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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I’ve now had time to sleep on it and reflect on NASA bombing the moon and I think it is okay in an Armageddon sort of way. I mean, I can accept all sorts of awful hardships in my own life, so long as they make a good story later. Why should I hold nation states to a higher standard?

NASA decided it would be awesome to bomb the moon, because a circus clown told them it would be a green thing to do, as the world needs clean water. Not just any circus clown though. A circus clown who is into acrobatics and very very very rich. All totally logical. If a writer pitched Batman having to stop the Joker from putting explosives on the moon, the idea would be dismissed as too ridiculous. Allow me to recap: NASA IS BOMBING THE MOON BECAUSE A CIRCUS CLOWN TOLD THEM TO. To discover ice water humanity already knows is there. Toss in double digit unemployment, the meltdown of much of the world’s economy, record bankruptcies, record foreclosures, banks and insurance companies looting the United States Treasury among others, the hunting of albinos, and various atrocities around the globe and you’ve got a cyberpunk noir too dark and too implausible to sell to any publisher.

Speaking of water, the Mayans were innovators in plumbing, built ground level aqueducts, …

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I hope we have recreational space travel within my lifetime. And I’d kind of prefer it if all the extraterrestrials didn’t hate Americans by the time that happens.

When I went to high school in Germany, my (brief) boyfriend at the time was beaten up by protesters during anti-American missile riots. His father actually was a Colonel in the U.S. Air Force, but the pacifists clocked him for a beating because he was hanging out with someone whose parents were attached to an African embassy. Although the hilarious irony of getting his ass kicked by pacifists was lost on their victim, the fact that Americans don’t always exactly get the benefit of the doubt abroad really is kind of a drag.

This weekend, NASA TV will be rebroadcasting an event they did today to raise awareness of the need for clean water. Guy Laliberte, founder of — wait for it — Cirque de Soleil, spent some time on the space station to put this fiesta together and other celeb participants included “former Vice President Al Gore, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Julie Payette, actress Salma Hayek and singers Shakira and Bono.”

But the salient point here is that WE JUST BOMBED THE MOTHERFUCKING MOON! In theory, the idea was to check whether the moon has water we could utilize. Presumably by bombing it. According to multiple accounts …

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