Several Republicans have come out and said that Sarah Palin is too uninformed to be the vice president. I think they might have a point, because before the debate, she went sightseeing and saw the St. Louis Arch and said, “Who put up that huge McDonald’s sign?” Hustler is producing a porn movie with a Sarah Plain lookalike. In the movie, she has sex with a Bill Clinton lookalike. I think Bill has actually volunteered to be in it. And yes, I want a copy. This just in: A backwoods hiker has just found the wreckage of John McCain’s campaign. John McCain has pulled out of Michigan — I guess the surge wasn’t working. They say they won’t try to compete for votes there. Apparently, this is part of McCain’s strategy to try to win votes only in the original 13 colonies. This weekend, the jury in the O.J. Simpson armed robbery case found him guilty on all counts. So be careful parents — if your child experiments with double murder it could lead down the treacherous path to sports memorabilia theft. In a new interview, Angelina Jolie said that she wants to have more children. Then someone explained to Jolie that thanks to her there are no more left. eBay announced that they are firing 1,600 people. On the bright side, the fired eBay employees will be allowed to bid on the contents of their desks. You'd think with my $900 plus bids on eBay these last six months they could keep some of their workers. A few nights ago was the second Presidental debate. McCain prepared by putting new tennis balls on his walker. The media treats these guys like they're too cute to question seriously — like they’re The Jonas Brothers or something. Most people would say Barack Obama is winning: He’s ahead in the polls; he has ways to fix the economy; and he’s with that gorgeous sex-pot Joe Biden. But I wouldn’t rule out John McCain, just yet. Obama is like the hare, surging ahead with his ideas . . . his plans . . . his cute little bunny ears . . . McCain is like the tortoise. He’s thousands of years old . . . shuffling forward, occasionally poking his head out of his shell to go to the bathroom . . . I did take exception to McCain calling Obama “that one.” I can’t think of anytime it would be appropriate to call a United States senator “that one.” Well, maybe if you had to pick a senator out of a lineup. And finally, people looking into Barack Obama’s campaign contributions say that Obama may have received $3.3 million from abroad. And it turns out that broad is Oprah Winfrey.
THE PEVERETT PHILE TOP TEN LIST
From the home office in Groveland, Florida, here is this week's top ten list...
Top Ten Things Overheard During The Barack Obama-John McCain Debate
10. "Who left the Geritol in the dressing room?"
9. "Quick, before I go onstage -- how many houses do I own?"
8. "Somebody open a window; that old man smell is making me gag"
7. "The loser has to read the Phile"
6. "This debate would have been a lot shorter if McCain hadn't needed five bathroom breaks"
5. "My solution for the economy: bet 700 million against the Mets"
4. "I knew Abraham Lincoln, you are no Abraham Lincoln"
3. "For the last time, Senator Clinton, we do not have another podium"
2. "I would like to suspend by answer to concentrate on the financial crisis"
And the number one thing overheard during the debate...
1. "Forget these guys, bring on the hot chick from Alaska!"
SHARPENING AXES
Every year around this time, our thoughts turn to holiday shopping as deals for Black Friday start to get leaked out to the press. The economy has made the discounting start earlier and earlier every year, and the Internet has made it possible for the scoops to come out instantaneously. So if you want to fill your shopping cart with the lowest priced items possible, you better start making your lists early, and we're here to help. Click through our gallery to see what type of Black Friday deals you can expect at these popular retailers. 1. Target. Status: Doing well, but still falling behind Walmart
What's likely to be on sale: Target will continue to draw in customers with low prices on apparel, DVDs (including TV box sets) as well as toys and videogames. The chain will have a few deals on electronics, but the bulk of their low-priced items will be on low-cost items for holiday shopping. Prediction: Look for Target to go low as it senses wallets tightening even more in its core demographic. 