I often feel that I’m focusing on the negative’s a bit much on this blog, so I’m really happy (good breeds good, it’s self-perpetuating!) that I’ve found enough stories in the news today that genuinely make me think that some pretty awesome things have been happening on Earth recently.
U.S. teen lives for 118 days without heart. When I saw that headline I was hoping for some Mike the Headless Chicken style action, but the reality was actually far more impressive (yes, more impressive than a headless chicken that didn’t die). A 14 year-old girl from South Carolina who suffered from “dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the patient’s heart becomes weakened and enlarged and does not pump blood efficiently,” spent 118 days having her blood pumped by an artificial device until a transplant became available. The girl did find the whole situation distressing, I imagine I would too if I were living without a heart, but I think its pretty incredible that modern medicine can keep people alive when they can’t pump their own blood, and apparently adults have been kept alive for up to a year with the same process. Incredible.
Scientists, having almost completed sequencing the DNA of a wooly mammoth, are getting all cocky and saying that they can create a living mammoth for less than $10 million dollars. Considering how little you can do with $10 million dollars nowadays, I’d say that resurrecting a long extinct animal is actually a pretty good deal. Apparently this is still firmly in the realms of science theory rather than science practise, which drops this a notch on the awesome-o-meter, but the very possibility that ‘we’ could bring back a beast that last lived around 60,000 years ago is pretty cool.
Next up on the “hey, cool things are happening” list, Shaq, aka The Big Aristotle, is now on Twitter (a micro-blogging network where people post short messages), which makes me feel like less of a nerd for also being a member and tweeting about things that happen during my day. I was under the impression that the jury was still out over whether @The_Real_Shaq was actually the real Shaquille O’Neal, so I did a bit of hunting aqround, and it turns out that its true, Shaq is actually tweeting along with the rest of us. The account was set up after someone created a fake account pretending to be the legendary center (for fun, there was no malice intended), and he wanted to set the record straight. What I really like about this story is that the messages are actually coming directly from the big man himself, most celebrities on Twitter don’t actually write the messages themselves, their assistants and PR reps will do it for them (Britney Spears & Barack Obama are good examples), which I don’t particularly have a problem with, but I think its really cool to see a sports star who is a role model to a lot of kids connecting so directly with his fans.
Guns N’ Roses have finally, finally, released ‘Chinese Democracy’ the bands first release in approximately 75 years. I say released, you can’t actually buy it until Monday, but that album has more leaks than a Welsh village (note: joke may not translate internationally, basically, that’s a lot of leaks), you could just be surfing CNN and somehow end up downloading one of their songs. I know that this item doesn’t really fit in with the spirit of the other stories I’ve mentioned, but I am just so glad that the Chinese Democracy ordeal is coming to an end, not because I’m a particularly big fan of the band, I’m just utterly sick of that album being a punchline, maybe now we can all move on. Oh, and from what I’ve read, the most expensive album of all time kinda sucks.
When something as momentous as a black man becoming President, apparently knocking down many racial barriers in the US, and causing a lot of people in the world to stop hating America, it feels quite hard for me to start writing about something else. Talking about what Lindsay Lohan is doing now, or which star of The Hills hates another star of The Hills just doesn’t seem to hold as much historic weight as my last few posts. I guess I’m just going to have to accept that I can’t cover something groundbreaking every day… or can I?
The Dow Jones made its third-biggest ever points gain today, which I guess would be big news, but there seems to have been a story like that every day over the past few months. I guess I’m getting a bit cynical of this whole economic apocalypse, but it seems to be up and down every day to the point where the only point at which I’d be surprised was if a financial correspondent on TV opened a report by saying “nothin’ much doing on Wall Street today, no ones jumped out the window yet, and no ones having a shower with vintage Dom Perignon champagne… sigh… and now here’s Steve with the weather.”
Someone might, and I’d like to stress the might, and stress it again, mighthave cured HIV.
Specialists are cautiously appraising reports that a bone marrow transplant - with specially selected donor stem cells — appears to have cured a 42-year-old American man of HIV.
