretter is precisely …

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Most years, friends of mine have pumpkin carving parties. This year, the economy sucks so hard that spending a bunch of dough on squash abuse seems profligate. So I’ve been getting my jack o’lantern fix from the internet and photos of Halloweens past.

The Pumpkin Lady posts, in addition to her premium templates, free pumpkin carving templates. I admit that watching her pumpkin carving videos is not the same as the real thing, but it is still fun.

One of the supermarkets near me hasn’t been selling their pumpkins at all this year. I so deeply want to buy like a zillion of them, when they are marked down on November 1, and have Halloween late this year. And I just might get me and my unsavory pals some pumpkin carving template designs from Pumpkin Lady and do just that. If every day is Halloween anyway, that is really just taking it one step farther. Whoo-hoo! Pushing the envelope!

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It seems like it should be unnecessary to point out that models are human beings, but a lot of people seem to have difficulty with this. Nobody is as beautiful as their best photo or as hideous as their worst. Ugly may go to the bone, but beauty is still only skin deep. All true.

The nature of digital interaction makes the relationship of humans with their images more difficult. Once upon a time, my unsavory pals and I could hang out at our punk rock group house and, if someone said a model in some of the trannie porn in our living was not feminine enough, nobody’s feelings were going to get hurt.

Today, a lot of people seem to be polarized in their responses to imagery, in particular in their responses to sexual imagery. On the one hand, there are people who callously and casually critique a model’s weight or body parts in public, even though the human being in those photos is going to see those comments. On the other hand, there are people who, on some deep lizard brain level, feel that, if they have seen someone’s hoo-ha, even someone who was paid to show it to them, that person is practically their mate.

It does not make you respectful and/or feminist, if you pathetically slavishly agree with everything someone ever says or posts because you have seen naked pictures or video of them, especially members of your gender of …

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Long ago, in a land far far from here, I lived in a punk rock group house with a lot of fans of Steve Purcells’ Sam and Max characters and their unsavory pals. Sam and Max was a hilariously antisocial comic strip. Assuming one thinks punk humor is hilarious and freelance talking animal police are a good source of humor.

Some time later, LucasArts decided to make a game based on the Sam and Max comics. The internet tells me that LucasArts was Steve Purcells’ day job and Sam and Max were a long-running LucasArts in-joke, which is the sort of little fun fact to know and share that tended to be unknown pre-internet. I could comment on this more, assuming I read all of the background info (which I haven’t yet), but suffice it to say that LucasArts actually made a pretty pleasingly unsavory game based on Sam and Max. The internet also tells me that the characters were eventually made into a television show which aired on a secondary FOX channel called FOX Kids. Which is weird both because it is simply weird and because I’ve never watched it, despite my affection for Sesame Street and Back at the Barnyard.

I’m excited to report that the awesome old Sam and Max comics are all back in print now. Full disclosure: the source of …

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Edit: I was just feeling glum because someone I respect wrote something I wish were true, which I do not believe is true. I don’t feel like I was able to fully express my thoughts on this.

Full disclosure: Bing is an advertiser on this site, yet BlueBlood.net does not on the first dozen pages of search results for a search on Blue Blood. SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is internet professional lingo for the process by which someone expert in this area would attempt to fix Bing’s search results so they would no longer be defective in this regard.

I’ve been really bummed out all day because of something Derek Powazek wrote. (Also, I made the mistake of watching this week’s brilliant but melancholy Mad Men on TiVo to snap myself out of it. Doh.) Halcyon first turned me on to Derek Powazek’s writing. Derek Powazek tends to write useful articles about how to make good web sites. He has an engaging style and manages to speak clear tech talk. I think we shook hands once at an event, but we do not know each other; I’m just a fan.

Entertainment industry professionals always used to joke with me and Forrest Black about Blue Blood in print being the “trade mag of cool”, maybe because we always found the next big thing and provided contact …

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So the nice girl next door at Evergreen Terrace is going to be sort of taking it off for Playboy. A Playboy spokeswoman seems to indicate that Marge Simpson will only be showing implied nudity in her three page pictorial, despite having landed the cover of Playboy for all newsstand copies. (Subscribers will get a non-cartoon celebrity on the cover. No word on whether it is a naked celeb.) The old saying goes, implied nudity is a lot like implied food. I don’t a hundred percent agree, but it seems like doing Playboy should equal conservative nudes because that is their format. Unless Marge were just doing an interview, in which case I’m not sure about her being the sexy covergirl, much as I love The Simpsons.

I think a number of people keep saying Lois Griffin from Family Guy should do Playboy next, because they know Lois Griffin would actually show the goods. Let’s be realistic here and see that Lois Griffin would be a great fit for Hustler. Regardless, Marge Simpson doing Playboy is a very cute way to celebrate The Simpsons 20th anniversary. Yup, The Simpsons have been on the air for twenty years.

Playboy CEO Scott Flanders, who replace Hugh Hefner offspring Christie Hefner this summer, states that he is really excited about having a cartoon on the cover …

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