Who are the sexiest women in rock??? ATTENTION Fuckers! I mean ROCK! NOT Britney or Madonna, any pop, hip hop, nothing. ROCK N ROLL!!!! I MEAN WOMEN PERFORMING WITH LIVE INSTRUMENTS!!!!!! My ultimate vote is of course Debbie Harry and then Meg White. Thank you!

this was in another thread, and it got me thinking: RagleGumm said: (image) (image) But also (especially in the eyes): (image) (image) i've always thought that fractal looks a lot like natalie wood - an actress from the 60-70's, was in rebel without a cause, gypsy, the great race, etc. but i... more

this was in another thread, and it got me thinking:

RagleGumm said:




But also (especially in the eyes):




i've always thought that fractal looks a lot like natalie wood - an actress from the 60-70's, was in rebel without a cause, gypsy, the great race, etc. but i definitely see the resemblance above.

anyways, anyone else notice resemblances between any of the girls and particular celebrities?

Dr. Phil Plait comes at science blogging with some heavy credentials, having actually worked on the Hubble Space Telescope and, to a lesser extent, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) programs. His blog, Bad Astronomy, began life as an outlet for his frustration at the misuses and misunderstandings... more

Dr. Phil Plait comes at science blogging with some heavy credentials, having actually worked on the Hubble Space Telescope and, to a lesser extent, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) programs. His blog, Bad Astronomy, began life as an outlet for his frustration at the misuses and misunderstandings of astronomy in popular culture, but soon became a venue for his advocacy of all things science-based. From 2008 to 2010, Dr. Plait was the President of the James Randi Educational Foundation, a group which advocates for science and critical thinking. He’s written two books, the most recent of which is Death From the Skies, chronicling all the ways the universe might kill us all, and recently created and starred in three pilot episodes of a Discovery Channel program called Bad Universe.

Keith Daniels: You spent years working on the Cosmic Background Explorer and then on Hubble. Why did you feel that focusing instead on science education and popularization were where you were needed the most?

Phil Plait: [Laughs]. “Where I was needed the most!” Yes, I’m Captain Astronomy, here to save the world from its misuses and abuse! I don’t know if I’d phrase it that way precisely, but yeah, I was doing some research on Hubble. I wasn’t on COBE for very long, but I did use Hubble when I was in graduate school, and then for several years afterwards. It’s not that ‘I was needed more elsewhere’, it was more along the lines of... I really enjoyed talking about this. I always have. I like writing about it. I like talking to people about astronomy, and I just started doing it. What I found was that the more I did it, the more I liked it. As far as research goes, a lot of it was really cool, and really interesting, but it didn’t “sing to me”. It didn’t feel like my calling. It felt more like getting out there and writing about this, and showing people what’s going on... it was more fun and more gratifying. I guess it is important, you know?! People are interested in this kind of stuff and it’s cool, and I wanted to make sure everybody sees what’s going on in the sky above their heads. I guess that’s why I started spending more and more time doing it.

KD: You’ve published two books, you’ve had a popular blog, and you’ve done tons of public speaking, but last year you did a television show, Bad Universe. Is television another level entirely?

PP: Yeah, it’s kind of terrifying. A one minute cameo on Jersey Shore can actually reach more people than a year of blogging, which is sad, but true. Yeah, television is a terrific medium. It’s really good for astronomy, because astronomy is a really visual science. There are two broad appeals of astronomy: one is that it is simply beautiful -- you have these pictures of galaxies and planets and all these things.. it’s artwork, it’s just fantastic, and every time I get a press release, or a note on Twitter or something, from Hubble, or the European Southern Observatory, or any of these groups, I always get excited, because I know there’s going to be some sort of really beautiful image involved with it, and that’s great. The other prong of the fork is: it appeals to our brains. Astronomy covers a lot of really great questions that we’ve had forever, including, “Why are we here?”, “How did we get here?”, “Is the universe all there is?”, “Is there life on other planets?”, “How big is ‘big’?”, “Is the universe infinite?” All of these [questions] can be realistically claimed by astronomy. So, I think there are these two reasons that it really appeals to people, and on television you can tackle a lot of this stuff. Now, it’s kind of hard to dive in and say, “Here’s precisely why stars blow up,” or, “Here’s how black holes work.” It’s not easy to do that in a 42-minute documentary, and have it make sense, and still have people watching by the end of it, but it’s still a terrific medium for that and something that I’ve always wanted to do. So I was pretty excited to be able to get the documentary.

KD: You mentioned answering the Big Questions with astronomy. Going all the way back to its beginnings as a science, astronomy has always had an almost... political... dimension. Why do you think that is? For example, why does it make the news every time Stephen Hawking even mentions the word ‘God’?

PP: [Laughs]. I don’t know about “politics”, but it’s always had strong roots in our psyche. You can imagine, in an agricultural society, they need to know when their seasons start. They need to know when their river’s going to flood. They need to know when the days are going to start getting longer, that sort of thing, and astronomy tells them that. The seasons are astronomical, and so people were tied to the skies. Plus the fact that, before big cities, people were more familiar with the sky. It was darker at night. Now we have so many people living in the cities and suburbs that they’re not as tied to the sky as they used to be. So it’s not surprising to me that there’s a deep and rich history of astronomy being tied to people. Nowadays, there’s so many different ways astronomy plays on people. On the Internet, certainly, it connects with people. A lot of the people who were originally on the internet were, y’know, geeks like me, and so they were already interested in astronomy. Then you’ve got this reliance on experts that is kind of funny. Stephen Hawking, everybody knows who he is, although they may not know why they know who he is. I mean, here’s a guy who, 30 years ago, was breaking ground with black hole research as a theoretical astronomer and astrophysicist, and he came up with some really cool ideas and became very famous for it. Now, when he says anything it’s newsworthy, which I think says more about us than it does about him, whether he’s right or wrong. I’ve disagreed with him on a couple of things he said, but yeah, he comes in and says something like, “We don’t need God to explain the universe,” [and] it’s huge news, and I think that’s funny, because a lot of people have been saying that for a long time. [Laughs]. That idea goes back a long time, but for some reason, when a famous scientist says it, it becomes newsworthy. I’m not sure exactly what it means, but I guess if people have somebody they look up to and respect and then he says something like this, it’s controversial. And of course the media these days, anything that has anything to do with religion, they like to play it up.

KD: You’re also involved in the skeptical movement with the James Randi Educational Foundation, and TAM. Skepticism is often seen as a negative process, y’know, “debunking”, but one of the common themes of your work is demonstrating just how awesome actual science is. Do you feel that’s more important than demonstrating what isn’t true?

PP: Yeah! People think skepticism is a bunch of cynical old balding white men with beards, and I’m like, “I’m not cynical!” I am a middle-aged white guy with increasingly flesh-colored hair -- that’s the way I usually phrase it -- and a beard, so I guess I kind of fit in to that, but I’m not cynical. People think that skepticism is cynicism, it’s saying, “No, that’s not true,” and that’s not at all what skepticism says. That is an output of skepticism if the evidence points that way, but what it really is is a way of looking at stuff and saying, “What’s the evidence for this?” Here’s a claim, “I think that there is a 75-foot purple turtle living in my basement.” Alright, What’s your evidence for this?” You start looking at the evidence and saying, “This is good evidence,” “This is bad evidence,” “Where do you stand on this?,” “What’s the precedent for this?” You can look into all these different ideas, and then at the end, look at them all and say, “What’s my conclusion?” Is my conclusion that, “This idea does not make sense,” or “This idea does make sense,” “it might make sense,” “I don’t know,” but skepticism is not a conclusion, it’s a process. It’s basically the same process science uses: you make a claim, you look at the evidence to support it, or that tears it down, and you make up your mind based on that evidence. Everybody is skeptical of something, and it may be something as mundane as going out and buying a car, and looking at the car salesman and saying, “He really wants to make this sale, so is he going to mention that in crash tests this car tends to explode and kill everybody within a 100 mile radius? Maybe he won’t, because he wants to make that sale.” That is skepticism, looking at why somebody might be making a claim. Now, there are all sorts of logical traps. You don’t want to immediately assume that person’s lying to you because they may have a vested interest in making that sale, but you’ve got to make sure you’re looking at all these things, and that’s what a skeptic does. What is the claim somebody is making? Why are they making it? What is the evidence for that claim? Do I have evidence that supports or denies that claim? Does the claim even make sense? You can look at all these things and come to a conclusion, and you can apply that to more than just comparison shopping. You can do that when you’re listening to a politician, or a religious leader, or a scientist. When somebody tells you -- and this is where it really gets important -- “I think vaccines cause autism,” “I think if I drink this water, in a couple of days I’ll feel better and my shingles will go away,” or something like that. These are testable claims, and that’s what skepticism looks at: the evidence for testable claims. It’s really easy to fool people, and it’s really easy to fool yourself, and if you use these skeptical ideas, you find out what the truth is. The whole idea of skepticism and science is to find out what’s most likely to be true, and what’s most likely not to be true. That’s the goal: to not fool ourselves, and that’s where the real power of skepticism is. That’s why it bugs me when people think it’s a negative thing -- it’s not! It’s the most positive thing we have. It is the search for the real, objective truth.

KD: Do you think a lot of skeptics themselves get the wrong idea? You gave a famous speech at TAM 8 called “Don’t Be a Dick”...

PP: Uh-oh, here we go.

KD: ...I think it’s tempting sometimes to lash out, as an atheist myself, because we’re possibly the last group in the U.S. that it’s completely OK to discriminate against. I read a poll recently that more people would rather have an openly gay President than an atheist, for example.

PP: That’s right. It’s the last subculture that it’s OK to make fun of, or be prejudiced against. It’s amazing, and polls show that when people are asked, “Can an atheist be moral?,” a lot of people think, “No, you need to be religious to be moral,” which is fascinating. That’s completely wrong, and there’s a lot of evidence that that claim is wrong. Atheists can be moral without religion. As far as the “don’t be a dick” talk goes, the two problems with it were that I didn’t have a lot of time to make all the points I wanted to make, and so that made it really misinterpreted. What I found out was that a lot of people really read-in their own prejudices into that talk which were not at all what I meant, which happens. A lot of times people [hear] different things in something you’re saying than what you originally meant. What’s funny is: they were reading stuff in that I never said. A lot of people were saying, “Oh, Phil is saying we should just stand by the sidelines and wring our hands and never say anything bad about people....” I didn’t say that! Oh my gosh, I was very clear to say that we need our passion, we need to fight, that I’m not giving a free pass to anybody. It’s ridiculous that people have said that, and I’ve seen that over and over again. If you read anything I’ve ever written... right as we’re talking I’ve got a window open for a blog post about people claiming that an airplane con-trail was a missile, from last November. There’s an ex-politician who is still rattling his saber about this...

KD: This is the one in L.A.?

PP: Yeah. It was an airplane flying over L.A., but he was saying it was a missile launch. Here’s a guy who is an ex-Senator from New Hampshire writing an op-ed about this, saying, “Why aren’t we getting any answers about this?,” and making an off-hand comment about Obama not being a citizen, and all this stuff, crazy talk. I’m like... no, [skeptics] don’t have to let this stuff go! You can be forceful, but I’m not going to call this guy an idiot. I might use mockery. I think mockery is OK: satire is a well-established method of showing something is silly, and I don’t have any problems with that. What I don’t like are the attacks: the mean-spirited, immediate reactions that a lot of people have when they feel like whatever it is they’re fighting against is ticking them off. I see this all the time... not just arguments -- I’ve had arguments with people all the time, it happens -- but it’s the really over-the-top dickishness. I was vague on that term on purpose, because you can insult somebody, and even that might not be a real dick-headed move. There are times when it’s uncalled for, when it’s really over-the-top, and that’s what I was trying to say. You don’t have to be super nice. You don’t have to be all polite and milquetoast-y about this, but studies have shown repeatedly that when an argument gets really heated, you’re less likely to convince the other person -- they’re going to dig their heels in even more. The fact of the matter is that when people are watching an argument like that, if somebody’s being a real jerk, people who are listening to that argument aren’t going to listen to the person they perceive as being a jerk. They’re going to find ways of saying, “That guy’s being a jerk, and so I don’t think what he’s saying is true.” So, my point is that, if your goal is to convince people that you’re right, it’s probably best to try to restrain yourself a little bit. I get angry. I get furious. Babies are dying because people aren’t vaccinating enough. Whooping Cough is literally killing infants who are too young to get vaccinated. [ed. note -- And thus depend on the herd immunity of the people around them.] How angry do I get about that? So angry I can’t speak, where my blood-pressure goes up, and I can’t sleep at night, I’m so furious about this kind of stuff. It’s difficult to restrain yourself, but I think it’s necessary if you want to make a difference in this world.

KD: On the internet, it seems like someone can’t just say, “I didn’t really care for that movie,” instead it’s, “the Worst Movie Ever.”

PP: The internet is a terrific medium because it gives everybody a voice, but it’s also a terrible medium because it gives everybody a voice. You look at comments, like on Youtube if you want to go to the absolute rock bottom, but even on Twitter... It’s just so easy to snark. It’s so easy to just make fun of stuff. When you’re driving down the road and somebody cuts you off, it’s suddenly, “I want to murder this guy!” When the airline announces that the flight is delayed fifteen minutes, “Oh, this is terrible! How can they do this?” Really? There are people starving in the world, and dying from epidemics, and it’s so easy to get into that mindset of “first world problems”. I love it when people say, “I know this is a first world problem, but...,” and it’s like, “Good! I’m glad you see that,” because it’s really easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. We are such a reactive species that when somebody says something, you’re like, “Oh no, you’re full of crap, you idiot. How can you possibly believe that?” I see it all the time in skepticism, and it’s easy because people are attacking your beliefs. It’s your self-identity! When you introduce yourself to someone, what do you say? “I’m an astronomer,” “I’m a Catholic.” You identify yourself with these words, and so when somebody attacks those words, they’re attacking you. You’ve got to be super careful not to trip that reaction, because as soon as you do, the argument’s done -- you’re not going to make any headway that way.

KD: What are the most common mistakes you feel most scientists make in dealing with the media? Do you feel that media literacy should be added to the curricula of science educations?

PP: Oh God... The most common mistake scientists make [in talking to the media] is talking to the media. No, it’s really kind of funny. This is a long, looong argument that’s been going on for as long as there has been science and the media. Scientists need to talk to the media, for all kinds of reasons. The public loves this kind of stuff, in general. A lot of polls show that the public want more science, and they like it, so I think it’s important for scientists to talk to the public. Plus, the public pays for a lot of the science, so I think you’re kind of obligated to talk to them and say, “Here’s what your money’s going for.” That’s not to say that every scientist is good at talking to the media; some are, some aren’t, just like anybody else. On the flip side of that, the media... a lot of them want to do this right, they try to do this right, but you’ve got people who don’t understand the science trying to report on it, and that makes it really difficult to get a really good, accurate story. In the meantime, you get a lot of misquoting. Every astronomer I know -- and I mean that almost literally -- has been interviewed for the news, a newspaper, a website, whatever, and the journalist has gotten their story almost completely backwards. They’ve either inserted the word “not”, or left the word “not” out. So a story about, “This asteroid is not going to destroy the Earth,” kinda turns into the opposite story, and so they report it as, “This asteroid may destroy the Earth.” [Laughs.] It just gets inflated beyond reason. A lot of the media online are irresponsible that way: it’s not really journalism, it’s churn-alism. They’re trying to stir the pot. They don’t care if it’s accurate or not. “If it bleeds, it leads.” So, if they can say, “Oh, astronomers say this asteroid’s going to hit us in 2036, and it’ll blow up with the yield of all our nuclear weapons,” even though that is completely not true, and not at all what the astronomer said, they’ll write it, and hey, it makes [that website] popular for a short amount of time. You can fight that kind of stuff, but it’s going to be there forever. If people are going to do that, they’re going to do that. I just wish there were more science reporters, and more people trained in science. CNN let go of Miles O’Brien, who was basically their best science reporter, and CNN’s science reporting has been abysmal since then. That’s true for a lot of big sites, they’ve just been consolidating and trying to save money, and what’s happening is their science reporting has gone into the trash can.

KD: On Thursday the shuttle Discovery is set to launch. It’s possible that it could be the last shuttle launch ever. Is there any positive side to the end of the shuttle program?

PP: It’s the last launch for Discovery. There’s one more shuttle launch later this year for, I think, Endeavor, and these are both going up to the space station to deliver pieces of it and crew and all that kind of thing. The shuttle’s an interesting machine. It’s a magnificent, complex, amazing rocket that can actually lift a huge amount of material into orbit, which is hard to do. The problem is it was sort of billed as a space truck: it was going to launch every two weeks, and it was going to be cheap. The original NASA designs for it were kind of going to be that way, but it became a political football. Anything that costs a certain amount of money, suddenly every congressman wants their district involved with it, and it just got more and more bloated, got more and more complicated, and eventually basically could [only] be launched four or five times a year and couldn’t do a lot of the stuff that NASA wanted it to do originally. So, considering it costs a billion dollars a flight, or something like that, yeah, seeing the shuttle go away is not entirely a bad thing. The problem is, because of all the political issues over the past few years, we don’t have a replacement rocket. A lot of people are saying, “Obama’s killing the shuttle and manned-space program.” That’s bull. That makes me so upset when people say that, because that is total crap. It was George [W] Bush who cancelled the shuttle program, and said, “You guys are going to have your last flight in 2010, get moving on this,” and the problem was it was too late to actually design, build, and test a replacement rocket. So, no matter what, even before Obama was even sworn in, it was too late to have a replacement for the shuttle and not have this several-year gap. I’m hoping that NASA will come up with a good replacement for it, and, in the meantime, private industry will be able to launch payloads into orbit. SpaceX is a company that’s doing that -- testing a rocket right now -- and it’s looking pretty good that they’ll be able to have launches to the space station within the next couple of years. I think that’s what should be happening. I think private industry should be taking over this routine, quote-unquote, “space truck” business. Let NASA be paving that road, and then let private industry follow.

