I Heart Reese

Hello, Phile Phans, how are you all doing? Are you ready for another fun-filled Peverett Phile? Today is Reese Witherspoon's thirty-first birthday, so, Reese, if you're out there reading this, and I know you are...HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SWEETHEART. BTW, I am still waiting for your call. Today's Phile entry is brought to you by Ace Hardware: need a good screw? In Washington D.C. people want the attorney general to resign. Some republicans are looking for a replacement for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, but apparently they need to find an experienced legal mind that President Bush is comfortable with. The No. 1 candidate is Judge Judy. Scientists say they are trying to develop a drug that eliminates memories of traumatic events. The research is being funded by Star Jones’ husband. In Hollywood the other night, the producer of "Girls Gone Wild” was spotted hanging out at a gay bar. Which explains the title of the new DVD, "Girls Gone Wild — At Least I thought They Were Girls; I Was Really Drunk.” According to USA Today, Tom Cruise’s wedding was in an Italian castle. Well that inspired Elizabeth Hurley to marry in a British castle, and inspired Eva Longoria to book her wedding in French castle. Meanwhile Kirstie Allie is getting married at White Castle. Tara Reid is starting her own fast food restaurant. Great news for anyone who likes their food cheap and soaked in vodka. I saw Tara a few weeks ago at a mall here in Florida. She was being followed around Macy's by a group of teenage girls and myself. That Boy Scout in North Carolina was rescued by a dog named Gandolf. Do you know who I would have sent into the forest to find him? George Michael. He can always find a man in the forest. The Supreme Court debated a case where a high school student in Alaska was suspended for bringing a banner that said, "Bong Hits For Jesus” to school. The argument is whether the student’s right to free speech was violated. The case is Roe v. Weed. Do you watch "Jeopardy"? Guess what happened. For the first time in history, they had a three-way tie. Now it’s going to be decided by the Supreme Court. Alex Trebek, the host of the show, was so stunned, he shaved his head and entered rehab. Here’s a creepy story. A guy is flying on a long flight. Six-hour flight, British Airways. Half way through the flight, he realizes the person sitting next to him is dead. Long flight. Six hours. Person in the seat next to him, dead. I say, Hey, count your blessings. And this morning, out of habit, JetBlue apologized. Have you been watching college basketball? To get in the mood I asked my wife to dress like Billy Packer. The world’s largest airliner flew from Europe to New York today. The plane is so big, it can carry 500 passengers . . . or 80 Americans. Hooters is in the news. Hooters announced it’s opening up its first restaurant in the Holy Land. After hearing this, Bill Clinton said, "As far as I’m concerned, Hooters is the holy land.” Al Sharpton and Barack Obama spoke on the phone for about five minutes yesterday. They have reportedly put their differences behind them. Which means Obama can get back to running for president, and Sharpton can get back to whatever the hell it is that he does. On St. Patrick's Day we went to Sea World and I saw a lot of people wearing buttons saying, "Kiss Me I’m Irish.” My friend Omar wore a button that said "Frisk Me I’m Arabic.” President Bush celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by saluting prominent Irish Americans. Bush praised Sandra Day O’Connor, Tip O’Neill, and Barack Obama. In Palm Beach, Florida this week, a shark attacked a lawyer who was surfing. Remarkably, the shark survived. Wal-Mart now classifies its customers into three groups: Brand Aspirationals, Price Sensitive Affluents, and Value-Priced Shoppers. When they heard this, Wal-Mart customers said, "Which aisle has them big boxes of shampoo?” Exciting news from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The Norwegians released a study that says having a sense of humor can help people live longer. In other words, if you don’t laugh at this Phile entry, you’re going to die.