2. Walmart. Status: Tough economic times are boom times for the discounter. What's likely to be on sale: Everything. The retailer will be cutting prices early and often this season -- like announcing a $10 toy deal at the start of October -- to try to get the scoop on everyone and keep its #1 position. Expect laptops in the $299 range, popular video games for $10 and toys for practically nothing. Prediction: Walmart will win in holiday sales, but extra-deep discounting will hurt the bottom line. 3. Kmart. Status: Struggling and playing major catch-up. What's likely to be on sale: Traditionally Kmart has used Black Friday to move kid's clothes and those prepackaged Christmas gifts you end up buying on the way to a gift exchange you forgot about, so expect extra discounts like last year's 10% off all apparel. If the past is any indicator, shoppers can expect to see great deals on board games -- buy one, get one -- and other toys. And cheap, cheap electronics. Prediction: Kmart will likely draw in a crowd with a careful selection of low-priced loss leaders. 4. Toys R Us. Status: While the toy industry is facing a poor outlook in sales this fall, one analyst called Toys R Us a "beacon of hope." What's likely to be on sale: Young kid's toys and video games will dominate the ads this fall. There will definitely be rock bottom prices to aim for consumer's shrinking disposable income. Prediction: Many Buy-One-Get-One and Buy-Two-Get-One sales will bring in shoppers with young children at home who still expect Santa to shower them with presents. 5. Best Buy. Status: Even when the economy is doing poor, consumers still want their gadgets. What's likely to be on sale: HDTVs, laptops, picture frames and GPS. Expect to see extra long lines at Best Buy this year as many first-time Black Friday shoppers looking for new TVs in response to the digital switchover. Dan de Grandpre from Dealnews.com predicts that shoppers will find very aggressive pricing on laptops and Blu-Ray players as well as Insignia and Westinghouse HDTVs. Prediction: Lines stretched around the block will bring in record sales for the electronics giant. 6. Circuit City. Status: Under new leadership, Circuit City will be counting on Black Friday to bring in a profitable quarter. What's likely to be on sale: Home theater, games and cameras. Like Best Buy, Circuit City will be looking to lure in customers who are upgrading to their first HDTV. Don't be surprised if Circuit City also offers crazy deals for a quality 7.1 surround sound home theater in a box system below $200! Dan de Grandpre from Dealnews.com expects similar laptops deals as well as "wicked" HD TV deals from Circuit City. Prediction: Circuit City may do well this year by being a one-stop Black Friday shop.
UNSOLVED MYSTERIES WITH REALLY OBVIOUS SOLUTIONS
The Lost Roanoke Colony
The Roanoke Colony was either the first permanent settlement in America, or an elaborate practical joke. Walter Raleigh sent the colonists there and then left them without supplies for three years, perhaps just to see what would happen. What he probably didn't expect was for the colony to just vanish. When new settlers finally arrived, none of the original colony remained at the settlement (except for the old skeleton of one guy) and the mysterious word "Croatan" was carved into a tree, right under, "Metallica Rules". So, was it a UFO abduction? Perhaps the colonists were held in some kind of suspended animation and are still being anally probed to this very day. The Obvious Answer: That second group of settlers didn't really get the chance to investigate what happened to the original bunch, because a few years later an even bigger mysterious phenomena occurred: Blue-eyed, pale-complexioned Indians began showing up on nearby Croatan Island. So what to make of these mysterious children, who looked like they might have been the descendents of white/Indian mixed race parents? On CROATAN island? It's almost as if, I don't know, a certain group of settlers realized their colony sucked, and went and found some natives nearby who seemed to know how to live off the land. And that they then left their shitty colony forever to go live happily ever after on Croatan Island, and to have impressive amounts of sex with the natives.
FLORIDA: AMERICA'S WANG
There's a bra bandit on the loose in southwest Florida. The Lee County Sheriff's Office was searching for an individual they say stole 160 bras valued at nearly $6,000 on Thursday from a Victoria Secret store, the latest in a string of bra burglaries in the area. Since February, authorities say 452 bras valued at nearly $19,000 have been stolen from two of the chain's southwest Florida locations. Six different bra thefts at the stores have been reported during that time. Investigators said a female customer walked into the store Thursday and immediately went to a four-drawer cabinet with new bras of the PINK brand name. The store manager told deputies the woman waited until employees were busy helping customers and then thrust the bras into a bag and exited the store.
OCTOBER 9TH IN HISTORY
1919
The Cincinnati Reds win the World Series, but only because key Chicago White Sox ballplayers agreed to throw the series for $100,000 in bribes.
1951
RKO Pictures asks Marilyn Monroe to wear panties while working. Damn them.