KD: Do you feel like the Obama administration has done better, in general, on science issues than the Bush administration?

PP: You’re setting a pretty low bar there. The Bush administration did a lot to absolutely destroy science, from the stem-cell issue, to global warming, to a hundred other things, including infiltrating NASA with political hacks -- which happened, a few years ago I reported on that quite a bit. There was a P.R. guy there was who was trying to downplay global warming and the Big Bang in NASA science. It was pretty astonishing. So it would be pretty easy, just by not doing anything, to do better than the Bush administration, and Obama’s administration has done quite a bit. They could do a huge amount more. I mean, he talks a good talks, in his “State of the Union” and other things, about getting science back to where it should be, but he had two years of a Democratic Congress and couldn’t seem to get it done. I know that the Republicans did a lot to obstruct a lot of that, and now that the Republicans have a majority again, they’re attacking science with glee as far as global warming goes -- and some other issues of science. It’s really astonishing to see this anti-reality force brazenly saying things which are just grossly and provably false about issues like global warming, evolution, and that sort of thing. These attacks on science are pretty brazen. I would like to see Obama and the Democrats -- and Republicans! -- standing up to this sort of thing. I don’t know what happened over the past ten years. Ever since Newt Gingrich destroyed the Office of Science and Technology in Congress, things have been on a long downhill slide for science, and it’s terrible. Our economy depends on science and tech, and we’re raising a generation of kids to not understand this stuff. Carl Sagan talked about this even before it was happening, politically, and said this is a recipe for disaster. He’s still right.

KD: He was pretty much right about everything.

PP: [Laughs]. Well, not everything. I’m re-reading The Demon-Haunted World right now, which is as far I’m concerned his best work, and even though it was written fifteen years ago -- something like that -- you know, I hate to use the word “prophetic”, but it really does seem like a prophecy of the 21st century right now. The things he said could be a blog comment off of things that happened on the news the night before. It’s amazing that he basically called all this stuff out, and said we’ve got to be super careful about what our politicians are doing, and how this fundamentalist religious stronghold on science is growing. It’s bad, it’s really bad. If kids don’t understand evolution... If a state board of education... [cough]Texas[cough] ...comes out and says that Evolution is a crock and Creationism should be taught in class, biomedical industries are not going to want to go to Texas, or Louisiana, or any of these other states that are downplaying [science]. They’re not going to want to go there if the only people they can hire are people who think the Earth is 6,000 years old. This has a real, fundamental -- ha ha ha -- financial impact on this country.

KD: Speaking of hiring people who think the Earth is 6,000 years old. The University of Kentucky recently settled out of court in the case of Martin Gaskell, who was probably discriminated against in his application to become the Director of the university’s new observatory, on religious grounds, because he’s a Young-Earth Creationist...

PP: Allegedly. It’s unclear whether he’s a Young-Earth Creationist, actually, but go ahead...

KD: Religious discrimination is illegal, but in cases like that, is it wrong?

PP: You know, that’s a really, really good question, and I wrestled with that. When the news came out it was unclear to me exactly what was going on, and then, as time went on and more emails were released, it became a lot more clear. It was funny how a lot of the science blogs were fomenting about this, and I thought, “You don’t really know! You’re saying this, but you don’t really know exactly what happened.” Then it became clear that, yeah, the religious discrimination was pretty obvious. These guys [from the University of Kentucky] were saying, “This guy’s a religious fundamentalist, and we don’t want him representing our university, so we’re not going to hire him,” and that is illegal. Like you said, is that right? Should you be able to discriminate against somebody on religious grounds? I think, yes, you should, because if somebody’s religion dictates to them that the Earth is 6,000 years old, I’m not going to hire them to teach geology, astronomy, biology, archeology, or any of a hundred other “ologies”, because, clearly, all the real evidence points to the Earth being billions of years old not thousands. I wouldn’t be able to trust somebody to separate their religious belief in a young Earth from the actual truth of the matter, which is that the Earth is old. It’s interesting that we have these laws against religious discrimination; they’re too broad, basically. If I’m going to hire somebody at a fast-food restaurant, or to be my waiter or... whatever, if it has nothing to do with religion, then yeah, you shouldn’t be able to discriminate against their religion any more than you should because they’re a man or a woman, or they’re gay, or they’re black, or whatever. But, when it comes to their beliefs having a direct impact on the job requirements, you should be able to discriminate, because the word “discriminate” means to be able to separate somebody out because of the evidence. I don’t think you should be prejudiced. On the other hand, I do think you should be able to look at all the job requirements and see if what they believe will interfere with that. You don’t expect a Catholic church to hire an atheist to be a priest -- now, the Catholic church may not be getting public funding to do that, but maybe they are -- but the point here is that when the job requires something, and their religious beliefs will interfere with that requirement, then you don’t have to hire them. If somebody applies to a job where I need a doctor on Sundays, and their religion says they can’t work on Sundays, I’m not going to hire them. I don’t think anybody would have a problem with that, but when it comes to an astronomer, suddenly it’s terrible that we’re discriminating against them. I don’t think it is. I’m sorry, I’ve been giving you long answers to these -- I tend to do that -- but this is an interesting case where it’s not straightforward. It’s not a bumper sticker issue where I can just say it in six words. It doesn’t work that way. There are layers and levels and subtlety to a lot of this, and that’s why I get unhappy when I hear people sort of rallying on one side or the other based on their own prejudices. You’ve got to really look at the details of this, and that’s why I never wrote about this issue, because the more I learned about it the more I realized that I’d have to write a 5,000 word blog post, and nobody’s going to read it.

KD: Switching topics here, how important is the work being done by Kepler?

PP: [Laughs]. The work being done by Kepler is super important, for a lot of reasons. The design of this mission is to sit and stare at one spot in the sky. It’s looking at 150,000 stars I think, and it’s just staring at them. It’s looking for tell-tale signs of a planet passing between us and that star. So, if there’s a star in that field, and it’s got planets orbiting it, and a planet’s orbit happens to line up such that it passes in front of the star, the starlight will dip a little bit. You can measure that dip, and by precisely measuring the length of time that dip takes and how much light is being blocked from the star, you can get an idea of the planet’s orbit and how big the planet is. We have some idea of planets orbiting other stars, but it’s sort of vague right now. The methods we had for looking at them didn’t give us a good idea, statistically, of how many planets are out there and what they’re like. Kepler’s going to do that. So, by really staring at those stars, Kepler’s going to say, statistically, “Here’s how many stars have planets, here’s how close they orbit to their star, here’s how big they are,” and that’s really important right because we don’t have those numbers. What it’s finding, statistically speaking, is that there may be billions -- with a ‘b’ -- of planets in our galaxy alone, certainly millions, but maybe as many as billions that could be -- in some stretch of the imagination -- Earth-like. They are orbiting far enough from their star that temperatures at that planet could [allow] liquid water on them, which is what we think is really important for having life. There could be other kinds of life that don’t need liquid water, but all the kinds we know do. If there is liquid water, that means our kind of life has a shot, and that is one of those Really Big Questions, “Is there life in space?” Holy crap! Is there a cooler question you can ask that we have a really good shot at answering in the next few years? No, there really isn’t one, and that’s it. The proof of that is basically if we find a fossil on Mars, “Oh, look! Here’s a fossil on Mars! The answer is, ‘Yes, there is life on other planets.’” But you need to find these planets first, and that’s what Kepler is doing. It’s doing it very, very well. It has already found several dozen planets that could potentially be something like the Earth, or have Earth-like conditions at least. That’s frickin’ awesome.

KD: Some of the stars that Kepler is looking at are over 4,000 light-years away. Imagine that tomorrow you wake up and Kepler has found an Earth-like planet in the “Goldilocks zone”. Later observations find that it’s got liquid water, and oxygen in the atmosphere. But it’s 4,000 light-years away. How do you react to that?

PP: That’s a good point. There’s a sense of scale here that a lot of people don’t have, because they’re just not familiar with how freaking big space is. Honestly? 4,000 light years isn’t that much different than 4, because both of them are really, really far away. A light year is six trillion miles, and our faster probes ever launched would take tens of thousands of years to get to the nearest star. So, honestly, is 4,000 light years any worse than 4? In my opinion, no, that’s not the point, how far away these planets are. The point is they exist. If we can find a planet orbiting another star, and we can actually observe it with our telescopes and say, “Look, it has oxygen in its atmosphere,” that would be really critical. Oxygen is really reactive, and it’s really hard to keep oxygen around unless you’re producing it; otherwise, it goes away really quickly, and the best way to produce it, not the only way, but the best way, is biology -- is something alive and making that oxygen. If we were to find that, holy crap, would that be awesome! That would really be strong evidence that there is life on other planets. Even if we got a signal from intelligent life on these planets, it’s not so much the distance that’s important. It’s the fact that it happened, and we’re not alone, that there could be other life out there. Now, very briefly if I can, the difference in distance comes in because if we do detect a signal... Imagine if we don’t just detect oxygen in an atmosphere, but we get a radio signal from one of these planets, the difference between 4 light-years and 4,000 is huge. The speed of light is really fast, and if there are aliens living on Alpha Centauri trying to communicate with us, we can send them a signal and hear back from them in 8 or 9 years. If we try to have a conversation with somebody 4,000 light-years away, it’s going to take 8,000 years to hear something back. So, we might at least have something resembling a conversation with somebody who’s close, but that’s a pretty big “if”. I’m more interested right now in the much more realistic chance of us finding Earth-like planets, than us finding aliens we can talk to.

KD: What are your plans for the near future? Are you working on a new book? Are we going to get some more Bad Universe?

PP: Well, I’m getting a lot of tattoos and piercings. I’m hoping to be a model for Suicidegirls. I’ve got the pale skin, I never see sunlight, so I should fit right in. Actually, I’m hoping that the network will pick up the show as a series. It was basically sort of a pilot to see if they would run it as a series, so I’m waiting to see if that will happen. In the meantime I’m still writing the blog. I have a couple of book ideas I’m working on right now, nothing I can talk about specifically, because they’re still in the proposal stage. A lot of other things [are] keeping me busy. I really, really enjoy writing and giving talks about this kind of stuff, so I’m still doing that. I don’t know! This is my... fifth? career. I was a research scientist, a writer, a public outreach guy, I was in education for a while, and now I’m a blogger. The evolution of an astronomer goes from cutting edge scientific research to sitting around in my pajamas railing in my blog about how they cancelled Stargate: Universe, but honestly, it’s a lot of fun. I love having the ability to talk about this stuff, and actually have a voice on the Internet. To be able to say, “Here’s something you guys may not know about that you might find interesting, and is actually kind of important,” that is terrific, even if it does mean I don’t see the Sun for three or four days in a row. It’s important to me, and I think it’s important in the grand scheme of things to open this door to people who might not otherwise see it. A lot of stories go away that really deserve to be investigated, or at least read by people out there, like, “Look, here’s this galaxy that’s kind of throwing a monkey-wrench into how we think things work. Look over here. This star, why is it doing this? What would happen if this thing were to do that?” I love writing about that, and from the comments I get, the emails I get, the questions, the tweets on Twitter, people love this stuff. They want their minds expanded. They want to know what’s going on in the universe without all the B.S. about it, and that’s what I’m trying to do. That’s my goal in life. If I can take somebody by the hand and say, “Look over here. Look at this thing right here. Isn’t that awesome?” If I can achieve that every now and again, that’s it, I’ve got it made.

by Clio, Lexie, Thistle, and Vanessa SuicideGirls’ essential guide to tattoo etiquette: how to keep your artist sweet, and how to get the body art you want. (image) [Clio in Black Heart] Do: Research to find a suitable practitioner. Look up local artists, and ask around. If you happen to see someone... more

by Clio, Lexie, Thistle, and Vanessa

SuicideGirls’ essential guide to tattoo etiquette: how to keep your artist sweet, and how to get the body art you want.



[Clio in Black Heart]

Do:

• Research to find a suitable practitioner. Look up local artists, and ask around. If you happen to see someone that has a tattoo you are particularly fond of, ask them (politely) where they got it done.


• Look at portfolios. Several different ones if you have to. Find someone with a style and personality that will mesh well with your own – especially if it’s your first.


• Make an appointment, both for a consultation, and to get the actual work done. While walk-ins are convenient, if you have a more elaborate piece, respect the artist enough to give them time to work on it.


• Be original.


• Know what you want, and have several ideas about where you’d like the tattoo to go.


• Make drawings (as long as you don’t have the art skills 5-year old) or find reference photos, as many as you think you’ll need to get across the concept/image you want.


• Listen to the artist’s suggestions, and understand that they may say no to some of your ideas simply because they wouldn’t come out right or make a good tattoo.


• Get something that means something personal to you, as long as it’s easy enough to convey. Getting a tree that twists into a lizard that has bird wings and a feathered mask may be the most sacred thing you could possibly think of in this world, but, really, how would that look? Weird, that’s how.


• Bathe beforehand.


• Bring something (non-alcoholic) to drink.


• Let your artist know if you feel like you’re going to be sick and/or pass out. The last thing you want on your person is a big line going in the direction you fainted because you didn’t tell your artist you were about to black out.


• Tip your tattoo artist. ALWAYS. Even if they’re your best friend. TIP THEM. It’s rude and offensive not to. As a rule, leave an extra 20%, unless it’s something minimal like $50-$60, then tip about $10. If it’s a HUGE piece that the artist works on for over 5 hours, then tip anywhere from 25 to 30%. (If the artist also happens to be your significant other and they won’t accept money, give them some extra good sex that night or something.)

[Lexie in Noir Staircase]

Don’t

Copy someone else’s tattoo verbatim – it’s pathetic and infuriating. (While they say imitation is the highest form of flattery, it’s also good reason for an artist, who spent hours coming up with something original, to kick your ass.)

Make the artist change the concept of your tattoo 400 times. A few changes, modifications or additions are fine. But keep it reasonable.

Get a piece started and have another artist finish it unless there’s a good reason behind it, such as a long distance move, or you just didn’t work well with that artist. (See SG’s Tommy Lee interview for more on this particular faux pas).

Do it drunk or high. The last thing the artist needs is you smelling like ass, rambling about how much whiskey you’ve ingested and your amazing stories of shoplifting things from Walgreens.

Drink coffee or alcohol before your appointment. Caffeine can enhance pain perception, while alcohol can cause nausea, dehydration, and fainting while you’re getting tattooed.

Bring food into the store – it’s unsanitary.

Bring 10 friends with you (one buddy for moral support is a good idea though).

Skip out on appointments. Cancel in a reasonable time.

Waste the artist’s time.

Move too much while you’re being tattooed. I know being tattooed is not the best feeling on earth, but at least TRY not to. If you’re squirming and wiggling around, and your tattoo comes out looking like a Picasso, that’s your fault.

Be a pussy when you asked for a full chest piece and it – surprise – hurts.

Throw up on your artist – that’s just gross. There’s no shame in puking. It hurts, your adrenaline is going, and sometimes your body can freak out. Just make sure you make it to the bathroom in plenty of time.

Fall asleep in the chair. (If you wake up with your face covered in stars like that stupid girl from the UK, again, that’s your fault.)

Get a tattoo in a language you don’t speak. Your artist probably won’t be able to tell if it’s mistranslated or misspelled! And while Italian sounds really great and looks even greater, you may have just gotten “My dog’s breathe smells yellow” on your forearm.

Get tattooed at a house party, or from someone who will give you a discount/trade for beer, weed, or cigarettes.

[Thistle in The Lowrider]

Remember:

• Getting your kids’ names, your parents’ names, your pets’ names, your siblings’ names tattooed on you, that’s sweet. Getting your current significant other’s name, not so much. No matter how in love you think you are, things can go wrong.




• This is YOUR tattoo! It will be on YOUR body forever! If your artist suddenly decides he/she wants to change something on a whim and you don’t speak up about not liking it, you’re stuck with it. Don’t be afraid to speak up, it’s supposed to be a collaboration between you and the artist.




• Cheap prices don’t usually equal good tattoos. In general, you pay for what you get. And if you pay $20 to some person with a homemade tattoo gun, you’ll likely end up with something spelled wrong and whatever it was you were trying to get tattooed looking like Pee Wee Herman.




• Last, but not least, don’t let anyone talk crap about any of your tattoos (unless it’s your significant other’s name). It’s YOUR tattoo. It means something to you. People who make fun of other people’s tattoos are incredibly rude. I have an orange on a toothpick on the back of my left arm. “WTF is that about? It’s so stupid! What a dumb tattoo!” It’s my tattoo I got in honor of my older brother because we both love So I Married An Axe Murderer. Yeah, don’t have shit to say about it now, do you? Ass.

[Vanessa in My Favorite Things]

(image) [Razzi in Sounds Like Fun] Hi this is Missy! I started SuicideGirls ten years ago and for a good part of those ten years we've been trying to create a tv show about our live tour: the SuicideGirls Burlesque Show. Vh1 has been nice enough to give us a shot at it, and so we're going to... more

[Razzi in Sounds Like Fun]

Hi this is Missy!

I started SuicideGirls ten years ago and for a good part of those ten years we've been trying to create a tv show about our live tour: the SuicideGirls Burlesque Show. Vh1 has been nice enough to give us a shot at it, and so we're going to start things off by looking for some of the most unique, interesting & beautiful burlesque performers in the US.