FREAKY MUPPET MOMENTS

Looking back to the early days, probably the strangest thing of all is to see Kermit the frog with Jim Henson’s arm attached, as he did in a 1974 appearance on "What’s My Line". Even stranger — Henson cycles through a series of different voices to throw off the panelists. (Which stumped Arlene Francis and Dr. Joyce Brothers - but not puppet enthusiast Soupy Sales.) 16 years later Henson would perform the same trick on "Live with Regis and Kathy Lee". It would be his last public performance ever with the frog before his death of pneumonia at age 54. So it’s re-assuring to travel back in time and see the gentle puppeteer enjoying the reaction from delighted game show panelists — and showing just how much of his personality he projected into his work. Host Larry Blyden jokingly addresses a question to Kermit the Frog, asking “How long did it take you to finally get Jim Henson right?” Kermit replies that “The beard was the hardest part.”

UNFORTUNATE STAR WARS COSTUMES

This woman is dressed as one of the Tonnika Twins, characters who appear on screen in the Cantina scene in the original Star Wars for but a fraction of a second and do not speak. This is the equivalent of going to a Psycho convention dressed as some random person Janet Leigh walks by in the street in the early scenes. It's madness, I tell you, and it has to stop somewhere! Also, the Tonnika Twins have more of Speedo style shorts and the belts are completely different. Let's get it right, people.

REJECTED CRAYONS

Each year, hundreds of new color names are considered for inclusion in boxes of crayon. As you might expect, most potential color names never make the cut. Gathered here are some proposed crayons that weren't quite up to snuff. 1) FOUND IN A DIAPER GOLD 2) McDONALD'S BURGER GRAY 3) LOS ANGELES AIR BROWN 4) KLAN WHITE 5) FLU PHLEGM GREEN 6) SPOUSAL ABUSE BLACK 7) SPOUSAL ABUSE BLUE 8) SPANK ME PINK 9) MELANOMA TAN 10) TIME O' THE MONTH 11) TIN MAN JOHNSON'S SILVER

SHARPENING AXES

There are 1,929,770,126,028,800 possible color combinations on a Rubik's Cube. Gandhi once wrote an open letter to the British people urging them to surrender to the Nazis and to accept whatever fate Hitler had in store for them. NASA countdowns start 43 hours before launch. A recent survey of executives concluded that 91% consider a sense of humor important to career advancement. The area code for Antartica is 672. Forty-eight percent of Americans think aliens have visited Earth. Elvis Presley made only one television commercial, for Southern Maid Doughnuts, in 1954. The original Guinness Brewery in Dublin, Ireland has a 6,000-year lease. Only 2% of Americans say they're in a good mood every day. Ulysses S. Grant was once fined $20 for speeding. On his horse. The hole in a ship's bow for a rope, like the ones used to secure an anchor, to pass through is called a "hawsehole." New Jersey is the only state where all its counties are classified as metropolitan areas. In France, it's legal to marry a dead person. Before 1900, boxing matches lasted all day and sometimes went as long as 100 rounds. The "you are here" arrow on maps is called an "ideo locator." According to the FDA, a cup of orange juice may contain 10 fruit fly eggs, but only two maggots. On Venus, a day lasts 5,832 hours. George Washington was deathly afraid of being buried alive. Crayola is a French word that means "oily chalk."

And now, for a new feature called...

