Month: August 2005

In the history of bad TV ideas, I’m not sure where to rank a comedy about eating disorders. It’s probably up there with the Star Wars Christmas Special or something. It’s just… so… awful.

Now, difficult subjects and comedy are not totally incompatible, but it takes a real genius to pull off that kind of thing– Life is Beautiful is a beautiful movie about life and love and laughter that just happens to be set during the holocaust. But let’s be honest here, Roberto Benignis don’t just grow on trees. They sprout wild like truffles and have to be hunted by trained pigs on leashes in the pristine Benigni fields of mountainous Italy.

Do they have comedic geniuses? Probably not. I mean, even the promotions are dumb, too: they’re advertising it in my gym. Next to the ad about how you’re really tough if you show up at the gym at 7AM with a hangover. (You’ll need our powerful deodorant then, because you’ll smell like the sewer you slept in. Or is that the sewer that is your bloodstream? I can’t tell which, they’re pretty close in consistency. How about a campaign for “You’ve got the shakes and puking, but at least you’re not sweating, because you’re a Mitchum Junkie!”)

Another way we can tell they’re not doing this out of a strange sense of genius: they’d be looking for new territory, and Mike Leigh did this back in 1990 in the film “Life is Sweet”. That movie, despite its description and pitch as a “comedy,” is one of the most depressing things I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some depressing movies. (Naturally, being a Mike Leigh movie, it’s about totally screwed up British people and is horribly depressing with a slight dose of stiff-upper-lip humor: her boyfriend is the sensitive one and she just uses him for sex… of course, they’re both still miserable.)

So far, they’ve made a pilot and one episode. Maybe they’ll get as far as three or four before they remove the feeding tubes (ha ha get it?) and let the brain-dead creature die.

I mean, I knew it was coming. I read about it in places like Berkeley economist Brad DeLong’s Website and Fistful of Euros, but the Chinese currency revaluation didn’t really hit home until I got this email today (nearly deleted by spam filtering, of course) warning me that all the promotional plush penguins and ball-caps with the company name on them are going to be more expensive now.

Perhaps this is good news for the US novelty, gimmick, and gizmo industry. Or did we shut that down twenty years ago? Do we still have a novelty/gizmo industry in this country?

Amazon sells badonkadonk. Which is, apparently, some kind of Burning-Man-related vehicle from a conceptual design firm. Now, of course, since they’re made-to-order, it’s not likely that more than one was ever built. It’s possible none were ever built.

My current guess is that this personal tank is named after the booty, and not the other way around. I have no etymology for the booty, though. Oh well.

We got us some medical waste dot com. Now there’s a place with affiliate programs I want to associate with! I bet they get their parts from the Alabama prison system. That’s a great source of body parts I hear.

How do you spell Badonkadonk anyway? Urban Dictionary has one entry for bedonkadonk, used only as an adjective, and quite a few more for badonkadonk.

But Slate goes with the e spelling anyway in its review of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. Most of the discussion about the ad campaign has focused on whether the women are beautiful, and whether media creates eating disorders, and so forth. This article focuses on whether the ad campaign is effective in promoting Dove, and points out that while it’s obviously gotten plenty of press, it risks becoming “the brand for fat girls” and you know that’s not good for business, even if AOL seems to have done fine being the brand for idiots.

I admit it, I really posted this because I wanted an excuse to use the word “badonkadonk.”