If you are a female over the age of 18, eligible to work full time in the United States, and have a background in dance, we would love to meet you!

We are looking for women who are:

INDEPENDENT
DYNAMIC
SEXY
STRONG
EDGY

Those with tattoos, piercings, and talents such as burlesque dancing, fire twirling, contortion, aerial talents on rings or silks, or anything unique are encouraged to apply.


[Korento and friends in Moulin Rouge]

Open call auditions are being held in Las Vegas, New York and Los Angeles to find dancers for this documentary style series about pursuing your dreams in the world of burlesque.

Please email the following information to the appropriate casting associate for the city you would like to audition in:

Name
Phone #s
Dance style / background
3 Photos (to include close-up face shot & full-body shot)

**Depending on which open call you wish to attend,
the subject of your email should read:
"Vegas", "NYC" or "LA"

The casting associates will respond with full audition details.

OPEN CALL AUDITIONS

Las Vegas - February 26th:
Caesars Palace in the Roman Ballroom
Jen - BShowCasting@Gmail.com

NEW YORK OPEN CALL AUDITION
Saturday, March 5th 2011
11am-5pm
Roy Arias Studios and Theatre
300 W. 43rd St. New York, NY 10036
Carrie - CarrieDanceCasting@Gmail.com

LOS ANGELES OPEN CALL AUDITION
Tuesday, March 8th 2011
11am-5pm
The Basement Dance Center
5259 Lankershim Blvd. Suite C, North Hollywood, CA 91601
Greg - BurlesqueShowCasting@Gmail.com


If you are unable to make the open casting calls in the cities listed above, but would still like a shot a participating in the show:

Please email: BurlesqueShowCasting@gmail.com

Name
Phone #s
Dance style / background
3 Photos (to include close-up face shot & full-body shot)

**The subject of your email should read:
"UNABLE TO ATTEND OPEN CALL"

Click to read the eligibility requirements

Good luck!

Really excited to meet you all and see your talent!

xoxo
-missy

Hello there! I have been pulling pics from the threads you have been posting about eyes and girls who look like celebrities to post as previews on facebook for awhile now. It has been a wealth of great images of the girls. I thought I could start a new thread to find the sexiest clothed pics on the site. more

Hello there!

I have been pulling pics from the threads you have been posting about eyes and girls who look like celebrities to post as previews on facebook for awhile now. It has been a wealth of great images of the girls.

I thought I could start a new thread to find the sexiest clothed pics on the site.

I'll start...





Thank you in advance!

xoxo
-missy

The ultimate Community fan encounter might be to be a guest on “Troy and Abed in the Morning” at Greendale Community College. I’ll settle for evening empanadas with Danny Pudi. At NBC’s party for the Television Critics Association, I found Pudi mingling early in the night. We found a corner table... more

The ultimate Community fan encounter might be to be a guest on “Troy and Abed in the Morning” at Greendale Community College. I’ll settle for evening empanadas with Danny Pudi. At NBC’s party for the Television Critics Association, I found Pudi mingling early in the night. We found a corner table to sit at for an interview, and grabbed the hors d’oeuvres that came by.
Very quickly into Community’s premiere, Abed became a scene stealer. His socially awkward deadpan comments pointed out any TV cliché the show would fall into. By episode two, he and Donald Glover made Troy and Abed the standout duo who would close each show during the credits.
Abed remains responsible for much of the show’s meta humor. Abed’s perspective turned the show into stop motion animation for the Christmas episode, and he explained the term “bottle episode” for audiences. It meant the entire cast stays in one location, often used by shows to save costs on other sets.
The sit down interview with Pudi quickly became a meta analysis of interviews. I had some questions prepared but his tangents were more interesting so I followed them. He asked me several questions about my week covering the new TV lineup and yes, he really does talk that fast in real life.
Danny Pudi: You’re named after one of my favorite characters. Well, favorite people.
SG: Wait, a real person or a fictional character?
DP: Well, it’s a real person who plays a role in one of my favorite TV shows from the ‘80s.
SG: Fred from the ‘80s. Is it Fred Dryer?
DP: Yeah, Hunter. I love Hunter.
SG: Fred Willard once told me there’s a Fred club for people named Fred.
DP: Like Flintstone?
SG: No, for real people.
DP: Like everyone? There’s a Fred Club. Wow, there’s not that many Freds. There’s a lot of Dannys. A Danny club would be always to the max.
SG: You spell it differently though, don’t you?
DP: I spell it D-A-N-N-Y. People spell it D-A-N-I frequently because I think they see P-U-D-I and symmetrically they think D-A-N-I P-U-D-U. It’s fine. I actually like both. I think it’s creative and I don’t mind. You can call me Dani Pudi all you want, with an I.
SG: Have you always been a rapid talker?
DP: You know, a little bit, yeah. I think that that’s sort of my energy. I’ve always been a little bit of running around a little bit, can’t sit down, can’t sit still. “Lack of focus” was frequently stated by my teachers through grade school, that kind of stuff. I think also through the show right now, I’m in a rhythm too playing Abed that to me that’s a very fun thing about playing Abed. Not just the world around him but his rapid speech, or the rapid speech patterns because there isn’t a filter and it’s very much processing and stating, a lot of that.
SG: Do you think they mistake lack of focus for just not caring?
DP: Teachers? [Laughs] Here’s the thing. I do care. I think that people do care, but I don't think they’re like, “Oh, I just don’t care about social studies. Who cares about the Byzantine Empire? I don’t care about them.” It’s more of like, “Oh my gosh, did you see that flower? I care more about that.” Constantly looking for that thing that you can connect with.
SG: You’re a better student than I was. I just didn’t care about history or English. Give me music or movies and I’ll focus.
DP: [Laughs] I completely agree and I think that’s a real struggle. For me I always had a good time in school but a lot of it, I was not doing great in class, not fulfilling potential because I had more fun learning from friends or talking to buddies or reading something else or talking about a TV show, that kind of stuff. Until you find the one thing that you really like, there’s a lot of aimless kind of stuff that can be like not caring, but it can also be like teachers can be like, “God, just get him out of my class.”
SG: I know ADD is true because they play music in between press sessions here, because God forbid we should be alone with our thoughts for 10 minutes. Then it’s hard for me to focus on writing during the breaks.
DP: [Laughs] What was the music, anything good?
SG: NBC was better than others. They had a Rooney song.
DP: Oh, okay, that’s pretty good. So every network gets their own playlist? Oh wow.
SG: I noticed a lot of Disney artists at
ABC.
DP: So subtle, like Disney sense coming in, Mickey’s running in serving you stuff. I’m trying to think of what my good play list would be for a day like this. Today I’d need some adrenaline.
SG: It still repeats. Even when it’s good there's only maybe an hour's worth of songs.
DP: Awww, and then you’re just like, “Okay, this is the third time I’ve listened to…" I don't know, I’m trying to think what would be good today. I like XX. Do you like The XX?
SG: I don't know them.
DP: “Heart Skips a Beat,” great song. “VCRs.” It’s good, it’s a British band. I’m into them right now. That would be good because there’s some mellow stuff sprinkled with enough stuff that you’re just like, “Oh yeah, get me going a little bit.” So look for that one your next playlist.
SG: Oxygen gave us an iTunes gift card so I can download them.
DP: Nice, well get The XX, get Jones Street Station. They’re really good if you like bluegrass music. Then Kanye’s new album, right? Come on.
SG: I’d peg you for more of a collector that you’d want the actual CD.
DP: I have Kanye’s CD. I have The XX CD. I have Jones Street’s CD but I don’t
recommend people go get the CD. I understand the nature of the world right now and I understand people are busy, but I also understand that you can do it right now. You can
literally download it right now with your phone.
SG: But if I get the CD and put it on iPod, I can sell the used CD to someone else.
DP: Uh-oh, I am not endorsing this. I am not endorsing this behavior.
SG: That’s not illegal. You’re allowed to sell your used items.
DP: Here’s what you can do with that too. You can take that CD, put it in your car,
use it as your car playlist but first download it into your iTunes or whatever. Then you have it on your laptop. Then you can buy other CDs, blank CDs, burn them, burn that for your friends and be like, “Hey, have you heard Robyn’s new CD, the Swedish pop artist? She’s excellent. Here, have that.” But you still have Robyn in your car, you still have Robyn on your laptop and now your friend has Robyn. Everyone wants some Robyn.
SG: Now I have to look her up.
DP: She’s really great, with a Y.
SG: What was the moment that you and Donald Glover realized something clicked about Troy and Abed?
DP: It was pretty early. I mean, a lot of this as Dan [Harmon] says, there’s not a
lot of planning out here. Things are just happening and Dan and the writers are incredibly gifted and geniuses at capturing that. They’re capturing what’s happening right now and I think Donald and I just kinda clicked. We got each other, we had fun and we like making
each other laugh and we like not paying attention and talking about something. All of a
sudden we were doing a hobo bit or whatever it is. We would just sit there and for the next 15 minutes we’d be doing a bit while we should’ve been working, but we also realize this is valuable. That time spent goofing around with your friends is so valuable, it’s just as valuable as the time on screen because you’re building a relationship that’s going to be shown on television. I think people see it. All my friends or people I run into are just like, “Dude, Troy and Abed, you guys gotta be real friends in real life.” And I’m like, yeah. You can feel that through the TV when people get along. We just like to get along.
SG: You hear that about Donald Faison and Zach Braff on Scrubs too.
DP: And it shows. It really shows. It just makes it so much easier when you’re shooting long episodes and doing crazy stuff when you trust each other, number one. When we’re doing an episode about zombies and we’re chasing zombies, things like that and we don’t really know what’s going on, but when I’m with Donald, there’s such a level of trust where I’m like we’ll figure it out. We’ll figure it out whatever we’re going to do and at the end of the day, it’ll be funny. We’ll eventually figure it out. The tags too at the end of every episode, I feel like there’s an extra day or half day where Donald and I get to work together where we get to just really goof around. That’s awesome when we’re working a lot of hours, it can be tiring, to be able to just be a kid for 10 minutes is incredible.
SG: Do you hang out off the set?
DP: We do. I helped him move when he moved initially. I just saw his
I Am Donald show in Los Angeles at the
El Rey which is great. I mean, he is an incredibly busy guy so Donald’s touring a lot doing his standup comedy and I’m married so my wife gets mad at me if I’m not at home when I’m off set. But we do find time to hang out but the majority of time is we’re on set because we see each other more than anybody. We’re on set together five days a week, 15 hour days. It’s fun but we spend most of our lives together so it’s a true, real bromance.
SG: The knowledge at Abed’s disposal makes me wonder: What is your DVD collection like? What’s in heavy rotation?
DP: Okay, so right now in my DVD collection I have Shaun of the Dead, one of my all time favorite comedies. Huge fan of that movie. I have the Indiana Jones trilogy. I don’t have it on Blu-ray but I think it’s going to be out on Blu-ray soon hopefully. And I saw Back to the Future’s out on Blu-ray by the way which is awesome, but Indiana Jones is my favorite movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. That whole trilogy was monumental to me and I wish there were more movies like that that blended action, comedy, everything together. There’s so many beautiful moments in Raiders of the Lost Ark that I’m in awe of. What else? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I have a Polish trilogy called Blue, White, Red which is really great. I have Almost Famous, big fan of that movie.
SG: And these are movies you pop in every now and then?
DP: Yeah, these are all movies I can watch repeatedly. Those are off the top of my
head that I love. And of course Dark Knight because that’s just incredible, one of my favorite movies.
SG: Isn’t it amazing to watch a recent movie become that classic as we live through
it?
DP: Completely. The first time I saw that movie it was one of those movies where you’re turning your head to look to someone next to you the whole time. The sweeping shots on the rooftop, the joker, the quotes. There’s so many moments where you’re looking around being like, “Did you see that?” where I knew immediately after I saw it in a theater, I was like, “I need to watch this again and again.”
SG: Do you have it on Blu-ray?
DP: I don’t, no.
SG: Oh, you need that because the Imax scenes open up to the full TV frame.
DP: Wow. I need to get that. That’s a definite. I have to confess, I actually just hooked up my Blu-ray player only about a month ago. I just watched another one of my
favorite movies I actually have on Blu-ray, Children of Men. Have you seen that?
SG: Of course!
DP: One of the best movies ever, so that and City of God kind of rotate on my “best hard movie to watch” list. They’re very difficult movies to watch, with very difficult subject matter but god, do I love both of them.
SG: Do you have any DVDs that you don’t really like but you can’t get rid of it?
DP: Hmm. Probably. Movies that I don’t know about, that’s a really good question. I don’t know if I have any. If I buy a movie, it tends to be a movie that I really connect with and I can watch repeatedly.
SG: If you’re married, how often can you have Danny’s movie night?
DP: [Laughs] Well, I can have it any night I want but it has to be after my wife goes to bed, so it’s always at like two in the morning. I just watched True Grit the other day after my wife went to sleep. I thought I was going to fall asleep but I was awake the whole time and I’m a huge Coen Brothers fan.
SG: So that was a screener of the new version.
DP: I got my hands on the screener. The whole time I was watching I was like, “This is great.” I also know the movies that my wife will not like. She’s not really big into westerns. She’s not really big into movies that I actually kind of like, there are some good ones like The Mummy.
SG: The Brendan Fraser Mummy?
DP: Uh-huh.
SG: I thought that was the second coming of Indiana Jones, the first one.
DP: I did too. I’m a fan of that. Even National Treasure. That movie’s just a
fun movie. I just thought it was fun. What else? Matrix. There’s a lot of good ones.
I could talk about movies all day.
SG: Are you a Tron guy? Were you excited when Tron Legacy came out?
DP: Haven’t seen Tron yet actually. I have a list. We’ve been working a lot through the holidays. We had a couple weeks off at the holidays so I’m kind of at a backlog right now. I saw Black Swan which I really enjoyed. I saw True Grit, I saw Winter’s Bone. I’m trying to think of any other award contenders. I haven’t seen Tron yet but I can’t wait to see it. I saw the trailer for it like a billion times which is interesting, to already go into a movie like I’ve seen the trailer so many times, but I can’t wait.
SG: I missed your whole background episode. What didn’t I see?
DP: You missed Abed giving birth. You missed the whole backstory with Abed and the girl and her boyfriend and the delivery. There’s a little bit of confusion as to are they fighting over who’s the boyfriend or are they fighting over who’s delivering the baby? It becomes this really fun background story which is another one of those things that the writers sprinkle in to be like hey, there’s always stuff going on in Greendale’s campus.
SG: Was the religion episode profound for you to film?
DP: It really was. I grew up catholic. I was an altar boy. To me that was terrifying to play Jesus because I was like oh, man, my mom’s going to be very angry.
SG: Well, it wasn’t necessarily Jesus.
DP: Exactly but I just thought it was a beautiful thing to see Abed kind of get immersed in this whole film within the film and embrace the meta thing to also realize, there are just some wonderful lines in that where Shirley’s like, “Yeah, I love Charlie Kaufman but some of have to go to work” or “some of us have to go to sleep” or whatever it is. That to me was just really fun and I think any time I get Abed just to play a character like that, it’s just really a freeing kind of fun thing.
Community airs Thursday nights on NBC.

after my sudden yerning for an sg belt buckle, i realized that i didn't just want that. now added to my list of things i'd like to see in the shop...
SG hip flask
SG martini shaker
SG zippo (you know you want one!)
and
SG cigarette case

by Damon Martin The union movement in the United States is in crisis mode thanks to the recent legislation being pushed forward by leaders in government looking to destroy or virtually eliminate public sector employees’ rights to collective bargaining. Since the 2010 elections, many state governors... more

by Damon Martin

The union movement in the United States is in crisis mode thanks to the recent legislation being pushed forward by leaders in government looking to destroy or virtually eliminate public sector employees’ rights to collective bargaining.

Since the 2010 elections, many state governors have made it a priority to propose laws that will strip government employees of any real power they may have in negotiations – vastly weakening the power of their unions in the process.



Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is locked in a battle in his state where he has proposed such a change. With Republicans holding the majority there, desperate times are forcing desperate measures. Unable to vote the measure down, Democrats have fled their homes and traveled to neighboring “safe” states to avoid the vote that could see the proposal become law. Meanwhile hundreds of protestors are continuing a sit in the State building (and an estimated 50,000 people attended ‘solidarity’ rallies held this past weekend in other states across the nation).

Walker has said time and time again that this is simply a budget issue to cut costs in his state where the $137 million dollar deficit continues to rise. (Though, in actual fact, this “deficit” was caused by Walker’s earlier tax cuts to the wealthy, which conveniently manufactured this agenda-forwarding situation.) Other states appear to be following Walker’s lead, like in Ohio where new Governor John Kasich introduced similar measures that would see 350,000 state employees essentially lose their collective bargaining power.

Like many “budget cutting” initiatives put forth by Republicans in the House of Representatives over the last few weeks, this seems to be a round about way of pushing forward other areas of the Republican agenda (like breaking the unions), and prodding Democrats instead of actually focusing on any meaningful fiscally responsible steps.



Unions in America were once a thriving entity, representing 35% of the workforce at a time when the middle class was at its strongest. Employees made less than their CEO bosses, but the wages were still in line with what could be considered a living wage.

Now Unions represent only 7% of American workers, and while the middle class struggles to find its footing, CEO’s of major corporations rake in on average more than 500 times what the average employee makes. Major corporations like Verizon Wireless give “union awareness” speeches to employees, and while stating that it’s just for “awareness,” in reality it’s simply propaganda to keep unions out of the workplace.

What many Americans may be missing out on in 2011 is what the Unions represented in the landscape of U.S. history. Unions were responsible for the minimum wage, unions were responsible for an 8-hour work day, and unions led the fight for health care for employees.

