I saw Birdman a while back. I didn’t actually like it very much, but I respected it — it’s a movie about actors acting about acting, and they acted the hell out of it. I was totally unsurprised that it won a bunch of Oscars last night, because the people voting on it were all in the acting business, and rightly enough, they all voted for the well-acted movie that was about them.
Brian Williams got smacked around hard for his confabulation of events, in which he placed himself in a helicopter that was shot at by insurgents (he wasn’t — it was a different helicopter in a group he was flying with). But he at least acknowledged that he was wrong.
Now Bill O’Reilly has been caught in a similar exaggeration. Do you think he backed down? Oh hell no..
I enjoyed this video of one guy playing the same tune in the style of 10 different well-known guitarists, but at every change I was thinking Jimi Hendrix has got to be next. And he wasn’t.
Ken Ham has declared Darwin’s birthday, 12 February, to be Darwin Was Wrong Day. It’s another brilliant misstep for that bastion of inanity: browse the #DarwinWasWrongDay hashtag.
I’m not a fan of Taylor Swift — that bouncy squeaky-clean all-American stuff just leaves me cold. But I am a big fan of Trent Reznor, because there’s nothing better on a road trip than cranking up some throbbing industrial beats as you’re cruising down the road, and I like a gritty raw sound. But who would have guessed that mashing up a duet would be so interesting? Injecting a bit of corruption and rot into the pure paleness of a Taylor Swift song is surprisingly listenable.
Last night, my twitter feed lit up with the news that Annie Lennox was singing on the Grammies. I love me some Lennox, but awards shows annoy me, so I didn’t tune in. But just to get Monday started, here’s a classic from Annie Lennox and David Bowie and Queen:
This woman does 17 British accents (well, she cheats a bit and jumps over the Irish Sea a couple times). I’m an American, and a Yankee at that, so I’m a poor judge, but a few of them sounded a bit off. Also, I know she isn’t hitting all the variations: there were people all over the UK who’d say something to me in a particularly thick local speech variant, and it just sounded like Dutch being gargled through a misfiring diesel engine, to me, and that was just Alan Moore.
He’s going to be touring a few cities in America this spring, and then Robin Ince is going to Australia for more shows. Everyone should go.
I know what I’ll be reading in July: Go Set a Watchman, the old new novel from Harper Lee.
"Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father, Atticus," the publisher’s announcement reads. "She is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood."