UNINTENTIONALLY FUNNY COMIC BOOK PANELS

DAD

WHEN YOU'RE A CELEBRITY, ADIOS REALITY

Few episodes of  "The Amazing Race" have provided such accidental amusement and pop culture references as last night’s episode did. From sound effects at the pit stop that turned the race into a Benny Hill episode momentarily to a team member looking like a character from A Christmas Story, it was non-stop slapstick action. Joyce memorialized fallen team Rob and Amber by telling us, “They’re great to beat because they’re such amazing competitors.” Translation: Nanny nanny boo boo! We beat you, you bastards! Mirna said, “We’re going to be anicicle before this is day is over.” But her cousin had a better, PG-13 idea: “We’ll just be a popsicle; somebody can just suck us.” Teri and Ian had a conversation with Joe and Bill, and Ian jokingly asked, “Is your underwear tagged ‘Team Guido’?” Joe said, “You doTn’t want to see our underwear … We have thongs.” But that was not the disturbing part of the conversation; instead, it was when Ian said, “We have paper.” If he wasn’t referring to disposable underwear, it seems like he admitted wearing Oops I Crapped My Pants on national television. “They’re really not that smart,” Charla said of the blondes, but like everything else she said, her voice was muffled and her words subtitled because she was zipped up in her jacket as tight as Randy in A Christmas Story. She ran like him, too, although to be fair, she kind of runs like that even when she isn’t in a parka. Ian overcame his fear of rats while working with a giant mine-sniffing rat named Tupac. Things just don’t get weirder than that. “I’m glad they have metrosexuals everywhere in the world,” Mirna said, having convinced a number of men in Mozambique to let Charla and her paint their nails. Charla and Mirna fell behind and were in last place at one point, but they pulled ahead and checked in first and screamed with excitement. Mirna explained what this meant: “Just because someone’s a little shorter or a little skinnier doesn’t really matter. We work hard and we’re a damn good team. And if coming in first lets people have a little more respect for us, than that’s a wonderful thing to accomplish.” Yes, she did just equate her skinniness with the fact that Charla is a little person. This probably says more about my sick sense of humor than anything else, but I have never laughed more at The Amazing Race as I did when I saw Joe and Bill at the coal-bagging Detour. All the teams had coal dust on their skin, but for some reason, Joe’s was concentrated directly beneath his nose (right). I looked up at the TV and thought, holy crap, Hitler’s in the race. Oswald, covered in coal dust, ran to the mat yelling, “I’m hugging you!” Phil shouted, “No way,” and then started running around in circles with Oswald chasing him. The editors even included some Benny Hill-esque music. The Guidos beat Eric and Danielle to the mat, which did not make Eric happy. “The Guidos remind me of old women who are past their prime. She got beat by a bunch of queens.” Indeed she did: Joe, Bill, and Eric all arrived at the mat before she did. Uchenna and Joyce were saved by the first non-elimination leg, and became marked for elimination. Somewhere, Rob and Amber are forming a conspiracy theory.

TODAY IN HISTORY

1622: A band led by the Brother of Powhatan slaughters 347 settlers near Jamestown, in the first indian massacre. 1923: Marcel Marceau's birthday. Fucking mimes. 1931: William Shatner, the great actor, birthday. 1933: The first SS-run concentration camp, Dachau, receives prisoners. 1947: U.S. President Harry Truman signs Executive Order 9835, beginning the Great Loyalty Crusade. 2,000,000 government employees were required to take oaths and submit to loyalty investigations; of those a mere 139 were terminated in the span of three years. 1972: National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse recommends ending criminal penalties for possession of marijuana. No subsequent administration has heeded their recommendation. 1978: One of the Flying Wallendas, 73 year old Karl Wallenda, plunges to his death on a cable strung between two hotels in San Juan, PR. 1991: Ivana divorces The Donald.

IMPORTANT LESSONS LEARNED FROM CARTOONS

CARTOON: G.I. Joe LESSON: Knowing is half the battle.
The other half of the battle is kicking Cobra’s terrorist ass. And with the coolest soldier codenames ever --Snake Eyes, Duke, Lady Jaye, Shipwreck-- winning the war on terror should be no problem. Good will always win out over evil, because good guys work together (Team Work! Cooperation!), while bad guys are ruthless cowards who turn tail and run whenever G.I. Joe’s laser guns get to zappin’. As Sergeant Slaughter once said: “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people and neither do we.”
Now that’s some good strategery. How it affected us as adults: Actually, we’re pretty certain that our strategy for the Iraq War was conceived after a two day long G.I. Joe marathon in the Pentagon. They just implicitly trusted that the good guys were going to win, that firing off our guns would make the bad guys run for the caves and that giving everyone cute nicknames was somehow endearing. When things didn’t turn out the way they’d planned, the administration placed the blame on faulty intelligence, or in other words: “Knowing is half the battle, and we unfortunately didn’t know shit.”