In Indiana, Governor Mitch Daniels eliminated collective bargaining for state employees 6 years ago and he claims it has been a fiscal wonder for his budget. He commented that by eliminating union interference, he’s been able to save millions of dollars for the state.

But those “savings” came at a high price. For example, to “save” money, he outsourced food services for Indiana prisons. That cut $100 million dollars from the budget, but cost the community hundreds of jobs in the process. And since Daniels stripped unions of their rights in Indiana, government workers have had their pay frozen in both 2009 and 2010, while seeing the cost of their health benefits increase significantly (resulting in a net pay decrease).

Other states like Michigan and New Jersey are following Wisconsin and Indiana’s lead in an effort to cripple the union movement in America.

Wisconsin protesters have sat in the Capital building for 8 days straight, voicing their opinions about the bill that has already passed in the House, and is now awaiting a vote in the state Senate. Ohio protesters have taken up the cause as well, traveling to Columbus to voice their opinions with another rally planned for Tuesday.

Though Republican governors will deny it (unless they’re caught unawares by prank calls supposedly from like-minded fatcat donators to the party), this is purely a political move to take a jab at the heart of the Democrat machine and the unions that back it, since unions overwhelmingly back Democrats in the election process, and donate millions of dollars to their campaigns.

However, since collective bargaining is such a basic freedom, essential to any democracy, the union-busting battle is causing friction within the Republican party. Newly elected Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett and governor Terry Branstad of Iowa both stated they would not attempt to change anything with regards to union powers in their states.

The stakes go far beyond union-busting however. In Ohio the battle for Union rights could carry all the way to the presidential elections, since historically the state has voted on the side of every eventually elected president since 1944 (except for Richard Nixon over John Kennedy). Ohio therefore plays a pivotal role in the national politics, and how the lines are drawn there now could be a major factor in the outcome of the election in 2012. How Kasich handles this situation with regards to the unions – and the hardworking men and women they represent – could mean very good or very bad things for the GOP as the presidential race heats up.

With a skyrocketing budget at a national level for things like defense, Medicare and Medicaid, and Social Security, why do Republicans continue to target reatively insignificant budget items in the name of economic reform? To say this is anything but a political attack is just smoke and mirrors, and people shouldn’t buy this fabricated lie from the Republicans.

Unions will not go down without a battle however because that’s what unions are there for…to battle for what working and middle class America wants and need to survive, even if the fatcats in charge try to crush them under their Armani boots.

Images from the Feb 26th Wisconsin Solidarity Rally in Downtown Los Angeles courtesy of Cathy Roberts.

Related posts:

Taking Women From The Clinic To The Coat Hanger: Republicans Now Targeting Planned Parenthood

Republicans Tell Big Bird and All Things Considered To Bugger Off

Republicans Attempt To Slip A Proverbial Political Roofie As They Strive To Redefine Rape While Trying To Pass Anti-Abortion Law

The Revolution Will Be Twitter-ized

by Shotgun Suicide Shotgun Suicide takes you through the basics of getting poked – and shows you how to stay clean afterwards. (video) Thanks to Epiic Suicide (for getting poked on camera) and Jon from West Coast Tattooing (for doing it). Music: “Hot Zombie F**k” by ThunderDikk and “Decaying”... more

by Shotgun Suicide

Shotgun Suicide takes you through the basics of getting poked – and shows you how to stay clean afterwards.



Thanks to Epiic Suicide (for getting poked on camera) and Jon from West Coast Tattooing (for doing it).

Music: “Hot Zombie F**k” by ThunderDikk and “Decaying” by Despite These Words.

Related Posts:

Body Mods 101 with Shotgun Suicide: Part 1 – Getting a Tattoo

I'll start: (video) I like when she talks about butter. MMMM flux and butter.

Camilla d’Errico burst onto the comics scene earlier this decade and doesn’t seem to have slept since. It’s not just that she worked on comics like “Burn,” “Make 5 Wishes,” “Mightmares and Fairy Tales,” “The Sky Pirates of Neo Terra,” and her own “Tanpopo,” though that’s certainly... more

Camilla d’Errico burst onto the comics scene earlier this decade and doesn’t seem to have slept since. It’s not just that she worked on comics like “Burn,” “Make 5 Wishes,” “Mightmares and Fairy Tales,” “The Sky Pirates of Neo Terra,” and her own “Tanpopo,” though that’s certainly a full time career in itself. d’Errico has been an artistic dynamo, moving from one form and one media and one genre to another. Besides comics there’s illustration for a variety of sources, a print done in collaboration with Neil Gaiman, toys, a series of Ride Snowboards, clothing from Hot Topic, not to mention gallery shows around the world.

This month Dark Horse releases her first art book “Femina and Fauna” and she spoke with SG about her rich and busy career, her use of color, and what we can look forward to from her in 2011.


ALEX DUEBEN: How do you describe your work? I see phrases thrown around like “lowbrow” or “pop surrealism” but I’m never exactly sure what any of them mean or if they mean anything to artists whose work it’s being applied to?
 
CAMILLA D’ERRICO: Pop Surrealism and Low Brow are actually pretty well defined in the art world, and I’ve seen many other new names for artists that show in certain galleries that have traditionally shown Low Brow or Pop Surrealism artists – like New Contemporary, Urban Contemporary, and New Brow and even New Figurative. The way I see it, is that people are trying to define an art movement that can’t be reigned in because it’s like a creative explosion – like the big bang! It’s all constantly evolving. I’m labeled under many of these categories and I use them as well in ‘marketing’ – because people need to be given definitions so they can put what they are looking at into context. As far as I’m concerned though, what I care about is that people look at my art objectively and hopefully appreciate it. And if they don’t, that at least they have a good reason not to – and not dismiss it because it’s Pop Surrealism or Lowbrow or Manga. Labeling and pigeon-holing artists is horrible and hurtful.

AD: We’re about the same age. What were you watching/reading as a kid that really influenced you and made you want to be an artist, or at least provided these influences?

CD: What didn't I watch in the 80's! It was all about He-Man and She-Ra, nothing got me more excited then those shows. Astro Boy and Sailor Moon guided me into the world of anime and once there I was in total heaven. It opened my eyes to new storytelling styles and storylines that were developed over 24 episodes instead of episodic storylines that were characteristic of North American cartoons. My first comic book was The Darkness by Top Cow. And I fell into the world of Witchblade, Michael Turner, Silvestri and trickled my way to Humberto Ramos. Its an amazing thing to be influenced by so many different styles of both art and storytelling.

AD: Were your parents supportive of this decision to be an artist?

CD: Like any parent, especially old world Italian ones, they wanted me to have a successful future. Terms like "starving artist" tend to scare a caring parent into siding on the more practical and conservative side. They always believed in my talents, and were always supporting me when I had exhibitions in school and when I chose to study in college. They tended to steer me into a more secure future, like teaching or animation. But they never once told me not to do art, in fact my father was the one who brought me to comic con in ‘98. He was the one going up to the publishers and talking to them about careers and bringing my, then, shy self up to talk to them. They are really proud parents and my art has brought me closer to them, especially my mom and its really wonderful. 

AD: I know you went to art school. Was it a useful few years for you? Did they encourage and support the kind of work were you doing?

CD: I went to several art schools, 3D animation, Fine Arts and Illustration and Design. I found that I learned so much from each experience and that although I am in a completely different field this experience has given me extremely useful skills. My teachers in the Design program didn't encourage my comic side, and tended to be a little dismissive. When they realized that I was not going to change my mind, they became encouraging. My painterly side was brought out during these years and its how I discovered that I could paint!

The courses definitely structured my chaotic artist mind into a more disciplined one. I am thankful for having done the courses because deadlines are what make the world go round, and previously I was falling off the edge of it! I am thankful for the discipline and would highly recommend any artist that has trouble finishing work, to go to a program where they whip you in shape! I met a lot of artists that absolutely inspired me and I still keep in touch with them.

AD: You started working in comics and then you segued into painting and fine art. How did that happen?

CD: Since I was a teen I dreamed of being a comic artist, so the idea of me being a painter never really crossed my mind. Even after college it wasn't a direction that I intended to go in and it sort of happened, almost by way of a universal slap in the face! I credit Ken Lum at the Ayden Gallery in Vancouver for this. He was the first person to suggest I do a show with full color paintings, just to see if I could and if I liked it. Its an interesting moment in a person's life, when they are suggested something that hadn't really occurred to them. If Ken hadn't asked me to do full color paintings, I don't know if I would have. Imagine if Mozart hadn't been put in front of a piano. Not that I'm Mozart, but just to say, if you never try something how do you know your not good at it? I really love painting, and I release a different side of myself in these images, subconscious thoughts, riddles and emotions that I otherwise couldn't express. I'm glad that the universe opened up this path for me. 

AD: One aspect of your artwork that really stands out is your use of color. Where did this palate and approach to color come from?

CD: I adore color! My eyes are always hungry for rich and vibrant colors to eat up. Not sure if other artists experience the sensation of wanting to taste color but I do! When I look at a green lawn, or the colors of the ocean, the gorgeous colors of parrots, I'm mesmerized by them. I grew up with peach faced love birds, and I remember staring at their feathers and detailing how the colors faded into each other. Moments like these inspire me and I can't help but pour those onto a canvas.

AD: You enjoy working with water soluble oils. What’s the benefit of that particular type of paint for the kind of work that you do?

CD: There are many amazing aspects to these paints – Holbein DUO paints. Oils carry a higher pigment load than acrylics, richer colors, and the smooth blending. But unlike regular oils, these water soluble DUO oils are not as toxic. You don't need paint thinner to clean the brushes or the highly toxic mediums to mix with the oils. I work in a small studio and its not recommended to use regular oils unless well ventilated. So the DUO oils are perfect for me. Its also a beautiful effect to see them thinned with water. It creates illusions and people don't know what its painted with, and that adds to the painting's mystery.

AD: So the art book, Femina and Fauna. How did this come about?

CD: I had been wanting an art book for a long time and so many fans bugged me about it too but I have to say that although I did look into it, into various avenues and publishers, it sort of happened naturally during a meeting with Dark Horse editor Samantha Robertson. I had done a couple of projects for them – Vampy Cat Plaything and the cover of Dark Horse Myspace Presents. And of course Dark Horse was the first company to license my work – the journal and stationery sets. I love Dark Horse Comics, they are a great company and I’m so happy that they published my book. It’s a great fit and a preview of more great collaborations with them in the future.

AD: Where did the title come from?

CD: I have to credit that to my sister AdaPia. Many people know her or of her, as my manager and business partner. Lots of what “I” do is a “we do” because she makes so many things happen. She’s also got a knack for words so when we were all brainstorming, she threw this one out there and it’s so fitting!

AD: Ashley Wood wrote the forward to the book. How did you get to know him and why did you ask him to write a few words about your work?

CD: Ash is my hero. I'm not shy to say it. When I was first entering the world of comics, I picked up one of the most unique books I'd ever seen, Popbot, and this opened my eyes to an entire new world. I had no idea that comics could be painted, that they could exist outside the "standard" paneling, and flow freely and express themselves with few words. I was blown away. We had a connection, Ride Snowboards. I was doing the new series of boards and Ash had done the last, so I took the opportunity to email him. I was SO nervous, to email your idol is not easy. But we began a rapport and have been friends ever since. I couldn't think of a better person to write the forward, he's the reason why I think outside the box!

AD: It was announced a while back that you were working on a project with Grant Morrison at Vertigo. Is that still happening?

CD: It is! However, Grant is like a god and so we must all wait for his schedule to clear up – and probably also for him to get into the story. It’ll be a creator owned graphic novel. I’m still excited about it, and whenever it happens, I’ll be ready! I was even in his documentary … though I wanted to crawl under the seat when I saw myself since I’m quite shy, but at the same time proud to be in there. I know it’ll happen, like I said. I’m ready when he is.

AD: Is there anything that you haven’t tried your hand at, but would be interested in trying?

CD: I've tried lots of things, sculpting, water colors, oils, acrylics, ceramics, soap stone, sculptures made of found objects, paleontology (when I was a kid I thought I found a dinosaur foot!). I think I'd really like to do more sculpting, and maybe learn to carve wood. Actually, sewing sounds like fun! I've always loved fashion and it would be so great to learn to make outfits, especially if I could design the fabrics.

AD: So 2011. Your first art book is now out. What else can we look forward to seeing from you this year? 

CD: More Tanpopo! Issues 4 and 5, plus vinyl toys – my very first vinyl of my character Kuro from the Tanpopo series. I’m also working on a mini manga for a Spanish pop opera singer, Monica Naranjo. Once that is done I’m going to dive into a new graphic novel with a French writer, and you’ll be seeing some Sky Pirates of Neo Terra stories – and the game version go live in March. I’m also prepping a solo show for 2012. I haven’t been painting much the past few years other than my Helmetgirls solo last June so I’m looking forward to producing a body of incredible, full color paintings. And of course – you’ll be hearing more about Helmetgirls.

AD: Well I’m certainly looking forward to more Helmetgirls. Did you want to talk a little about Tanpopo? I can’t help but feel that it’s something that falls off a lot of people’s radar.

CD: Tanpopo is my passion project! I started it as a single 20 page self-contained story and printed only 100 copies, but it was so popular, selling out in only two conventions, that I expanded it into a series of 10 books. It's based on classic literature - poetry and prose. The overall story arc was inspired by Goethe's Faust and each book is inspired by a different piece of literature. I take the literature and use the original (public domain) text to narrate the story of Tanpopo and Kuro. Tanpopo is a mysterious girl who is superhumanly smart however she feels no emotion. She laments her existence, knowing everything, but yet feeling nothing. So along comes this cute little character, Kuro, who as it turns out is the devil in disguise. He tells Tanpopo that he'll guide her through the world and teach her to feel emotion. She leaves her machine of knowledge - the only world she has ever known - and goes with Kuro. He maintains his promises by creating situations where she will feel emotion. A trickster, a shapeshifter, a sly fox ... but at the same time you can't hate him! Being that he is the devil, and he's ultimately after her soul, I wanted the story to play on a lot of different themes, that are not necessarily about evil or good.  It's a very emotional story, and each issue brings her to more emotional peaks that I really want the audience to feel with her. What's surprised me about it is that it has been SO appreciated by people and especially young people who LOVE reading classic literature in this format.  It's like an indie, underground cult book.  This year I'll be releasing issues 4 and 5, where Tanpopo feels anger and fear. Very strong emotions that I'm excited to draw.

As for Helmetgirls, you'll definitely be seeing more! Lots more.  I'll be making some announcements about it soon, and releasing some new images too.  I can't say much more than that, but for sure this year the website, www.helmetgirls.com will be going live!

by Sash Suicide (image) Minx the Cat (pictured with her mistress Clio Suicide) INTO: Food, creeping around the garden, leaving white hair on black clothes. NOT INTO: Chasing mice, canine intruders, vacuum cleaners. MAKES ME HAPPPY: Human affection at the appropriate time, delicious treats. MAKES ME SAD:... more

by Sash Suicide





Minx the Cat (pictured with her mistress Clio Suicide)

• INTO: Food, creeping around the garden, leaving white hair on black clothes.


• NOT INTO: Chasing mice, canine intruders, vacuum cleaners.


• MAKES ME HAPPPY: Human affection at the appropriate time, delicious treats.


• MAKES ME SAD: Being rudely awoken from my beauty sleep, empty food bowls.


• HOBBIES: Stalking potential prey, waking up unsuspecting owners in the middle of the night.


• 5 THINGS I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT: Less than 15 hours of sleep a day, a scratching post (or the couch), a carnivorous diet, outdoor action, comfortable spots near central heating.


• VICES: Snoring, occasionally peeing on expensive stuff, uncalled-for attacks.


• I SPEND MOST OF MY FREE TIME: Sleeping, purring, keeping an eye on things.

Photography: Mark Meijering

Get to know Minx’s mistress, Clio Suicide, over at SuicideGirls.com!

by Blogbot To celebrate the release of his groundbreaking Level 26 app, Anthony Zuiker is giving away an iPad pre-loaded with Dark Prophecy via Twitter. SuicideGirls is also throwing in a year’s membership to make this a truly killer prize. For your chance to win, follow @zuiker on Twitter and RT:... more

by Blogbot

To celebrate the release of his groundbreaking Level 26 app, Anthony Zuiker is giving away an iPad pre-loaded with Dark Prophecy via Twitter. SuicideGirls is also throwing in a year’s membership to make this a truly killer prize.

For your chance to win, follow @zuiker on Twitter and RT:

No purchase necessary. Entrants must be 18 & over and live in the US. The contest will run for 12 days, starting Monday (2/28) morning at 9:00 AM EST and ending Friday (3/11) night at 11:59 PM PST. The winner will be chosen at random from those who have posted qualifying tweets.



“I think that Dark Prophecy is really the book of tomorrow that’s available today,” says Anthony E. Zuiker. The creator of the incredibly successful CSI TV franchise, has just launched an iPad app for the second installment of his Level 26 fiction series. It follows the adventures of a detective, Steve Dark, who, with a similarly tortured soul, can get into the minds of the worst of the worst killers – those worthy of Level 26 status.

Like the psychopaths Dark hunts, who are no ordinary killers, the Level 26 books are no ordinary thrillers. Dubbed “digi-novels” by Zuiker, the multi-platform murder mysteries combine traditional text with web-based movie “cyber-bridges” and community elements.

However, with the launch of the Dark Prophecy iPad App, Zuiker has kicked his digi-novel concept up to the next level (if you’ll pardon the pun). “Whereas last time we talked it was read the book and watch these 20 individual bridges, now we have 3 levels of engagement,” explains Zuiker. “The traditional Kindle-like version, the digi-novel, which is the book and the movie, and the ultimate digi-novel which is the book, movie, effects, and activities, such as collecting evidence, and unlocking new storylines.”

