The Definitive Consumer’s Guide To Superbowl Ads

  BY MIKE WOLVERTON SPORTS GUY That game was pretty good. I was rooting for Baltimore, so I’m happy. On to the commercials. They only count if they air during the game (kickoff-to-final gun, no halftime). I’ve thrown out the car ads, movie trailers and CBS promos and rated everything else that tried to be funny or cool. With a nod to the old axiom, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” I’ve changed the grading system from a 10-point scale to letter grades. The past three years have played out thusly:

SPARE US THE CUTTER: Man Paid $149,000 By Tom Corbett To Throw 89,000 Children Off Medicaid Quits

  INQUIRER: In January 2012 Alexander announced the department was instituting an asset test – making the amount of food stamps that people receive contingent on the assets they possess. It was an unexpected move that bucked national trends — favored by both Democrats and Republicans, to eliminate asset tests altogether — since they are viewed as punitive toward elderly people saving for their burials, poor people trying to save enough to get out of poverty, and working- and middle-class people who lost their jobs in the recession and would have to liquidate assets to feed their families. Alexander’s department […]

Hatchet-Wielding Homeless Hitchhiking West Virginny Skater Dude Saves Woman From Jesus Attack

You can’t make this sh*t up. Well, you could, but, well, just watch the video… WARNING: Numerous F-bombs and reinforcement of Jam Band Nation stereotypes. RELATED: In Fresno, California, a man claiming to be Jesus Christ rammed his car into an unidentified Pacific Gas & Electric worker on Saturday. The PG&E employee was innocently standing next to his company-issued truck when the son of god — a.k.a. Jett Simmons McBride of Tacoma, Washington — broke the worker’s leg with his car, wedging the victim between McBride’s front bumper and the PG&E truck’s rear bumper. McBride got out of the car […]

MUST SEE TV: The Bravest 15-Year-Old Girl On Earth

In America females become famous for being the shallow, talent-free, attention-whore with a big ass that’s banging Kanye. Or for being her sister. In Pakistan, females become famous for getting shot in the head by the Taliban for suggesting that Muslim girls deserve the same access to education as the boys — and living to tell the tale. It’s hard to say which society is more f*cked up. NEW YORK TIMES: Speaking on camera for the first time since she survived an assassination attempt by the Pakistani Taliban last year, the young activist Malala Yousafzai began with the words, “Today […]

THE HURDY GURDY MAN COMES SINGING SONGS OF LOVE: Q&A w/ Julian Koster Of The Music Tapes

  UPDATE: Tonight’s performances of The Music Tapes’s Traveling Imaginary has been postponed due to a band emergency. The show will be re-scheduled with a new date TBA. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Julian Koster was more or less was the one-man Salvation Army Band within Neutral Milk Hotel who made those proverbial ‘bare ruined choirs’ sing and gave NMH that Barton Fink feeling. In the wake of NMH’s long, never-explained self-exile, Koster has focused on The Music Tapes, wherein he creates whimsical, antediluvian hallucinatory circus music out of singing saws, rusty banjos, wrinkled horns and calliope-like keyboards with a revolving cast […]

BANNED IN THE UAE: Phawker, Striking Fear In The Heart Of Repressive Arab Petrol Kingdoms Since 2013

  Hat tip to Sean Agnew for sending this in. Whatever we said that got us banned? That now goes double. HUMAN RIGHTS: The Human Rights situation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) deteriorated rapidly during 2012, Human Rights Watch said today in its World Report 2013. The government has carried out a repressive campaign that has targeted Islamists, liberals, activists, and scholars alike, Human Rights Watch said. The campaign has systematically violated UAE citizens’ rights to free expression and fair trial, and employed tactics that directly contravene the international prohibition on arbitrary detention and forced disappearance. At the same […]

THE SECOND COMING: MBV Releases New Album

  Twenty-two years after the release of Loveless, we’d come to believe Jesus would come back before My Bloody Valentine. Never thought we would occasion to type these words: HERE is the new My Bloody Valentine album. Tourists and the broke can listen HERE. INSTA-REVIEW: Opening trio of wall-of-noise tracks are stunning and deathless (and progress-less, too) but the bottom kinda falls out midway (tracks 4-6) when they peel back the wall of noise to reveal that there ain’t that much there there. But it picks up again with a pretty fucking ass-kicking three-song homestretch. “In Another Way” and especially […]

BEING THERE: Flogging Molly @ The Electric Factory

Photo by PETE TROSHAK Midway through an intense, sweaty two-hour set at the Electric Factory on Thursday night Flogging Molly frontman Dave King stopped to share a Philly memory. He described a moment much earlier in the band’s career when a fan in Philadelphia showed him a blown up picture of the mosh pit from a previous show here and he described it as “the most frightening and beautiful thing” he had ever seen and said that after seeing that he knew his band would make it. The Celtic punk/folk rockers were in town with their Green 17 tour, an […]

SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Out Of The Mouths Of Boobs

  BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Last week, Paul Ryan (you remember him, he’s the guy whose selection was sure to put Mitt over the top) proclaimed the following: “Mitt Romney and I lost not because of ideas, but due to ineffective communication. President Obama and Vice President Biden also prevailed because they did a better job with ‘technology and (voter) turnout.’” Hey, Paul, do me a grand favor. Savor those words, cherish them, embrace them, nurture them, memorize them! Above all, promise me you’ll take every opportunity possible to repeat them especially whenever there’s even the slightest chance they’ll be […]

CINEMA: The Tao Of Ed

  NEW YORK TIMES: It is hardly an uncritical account of Mr. Koch’s dozen years as mayor, but time has a way of turning the furious political battles of the past into amusing war stories, and of softening old enmities. Politicians, civic leaders and journalists who were thorns in Mr. Koch’s side offer measured, even affectionate assessments of his administration, though some hard feelings persist, especially on matters of race. In the film Mr. Koch himself, who died at 88 on Friday, seems to have mellowed very little. New York may be a safer, cleaner and less argumentative place than […]