Some 20 months after the transplant, there is no sign of HIV in his system, according to Gero Hütter, M.D., and colleagues at the Charité-Medical University here.
“We waited every day for a bad reading,” Dr. Hütter told reporters this week, some eight months after he first reported the case, in February at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.
But so far, he and colleagues have been unable to find the virus in blood, bone marrow, lymph nodes, intestines, or brain, he said.
I can understand how Obamania has taken over the news somewhat over the past week, but how on earth has this story slipped under the radar? I hadn’t even heard about this until I went hunting for news on Google, and I’ve had the news on TV for about 3 hours today (I think that in that time they managed to discuss about five or six stories, but that’s another matter altogether). Added to my earlier caution, the doctors involved have warned that the patient had a rare strain of HIV, and that a bone marrow transplant is too dangerous and too expensive to be a routine treatment for HIV. Still, despite those caveats, that’s still a pretty amazing story.
Right, now I have found a story that truly deserves to follow-on from the momentous occasion that was the 2008 American election. Jennifer Aniston has finally broken her silence over the Brangelina affair in an interview with Vogue magazine, branding what Angelina did (breaking up Brad & Jen’s marriage) and “very uncool“. In turn, Brad Pitt has told Jen to ’shut it’. The whole affair appears to have made the internet explode. Isn’t it great to hear that even impossibly good looking people have problems to?
Okay, I know I’ve said more than once on this blog that us here at Pop Vulture don’t want to officially endorse one candidate or another, not that we’d expect it to sway you in any way, if the blog from a clothing company is going to decide which candidate you’re going to vote for, it might actually be a good idea if you stayed home on election day, and perhaps for a lot of other days too. That said, I’d be very proud if some of the things I’ve written over the past couple of months, and some of the stories I’ve linked to, actually did help to form your opinion and guided you through the extremely complex and important process of deciding who to pick. Or, failing that, just pick the person with the best hair, that almost always works.
That whole paragraph was basically a pretty long-winded way of saying Pop Vulture have released a t-shirt (the one in the picture accompanying this post, surprisingly enough) which features Barack Obama. So, yeah, we’re kind of endorsing Obama. The t-shirt could have just as easily been made with a John McCain image, but I’m afraid that Barack has already pretty much sewn up the graphic design vote. In my other job, writing about t-shirts and hoodies on Hide Your Arms, I’ve been sent e-mails about many, many Obama t-shirts, some well designed and some not so well designed, but I haven’t been sent a single e-mail pointing out a t-shirt supporting the Vietnam veteran, and since I place a massive amount of importance on t-shirts (hey, they’re my life), I think that is a pretty telling statistic.
The t-shirt is based upon the very famous series of prints done by Andy Warhol of Marylin Monroe, a style which has been reused countless times since the white-haired artist popularized it. I think its a very good way of portraying Barack Obama, pointing out the way that he has come to have a foot in both the worlds of celebrity and politics. The McCain campaign tried to publicize that as being a bad thing, but to me that smacked of them saying “why the hell would you want to vote for him? Because he’s popular? Because people like him? Are you a moron?” Just because someone is famous does not mean that they’re the same as Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, its a link that makes a few leaps of imagination for me to fathom, but I guess that the insinuation that Barack could become distracted by his status of being a ‘cool’ world leader is far more important than whether its actually true or not. Yes, Obama gets endorsed by celebrities all the time (don’t worry McCain, you’ve still got Chuck Norris and Heidi Montag!), but its not like you see him going out to brunch with George Clooney and then swinging by the Pitt-Jolie’s for dinner so that they can all talk about how awesome they are.
Let’s hope that when November comes around Obama doesn’t suffer a similar fate as the subject of Warhol’s orginal prints (I’m talking about a political death, by the way) and also that his fame lasts for rather more than the 15 minutes that is so often talked about when Andy Warhol is brought up.