Aside from the embedded movie clips and interactive extras, the novel pages themselves have some neat special sonic, visual and vibrating “sensory” effects that really exploit the immersive potential of the iPad experience. “If you’re reading about a guy being poisoned in the middle of the book, the words may begin to fog out like you’re drunk,” says Zuiker. “If you’re reading about a guy that gets shot, your screen will be shot with a gun. It’ll crack like a window and slowly go back to normal. And if you’re reading about a guy hanging from the ceiling, blood drops might fall on your page. We’ve timed it out with the average read speed for a certain page, so the effect will happen at the precise moment.

“There’s also a mechanism where you press a character’s name, and a bio pops up along with a carousel of pictures. Sometimes it says white rose, or yellow, you’ll press that and a white rose will pop up. Then you press another button and suddenly Steve Dark begins to explain the significance of what a white rose means. There’s separate storylines going on while you’re collecting evidence, while you’re watching a $250,000 motion picture, and while you’re reading a 400-page hi-octane crime novel, so it’s really a lot of fun.”

With impeccable navigation ability, a bookmark function, and the capability to change text font, size, and color (from black on white, to white on black), there’s all kinds of reasons to kick the pulp-based fiction habit and go hi-tech with Level 26. A documentary and an interview with Zuiker and Ann Margret (who starred in a CSI episode featuring a Level 26-based storyline) are also included in the app. “There’s just a lot of bells and whistles, and a lot that you get for a $13 price point,” Zuiker enthuses. “We’ve learned so much in this book go around, that book three should be unbelievable.”

Dark Prophecy ($12.99) is available via the iTunes Store.

Dr. Phil Plait comes at science blogging with some heavy credentials, having actually worked on the Hubble Space Telescope and, to a lesser extent, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) programs. His blog, Bad Astronomy, began life as an outlet for his frustration at the misuses and misunderstandings... more

Dr. Phil Plait comes at science blogging with some heavy credentials, having actually worked on the Hubble Space Telescope and, to a lesser extent, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) programs. His blog, Bad Astronomy, began life as an outlet for his frustration at the misuses and misunderstandings of astronomy in popular culture, but soon became a venue for his advocacy of all things science-based. From 2008 to 2010, Dr. Plait was the President of the James Randi Educational Foundation, a group which advocates for science and critical thinking. He’s written two books, the most recent of which is Death From the Skies, chronicling all the ways the universe might kill us all, and recently created and starred in three pilot episodes of a Discovery Channel program called Bad Universe.

Keith Daniels: You spent years working on the Cosmic Background Explorer and then on Hubble. Why did you feel that focusing instead on science education and popularization were where you were needed the most?

Phil Plait: [Laughs]. “Where I was needed the most!” Yes, I’m Captain Astronomy, here to save the world from its misuses and abuse! I don’t know if I’d phrase it that way precisely, but yeah, I was doing some research on Hubble. I wasn’t on COBE for very long, but I did use Hubble when I was in graduate school, and then for several years afterwards. It’s not that ‘I was needed more elsewhere’, it was more along the lines of... I really enjoyed talking about this. I always have. I like writing about it. I like talking to people about astronomy, and I just started doing it. What I found was that the more I did it, the more I liked it. As far as research goes, a lot of it was really cool, and really interesting, but it didn’t “sing to me”. It didn’t feel like my calling. It felt more like getting out there and writing about this, and showing people what’s going on... it was more fun and more gratifying. I guess it is important, you know?! People are interested in this kind of stuff and it’s cool, and I wanted to make sure everybody sees what’s going on in the sky above their heads. I guess that’s why I started spending more and more time doing it.

KD: You’ve published two books, you’ve had a popular blog, and you’ve done tons of public speaking, but last year you did a television show, Bad Universe. Is television another level entirely?

PP: Yeah, it’s kind of terrifying. A one minute cameo on Jersey Shore can actually reach more people than a year of blogging, which is sad, but true. Yeah, television is a terrific medium. It’s really good for astronomy, because astronomy is a really visual science. There are two broad appeals of astronomy: one is that it is simply beautiful -- you have these pictures of galaxies and planets and all these things.. it’s artwork, it’s just fantastic, and every time I get a press release, or a note on Twitter or something, from Hubble, or the European Southern Observatory, or any of these groups, I always get excited, because I know there’s going to be some sort of really beautiful image involved with it, and that’s great. The other prong of the fork is: it appeals to our brains. Astronomy covers a lot of really great questions that we’ve had forever, including, “Why are we here?”, “How did we get here?”, “Is the universe all there is?”, “Is there life on other planets?”, “How big is ‘big’?”, “Is the universe infinite?” All of these [questions] can be realistically claimed by astronomy. So, I think there are these two reasons that it really appeals to people, and on television you can tackle a lot of this stuff. Now, it’s kind of hard to dive in and say, “Here’s precisely why stars blow up,” or, “Here’s how black holes work.” It’s not easy to do that in a 42-minute documentary, and have it make sense, and still have people watching by the end of it, but it’s still a terrific medium for that and something that I’ve always wanted to do. So I was pretty excited to be able to get the documentary.

KD: You mentioned answering the Big Questions with astronomy. Going all the way back to its beginnings as a science, astronomy has always had an almost... political... dimension. Why do you think that is? For example, why does it make the news every time Stephen Hawking even mentions the word ‘God’?

PP: [Laughs]. I don’t know about “politics”, but it’s always had strong roots in our psyche. You can imagine, in an agricultural society, they need to know when their seasons start. They need to know when their river’s going to flood. They need to know when the days are going to start getting longer, that sort of thing, and astronomy tells them that. The seasons are astronomical, and so people were tied to the skies. Plus the fact that, before big cities, people were more familiar with the sky. It was darker at night. Now we have so many people living in the cities and suburbs that they’re not as tied to the sky as they used to be. So it’s not surprising to me that there’s a deep and rich history of astronomy being tied to people. Nowadays, there’s so many different ways astronomy plays on people. On the Internet, certainly, it connects with people. A lot of the people who were originally on the internet were, y’know, geeks like me, and so they were already interested in astronomy. Then you’ve got this reliance on experts that is kind of funny. Stephen Hawking, everybody knows who he is, although they may not know why they know who he is. I mean, here’s a guy who, 30 years ago, was breaking ground with black hole research as a theoretical astronomer and astrophysicist, and he came up with some really cool ideas and became very famous for it. Now, when he says anything it’s newsworthy, which I think says more about us than it does about him, whether he’s right or wrong. I’ve disagreed with him on a couple of things he said, but yeah, he comes in and says something like, “We don’t need God to explain the universe,” [and] it’s huge news, and I think that’s funny, because a lot of people have been saying that for a long time. [Laughs]. That idea goes back a long time, but for some reason, when a famous scientist says it, it becomes newsworthy. I’m not sure exactly what it means, but I guess if people have somebody they look up to and respect and then he says something like this, it’s controversial. And of course the media these days, anything that has anything to do with religion, they like to play it up.

KD: You’re also involved in the skeptical movement with the James Randi Educational Foundation, and TAM. Skepticism is often seen as a negative process, y’know, “debunking”, but one of the common themes of your work is demonstrating just how awesome actual science is. Do you feel that’s more important than demonstrating what isn’t true?

PP: Yeah! People think skepticism is a bunch of cynical old balding white men with beards, and I’m like, “I’m not cynical!” I am a middle-aged white guy with increasingly flesh-colored hair -- that’s the way I usually phrase it -- and a beard, so I guess I kind of fit in to that, but I’m not cynical. People think that skepticism is cynicism, it’s saying, “No, that’s not true,” and that’s not at all what skepticism says. That is an output of skepticism if the evidence points that way, but what it really is is a way of looking at stuff and saying, “What’s the evidence for this?” Here’s a claim, “I think that there is a 75-foot purple turtle living in my basement.” Alright, What’s your evidence for this?” You start looking at the evidence and saying, “This is good evidence,” “This is bad evidence,” “Where do you stand on this?,” “What’s the precedent for this?” You can look into all these different ideas, and then at the end, look at them all and say, “What’s my conclusion?” Is my conclusion that, “This idea does not make sense,” or “This idea does make sense,” “it might make sense,” “I don’t know,” but skepticism is not a conclusion, it’s a process. It’s basically the same process science uses: you make a claim, you look at the evidence to support it, or that tears it down, and you make up your mind based on that evidence. Everybody is skeptical of something, and it may be something as mundane as going out and buying a car, and looking at the car salesman and saying, “He really wants to make this sale, so is he going to mention that in crash tests this car tends to explode and kill everybody within a 100 mile radius? Maybe he won’t, because he wants to make that sale.” That is skepticism, looking at why somebody might be making a claim. Now, there are all sorts of logical traps. You don’t want to immediately assume that person’s lying to you because they may have a vested interest in making that sale, but you’ve got to make sure you’re looking at all these things, and that’s what a skeptic does. What is the claim somebody is making? Why are they making it? What is the evidence for that claim? Do I have evidence that supports or denies that claim? Does the claim even make sense? You can look at all these things and come to a conclusion, and you can apply that to more than just comparison shopping. You can do that when you’re listening to a politician, or a religious leader, or a scientist. When somebody tells you -- and this is where it really gets important -- “I think vaccines cause autism,” “I think if I drink this water, in a couple of days I’ll feel better and my shingles will go away,” or something like that. These are testable claims, and that’s what skepticism looks at: the evidence for testable claims. It’s really easy to fool people, and it’s really easy to fool yourself, and if you use these skeptical ideas, you find out what the truth is. The whole idea of skepticism and science is to find out what’s most likely to be true, and what’s most likely not to be true. That’s the goal: to not fool ourselves, and that’s where the real power of skepticism is. That’s why it bugs me when people think it’s a negative thing -- it’s not! It’s the most positive thing we have. It is the search for the real, objective truth.

KD: Do you think a lot of skeptics themselves get the wrong idea? You gave a famous speech at TAM 8 called “Don’t Be a Dick”...

PP: Uh-oh, here we go.

KD: ...I think it’s tempting sometimes to lash out, as an atheist myself, because we’re possibly the last group in the U.S. that it’s completely OK to discriminate against. I read a poll recently that more people would rather have an openly gay President than an atheist, for example.

PP: That’s right. It’s the last subculture that it’s OK to make fun of, or be prejudiced against. It’s amazing, and polls show that when people are asked, “Can an atheist be moral?,” a lot of people think, “No, you need to be religious to be moral,” which is fascinating. That’s completely wrong, and there’s a lot of evidence that that claim is wrong. Atheists can be moral without religion. As far as the “don’t be a dick” talk goes, the two problems with it were that I didn’t have a lot of time to make all the points I wanted to make, and so that made it really misinterpreted. What I found out was that a lot of people really read-in their own prejudices into that talk which were not at all what I meant, which happens. A lot of times people [hear] different things in something you’re saying than what you originally meant. What’s funny is: they were reading stuff in that I never said. A lot of people were saying, “Oh, Phil is saying we should just stand by the sidelines and wring our hands and never say anything bad about people....” I didn’t say that! Oh my gosh, I was very clear to say that we need our passion, we need to fight, that I’m not giving a free pass to anybody. It’s ridiculous that people have said that, and I’ve seen that over and over again. If you read anything I’ve ever written... right as we’re talking I’ve got a window open for a blog post about people claiming that an airplane con-trail was a missile, from last November. There’s an ex-politician who is still rattling his saber about this...

KD: This is the one in L.A.?

PP: Yeah. It was an airplane flying over L.A., but he was saying it was a missile launch. Here’s a guy who is an ex-Senator from New Hampshire writing an op-ed about this, saying, “Why aren’t we getting any answers about this?,” and making an off-hand comment about Obama not being a citizen, and all this stuff, crazy talk. I’m like... no, [skeptics] don’t have to let this stuff go! You can be forceful, but I’m not going to call this guy an idiot. I might use mockery. I think mockery is OK: satire is a well-established method of showing something is silly, and I don’t have any problems with that. What I don’t like are the attacks: the mean-spirited, immediate reactions that a lot of people have when they feel like whatever it is they’re fighting against is ticking them off. I see this all the time... not just arguments -- I’ve had arguments with people all the time, it happens -- but it’s the really over-the-top dickishness. I was vague on that term on purpose, because you can insult somebody, and even that might not be a real dick-headed move. There are times when it’s uncalled for, when it’s really over-the-top, and that’s what I was trying to say. You don’t have to be super nice. You don’t have to be all polite and milquetoast-y about this, but studies have shown repeatedly that when an argument gets really heated, you’re less likely to convince the other person -- they’re going to dig their heels in even more. The fact of the matter is that when people are watching an argument like that, if somebody’s being a real jerk, people who are listening to that argument aren’t going to listen to the person they perceive as being a jerk. They’re going to find ways of saying, “That guy’s being a jerk, and so I don’t think what he’s saying is true.” So, my point is that, if your goal is to convince people that you’re right, it’s probably best to try to restrain yourself a little bit. I get angry. I get furious. Babies are dying because people aren’t vaccinating enough. Whooping Cough is literally killing infants who are too young to get vaccinated. [ed. note -- And thus depend on the herd immunity of the people around them.] How angry do I get about that? So angry I can’t speak, where my blood-pressure goes up, and I can’t sleep at night, I’m so furious about this kind of stuff. It’s difficult to restrain yourself, but I think it’s necessary if you want to make a difference in this world.

KD: On the internet, it seems like someone can’t just say, “I didn’t really care for that movie,” instead it’s, “the Worst Movie Ever.”

PP: The internet is a terrific medium because it gives everybody a voice, but it’s also a terrible medium because it gives everybody a voice. You look at comments, like on Youtube if you want to go to the absolute rock bottom, but even on Twitter... It’s just so easy to snark. It’s so easy to just make fun of stuff. When you’re driving down the road and somebody cuts you off, it’s suddenly, “I want to murder this guy!” When the airline announces that the flight is delayed fifteen minutes, “Oh, this is terrible! How can they do this?” Really? There are people starving in the world, and dying from epidemics, and it’s so easy to get into that mindset of “first world problems”. I love it when people say, “I know this is a first world problem, but...,” and it’s like, “Good! I’m glad you see that,” because it’s really easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. We are such a reactive species that when somebody says something, you’re like, “Oh no, you’re full of crap, you idiot. How can you possibly believe that?” I see it all the time in skepticism, and it’s easy because people are attacking your beliefs. It’s your self-identity! When you introduce yourself to someone, what do you say? “I’m an astronomer,” “I’m a Catholic.” You identify yourself with these words, and so when somebody attacks those words, they’re attacking you. You’ve got to be super careful not to trip that reaction, because as soon as you do, the argument’s done -- you’re not going to make any headway that way.

KD: What are the most common mistakes you feel most scientists make in dealing with the media? Do you feel that media literacy should be added to the curricula of science educations?

PP: Oh God... The most common mistake scientists make [in talking to the media] is talking to the media. No, it’s really kind of funny. This is a long, looong argument that’s been going on for as long as there has been science and the media. Scientists need to talk to the media, for all kinds of reasons. The public loves this kind of stuff, in general. A lot of polls show that the public want more science, and they like it, so I think it’s important for scientists to talk to the public. Plus, the public pays for a lot of the science, so I think you’re kind of obligated to talk to them and say, “Here’s what your money’s going for.” That’s not to say that every scientist is good at talking to the media; some are, some aren’t, just like anybody else. On the flip side of that, the media... a lot of them want to do this right, they try to do this right, but you’ve got people who don’t understand the science trying to report on it, and that makes it really difficult to get a really good, accurate story. In the meantime, you get a lot of misquoting. Every astronomer I know -- and I mean that almost literally -- has been interviewed for the news, a newspaper, a website, whatever, and the journalist has gotten their story almost completely backwards. They’ve either inserted the word “not”, or left the word “not” out. So a story about, “This asteroid is not going to destroy the Earth,” kinda turns into the opposite story, and so they report it as, “This asteroid may destroy the Earth.” [Laughs.] It just gets inflated beyond reason. A lot of the media online are irresponsible that way: it’s not really journalism, it’s churn-alism. They’re trying to stir the pot. They don’t care if it’s accurate or not. “If it bleeds, it leads.” So, if they can say, “Oh, astronomers say this asteroid’s going to hit us in 2036, and it’ll blow up with the yield of all our nuclear weapons,” even though that is completely not true, and not at all what the astronomer said, they’ll write it, and hey, it makes [that website] popular for a short amount of time. You can fight that kind of stuff, but it’s going to be there forever. If people are going to do that, they’re going to do that. I just wish there were more science reporters, and more people trained in science. CNN let go of Miles O’Brien, who was basically their best science reporter, and CNN’s science reporting has been abysmal since then. That’s true for a lot of big sites, they’ve just been consolidating and trying to save money, and what’s happening is their science reporting has gone into the trash can.

KD: On Thursday the shuttle Discovery is set to launch. It’s possible that it could be the last shuttle launch ever. Is there any positive side to the end of the shuttle program?

