Zimbabwean strongman
Robert Mugabe has been finally and officially
stripped of his knighthood by staggeringly lenient Dungeon Master
Queen Elizabeth II.

This makes Mugabe officially a fighter, which is probably the class he should have been all along.
But before we look forward at the next few years of borderline-genocidal min-maxing that Mugabe will bring to his beleaguered nation once he is declared the winner of last week’s joke election (as of this writing, the votes hadn’t been counted, but, oops, SPOILER ALERT!), let’s take a look at what Mugabe loses along with his Paladin class, and what he did to let it slip away –
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Posted in culture, magazine | 5 Comments »
posted by mlawski on June 22nd, 2008
Posted in: culture, magazine, movies
Tags: an american tail, angelina jolie, Disney, frog, maddy, magazine, princess, race, tiana

According to IMDB’s
June 5th edition of Studio Briefing, Angelina Jolie brought up in public what many of us were thinking privately: Where in the world are Disney’s black princesses?
Disney has had Chinese, Native American, Middle Eastern, mermaid, and even Hawaiian heroines–not to mention its many dog, cat, and mouse heroines. And Latinas at least got The Three Caballeros, which featured such memorable female characters as “The Brazilian Girl,” “Mexico Girl #1,” and “Mexico Girl #2.” What about the sistahs? More importantly, as a white girl, am I even allowed to say “sistahs”?
Evidently Ms. Jolie didn’t know about Disney’s upcoming new animated feature, a film slated to arrive in more than a year and a half but has already gathered around itself much controversy.
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Posted in culture, magazine, movies | 14 Comments »
posted by fenzel on June 8th, 2008
Posted in: culture, humor, links, magazine, movies, video
Tags: dialectic, down syndrome, forgotten heroes, law enforcement, magazine, movies, political correctness, viral video
[Overthinking It Magazine is the weekly feature where we give you articles you'll like all the more since the sabbath gives you an extra minute to ponder them. It may not replace your Sunday morning tryst with the newspaper of record, but we promise it will give you lots to overthink about. Oh, and if you're in a newsreader, click through to the site. I spent precious time on that graphic. --Ed.]
For your overthinking consideration, I give you Mediocre Film’s hit web series,
Retarded Policeman:
It stars the very funny Josh “The Ponceman” Perry, who is an aspiring professional actor and has Down Syndrome.
If you’re like me, your first reaction after laughing (it’s a good little show that’s very funny in its own right) was, “How am I supposed to feel about this?”
Discussion and more video, after the jump.
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Posted in culture, humor, links, magazine, movies, video | 3 Comments »
Devout followers of this blog will have noticed that I have had
horror on the brain over the past few months. (To those of you who scare easily, I apologize.) I’ve been taking a class on horror movies, so I was watching a bunch of them, and hey: you’ve got to write about something. Well, the class is over now. I’m not saying you’ll never see another horror post from me, but they’ll probably be few and far between. Before I bid farewell to the genre, though, I want to share one more movie with you all. Ken Russell’s
Lair of the White Worm.

As with everything I write about movies, there are spoilers ahead. And if you have even the slightest intention of ever watching this movie - which you TOTALLY SHOULD - please stop reading right now. Lair of the White Worm is so weird, so gleefully bonkers, that a full %70 of my enjoyment of the film came from the surprise factor; from the “Oh my god did that just really HAPPEN?! Am I WATCHING this?” aspect of the experience. And I wouldn’t want to ruin that for you. But if you are never going to watch it anyway - and I’ve got to imagine that applies to most of you - then by all means read on. Note: some images below the jump could be classified as NSFW. Not in the way we usually think about these things, but still… it’s a hard R, you know?
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Posted in magazine, movies | 6 Comments »
As a new blogger, mostly, what I’m worried about is picking the right subject. What is a female blogger to write about? Other media have rules for us womens, and I’m kind of lost without them.
If I were setting out to write a screenplay, for example, it would be incumbent upon me, as a female screenwriter, to write about out-of-wedlock pregnancy. The dialogue should be spry and witty, the characters quirky but attractive, the themes superficial. Write what you know, right?
Likewise, if I were a poet, I’d write about depression/oppression and die young, preferably by suicide.
I’m all about selling out and playing into stereotypes, but the one “female writer regulation” by which I cannot abide is the rule coercing vaginal novelists to entitle their books The Such and Such’s Wife or The Such and Such’s Daughter. For whatever reason, this particular commonplace really gets my goat… to vomit copiously on the carpet.
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Posted in books, magazine, movies | 2 Comments »
posted by sheely on March 29th, 2008
Posted in: culture, magazine, music
Tags: american apparel, francophilia, francophobia, globalization, justice, magazine, syncretic transnational hipsterati, yelle
[Beginning today, we will be saving our most thoughtfully overthought articles for Sunday publication. Though we haven't the audacity to hope that we will replace your ritual of lugging the phone-book sized Sunday Times down to your favorite obscure Park Slope coffee house to pore ostentatiously over while sipping the organic, shade grown, fairly traded red eye your favorite heavily tattooed and multi-pierced barista pulls with tender loving care, we hope this weekly day of rest affords you time to devote some extra overthinking to this new weekly feature, Overthinking It Magazine. —Ed.]

Even as McDonalds continues to evoke
freedom fries francophobia in
new advertisements, there are signs that the popular culture has moved on, and that we are on the brink of a new era in French-American relations. The ambassador of this détente? None other than a 25 year old female electro-hip-hopper named
Yelle. Video and analysis after the jump.
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Posted in culture, magazine, music | 3 Comments »