I’ve mentioned in the past that I have only a vague understanding of the current financial crisis that seems to be enveloping the world like some kind of giant squid monster, and despite trying to dress it up with an exciting squid metaphor my interest in the crisis is even more vague, especially since I’ve also mentioned in the past that I’m not actually doing too bad out of it. So with that in mind, I’m going to bail on the $700 billion bailout (equivalent to 2000 apple pies from McDonalds for everyone in America) and talk about some other important ‘news’… Clay Aiken is gay!
You may well have noticed that put quotes around the term ‘news’ because, well, is anyone really all that surprised about this ‘news’. I barely follow X Factor (the British version of American Idol), so I think I can be forgiven for not being too aware of what was going on in the US in a singing competition, even if it is the most watched thing on American television, but the first time I ever saw Clay Aiken I thought to myself “that guy’s gotta be gay” and then just presumed that he was gay ever since. I only realised that he wasn’t ‘officially’ gay a year or so ago when Clay kicked up a fuss after people accused him of being gay and he vehemently denied it.
I’m sure Clay had his reasons, it was probably decided that for Clay to come out of the closet wouldn’t play well with his fans (the ‘Claymates’), but I can’t really understand why it was necessary for him to hide this side of himself for so long. Of all the sections of society that people are willing to accept as gay, its singers. Think about it, Freddie Mercury was gay and everyone loved him, I’d bet that even people with “it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” tattooed across their chests sing “we will rock you” just like everyone else whenever it gets played in public (right? Everyone loves that song). Another example is Elton John, I think you’d struggle to find a man that was more flamboyant, just look at his Google Image results, and he’s one of the most famous singers in the world. I have a theory about how acceptance of gay people by those that would classify themselves as ‘anti-gay’, and its almost entirely based upon talent. If someone is really good at what they do, nobody cares whether they like men or women (or both), they just get respect for doing their job and doing it well. On the other hand, if they aren’t particularly good at what they do then the issue of their sexuality becomes exactly that, an issue. I’m not saying Clay was a bad singer (I fear an attack of the Claymates), but if he was a truly brilliant musician then people wouldn’t have focused on his personal life so much and just focused on the music. In fact, all the speculation about his sexuality probably contributed to his career for quite some time, and just as people were starting to forget about Clay he pops up with this ‘bombshell’ that he’s gay, now, I don’t want to sound cynical, but I think it would be pretty easy for someone to be cynical about that.
Yesterday I wrote about a few different celebrities and how they weren’t fans of Sarah Palin, one of which was Lindsay Lohan. Just to refresh your memory, between attending glamorous social events and walking around with Samantha Ronson having her picture taken by paparazzi, LiLo blogged on her MySpace that she “cannot hold [her] tongue anymore when it comes to Sarah Palin,” and then laid into her for a few hundreds words (one of the few things that Lindsay and I have in common) before instructing her legions of fans to go out and vote for Obama. After overcoming my own prejudice that someone like Lindsay Lohan (professional eye candy) could have a decent opinion, I read through what she had to say and found that, much to my chagrin, I agreed with much she had to say. Yes, she’s not exactly the world’s best blogger (it’s polite to link to your sources!), but I think that her fundamental points make a lot of sense. Oh, now is probably a good time to point out once again that we here at Pop Vulture don’t necessarily endorse or support one candidate over another, however blatantly obvious it is that I favor one over the other (at least on the Vice Presidential end of things).
It turns out that Lindsay doesn’t want to just soapbox on her blog (one of the many thing Lindsay and I don’t have in common) and offered to host a series of events in support of Obama that would try and energize young voters, because apparently young people don’t like Obama enough yet, but she her advances were rebuffed, which I assume is something that doesn’t happen to Lohan very often. Apparently, a top source from the Obama campaign told the Chicago Sun Times that the Mean Girls star ”is not exactly the kind of high-profile star who would be a positive for us.”