PP: It’s the last launch for Discovery. There’s one more shuttle launch later this year for, I think, Endeavor, and these are both going up to the space station to deliver pieces of it and crew and all that kind of thing. The shuttle’s an interesting machine. It’s a magnificent, complex, amazing rocket that can actually lift a huge amount of material into orbit, which is hard to do. The problem is it was sort of billed as a space truck: it was going to launch every two weeks, and it was going to be cheap. The original NASA designs for it were kind of going to be that way, but it became a political football. Anything that costs a certain amount of money, suddenly every congressman wants their district involved with it, and it just got more and more bloated, got more and more complicated, and eventually basically could [only] be launched four or five times a year and couldn’t do a lot of the stuff that NASA wanted it to do originally. So, considering it costs a billion dollars a flight, or something like that, yeah, seeing the shuttle go away is not entirely a bad thing. The problem is, because of all the political issues over the past few years, we don’t have a replacement rocket. A lot of people are saying, “Obama’s killing the shuttle and manned-space program.” That’s bull. That makes me so upset when people say that, because that is total crap. It was George [W] Bush who cancelled the shuttle program, and said, “You guys are going to have your last flight in 2010, get moving on this,” and the problem was it was too late to actually design, build, and test a replacement rocket. So, no matter what, even before Obama was even sworn in, it was too late to have a replacement for the shuttle and not have this several-year gap. I’m hoping that NASA will come up with a good replacement for it, and, in the meantime, private industry will be able to launch payloads into orbit. SpaceX is a company that’s doing that -- testing a rocket right now -- and it’s looking pretty good that they’ll be able to have launches to the space station within the next couple of years. I think that’s what should be happening. I think private industry should be taking over this routine, quote-unquote, “space truck” business. Let NASA be paving that road, and then let private industry follow.

KD: Do you feel like the Obama administration has done better, in general, on science issues than the Bush administration?

PP: You’re setting a pretty low bar there. The Bush administration did a lot to absolutely destroy science, from the stem-cell issue, to global warming, to a hundred other things, including infiltrating NASA with political hacks -- which happened, a few years ago I reported on that quite a bit. There was a P.R. guy there was who was trying to downplay global warming and the Big Bang in NASA science. It was pretty astonishing. So it would be pretty easy, just by not doing anything, to do better than the Bush administration, and Obama’s administration has done quite a bit. They could do a huge amount more. I mean, he talks a good talks, in his “State of the Union” and other things, about getting science back to where it should be, but he had two years of a Democratic Congress and couldn’t seem to get it done. I know that the Republicans did a lot to obstruct a lot of that, and now that the Republicans have a majority again, they’re attacking science with glee as far as global warming goes -- and some other issues of science. It’s really astonishing to see this anti-reality force brazenly saying things which are just grossly and provably false about issues like global warming, evolution, and that sort of thing. These attacks on science are pretty brazen. I would like to see Obama and the Democrats -- and Republicans! -- standing up to this sort of thing. I don’t know what happened over the past ten years. Ever since Newt Gingrich destroyed the Office of Science and Technology in Congress, things have been on a long downhill slide for science, and it’s terrible. Our economy depends on science and tech, and we’re raising a generation of kids to not understand this stuff. Carl Sagan talked about this even before it was happening, politically, and said this is a recipe for disaster. He’s still right.

KD: He was pretty much right about everything.

PP: [Laughs]. Well, not everything. I’m re-reading The Demon-Haunted World right now, which is as far I’m concerned his best work, and even though it was written fifteen years ago -- something like that -- you know, I hate to use the word “prophetic”, but it really does seem like a prophecy of the 21st century right now. The things he said could be a blog comment off of things that happened on the news the night before. It’s amazing that he basically called all this stuff out, and said we’ve got to be super careful about what our politicians are doing, and how this fundamentalist religious stronghold on science is growing. It’s bad, it’s really bad. If kids don’t understand evolution... If a state board of education... [cough]Texas[cough] ...comes out and says that Evolution is a crock and Creationism should be taught in class, biomedical industries are not going to want to go to Texas, or Louisiana, or any of these other states that are downplaying [science]. They’re not going to want to go there if the only people they can hire are people who think the Earth is 6,000 years old. This has a real, fundamental -- ha ha ha -- financial impact on this country.

KD: Speaking of hiring people who think the Earth is 6,000 years old. The University of Kentucky recently settled out of court in the case of Martin Gaskell, who was probably discriminated against in his application to become the Director of the university’s new observatory, on religious grounds, because he’s a Young-Earth Creationist...

PP: Allegedly. It’s unclear whether he’s a Young-Earth Creationist, actually, but go ahead...

KD: Religious discrimination is illegal, but in cases like that, is it wrong?

PP: You know, that’s a really, really good question, and I wrestled with that. When the news came out it was unclear to me exactly what was going on, and then, as time went on and more emails were released, it became a lot more clear. It was funny how a lot of the science blogs were fomenting about this, and I thought, “You don’t really know! You’re saying this, but you don’t really know exactly what happened.” Then it became clear that, yeah, the religious discrimination was pretty obvious. These guys [from the University of Kentucky] were saying, “This guy’s a religious fundamentalist, and we don’t want him representing our university, so we’re not going to hire him,” and that is illegal. Like you said, is that right? Should you be able to discriminate against somebody on religious grounds? I think, yes, you should, because if somebody’s religion dictates to them that the Earth is 6,000 years old, I’m not going to hire them to teach geology, astronomy, biology, archeology, or any of a hundred other “ologies”, because, clearly, all the real evidence points to the Earth being billions of years old not thousands. I wouldn’t be able to trust somebody to separate their religious belief in a young Earth from the actual truth of the matter, which is that the Earth is old. It’s interesting that we have these laws against religious discrimination; they’re too broad, basically. If I’m going to hire somebody at a fast-food restaurant, or to be my waiter or... whatever, if it has nothing to do with religion, then yeah, you shouldn’t be able to discriminate against their religion any more than you should because they’re a man or a woman, or they’re gay, or they’re black, or whatever. But, when it comes to their beliefs having a direct impact on the job requirements, you should be able to discriminate, because the word “discriminate” means to be able to separate somebody out because of the evidence. I don’t think you should be prejudiced. On the other hand, I do think you should be able to look at all the job requirements and see if what they believe will interfere with that. You don’t expect a Catholic church to hire an atheist to be a priest -- now, the Catholic church may not be getting public funding to do that, but maybe they are -- but the point here is that when the job requires something, and their religious beliefs will interfere with that requirement, then you don’t have to hire them. If somebody applies to a job where I need a doctor on Sundays, and their religion says they can’t work on Sundays, I’m not going to hire them. I don’t think anybody would have a problem with that, but when it comes to an astronomer, suddenly it’s terrible that we’re discriminating against them. I don’t think it is. I’m sorry, I’ve been giving you long answers to these -- I tend to do that -- but this is an interesting case where it’s not straightforward. It’s not a bumper sticker issue where I can just say it in six words. It doesn’t work that way. There are layers and levels and subtlety to a lot of this, and that’s why I get unhappy when I hear people sort of rallying on one side or the other based on their own prejudices. You’ve got to really look at the details of this, and that’s why I never wrote about this issue, because the more I learned about it the more I realized that I’d have to write a 5,000 word blog post, and nobody’s going to read it.

KD: Switching topics here, how important is the work being done by Kepler?

PP: [Laughs]. The work being done by Kepler is super important, for a lot of reasons. The design of this mission is to sit and stare at one spot in the sky. It’s looking at 150,000 stars I think, and it’s just staring at them. It’s looking for tell-tale signs of a planet passing between us and that star. So, if there’s a star in that field, and it’s got planets orbiting it, and a planet’s orbit happens to line up such that it passes in front of the star, the starlight will dip a little bit. You can measure that dip, and by precisely measuring the length of time that dip takes and how much light is being blocked from the star, you can get an idea of the planet’s orbit and how big the planet is. We have some idea of planets orbiting other stars, but it’s sort of vague right now. The methods we had for looking at them didn’t give us a good idea, statistically, of how many planets are out there and what they’re like. Kepler’s going to do that. So, by really staring at those stars, Kepler’s going to say, statistically, “Here’s how many stars have planets, here’s how close they orbit to their star, here’s how big they are,” and that’s really important right because we don’t have those numbers. What it’s finding, statistically speaking, is that there may be billions -- with a ‘b’ -- of planets in our galaxy alone, certainly millions, but maybe as many as billions that could be -- in some stretch of the imagination -- Earth-like. They are orbiting far enough from their star that temperatures at that planet could [allow] liquid water on them, which is what we think is really important for having life. There could be other kinds of life that don’t need liquid water, but all the kinds we know do. If there is liquid water, that means our kind of life has a shot, and that is one of those Really Big Questions, “Is there life in space?” Holy crap! Is there a cooler question you can ask that we have a really good shot at answering in the next few years? No, there really isn’t one, and that’s it. The proof of that is basically if we find a fossil on Mars, “Oh, look! Here’s a fossil on Mars! The answer is, ‘Yes, there is life on other planets.’” But you need to find these planets first, and that’s what Kepler is doing. It’s doing it very, very well. It has already found several dozen planets that could potentially be something like the Earth, or have Earth-like conditions at least. That’s frickin’ awesome.

KD: Some of the stars that Kepler is looking at are over 4,000 light-years away. Imagine that tomorrow you wake up and Kepler has found an Earth-like planet in the “Goldilocks zone”. Later observations find that it’s got liquid water, and oxygen in the atmosphere. But it’s 4,000 light-years away. How do you react to that?

PP: That’s a good point. There’s a sense of scale here that a lot of people don’t have, because they’re just not familiar with how freaking big space is. Honestly? 4,000 light years isn’t that much different than 4, because both of them are really, really far away. A light year is six trillion miles, and our faster probes ever launched would take tens of thousands of years to get to the nearest star. So, honestly, is 4,000 light years any worse than 4? In my opinion, no, that’s not the point, how far away these planets are. The point is they exist. If we can find a planet orbiting another star, and we can actually observe it with our telescopes and say, “Look, it has oxygen in its atmosphere,” that would be really critical. Oxygen is really reactive, and it’s really hard to keep oxygen around unless you’re producing it; otherwise, it goes away really quickly, and the best way to produce it, not the only way, but the best way, is biology -- is something alive and making that oxygen. If we were to find that, holy crap, would that be awesome! That would really be strong evidence that there is life on other planets. Even if we got a signal from intelligent life on these planets, it’s not so much the distance that’s important. It’s the fact that it happened, and we’re not alone, that there could be other life out there. Now, very briefly if I can, the difference in distance comes in because if we do detect a signal... Imagine if we don’t just detect oxygen in an atmosphere, but we get a radio signal from one of these planets, the difference between 4 light-years and 4,000 is huge. The speed of light is really fast, and if there are aliens living on Alpha Centauri trying to communicate with us, we can send them a signal and hear back from them in 8 or 9 years. If we try to have a conversation with somebody 4,000 light-years away, it’s going to take 8,000 years to hear something back. So, we might at least have something resembling a conversation with somebody who’s close, but that’s a pretty big “if”. I’m more interested right now in the much more realistic chance of us finding Earth-like planets, than us finding aliens we can talk to.

KD: What are your plans for the near future? Are you working on a new book? Are we going to get some more Bad Universe?

PP: Well, I’m getting a lot of tattoos and piercings. I’m hoping to be a model for Suicidegirls. I’ve got the pale skin, I never see sunlight, so I should fit right in. Actually, I’m hoping that the network will pick up the show as a series. It was basically sort of a pilot to see if they would run it as a series, so I’m waiting to see if that will happen. In the meantime I’m still writing the blog. I have a couple of book ideas I’m working on right now, nothing I can talk about specifically, because they’re still in the proposal stage. A lot of other things [are] keeping me busy. I really, really enjoy writing and giving talks about this kind of stuff, so I’m still doing that. I don’t know! This is my... fifth? career. I was a research scientist, a writer, a public outreach guy, I was in education for a while, and now I’m a blogger. The evolution of an astronomer goes from cutting edge scientific research to sitting around in my pajamas railing in my blog about how they cancelled Stargate: Universe, but honestly, it’s a lot of fun. I love having the ability to talk about this stuff, and actually have a voice on the Internet. To be able to say, “Here’s something you guys may not know about that you might find interesting, and is actually kind of important,” that is terrific, even if it does mean I don’t see the Sun for three or four days in a row. It’s important to me, and I think it’s important in the grand scheme of things to open this door to people who might not otherwise see it. A lot of stories go away that really deserve to be investigated, or at least read by people out there, like, “Look, here’s this galaxy that’s kind of throwing a monkey-wrench into how we think things work. Look over here. This star, why is it doing this? What would happen if this thing were to do that?” I love writing about that, and from the comments I get, the emails I get, the questions, the tweets on Twitter, people love this stuff. They want their minds expanded. They want to know what’s going on in the universe without all the B.S. about it, and that’s what I’m trying to do. That’s my goal in life. If I can take somebody by the hand and say, “Look over here. Look at this thing right here. Isn’t that awesome?” If I can achieve that every now and again, that’s it, I’ve got it made.

by Shotgun Suicide Shotgun Suicide shows you how to protect your nuts and put a rubber on in emergency situations. (video) Music: “I Do My Best” by Bo-Peep Related Posts: Vehicle Maintenance 101 with Shotgun Suicide – Checking Your Fluids Vehicle Maintenance 101 with Shotgun Suicide – Changing... more

by Shotgun Suicide

Shotgun Suicide shows you how to protect your nuts and put a rubber on in emergency situations.



Music: “I Do My Best” by Bo-Peep

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by Blogbot To celebrate the release of his groundbreaking Level 26 app, Anthony Zuiker is giving away an iPad pre-loaded with Dark Prophecy via Twitter. SuicideGirls is also throwing in a year’s membership to make this a truly killer prize. For your chance to win, follow @zuiker on Twitter and RT:... more

by Blogbot

To celebrate the release of his groundbreaking Level 26 app, Anthony Zuiker is giving away an iPad pre-loaded with Dark Prophecy via Twitter. SuicideGirls is also throwing in a year’s membership to make this a truly killer prize.

For your chance to win, follow @zuiker on Twitter and RT:

No purchase necessary. Entrants must be 18 & over and live in the US. The contest will run for 12 days, starting Monday (2/28) morning at 9:00 AM EST and ending Friday (3/11) night at 11:59 PM PST. The winner will be chosen at random from those who have posted qualifying tweets.



“I think that Dark Prophecy is really the book of tomorrow that’s available today,” says Anthony E. Zuiker. The creator of the incredibly successful CSI TV franchise, has just launched an iPad app for the second installment of his Level 26 fiction series. It follows the adventures of a detective, Steve Dark, who, with a similarly tortured soul, can get into the minds of the worst of the worst killers – those worthy of Level 26 status.

Like the psychopaths Dark hunts, who are no ordinary killers, the Level 26 books are no ordinary thrillers. Dubbed “digi-novels” by Zuiker, the multi-platform murder mysteries combine traditional text with web-based movie “cyber-bridges” and community elements.

However, with the launch of the Dark Prophecy iPad App, Zuiker has kicked his digi-novel concept up to the next level (if you’ll pardon the pun). “Whereas last time we talked it was read the book and watch these 20 individual bridges, now we have 3 levels of engagement,” explains Zuiker. “The traditional Kindle-like version, the digi-novel, which is the book and the movie, and the ultimate digi-novel which is the book, movie, effects, and activities, such as collecting evidence, and unlocking new storylines.”

Aside from the embedded movie clips and interactive extras, the novel pages themselves have some neat special sonic, visual and vibrating “sensory” effects that really exploit the immersive potential of the iPad experience. “If you’re reading about a guy being poisoned in the middle of the book, the words may begin to fog out like you’re drunk,” says Zuiker. “If you’re reading about a guy that gets shot, your screen will be shot with a gun. It’ll crack like a window and slowly go back to normal. And if you’re reading about a guy hanging from the ceiling, blood drops might fall on your page. We’ve timed it out with the average read speed for a certain page, so the effect will happen at the precise moment.

“There’s also a mechanism where you press a character’s name, and a bio pops up along with a carousel of pictures. Sometimes it says white rose, or yellow, you’ll press that and a white rose will pop up. Then you press another button and suddenly Steve Dark begins to explain the significance of what a white rose means. There’s separate storylines going on while you’re collecting evidence, while you’re watching a $250,000 motion picture, and while you’re reading a 400-page hi-octane crime novel, so it’s really a lot of fun.”

With impeccable navigation ability, a bookmark function, and the capability to change text font, size, and color (from black on white, to white on black), there’s all kinds of reasons to kick the pulp-based fiction habit and go hi-tech with Level 26. A documentary and an interview with Zuiker and Ann Margret (who starred in a CSI episode featuring a Level 26-based storyline) are also included in the app. “There’s just a lot of bells and whistles, and a lot that you get for a $13 price point,” Zuiker enthuses. “We’ve learned so much in this book go around, that book three should be unbelievable.”

Dark Prophecy ($12.99) is available via the iTunes Store.

(image) [Razzi in Sounds Like Fun] Hi this is Missy! I started SuicideGirls ten years ago and for a good part of those ten years we've been trying to create a tv show about our live tour: the SuicideGirls Burlesque Show. Vh1 has been nice enough to give us a shot at it, and so we're going to... more

[Razzi in Sounds Like Fun]

Hi this is Missy!

I started SuicideGirls ten years ago and for a good part of those ten years we've been trying to create a tv show about our live tour: the SuicideGirls Burlesque Show. Vh1 has been nice enough to give us a shot at it, and so we're going to start things off by looking for some of the most unique, interesting & beautiful burlesque performers in the US.

If you are a female over the age of 18, eligible to work full time in the United States, and have a background in dance, we would love to meet you!

We are looking for women who are:

INDEPENDENT
DYNAMIC
SEXY
STRONG
EDGY

Those with tattoos, piercings, and talents such as burlesque dancing, fire twirling, contortion, aerial talents on rings or silks, or anything unique are encouraged to apply.


[Korento and friends in Moulin Rouge]

Open call auditions are being held in Las Vegas, New York and Los Angeles to find dancers for this documentary style series about pursuing your dreams in the world of burlesque.

