- You can claim it’s going to end badly for Olympic
women's gymnastics champion Gabrielle Douglas, but you can’t argue it’s a bad
gamble. As the defending all-around gold medalist points toward becoming the
first gymnast in nearly 50 years to repeat as Olympic champion, she knows that
her time in the spotlight is limited. She can compete at the 2016 Summer
Olympics in Rio, but after that she’s going to age out of the gymnastics game
and that means she needs to be thinking about her next move. Thus, she and her
family will be featured in a new Oxygen reality show debuting later this year, "Douglas
Family Gold." The show will be co-produced by Douglas and her mother,
Natalie Hawkins, among others, and will follow Douglas as she trains for the
Games next summer. She will never be hotter than she is right now as the first
African-American to win the all-around title after scoring the win at the 2012
London Games as part of the "Fierce Five" that also won the team gold
medal. If that means pimping her life out in very scripted, contrived reality
television form in order to make some extra money and attempt to build herself
from perky, adorable gymnast into pop culture personality, she is clearly
willing to do so. Her gymnastics remain strong at this point, as she returned
to training last summer and finished fourth at the Jesolo Trophy in Italy last
weekend in her first meet in nearly three years. Taking three years off from
your chosen sport is a long time even if you might need a break after many more
years of relentless training with über-intense coaches, so adding reality TV
cameras to the mix should create quite the circus sideshow………
- Ladies, the career opportunity of a lifetime has arrived. If
you’re at a crossroads in your life or are merely open to something that will
blow your mind and take you places you never imagined going, then you’re going
to want to hear this. Word on the street is that North Korean
authorities are recruiting young women to be part of a revived so-called
"pleasure squad" that entertains dictator Kim Jong Un. The tiny,
gout-riddled despot wants to revive this distinguished group of debauchery,
which was disbanded shortly after Kim's father, Kim Jong Il, mercifully
shuffled off this mortal coil December 2011. The facts about the group are hard
to come by, but the members of its former incarnation reportedly forced to sign
a pledge of secrecy in exchange for money and gifts. If you believe their urban
legend, the women worked as, um, entertainers and received approximately $4,000
before returning to their hometowns. By comparison, women who worked in Kim's
palaces and summer homes as maids and cleaners received about half that amount.
But hell, both groups of women also reportedly received home appliances and in
a country where repression is the norm and modern conveniences are a luxury
that most people don’t even know it’s possible to dream about, a nice
washer-dryer combo is something to treasure. Bringing back the Pleasure Squad
is an interesting choice given that K.J. Un disbanded the group because he believed
the women who entertained his father knew too many state secrets. He reportedly
became interested in bringing back his Skank Brigade while recovering from an
undisclosed physical ailment at one of his summer cottages last year, believing
the women could have made the recuperation process more, um, pleasant……….
- In a very punk rock, use-what-you-have display of public
artistry, British rockers The Prodigy projected the artwork for their new album “The Day Is My
Enemy” on a series of London landmarks Thursday night, shamelessly promoting
the project on a massive scale and ensuring that even if the album sucks
abysmally, a hell of a lot of people will know about it. The artwork, featuring
an illustration of a fox, appeared first on the side of Battersea Power Station at 8:30 p.m. Ninety minutes later, it
showed up again, this time on the side of Shoreditch High Street underground
station. The final stop on this overhead projector tour of London was the
Houses Of Parliament shortly before midnight, with the band munificently
documenting the entire public promotional process via their Instagram account. “Residents
and representatives of London town,” the band wrote in the caption for their
final photo of the evening, adding the hashtag “Fuckeemandtheirlaw,” which is
the chorus of their song ‘Their Law’ from 1994’s album “Music For The Jilted
Generation.” It is nice to see a band that has been around for more than two
decades, long before Twitter or Instagram were close to existing, embrace the
role of social media in promoting their work and the brilliant irony of posting
a picture of a fox – i.e. a Fawkes – on the side of parliament is awesome.
Buckingham Palace or the Tower Bridge also would have been bold choices, but
you can lug your projector around the entire city in one night, even if it is
for something truly rock and roll………
- This is perhaps one of the sickest coincidences in the history
of fast food promotions – or is it? Why it happened is up for debate, but no
one is disputing the fact that a wayward pot-bellied pig wandered
into a Burger King restaurant on U.S. Route 30 near
Boswell in southwestern Pennsylvania at what can only be described as a
wonderfully and twistedly ironic time. The eatery was running a two-for-$4
special on bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches, making one wonder if this portly
visitor was there to rain hell down upon the minimum wage earners serving up pieces
and parts of its distant piggy relatives or simply to see if the horror stories
were really true. Check that, because this escaped pet had merely wandered from
its home and took up residence near the fast-food restaurant before wolfing
down some hash browns given to him by one customer and snapping at some others
who got too close before police arrived. It was the sort of call that has to
make an officer remember why he or she got into law enforcement in the first
place, stopping a 300-pound, dirt-loving quadruped from tearing up the booths
and napkin dispensers at a fast food restaurant on the interstate. Employees
were happy to have the pig hauled away and not having to hear any more pig
jokes. Of course, the real joke is the slop Burger King calls food and jams
into their waxy wrappers on plastic trays, but those are problems that no pig
can fix. Well, unless the pigs who pound a couple of whoppers and two orders or
fries and chase it with four refills of their soda cup on their lunch break
learn some dietary self-discipline……….
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