I can see where Obama’s people are coming from, not so long ago it was hard to hear the words “Lindsay Lohan” without them being preceded by “troubled star” or followed by “is heading to rehab again,” but beyond the fairly mild scandal of her getting a girlfriend Lindsay seems to have stopped being being such tabloid fodder. Trust me, I’m pretty surprised at myself to be taking the position of defending a celebrity, but I think that if a girl like Lindsay can turn it around in the high-pressure and high-temptation world of Hollywood that she wouldn’t actually be the worst person that they could have to front a few events.
Y’know, Heidi Montag didn’t have this trouble when she announced she will be voting for John McCain, in fact, he took it really well, saying that “she’s a very talented actress.” (hold up, The Hills isn’t real?). Yeah, its really reassuring when a potential President looks straight at a camera and lies like that, isn’t it?
The continuing financial woes around the world are really dominating all the news channels on TV, taking up a lot of column inches in newspapers, and what I assume to be quite a large amount of bytes in blogs. To be totally frank, its depressing, so let’s do the responsible thing and talk about celebrities!
To give this article just a little bit of credibility, I’m going to return to one of my pet peeves of celebrities discussing politics, except this time I’m not pissed off, I actually think its kinda funny. As you’d expect, a few left leaning celebs have put forth their opinions on the Vice Presidential nomination of Sarah Palin, on account of her being an almost laughably poor choice for VP. Matt Damon made me laugh when he described the idea of her being in charge of America (he believes that the chance of McCain dying in office is 1 in 3…) as being “like a bad Disney movie.”
Pamela Anderson, who I will remind you is Canadian, though I guess she’s been in the US for so long that she’s probably a US citizen by now, was rather more blunt about it, saying that “I can’t stand her. She can suck it.” Finally, its about time that someone stopped ‘analysing’ policies and ‘judging’ Sarah Palin on her ‘merits’ and just went with the gut!
Lindsay Lohan called Sarah Palin a “media obsessed homophobe” on her MySpace. I can imagine that pretty much every celebrity magazine editor in America collectively exploded with excitement when this story hit the wires. A Hollywood starlet who recently embarked on a lesbian relationship with Samantha Ronson commenting on a political issue, calling someone a homophobe, doing it in a vaguely new media way, and using poor grammar in the process? I’m pretty surprised that US Weekly didn’t run a special commemorative 16 page pullout!
Making fun of Lindsay Lohan is pretty easy, we’re more used to seeing her downing shots of tequila than taking shots at political figures, but, and I hate to admit this, she actually makes some pretty good points. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect to see her to be on a panel on CNN telling us what Barack needs to do to pick up working class voters in the South, but it does look from her blog that she’s tried pretty hard to read up on the issues, which at least means I can’t accuse her of being ‘yet another uninformed celebrity.’ Jeez, I’m going soft on the celebs nowadays, I must have lost my rage… or maybe its just because Lindsay Lohan is really hot, after all, I am but a man…
I don’t want this blog to just be doom and gloom and me ranting on about things that annoy me, so I was hoping to write at least one post a week about something in the news that has inspired me over the past seven days (like the post about the ‘100 things to do before you die’ author), but I’m afraid its just been a pretty depressing week across the globe. So instead of finishing the week on a positive note, I’m going to do a roundup of stories that were in the news this week, the ones which I couldn’t quite make a full venom-filled post out of, and provide a short commentary to it.
Jamie Lynn Spears sends Bristol Palin baby gifts.. or not: I can see where this story has come from, Jamie Lynn is famous because of a relative (and her own TV show, but would she have really got that without Big Sis’ fame?) and had a baby before she was 18, Bristol Palin is now famous because of a relative and is going to have a baby before she’s 18, so its kind of natural for the media to talk about them in the same breath, but it feels like the whole internet is talking about what Jamie Lynn Spears sent to Bristol Palin as a gift. Seriously, why is this a story and why have I heard about it almost a dozen times this week, to the point where someone who isn’t interested (me) knows that the gift was $60 worth of pink burp cloths. Then it turned out that the gift was never sent, such drama!
