The folks at Ironing Board Collective were nice enough to let me blog for them for the next eight Wednesdays, starting today.  My first subject: Bridget Kelly and Siobhan Martin, the good-and-evil identical twins played by Sarah Michelle Gellar on Ringer.  Which is SO GOOD, oh my God.

This morning I woke up at 6am to audition for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, because I saw a blurb in the newspaper yesterday about the show’s producers coming to Providence and, you know, why not.  Also, my financial situation is incredibly dire right now, and I know a bunch of useless trivia, so I thought this might solve some problems.

A coffee stop on the way made me a few minutes late for the first seating, but I hung out towards the front of a line for a long time while reporters and photographers from local media buzzed around.  The line swelled, largely with men in their fifties and sixties, by the time we were called in to take the 30-question written test.  (I don’t know why, but I assumed the crowd would be mostly female.)

We were given Scantron sheets and tests in envelopes.  There were about fifty of us there, although there was seating provided for almost ten times that.  We had ten minutes to answer thirty questions.  I think I got most of them right… (Picasso is the artist whose daughter designs for Tiffany.  “Tequila!” is the 1958 song featured in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.)  I got at least a couple wrong, though…  Though I periodically pretend that I watch football, I thought a torn ACL was a shoulder injury and not a knee one.  I have no idea what popular exclamation was first coined in Kung Fu Panda.  But worst of all, I got a music chart question wrong:  When Jay-Z broke the record for most #1 albums on the Billboard chart, I thought he took the record from Mariah Carey, not Elvis.  That one kinda stung.  (I was thinking Elvis was a singles artist, not an album one, and also I thought the whole point of Mariah Carey was that she broke pretty much every Billboard record there was.)

Even if I had met the producers, I’m sure my surly demeanor and complete inability to outwardly express enthusiasm would have kept me from making it onto the show.  Still, the money would have been nice.

Are there words for this?  I can not think of a word for this.

(via Videogum)

[UPDATE: I didn't realize this was Yesterday's News, but also the ads aren't real ads, they're user-submitted to some kind of Make Your Own Doritos Commercial contest.  Although why anyone would enter that contest--especially when they have the technical know-how and camera equipment to produce a very commercial-looking ad they could probably have gotten paid for, anyway--eludes me.]

Students think that sex work is pretty okay

Homeland Security shut down over seventy torrent sites over the weekend without any notice, taking advantage of the fact that most tech sites would be on vacation and unlikely to cause a fuss.

I stopped writing for Carnal Nation over the summer and they shut down last month.  But it looks like they’re coming back?

Fuck Yeah, Murder She Wrote.

I think I like this new Duffy song, although doesn’t it seem like “Mercy” was fifty years ago at this point?

Twenty years on, I’m thinking about maybe finally buying Pretty Hate Machine.

The Queer Suicide Teach-In last month at Brown/RISD is now online.

Jezebel wonders what you would do if Katy Perry crapped out a pizza for you.

[image: Sugar and Lust typed her dad's Facebook page on an electric typewriter]

The Woodhull Foundation has declared today National Sexual Freedom Day.  Just forty-five minutes ago, they held a press conference and released a report, The State of Sexual Freedom In The US 2010.  I’m in a bit of a rush now (blah blah blah) but check out this where is your line post, which points out all of the sex news that’s happened just this week alone.

Especially of note, this morning Dan Savage is asking LGBTQ folks to upload videos about how adulthood isn’t so bad.  This, in response to the suicide earlier this week of fifteen-year old Billy Lucas in Indiana.  You can read about it in his Savage Love column, although it’s kind of disappointing that the story gets buried beneath letters from “Threesome Complications” and “Hiding At The Elusive Fuzz Under Christine’s Knockers.”  (I contemplated making a video of my own, but I honestly wasn’t harassed at all for being gay when I was growing up.  Harassed for being fat, yes, and for being bad at sports, and for being good at school and for being quiet and not not dressing very well.  But not for being gay.)

In other sex news, Katy Perry’s “Hot And Cold” Sesame Street segment won’t be airing after parents complained that she shows too much cleavage.  (I’m not sure that I agree at all, but it is worth noting that the segment itself, which is about opposites, is even more challenging on one’s ears than Perry’s shrieky original.)  There’s a really… odd opinion piece about it on the Huffington Post.

Hundreds of blonde Latvian women are marching through Riga in order to boost national morale.  No, really.

For the first time, gay activists staged a Pride event in Moscow that was free of police intervention.

The new Kylie Minogue video is a little too silly for my taste — as is the song, although that could always change — but what I really want to see is the outtakes where people fall from the pile and dancers accidentally whack each other in the face.

An Idaho strawberry farmer and father of fifteen has legally changed his name to Pro-Life and now he is running for governor.

Henning Mankell, the Swedish mystery novelist I was told I’d love but who I’ve yet to really get into, isn’t appearing at the Hay literary festival in Wales right now because he’s being detained by Israelis.

