I adore this specific Jason Segel

Who else wants to go family style on the handsome guy?

Like a sparkly Face Punch to the face

For those who haven’t been there, Melbourne Central is a sprawling, disorganised shopping mall perched above a train station. There’s a Hoyts in the upper rafters with various bars scattered about to catch the punters as they wait for their films to start.  We’d planned to get a drink or four before ‘New Moon,’ figuring we would need one to survive either the throng of teenage girls or, worse, what might be a depressingly small crowd of adults like us who should know better. I spied a cluster of beribboned topknots and footless tights at the top of the escalator on the way in, so it quickly becomes apparent that we’d have to deal with the former.  We discovered an Ed Hardy bowling alley tucked next to the fake Irish pub perched on the top floor of a shopping mall. We ordered gin and tonics and talk about crabcore, settling in for a long night
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VERY IMPORTANT: these handsome gents are feeling the burn

Via BoingBoing.

Talking cats are kind of disturbing

But cute when they are tripping balls. Via Arbroath.

Third Chakra

My sister came to visit, goodness, almost a month ago, and she brought with her a hard drive full of television. Included was a little show called ‘Make It or Break It,’ about teenage gymnasts and the drama that happens to teenage gymnasts. At first you’d think it’d be a fairly standard riff on the ‘Bring It On,’ ‘Stick It,’ full of fizzy teen quippiness, but it’s quite the opposite. ‘Make It or Break It’ is largely about sex and teenage girls with preternaturally shiny hair, mostly whether or not teenage girls should have sex (answer: no). Any humour is entirely unintentional, and I love it, so I decided to cut together some of the more ridiculous moments.

And it took…. forever. I have no idea what compelled me to keep doing it; I think it must have been the pile of marking besides my desk. Anyway, here are the best parts of what I will call the Gymnasts and Hymens show. Enjoy.

VERY IMPORTANT: SOMEONE IS CLEANING THIS BAT WITH A TOOTHBRUSH

And he LOVES it. Via I Have Seen the Whole of the Internet.

I watched ‘An American Werewolf in London’ for the first time

David Naughton is smoking hot and frequently nude and there is penis and the funniest porno movie ever. Also, Rick Baker, bitches. New favourite film.

On hating Twilight

TRUE CONFESSION: I’m rather looking forward to the opening of ‘New Moon’ in November. I’ve even coerced someone into coming with me, possibly because I’ve hinted that there’s a positive relationship between opportunities to see my boobs and willingness to engage with the ‘Twilight’ franchise. I read the first book on a flight to New Zealand for a conference. I’m terrified of flying, but I’m trying to wean myself off drugs when I fly, and I thought ‘Twilight’ might be a nice substitute for benzodiazapenes. Stephanie Meyer’s incredibly profitable saga of sparkle teen vamps and the sullen girls who love them is, in a word, ridiculous. It reads like fanfic, which is to say that it is totally, completely earnest. Meyer means everything in these books, and when you factor in the paedophile werewolves, Clair de Lune, incestuous vampire families, magical brown people (this time they’re native American!), sports cars and a marriage consummation that, no kidding, involves pillow biting, that’s saying quite a bit. For instance, take this section from the third book, ‘Eclipse.’

The way he stared at her! It was like a blind man seeing the sun for the first time. Like a collector finding an undiscovered Da Vinci, like a mother looking into the face of her newborn child.

His wondering eyes made me see new things about her – how her skin looked like russet coloured silk in the firelight, how the shape of her lips was a perfect double curve, how white her teeth were against them, how long her eyelashes were, brushing her cheek when she looked down…

Watching them, I felt like I better understood what Jacob had told me about imprinting before – it’s hard to resist that level of commitment and adoration.

To clarify: Bella, the barely-sketched, mildly hysterical everygirl heroine, is watching a werewolf relative of nonthreatening magical brown man, Jacob, interact with a two year old girl. Jacob infodumped earlier that werewolves ‘imprint,’ which is to say, form longstanding erotic fixations on people just by looking at them. So the above is Meyer’s description of an adult man with an erotic fixation on a two year old child. When I read this I literally cackled with glee.  If you can put aside your irritation at the clunking, faintly juvenile prose it’s rather delightful and completely, batshit insane.

And the ridiculousness, as Gabe from Videogum notes, keeps on giving. The films quickly made to cash in on the fandom are ‘The Room‘-level awful and, again, in my opinion, similarly satisfying. It’s all you can do to keep from flinging spoons at the screen as Kristen Stewart and R. Pattz endure each scene, each looking equally bored and constipated.

So: in short, I have affection for the Twilight franchise, and I don’t totally understand the level of vitriol directed towards it and its largely female, largely young fan base. It strikes me that there’s a bit of ‘Madame Bovary’ style fingerwagging at foolish girls and their silly novels in the response to Twilight. Indeed, ‘Twilight fan’ has become a sort of shorthand for dim girl, and while many fans hardly help themselves with their hand-painted shoes and themed prom nights, I can’t help but bridle a little at the nastiness. There’s a lot of concern that the Twilight franchise is somehow Bad For Young Women, as in the fretting that Edward will somehow prime girls to seek and tolerate withholding, controlling, pouffy haired partners.  It’s just another case where young women’s media consumption is again rendered pathological, a sign of poor psychosexual development or something like that. I will enjoy ‘New Moon,’ sir, mostly because of the tide of youthful fandom. As Meyer herself said, it’s hard to resist that level of commitment and adoration.