Please email the following information to the appropriate casting associate for the city you would like to audition in:

Name
Phone #s
Dance style / background
3 Photos (to include close-up face shot & full-body shot)

**Depending on which open call you wish to attend,
the subject of your email should read:
"Vegas", "NYC" or "LA"

The casting associates will respond with full audition details.

OPEN CALL AUDITIONS

Las Vegas - February 26th:
Caesars Palace in the Roman Ballroom
Jen - BShowCasting@Gmail.com

New York – March 5th:
Roy Arias Studios & Theatres
300 W 43rd St, Ste 506
New York, NY 10036
(Between 8th & 9th)
Carrie - CarrieDanceCasting@Gmail.com

Los Angeles – March 8th:
Greg - BurlesqueShowCasting@Gmail.com

If you are unable to make the open casting calls in the cities listed above, but would still like a shot a participating in the show:

Please email: BurlesqueShowCasting@gmail.com

Name
Phone #s
Dance style / background
3 Photos (to include close-up face shot & full-body shot)

**The subject of your email should read:
"UNABLE TO ATTEND OPEN CALL"

Click to read the eligibility requirements

Good luck!

Really excited to meet you all and see your talent!

xoxo
-missy

I first became aware of Dave Navarro's penchant for cute things bearing the likeness of Sanrio's Hello Kitty character while doing the SuicideGirls Radio show. We broadcast each Sunday out of Indie1031.com's studios, which at the time also served as home for the wild living and hard rockin'... more

I first became aware of Dave Navarro's penchant for cute things bearing the likeness of Sanrio's Hello Kitty character while doing the SuicideGirls Radio show. We broadcast each Sunday out of Indie1031.com's studios, which at the time also served as home for the wild living and hard rockin' Jane's Addiction and Camp Freddy guitarist's Wednesday night Dark Matter show (which has since moved to Moheak.com's Silverlake base). In the Indie studio, there was a shrine of sorts, where people left various Hello Kitty offerings to Dave.

Having an affinity with the character myself, when I noticed the various Hello Kitty items on the counter, I asked SG Radio's engineer and co-host Jessica Sattelberger (who also manned the boards for Dark Matter and several other Indie shows) what they were doing there. She explained that people had left them for Dave. My first reaction was "Huh?" Then, after she explained that Dave was into Hello Kitty, my next was to track him down to find out why.

I called Dave up on what turned out to be his new Verizon iPhone. He was having new phone issues when I initially called for this interview, but, after a couple of false starts, we settled in for a chat that began with Hello Kitty, and moved on to his affection for his somewhat modified "Bondage Barbie" and his latest love - Angry Birds. We also talked Twitter, booty calls - and Jane's Addiction's new album, which he is currently in the process of recording.

NP: So I understand you're into Hello Kitty. Why?

DN: There's a multitude of reasons. I first became aware of Hello Kitty when I was about 7 years old. You know, it's been around for a long, long time. When I was in grade school, my first crush was a girl by the name of Rina Yasuda...Her family was from Japan, so she would go to Japan for the summers and come back to school. She would always have all this Hello Kitty paraphernalia - little rulers and pencils and stickers - and I always associated that image with my first crush. It always brought me back to this age of innocence in a strange way.

So, that's the number one reason. The number two reason is - I'm a weird motherfucker - what do you want me to say? I think in adulthood when the image is used, especially in the way that it's been used in terms of some of these young alt girls, it's transcended being for kids. A lot of young adult females have started really embracing the product. I've always found that - and I don't want to get in trouble for saying this because it doesn't stand for all of them - but for many of them the sweet little girly exterior that loves Hello Kitty and unicorns and rainbows and My Little Pony and Barbie, more times than not there's a dark hidden underside of these women's lives.

NP: I would agree with that. I mean, we do have a Sanrio Fan Club group on the SuicideGirls website.

DN: Right. So, being that there was this young experience with it as a kid, I wasn't really into it as a kid of course, but I associated it with this Japanese girl. And then now as an adult, seeing it kind of come back into the forefront of culture even more so then it did back then, with young, adult women, generally speaking a lot of them have very secretive dark pasts that force them to embrace something unique and pure and girly, if you will. There's a duality that's inherent in that which is interesting and fascinating to me.

The image itself is more of a symbol of darkness to me than anything else. Because you can take one person who's really dark and they're into really dark things, but it's the person who gravitates toward the light to hide away from the darkness that's actually more intriguing. A good example of that would be the serial killer John Wayne Gacy doing paintings of Bambi or doing paintings of himself as a clown or the Seven Dwarfs. There's such a severe contrast between the dark and the light, that's the type of intellect that I find incredibly fascinating.

NP: So it's almost like a Freemason handshake. Hello Kitty is a way of finding kindred souls.

DN: Yeah...And also for me personally, my mother was murdered when I was 15 and I'm a recovering drug addict, and so I am no stranger to the darkness. And again, I don't want to make a blanket statement and upset anybody, but I would say in about 75% of cases, adult fans of Barbie and Hello Kitty and things of that nature, there's usually a past of either abuse or divorce or maybe sexual abuse, eating disorders, something that can easily be looked up in the DSM IV, which is basically the psychiatric diagnostic manual of disorders.

I'm incredibly disordered myself. I've got plenty of them, you know what I mean? ...So when I meet adult women that are into the Hello Kitty product and the frilly, little girl stuff, I find that I ultimately identify with them better as people because of that duality of mankind.

NP: There's a level of understanding.

DN: Yeah. That's probably a way more heavy-handed answer then you wanted...But actually, it makes a lot of sense. It's the same reason why I have a collection of Barbies and I have a ballerina box. I went through a unicorn phase back in the '90s. There's always some little symbol that's supposed to represent life that I have always found is a much darker symbol than coffins and skulls and crosses and bats.

NP: I hear that you have a rare bondage Barbie.

DN: I do.

NP: I'm told that that was something that Mattel came out with and then rapidly stop producing.

DN: Well, you know the origin or Barbie right?

NP: No. Do tell.

DN: Barbie was a knock off of a German doll called Lilli, and Lilli was a novelty item for adult men. It was a little figurine of a hooker. So the original Barbie was based on a hooker doll. That's absolutely true.

NP: Wow, I had no idea.

DN: Yeah, you can Google it*. It was a novelty hooker doll for adult men and it came with little outfits. That is what it was intended for. The creator of Barbie saw that doll and decided to make a PG version, or a G-rated version for children in America and it took off like wild fire. So, again, if you take Barbie for what she stands for in today's culture, it's a pretty benign symbol of modern society. But if you do the research, you're talking about a doll that was based on a hooker in Germany, and there's all kinds of taboo that goes along with that. And then just for me to use it on stage and for me to have it on my amplifiers, there's a whole other element of that just being really fuckin' twisted.

The bondage Barbie...I ordered it online and I think it eventually got discontinued. We ended up getting out the black tape and made her a little more bondage-like than she came in the package. Let's just say we modified her. Since then I received another one that came as a result of friendships that I made on Twitter. There was a girl on Twitter who's kind of like an alt model, and, in a round about way just through Tweets and what not, I became friends with her and her husband, who live in Florida. Her husband thought it was kind of amusing that she and I had this online flirtation having never met. He created a Barbie doll made in her likeness, and they sent it to me as a gift for Christmas. So, I wasn't able to actually connect with the girl, but I was able to have my own Barbie version of her as a gift from them with their blessing. So now I got two.

NP: Nice. Two Barbie's can have a lot more fun than one. I hope we're going to see some interesting Twitpics.

DN: Oh, I've already Tweeted them out, they're all over the place. I've taken one of them to a movie. When I drive around with one I always buckle her in in the passenger seat.

NP: I saw that Twitpic.

DN: Yeah, there's lots of things like that. My appreciation for these modern day icons is a lot deeper and more twisted than one might think. Also, just being a sufferer from a few disorders myself, I certainly identify with the types of adult females that tend to gravitate towards them.

NP: Listening to your Dark Matter show, you're very honest about your life and your past. I know you don't always like doing interviews because by nature they're invasive...but the show is very much an open door into the mind of Dave Navarro.

DN: Well, it is in the sense that it's an open door into the aspects of the mind that I allow it to be opened into. A lot of people are struck by the honesty on the radio and my honesty online, and they think that I'm this open book. But, believe me, there's a few doors that are slammed shut. I'm aware that what I'm saying is being heard, and I'm aware that what I'm writing or Tweeting or posting is being seen, so it doesn't paint the whole picture. But yeah, when it comes to sex and drugs and you know, things that I may have done in the past that I learned from, I have no problem sharing those things. Frankly, I have found that the more open we are, the more confident one is about who they are, the less anybody has to hold over you. If I'm sitting here talking about all this stuff, what's anybody else going to say? There's nothing to dig up. So in a lot of ways it's freeing and it's empowering, and it helps a lot of people who are listening that may or may not have gone down some of the roads that I have.

NP: In your recent Twitter posts I noticed that you've been having fun pointing out the irony of posting seemingly private messages in a public forum.

DN: Well, sometimes I'll get negative responses from people. That's just the way the internet is. Instead of going to war with those people, I just create a JPEG of their message to me and post it and let everybody else go to war for me. Because that way the sender gets inundated with the multitude of the negativity they threw my way, and all I'm doing is saying, "Hey, this is what somebody said to me." A perfect example is this one guy sent me some kind of nasty message and his avatar was of, I think, a newborn child that he had. I pointed out, basically, what kind of a father is going to print those kinds of things next to a photo of his newborn infant child. I just took a screen shot of it and just Tweeted it back.

You know, it's fun. I can't really pay a whole lot of attention to the stuff that people say online. But if I have a moment where I can use technology in an advantageous way without mixing it up personally, I'm by all means going to do that. I think that's just the smarter way to go about it, because at the end of the day, I didn't really say anything back to this guy.

NP: It does annoy me when people say things online that they would never have the balls to say to someone in person. There's a weird amount of hate spewed out online.

DN: Oh yeah, it's horrible, it's horrible. But, one of my favorite go-to lines that I heard from someone else, and I kind of re-originated it, made it my own, is that any time somebody has something to say to me that is less than flattering or negative, I just look at them and go, "Hey man, anytime you want to compare lives and compare accomplishments, I'm ready to go." That usually shuts them up.

NP: I saw on Twitter that you just downloaded Angry Birds. How is that going for you?

DN: [deep breath] Not great.

NP: Is Angry Birds beating your ass?

DN: Well, I downloaded it last night. I just got an iPhone, I just stepped into the new millennium. I was holding off for a long time, but I couldn't resist when it went to Verizon.

NP: Were you a Crackberry before?

DN: Yes. Yes.

NP: So you're now a recovering Crackberry addict?

DN: I am a recovering Crackberry addict, and I'm still struggling with the iPhone transition. I went to the app store and, of course, it came up on the "Downloaded Top Apps" or whatever. So I get this Angry Birds thing which I had heard about, and I've got to tell you, I looked up and a few hours had gone by. I just discovered the new thing that's going to do me in and put my record on hold for the next six months. 'Cause Jane's Addiction is recording an album right now. We're about halfway through with it, and I'm going to miss going to the studio because I'm up late at night playing Angry Birds.

NP: Angry Birds is essentially going to put the next Jane's Addiction release back to 2012.

DN: It's very possible. And frankly, you know, it's two or three in the morning and you're on your iPhone playing Angry Birds, and then in comes the late night booty call texts, and I'm hitting ignore, ignore, ignore.

NP: Nooooo!! Angry Birds is getting in the way of your booty calls?

DN: It's destroying my sex life.

NP: Oh dear, oh dear. Well, if you ever get over your Angry Birds fascination, there are SuicideGirls iPhone apps too.

DN: What do the SuicideGirls iPhone apps do?

NP: Well one of ours actually got banned. It was called Flip Strip, and was inspired by those 1950s novelty pens. You could flip through images of various Suicide Girls and then, if you turned your iPhone upside down, the clothes would melt off. So that was kind of fun, but it got banned. We go a million downloads in a week, but it was too much fun for Apple. But there's another one, Seduce A Suicide Girl, where you get to go on a virtual date with an SG. It's an interactive game where, depending on what you do and what you say, there are different outcomes.

DN: The interesting thing about me, and a lot of people don't understand this, because I'm a porn director, I write for Penthouse magazine, [I'm] certainly no stranger to a free lifestyle per se, but when it comes to looking at pictures of naked girls or looking at pornography, I'm not necessarily a fan. I don't really do it. The reason is very simple; When you're hungry you don't just get a menu and look at what's on the menu, you want to order a sandwich.

NP: Right, you actually want to eat the sandwich.

DN: Exactly. I don't want to just get a menu and look at the pictures on the menu and see what kind of food they have. So that's the same kind of thinking. If I put on a porn film or if I look at naked pictures, it's the same kind of concept to me. I would rather just have sex than look at something that's going to get me all aroused. I'd rather experience something, or do something else. My other late night love, and a lot of the stuff we're talking about we're talking about late night stuff - because we're talking about broken girls, we're talking about sex, we're talking about Angry Birds and online stuff and Twitter - these are all things that kind of, for me, live between the hours of 11 and 4 AM. The rest of the day I actually have my life to live.

NP: Right.

DN: The other thing that comes to mind is horror films - horror, suspense, super dark documentary films. That's my other love, outside of music, of course....Have you seen any of the films by Gaspar Noé? Irreversible, Enter the Void, and I Stand Alone, those are three films that you need to see if you're interested. They're not horror films, but they're super dark suspense films. His directorial style is absolutely stunning. I've never seen anything like it.

NP: Given that you're doing all this between 11 and 4 AM, does that mean that you're an insomniac?

DN: Somewhat. I think what happens is that I'm a napper. I get up, go to the gym, go to work, do whatever I've got to do during the day, and then I kind of fall asleep again around 6 or 7, for a couple of hours. Then that takes me up until the wee hours of the night, which I prefer because I don't have as much incoming interaction with people. Because - as much as I work, and as many people as I know, and as out in the world as I appear to be - I'm really a loner, and I enjoy it. When the cell phone and the emails quiet down, and the workday is over, that's when I feel happiest.

NP: Well, especially with Twitter, it's a way of interacting with people while still being alone. You're interacting with people, but it's not in an invasive way because you can retreat from it.

DN: I basically use Twitter at night. During the day it's like band updates and funny little anecdotes and stuff for the majority of the followers, but once it's nighttime, I basically use it as a public global chat room. So I'm Tweeting stuff to people that only that person is going to get. A lot of people use it as a way to communicate with a vast amount of people at once. I do that the majority of the day, but then at night, it just becomes personal email that anybody can read basically. I think that's kind of interesting and fun and voyeuristic...I just think that, for me, to be able to eavesdrop on somebody's private conversations, so to speak, might be a little bit more interesting than [tweeting] "my band is playing out in Anaheim on the 17th." Anybody can find that out anywhere. You know what I mean?

NP: It's like a door that's slightly ajar into someone's private world.

DN: Exactly. But, like I said...

NP: And an ajar door is more intriguing than a wide open door.

DN: Exactly. The sense has been in the past that I'm this open book, and I let everybody into everything - believe me I don't. Nine times out of ten the women that I'm most flirtatious with on Twitter are the ones that I don't know. And the ones that I have actual friendships with are the ones I'm pretty tame about...At the same time, don't think I haven't direct messaged my cell number about 10,000 times to people, but you know. Always an interesting question is: How many times have you direct messaged your personal cell number? I've definitely been down that road, and I've definitely met really cool people on there.

NP: I have to ask...obviously you mentioned the Jane's album - how's that going?

DN: It's going really great. We're working with Dave Sitek, he's from the band TV on the Radio. He and Rich Costey are co-producing right now. We have all the material written, and actually today we're going to start tracking the actual album. It's an exciting day. It's going really, really well. It's totally different for us. It sounds like Jane's Addiction without sounding like any of our past records. I think a lot of that has to do with song structure, and the fact that we have Perry Farrell on vocals. I mean, he sings on something, it's certainly identifiable that it's him. But the music's really modern, and we're recording in a really new way...With this record, we're trying to sculpt a piece of art that's an entire album. I haven't been this excited about the band for many years.

NP: It is really hard to get people to see an album in terms of the whole when people are just downloading individual tracks.

DN: Yeah, and that's fine, they can do that, but I think as the artist you still want to create a body of work.

NP: And create a complete work of art.

DN: Exactly. I know a lot of bands focus on a couple of singles and then the rest of the record is filler, and a lot of bands really just focus on the album, and I think that we're the latter. We really want to make an epic album.

NP: So how are you making it feel complete? Is there a thread that's going to go all the way through it?

DN: Well, you can't help but have that thread with the same people writing and creating. That's going to be there. That's going to be inherent. I think when it comes down to the songs, we have a couple of hours worth of material, so obviously we're going to pick and choose the ones that are best suited. Some may be stronger than others, so we'll pick those, and then the way it's sequenced is an art form in itself. How the album unfolds. There's a lot of different ways that it can go, and we're hoping to make it something that provides a mood.

NP: When I spoke to Lincoln Park, they were talking about how they got to a point in production where they would actually work on the thing as a whole. If they made a change on one bit, they wouldn't just rewind to the start of that section and listen, they'd go right back to the start of the album and listen to how that change affected the whole album in terms of the journey.

DN: Yeah, that's a great point. A lot of people, I don't think today, take that kind of care when it comes to their music and their shows, and it's nice to see that others still do. We're definitely trying to exercise that kind of care on the album and certainly on the sequencing. I'm just really, really excited and motivated right now. This is a really cool time.


Catch the live stream of Dave Navarro's Dark Matter show on Wednesday Nights at 9 PM PST on Moheak.com.