1967
After being debriefed by CIA field agent Felix Rodriguez, Che Guevara is executed in a schoolhouse in La Higuera, Bolivia. Guevara had been captured by the Bolivian 2nd Ranger Battalion, which was specifically trained by U.S. Army Special Forces to catch him.
1987
24 boats equipped with Lowrance X-16 sonar units detect a "large object" at a depth of 606 feet beneath Loch Ness.
1989
Three aliens and their UFO visit Voronezh, USSR, acccording to the TASS news agency.
1989
The Hebrew edition of Penthouse magazine is released. Kosher pornography!
1995
A 12-car Amtrak train derails near Hyder, Arizona. Letters claiming responsibility are found, signed by the "Sons of the Gestapo."
HEROES
Ratings for NBC's "Heroes" are falling each and every week. The most recent episode was down 11% from the previous week's numbers. I gotta tell ya, I don't get it. I'm really loving this season, but TV critics left and right have given up on the show. Sure, it's completely ridiculous and over the top, but if you remember the first season wasn't exactly a PBS documentary. The show has always been comic-book crazy, so I wonder if the writers strike had a bigger impact on the show than we all thought. Or maybe people have just gotten tired of the show, not because of any massive drop in quality but just because they're watching other things, not into sci-fi as much anymore, or don't want to follow another show with a continuing storyline and a lot of characters. I don't know, but I do know that the show is a ton of fun to watch, and even if there is a lot going on, it's a great ride. It probably doesn't help that the ratings for the lead in show, "Chuck", are down 15%. Wow, if these two shows go away, what other hour-long shows will there be left to watch on NBC? I'm not sitting through "The Biggest Loser" or "Knight Rider", sorry. I wonder how "My Own Worst Enemy" will do in the Monday at 10 time slot when it premieres next week?
THE AMAZING RACE
Having previously cited The Amazing Race as my favorite reality series, I don’t want it to die. Right now, I kind of just want the race to slow down: let us get to know the contestants, and the locations, much more than it does now. It is a race, of course, and so that may be impossible, but the challenges could borrow from "The Mole", for example, and require a lot more thinking and strategizing. That won’t happen this season, though. And there are still spectacular locations and funny moments. Here are the things that stood out from the second episode: Why do Nick and Starr wear camouflage? Are they expecting combat? And do they realize that sleeveless camo kind of defeats the purpose? During a cab ride, Terence told Sarah, “Find the spot, really stick this in there. … Now, if you will be kind enough, blow it.” The Parents Television Council is already filing a complaint (even though he was just asking her to fix a minor wound on his forehead caused by the cab driver slamming the trunk on his head, which is definitely a point for the cab driver). Arriving at the airport, Ty asked Aja, “What do you want to do—do you want to buy the flight first or do you want to change the money?” Then they decided to change money instead of buy tickets. Did someone forget to tell them this is a race? Tina got increasingly more annoying after convincing herself that she’d convinced an airline to get a bigger airplane so that all of the contestants would fit. Because the best way to endear oneself to others is to demand that they like you, Tina went around and told everyone what she’d done, and then instructed them to appreciate her. “You owe me,” Tina told Ty and Aja, and then pulled a horse head out of her backpack and dropped it on the ground in front of them.
“I’m going to start giving people candy!” one of the blondes, Marisa or Brooke, said, thinking that’d be an effective strategy to get people to help her rather than, say, call the police when she starts handing out candy to strangers. Anthony and Stephanie foreshadowed their elimination by talking about how the abject poverty around them helped them to appreciate their lives, because there’s no better way to feel better about yourself than to compare yourself to someone whose life appears much worse upon superficial examination of that person’s community. It also helps if you’re condescending and insulting, like when Anthony criticized the country’s taxis and said, “If they learned how to fix a car, they’d probably make it rich.” Deciding to do the more physical Detour challenge, one of the (not exactly Abercrombie) frat boys said, “Me and him lift all the time, so it’s not like we’d pull a muscle or anything.” And that, friends, is proof that lifting weights and physical fitness do not necessarily have anything to do with one another. Any sentence that starts with “As Yoda would say” is a sentence that I wish I never heard. Nick declared, “Taxi Parking: There’s a sign that I can read.” I think he meant, “there’s a sign that’s in English,” or even “there’s a sign I’m glad to see,” but it’s much funnier to imagine that anything more complicated than those two words represents a significant reading challenge for him, and that he really had to work hard for his Pizza Hut Book It! personal pan pizzas.