One cherry lemonade from Auntie Anne’s has as much sugar as 11 bowls of Cookie Crisp.  Articles about calories and sugar never really mean much to me,  but holy crap, that’s a lot of sugar.

If I had more time I’d write an essay about male and female film critics and their seemingly universal hatred of women over forty having sex drives.  Also their need to constantly refer to the characters in this franchise as gay men.  This is but one of approximately 10,000 such articles written in the past week and a half.

Michelle Tea is fashion blogging?!?!

Finally, nothing has made me happier this week than this story about how Negroni Season is a concept that only a boozehound whore would come up with.

[image: Patti Smith, from Michelle Tea's essay on Just Kids and Ann DeMeulemeester.]

I’m sorry, but Michael von der Heide totally deserved to qualify for the Eurovision final.  I mean, the vocals are mixed kind of oddly, and admittedly his voice isn’t perfect, but this song is so elegant!  And who doesn’t like Amber-infused melodies?

Once again tomorrow I’m hosting a Eurovision viewing party chez moi, even though I have about 55 hours of work to do between now and then, my apartment is a pigsty, I have no food, I have no booze, I don’t really have a car to get to the supermarket, and I have not one and not two but three mandatory work meetings between now and then, in addition to all manner of other business to attend to.  Oh, and my laptop is completely incompatible with my television, which means we may not even be able to watch the show on an actual screen.

Sweden and Poland and Croatia, which were all among the better choices, all failed to make the final.  So now I’m really pushing for Romania, or maybe even Germany, to take it this year.

One thing about summer is that it makes sleeping seem so unappealing.  I’m anti-air conditioning, for the most part, and when it gets really humid I tend to sleep a lot less.  Which isn’t a bad thing, necessarily.  But it’s a thing.

Anyway, so I decided to check my Tumblr and saw this post from Rohin Guha.  Which in some way reminded me of my crush on Damon Pampolina, late of the revived Mickey Mouse Club and also from early-nineties teen-pop quintet The Party.  And then I started watching their videos, again, as I do every so often.  And then I found this post from Bear Mythology, about that homo’s crush on Pampolina’s groupmate Albert Fields.  And then I learned something really amazing.

I knew that The Party did a lot of unusual covers, as Mickey Mouse Club types often do (ie. the oft-overlooked Britney Spears cover of “The Beat Goes On.”)  I knew that, for all their squeak and cleanliness, The Party (or their wranglers) gravitated towards college rock staples like Elvis Costello’s “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace Love and Understanding” and The Waitresses’ “I Know What Boys Like.”  But I had no idea that “In My Dreams,” which was sort of I guess the closest they came to a hit, was actually cover of  a Dokken song from the soundtrack to Nightmare On Elm Street 3.  Crazy, right?

Compare and contrast after the jump:

I have to say I’m more partial to The Party’s version, because that’s the one I’ve known for two thirds of my life, but the Dokken song’s really catchy in that way that a lot of hit metal singles of the eighties are catchy.  (A way that, really, I didn’t fully appreciate until recently and which now makes me want to start a teenpop group that only covers eighties metal.)

Maria Mosterd, the Dutch teen who wrote the book about being forced into prostitution at the age of twelve, may have made the whole thing up, after someone questioned why the girl and her mother would sue the girl’s school but not anybody else.

The MacGruber movie opened this week, preceded by the “leak” of some “modeling photos” that show the character with a poorly Photoshopped micropenis.  Because male bodies are automatically hilarious, especially if they’re hairy!

A brief history of Batman-themed porn movies.

MTV’s new comedy series about big-dicked teen RJ Berger got written up in the Times this week.

Every single shirtless scene on Lost, which is not that many?

The fifty greatest samples in hip-hop history.  I’ve had this open in my browser for weeks now.

[Image: Jean Boullet (1921-1970), via Les Ombres Part Deux]

The Mirror on the first serial sex killer, which was apparently only half a century ago.

Is this month’s Playboy more feminist than usual?  No, of course not, but one HuffPo writer points out the difference between women getting paid to be in the magazine and women not getting paid for having their pictures unwillingly passed all over the internet.

A so-called “fat girl” was hired to sleep with soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo and then talk about it.  And she did.  The Frisky points out that she’s not actually fat and also that this is a weird thing.

This is apparently my week for getting news from editorial warehouses that I never read.  Here’s someone at Gather making fun of Roger Ebert for not liking Kick-Ass.

In another one of those “people pretending that an offer to do soft porn is a news story” items, Daniel Nardicio has offered Jon Gosselin $20K to do Playgirl, which is a lot less than he offered Levi Johnston.  Nardicio said in a statement that Gosselin’s not very attractive and probably won’t do it, so of course people are pretending it’s a story.

Speaking of Jon Gosselin (for probably the only time ever on this blog), Hailey Whateverthehell posted a photo of a 2-inch penis on Twitter the other day, claiming it was his, because she is a classy person and that is what classy people do.  I would like to point out that, no matter how small Gosselin’s penis is, he still managed to father eight children.

[image: Terry Fincher, Rillington Place, 1966, via Britmovie.co.uk]