THERE IS A GOD

Lindsay Lohan was spotted at Plumm in New York City last Thursday chain smoking and drinking Red Bull all night. And because this is Lindsay Lohan, she decided to pull her skirt up to her waist and give everybody a peek at her private parts. She's just walking around and removing her clothes in public now. I mean, c'mon, at least pretend it's an accident. Put your hand up to your mouth and go "Oops." Fake that your clothes are on fire. Something more than just, "Hmm, I feel like showing people my vagina" and whipping it out.

HEROES

Somehow I expected this: NBC is being sued over one of the concepts used on its hit series "Heroes". Not that I expected the show's creators and writers to have "stolen" ideas from elsewhere, but I expected some artists to try and claim the show stole ideas they developed before "Heroes" first aired. When a show becomes a hit, people want a piece of the pie. In this case, New York artists and couple Clifton Mallery and Amnau Karam Eele claim that "Heroes'" creators based the Isaac character and his power on a short story, a painting series and a short film they exhibited in 2004 and 2005. Both artists say in their lawsuit that two writers from "Crossing Jordan", a show "Heroes'" creator Tim Kring developed, attended their April 2005 exhibit about an artist who paints the future. They also say that their work focused on the artist painting the destruction of two landmark buildings in NYC. This storyline is not unlike the "Heroes" one where Isaac, an artist who paints the future, paints the destruction of NYC.
Reuters reports that a spokesman for NBC said that the network believes the suit is without merit and that they intend to defend it and expect to win. There are countless of books, movies, comics, short stories, etc., about ordinary people getting powers. So it was a given at one point someone would claim that some "Heroes" concept was based on their idea.

DOCTOR WHO

"Doctor Who" executive producer Russell T Davies says the show will be back for a fourth series (that's British for season). He made remarks at the London premiere of series three. What's less clear at the moment is who will be playing the Doctor in series four. Current Doctor David Tennant has remained silent on the issue. Series three has actress Freema Agyeman playing Martha Jones, the doctor's new assistant. She fills the void left by Billie Piper's departure from the program. It had been widely suspected that a fourth season was already on deck, but Davies' confirmation should come as good news for "Doctor Who" fans. Now if only I didn't have to wait months or years for each new season to show up on the SciFi channel.

R.I.P.

Bowie Kuhn (03/15) Rhymes with "blooey," which is the sound his heart made when he croaked. Larry 'Bud' Melman (03/21) His real name was Calvert DeForest, but, really, who cares?

MOVIE BUZZ

300 2: After the action flick's massive two-week box-office romp, graphic novelist Frank Miller is already working on a return to ancient Greece. Maybe it can come out the same time as that Gladiator sequel they're always talking about.

Goya's Ghosts: If you thought Natalie Portman's head-shaving scene in V for Vendetta was disturbing, wait until you see her sans clothes and strung up on a medieval torture device.

Ratatouille: The official trailer doesn't debut until Friday, but what makes any trailer about a zillion times better? Japanese subtitles!

Watchmen: Zack Snyder lets loose in this candid interview about turning a beloved comic-book masterpiece into a movie. He seems pretty calm for someone with thousands of rabid fans breathing down his neck if he screws up one frame of film. Me included.

Indiana Jones and the City of Gods: Sources claim this will be the official title of Indy's upcoming adventure. And that's Gods, plural. The original God, who lent his Ark of the Covenant and Holy Grail for the first and third film, declined to be represented this time out. He and Emma Watson must have the same agent.

Superman Returns Two: Some reports claim that instead of a sequel, Supes will next appear in the Justice League movie. Another insider (the videographer!) claims Bryan Singer will start filming his follow-up March 2008, as planned. Here's my suggestion: How about Singer stays away from both films?

Yeah! That's it for another entry of the Phile. Check out the Phile's Myspace site and Webshots site. I am still wanting to hit 2000 views by June, so come on people, spread the word, not the turd. Tell your friends, loved ones, family, whoever, about the Peverett Phile. I will leave you with a not so random pic. Until next Thursday, 'nuff said.