“Should we go in there and get an ice cream?” Terence asked Sarah, who replied, “Yeah, babe, because we’re sightseeing.” Seriously, did the producers forget to tell these teams they are racing? Kelly and Christy raised their stupidity flag as they wasted time in one of the most incomprehensible ways ever: “We were searching in the sand, searching in the water for a container we did not need,” one of them said. Yes, after they completed their own Detour task, they read the clue for the other Detour, which talked about location a shipping container by number, and so they started digging in the sand, apparently not realizing that they were a) doing something completely unnecessary, b) digging in the wrong place, and c) looking for something the size of the trailer they will soon occupy if their intelligence is any indication of their future earning potential. There was so much confusion between Spanish and Portuguese, the actual language spoken in Brazil, that I don’t even know where to begin except to just sigh. Phil hasn’t been much of a presence this season, but he did get a little randy on the mat when Dallas and Toni, Terence and Sarah, and Aja and Ty showed up. “Maybe you should talk about this love that I’m seeing here,” he said. “You guys are hugging and kissing.” As if their search for the shipping container wasn’t enough to demonstrate their cluelessness, Kelly and Christy stood around waiting for a taxi when theirs was sitting with the others the whole time. “I have a lot of things in my life to be thankful for: I have my health, I have my parents, I have, you know, my looks, and I have Stephanie,” Anthony said. Well, three out of four isn’t bad.
GEEK TALK
There's actually a lot of noteworthy geek news this week. Producer Lauren Shuler Donner talked up X-Men Origins: Wolverine over on Superhero Hype: "It's closer to the first X-Men in tone because it's a little darker, but there's a lot of action. It's his origin story. It's really good. I've been in the editing room the last couple of weeks and I think that it's good and that audiences are going to like it. But it's a little darker ... You haven't seen this side of him. It's darker and sadder and it's kick-ass. There's a ton of action. It's really kick-ass." She also suggested the film borrows from Wolverine's Victorian youth in one of my least favorite series, "Wolverine: Origins". The troubled Punisher: War Zone has launched its official site, and it's got all kinds of things to click on. The multiplayer game jammed up my computer so I don't know what that's all about. And IGN has the new poster, which will arrive in your local theaters framed in "real" guns. I must say, that is a pretty impressive piece of marketing. David S. Goyer, scribe of The Dark Knight, tried his best to end all these Batman 3 rumors. "It's all B.S.," he told MTV News. "ALL of it. Chris and I haven't even talked about it. He quite understandably is taking a long, long vacation and wants to purgehimself." This will dampen the "Guess who's playing Catwoman" rumors for approximately 3.5 days. Superhero Hype has 5 videos of Kick-Ass filming in Toronto. Mostly people standing around, and cars being driven on platform trucks. And /film has photos up of Dave "Kick Ass" Lizewski's costume, filled out nicely by his stunt double.
Okay, kids, there you have it, another new entry. I received an e-mail from AOL about the future of the journals, and here is what it said: Dear AOL Journals user, As we wrote in an e-mail on Sept. 30, AOL® Journals will permanently shut down on Oct. 31. It’s never an easy decision to shut down a feature, especially one like AOL Journals that some of our members have used for a long time. But with a decline in Journals usage, we have to look carefully at all of AOL’s features to make sure we’re providing as much value to our members as possible. Though we know this might be an inconvenience, the good news is that we've partnered with Blogger.com to provide a smooth transition for your journal. Blogger is a free service from Google that makes it easy to share your thoughts with friends and the world. Blogger supports most of the features you've come to expect from AOL Journals, and it's easy to get started. If you wish to transfer your journal to Blogger, they will move your posts, comments and photos to your new blog on their service. When you're ready, go to this link to get started. Blah, blah. blah. Anyway, I did register to Blogger, and another blog website as well. I will try Blogger out, and if I don't like it I will go with the other one. In the meantime, the Phile will be updated next Thursday, then on the 23rd and the 30th. In November I'll start posting on Blogger. So, until then, spread the word, not the turd.
Some like it hot and some sweat when the heat is on. Some feel the heat and decide that they can't go on. Some like it hot, but you cant tell how hot til you try. Some like it hot, so lets turn up the heat til we fry.
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