Jack Abramoff gets sent to jail: Well, I guess that something good did happen this week! Jack Abramoff was corrupt, I’m sure that’s hardly a shock to you, the man was a lobbyist, as I understand it lobbyists essentially find ways to be legally corrupt. He defrauded native Indian tribes out of millions of dollars and then used much of that money to curry favour with Republican congressmen and I’m happy (as is this guy) he’s going to spend the next four years in a cell, far removed from the lifestyle he once enjoyed.
Famous shorts-wearer Michael Moore is releasing his latest documentary as a free download… but I still think that he’s a horrible, manipulative, self-aggrandizing, pandering, shameless, graceless, classless, arse of a man. He’s hoping that by making his latest movie, Slacker Nation, available for free that he’ll encourage people to get out and vote in the upcoming elections. Even if I don’t like him personally, and probably won’t watch the documentary (I actually value his movies below a $0 value), I will begrudgingly respect him for trying to get more people voting.
And finally, we have two stories from the “well duh” file. The LA Times tells us that some men carry a commitment-phobia gene. What will scientists discover next? Genetic testing finds that the Pope is Catholic? Years of observations prove that bears do indeed crap in the woods?
If you found that last tidbit surprising, this next one is going to blow your mind (which is actually a very apt, and insensitive, choice of words). Two drug overdoses in the past year (the first from a cocktail of cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, ketamine and crystal meth in August 2007, the second was a marathon 36-hour cannabis binge in July this year), combined with her regular drug use, have left perpetually-troubled singing star Amy Winehouse with possible brain damage after she began displaying schizophrenic symptoms. I can’t really bring myself to actually make any jokes at her expense, I know this is Pop Vulture, but it would feel like poking a chained-up bear in a Chinese zoo, and whilst I can happily be cruel about most celebs, Winehouse clearly has a serious problem and needs help.
See, I told you I wasn’t going to kick off the weekend on a positive note.
If there’s one thing that I don’t like, and you’ll find that there are quite a lot of things that I don’t like, its uninformed, self-righteous celebrities forcing their religious, political and environmental views upon us ‘normal’ people when no one asked them to. They all seem to do it after they get bored of merely entertaining us, perhaps their lifestyles eventually catch up with them, they start feeling a bit guilty about driving a hummer to Starbucks two or three times a day and decide that its time to “give something back,” as the famous phrase goes.
Or in other words… I don’t like Madonna.
At a performance on Sunday night in Cardiff, Wales, the so-called Queen of Pop (who actually has the audacity to enter the stage sitting on a throne) ran a video montage during a song called “Get Stupid” that showed images of social and environmental destruction interspersed with pictures of Adolf Hitler , Robert Mugabe, and John McCain. Wow. That’s about as subtle as throwing a brick through someone’s window then screaming nonsensical ramblings through the hole you just made. As if that weren’t enough, when the song ended images flashed up of John Lennon, Mahatma Ghandi, Al Gore and Barack Obama, presumably whilst a white-robed choir sang “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”
Okay, maybe I’m embellishing slightly with the choir, but the part about the video montage is all true. I’m a reasonable guy, I don’t expect her to stop half way through a song and bring up a power point presentation detailing why she thinks John McCain should be compared Adolf Hitler and Robert Mugabe, but this kind of heavy handed and ill-conceived stunt doesn’t add anything to the political discourse in America, it just takes the focus and attention away from the issues and onto a few seconds of footage from a concert that was taking place in the Welsh capital of Cardiff, a city that is three and a half thousand miles away from Washington D.C., although I’m sure that events this week in Denver will ensure that McCain doesn’t get all that much attention over the next few days anyway.
I feel that I should point out that we here at Pop Vulture aren’t necessarily backing one Presidential candidate or another, we want you to make your own choices, and those choices should be based upon sound and reasoning logical decisions, not based upon rumours, slander and baseless attacks. I know Madonna has managed to reinvent herself numerous times throughout her career, but can’t imagine that if she were to transform herself into a political pundit that historians would regard it as a particularly golden era for Madge. I’m certain that she’d get a lot of air time on TV to let the world know her views, she is a global megastar after all, but perhaps she should leave politics to the experts… and bloggers that have half a politics degree.