* The original boobylicious blonde doll was based on an adult cartoon character called Lilli, who first appeared in the West German tabloid newspaper Bild Zeitung in 1952. She had sex for money, spent her time seeking out the company of fatcat businessmen, and talked saucily to male authority figures. Mattel president Ruth Handler came across the Bild Lilli doll on a trip to Europe. Handler claimed she was unaware of the adult nature of the doll when she took her inspiration for Barbie from it. Mattel subsequently bought the rights to Bild Lilli and ceased production of the rival doll in 1964.

Exit Through the Gift Shop is a film that defies explanation, and one’s ability to suspend disbelief. Indeed the plot would be utterly ridiculous, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s true. It started out life as a simple documentary about street art as seen through the lens of Thierry Guetta, a... more

Exit Through the Gift Shop is a film that defies explanation, and one’s ability to suspend disbelief. Indeed the plot would be utterly ridiculous, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s true.

It started out life as a simple documentary about street art as seen through the lens of Thierry Guetta, a French national living in Los Angeles. Thanks to a family connection, and his infectious and perpetuity ebullient personality, Guetta gained unparalleled access to the major players in the scene, who are a notoriously secretive and hard to track down bunch by necessity due to the predominantly illicit nature of their work. Guetta’s extreme enthusiasm for the form, and his zealous pursuit of its practitioners, ultimately led him to the scene’s holy grail, Banksy, an elusive British street art superstar.

After Guetta proved his worth as a location scout in LA, Banksy - whose real identity is shrouded in mystery - inexplicably agreed to participate in his documentary film project (or more accurately didn't object when he started rolling tape). Guetta proceeded to shoot hundreds of hours of footage, over a period that spanned several years. With no sign of the finished product in sight however, Banksy eventually suggested Guetta work on a first cut. It was only at this point that a major stumbling block became apparent – the fact that Guetta actually had no clue how to make a film, "I didn't know if I believed he was a filmmaker or a mental patient with a camera," said Banksy of Life Remote Control, the manic film Guetta subsequently produced. In an attempt to salvage the situation, Banksy decided to take control of the project - and of Guetta’s vast library of unlogged videotape. Banksy in turn, encouraged the camera man turned friend to make some art of his own, as he exchanged roles and became the filmmaker.

It was at this point that events took an unlikely and unanticipated course. Banksy recruited producer Jaimie D'Cruz, who then brought editor Chris King onboard. Together they began the process of assessing Guetta’s raw material to see if it was even possible to assemble it into some kind of meaningful narrative. As they viewed it they began to realize that the effusive Frenchman was ultimately the star of his own footage. Guetta meanwhile had taken Banksy’s edict a little more seriously than had been intended, and started work on an art show of epic proportions.

A crew was dispatched to LA to film Guetta as he mounted his assault on the art world under the moniker Mr. Brainwash. Having rented the extremely spacious old CBS building, Columbia Square, on Sunset Blvd., Guetta set about filling it ahead of his June 18, 2008 debut. As with his filmmaking endeavor, Guetta didn’t let his lack of prior personal experience hold him back from jumping in with two feet (neither did a broken leg).

Much to the surprise of everyone – including Banksy – the event proved to be an undeniable success. Thousands flocked to the opening night (which featured Shepard Fairey on the decks), and by the end of the first week Guetta had sold close to $1 million worth of his Mr. Brainwash “art.”

Guetta was a bona fide overnight sensation, but was he a bona fide artist? As Mr. Brainwash’s career took flight, Banksy, D'Cruz and King shifted the focus of the street art documentary, turning the lens on its original documentarian. Though the resulting film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, can’t possibly provide a definitive conclusion regarding Guetta’s authenticity as an artist, it poses the underlying question, and many more with it, in an incredibly smart and entertaining way. However, following initial screenings at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals, and the documentary’s cinematic release in April of this year, this ambiguity and the unlikely events chronicled have led some to accuse the filmmakers of staging an elaborate hoax.

Banksy’s reputation as a prankster has also confounded the situation, but, with his blessing, filmmakers D'Cruz and King are keen to set the record straight. While in town for the International Documentary Awards, SuicideGirls caught up with the duo at a brunch spot on Robertson Blvd. Though Exit Through the Gift Shop was passed over (in favor of Waste Land) at that particular ceremony, the film has won a prestigious Grierson Award, and is nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and shortlisted for Oscar nomination.

Nicole Powers: So congratulations, I understand you're nominated for an Oscar nomination, so to speak. When did you find out about that?

Chris King: About two weeks ago…There was a lot of shouting and hollering and jumping around. It's very exciting.

Jaimie D'Cruz: And now we've got a real nerve wracking [couple of months]. We have to wait until January 25th to find out the nominations, and that's quite a long time.

NP: But you can just enjoy being shortlisted?

CK: Yeah, of course, we're going to enjoy that. Because it started with such humble beginnings, this film.

NP: How did you guys get involved?

JDC: I got a call from Banksy, who I briefly met ten years earlier, saying can you help make a film. I went to meet him and he told me the idea, which was so ridiculous I couldn't believe he was serious.

NP: What was Banksy's original pitch?

JDC: His pitch was, I want to make a film about this amazing French guy who's been making a film about me. It just sounded ridiculous and nonsensical. Obviously I was really excited to get a call from him, because when I first met him he wasn't known at all, and by that point he'd become world famous.

NP: In what context did you first meet him?

JDC: I used to run a little underground magazine. Part of my job was to know about people doing interesting shit in the underground.

NP: What magazine?

JDC: It was called Touch. It was a black music magazine, but we used to do a lot of graffiti and street culture stuff. I had had a lot of kids working for me, [and one of them told me about] this guy called Banksy who'd been doing some really interesting stuff. We tracked him down and I hung out with him for a couple of nights. He was an impressive young [man], quite clearly ambitious, but a deeply secretive person even then.

NP: Even then?

JDC: Even then. Meeting him even in 1998 or 9, whenever it was, it was like meeting a CIA mole or something. I thought he was really nice and interesting, he was doing some great stuff, and then I never heard from him again. Obviously I monitored [his activities] like the rest of the world. I kept seeing him in other magazines, then in the newspapers.

What happened was he said let's make a film about this guy Thierry [Guetta]. I was quite skeptical, but was willing to explore. Of course I was excited that he wanted to make a film, because everyone was trying to make a film with Banksy. And they don't even get a "no." There's no answer. You can't even ask the question. So being approached by him was really exciting and potentially very interesting.

What we did was we looked at some tapes that [Banksy] already had. He didn't really have much at that stage, but he arranged for me to meet Thierry and he also showed me - which was a key thing - the DVD of Life Remote Control.

Life Remote Control is the film that in our film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, we refer to that Thierry made. It's an absolutely astonishing feature length bit of torture.

NP: You show clips of it in your film, and even those clips are torturous to watch.

JDC: People assume we cut it to look like that, but that is what it looks like. So basically, I said, "It sounds like a bit of a mad idea - who the fuck's this guy Thierry?" He just said, "Take this DVD home and watch it, and then I think you'll see what I mean."

NP: And it didn't put you off?

JDC: No, I was sold then. I was like, who made this? Who is the person?

So I met Thierry, called up Chris who is an editor. We'd both worked for the same company on and off for years. Chris has got a really good reputation as a very inventive and creative editor, and I thought that's clearly what we need. So me and Chris got hold of some of Thierry's tapes and started watching them.

Initially it was like jumping off a cliff into a sea of nonsense. We didn't have hundreds and hundreds of hours at that point, we had enough to know that this was going to be potentially quite interesting. And that's really how the film started.

The other thing that happened at the same time was that I knew that Thierry was going to do his own art show. That was the idea - Thierry was going to do his own art show while we made [the film].

NP: So you came on board in essence half way through the movie when it shifts gears.

JDC: Exactly, yeah. I knew he was going to do an art show, but I didn't know about the scale of it. As far as I knew, Thierry hadn't done anything ever before [by way of] an art show, so I just thought it was a bit of a strange idea, but [that] it might be interesting.

Also, we didn't have a plan that this would end up being a theatrically released documentary feature. [We thought] maybe we'll get a DVD out of it, maybe it'll go on YouTube.

CK: Sometimes [Banksy] has videos playing in the back of his exhibitions, we thought it might be that. I think we both just thought it's different, and it's an opportunity to work with an artist who's got funky ideas about things.

NP: To what degree did Thierry's art show snowball because of the documentary process?

JDC: Not really at all. I don't think the process of us making the film was the thing that made Thierry's show extraordinary. But it's probably also true to say that Thierry wouldn't have done an art show unless Banksy had suggested to him to go and do an art show.

CK: Thierry, as you see in the film, was absolutely enraptured by his relationship with Banksy. He couldn't believe that this man that he'd been idolizing for so long had let him in and they'd become friends. He was in awe of him.

NP: It was like this command from God: Go forth and do an art show.

CK: Banksy probably didn't quite grasp how deep it was with Thierry...At that stage, Banksy and other people in the street art world have been expecting Thierry to deliver a film which actually tells a story. Clearly Life Remote Control wasn't that, and [Banksy] was a little crest fallen. So I think initially he sat and mused for a while. He wanted to see if those rushes actually contained enough footage to make a more conventional kind of street art history. Because [Thierry] was with all the major players, so surely there was going to be enough stuff in there to do that.

We initially sat down in February or March of 2008 and had a look through this first suitcase full of tapes. They were all unmarked, had nothing written on them, [and we had] no idea about who anybody was on any of them either really. We didn't have any idea of the order of them, the chronology of it or anything. We had in our mind the idea that we were going to try and turn this into a street art documentary, but it was clear that we weren't going to be able to do that because of the way Thierry shot it.

He was great at climbing up on roofs with all these guys. When we found this stuff, it was all kind of visceral, exciting stuff, but he never took any shots of the actual work. At the end of it he never stood back and got a nice steady, locked on shot of the piece. So obviously it was going to be very difficult to make a film where we looked at the art.

But in the process of looking through all this stuff and working it out, you know Thierry's in his own footage quite a lot. He'd put the camera up on a wall and then he'd be wandering around and he'd be having conversations with the artists. It's not the conventional way of filming things. We would just be laughing at him, because he's just so funny - he's a bit like Jacques Tati...We thought, this guy's great, and we began to see why Banksy thought it'd be worth investing time in it.

Then there was another tape somewhere where he was driving back from a hit with an artist and there was a conversation going on in the back of a truck or in the back of the van. The camera, as always, was just left running on the back seat, filming the floor or something, but the sound was recording. There was a conversation going on which was, "So Thierry, how do you get into doing all this stuff?" And he began to tell this yarn, which was [puts on French accent], "Well my cousin was Space Invader in Paris and through him I met these other guys..." And he basically tells the story that you see in the film about how he got into it.

We started to see that this was a really amazing story arc that led to the illusive Banksy. That's when our initial skepticism about this began to soften and we realized that Banksy wasn't quite as bonkers as we had thought he had been in the first place. He's one step ahead of most people. Then we just sorted waded in. At the same time we had had heard that Thierry was putting on a little show of some sort over in LA.

NP: A little show.

CK: We thought we better get a local crew to just go and film a little bit of Thierry's preparation for this show, to see what happens there. [We had] no idea that it was going to anything like it turned out to be. It was dutifully covering that base. Then reports came back that it was all going pear shaped, and it was a really huge thing, and he had got this enormous space. So then Jaimie jumps on a plane and came over here, and started filming. That's when the true majesty of Thierry's ambition became clear to everybody.

NP: Was that when you first got face to face with Thierry?

JDC: I had met him briefly in London, only three or four weeks before the show opened, when he told me that he was doing the show. So I had met him and fallen in love with him as a character. I just thought, this guy is just genius. He said he was doing a show, and he also said he was very worried and scared because he hadn't made any art yet. There was a great quote, he kept saying [puts on French accent], "I can only go up. For me, I am at ze bottom, and now I can only go up." I didn't even know what he meant, [but discovered] basically all it means is that Thierry is just a relentless optimist. He just sees everything in life as full of potential and full of beauty and possibility in a really unusual very instinctive way.

NP: With a thought process like that, if you're successful, you're a genius, and if you're not, you're delusional.

JDC: Exactly. I think that was when I first thought this is Chance the Gardner from Being There, the Peter Sellers' film, which is basically about an idiot savant, who, through his innocent pronouncements about the world, is interpreted by the world as a crazed genius. Thierry had this kind of extraordinarily [quality]. For example, when he called his show Life is Beautiful, he literally means life is beautiful. There is no irony or cynicism, or post-modern comment on the state of the world. He just means [puts on French accent], "Life is beautiful. You wake up, you love your wife, your children, ze sun is shinning - why not be happy?" That's literally what he means. All the art critics would be, "That's a very clever comment on our cynical society." And actually it's not - it's just because life is beautiful.

CK: Yes, he is completely un-cynical.

JDC: Going back to the storyline, I went out to LA, saw what was going on, realized that this was [something special]. We'd had a couple of indications, phone calls coming back to London saying, "Oh, you're never going to believe what's going on." He broke his leg for example...All of it was kind of great story points from a filmmaking point of view. But it wasn't until a couple hours before the show opened that I realized this is actually going to be a huge sensation. Because I assumed it was going to be a bit of a disaster with no one there and no art on the walls.

NP: But then the LA Weekly made Thierry's show their cover story. How did that happen?

JDC: I think they'd heard that Thierry was doing something that was going to be really interesting and really big. They'd somehow got wind of it. There was a bit of talk that this guy had been hanging out with Banksy, Shepard Fairey and Invader, so I guess there was a kind of suspicion that something might happen.

CK: Well he inveigled little quotes out of his mentors, for want of a better word, and then really used them...

NP: Because Thierry didn't let the fact that he couldn't make art get in the way of putting on an art show, there was some intriguing speculation...

JDC: Hang on a minute, you say Thierry couldn't make art, but that's actually quite a judgmental position to take. Because what does it mean to make art? I'm not going to answer that question, I'm just going to push it out there.

NP: Well that's one of those questions that your film brings up. A lot of people ask what is art? This film almost begs the question is art a joke.

JDC: I know that Thierry would never in a million years - it's just not in his makeup, it's not in his DNA - try to punk everyone by making crap art and selling it for lots of money. He wouldn't understand that concept. He just makes art.

NP: He did sub-contract some of it though.

JDC: Yeah, but so does Damien Hirst. The factory system is an ancient venerated system that goes back to The Renaissance. There's nothing new in that. When I'm put on the spot with this question, for me, I think being an artist means having something to say. If you've got something to say, you can get monkeys to make it if you want - if they're conveying your message...My question would be: what is Thierry saying with his art?

NP: There was some speculation that some of the art was done by Banksy.

JDC: That's not true. Categorically, Banksy didn't make any of the art in Thierry's show. Quite the opposite. I hesitate to speak for Banksy, but I can be pretty certain in saying that he wouldn't have wanted to. Because for Banksy, I think the motivation was [that he thinks] everyone should make art. Banksy's whole thing has been about taking art away from the galleries and the dealers and the curators, and seeing as a populist form. So the idea that he would make the art for someone else would just be an anathema.

CK: Thierry had been making posters and dabbling in street art, so [Banksy] was obviously curious to see what Thierry was going to come up with. But I'm sure he imagined that it was going to be in a little space somewhere, in a lock-up or a little gallery - one room with a few examples on the wall. I don't think anybody, particularly Banksy, realized that Thierry was going to take it and run so far and so high with it all. But from Thierry's point of view I'm sure, having spent all that time with the kind of major players who had put on huge shows, when it came to that point where Banksy casually suggested that he go and do this little show, Thierry just sort of regurgitated all that stuff that he'd absorbed over a decade of hanging out with these guys.

NP: He's had the best education anyone could have.

CK: Exactly.

NP: No one had had that kind of experience, hanging out with...

CK: ...With everybody. Even the artists haven't necessarily hung out as closely as he had. I think it all just poured out in a completely unfiltered, unmediated way. He just followed his instincts.

I think that you do get a split with the way people view it. One of the other questions that comes up quite often is, all those 5,000 people who turned up at his show, a certain way of viewing the film is that they're mugs. They go to see this work, and because you've seen the process of how that art was [created], and the ramshackle chaotic nature of the show, and the fact that the people had to put Thierry's work on the walls for him, and the other elves so-to-speak were creating his bits and pieces - because of that, those people were duped. But I'm sure that if any of us had turned up that night and been in that queue and gone in and seen it, we'd have probably had a very nice evening, and seen some interesting bits and pieces - some of it funny, some not.

So the question of prior knowledge about artists and their process, and how you view the art, is another one that came up as we were making the film. It is a pertinent thing, particularly when you see Shepard, Banksy and Invader, who all have very clear motivations about why they're making art, clear intentions about where it's going to go and what it's going to mean and what they want to say. In knowing that, you view their work in a particular way. With Thierry, you're not quite sure what that motivation or intention is, and perhaps Thierry wouldn't be able to answer that question either.

JDC: One of the shrewder observations that Banksy makes in the film is that Andy Warhol was genuinely interesting because he took the banal and the every day and he turned meaningless objects into art. Then he says, "But then Terry really made them meaningless."

I think that Thierry, in a slightly outsider artist, unknowing, instinctive way, has done something genuinely quite interesting for art collectors and for the art establishment. It moves the game on, doesn't it? How many times can you paint an every object and say that's art. It has to go somewhere, and Thierry, in a very odd way, has done something quite interesting.

NP: It's almost like the artist is the everyday object.

CK: If you think about a lot of the conceptual artists...all the [Young British Artists], they had a thing of using their life stories as conceptual art. And if you look at Thierry's life, it's like an art piece in itself. The whole thing of going around for years, obsessively filming and putting things in boxes and never watching it, it does feel like some kind of situationist art thing that he was doing, but he just wouldn't be self-aware enough to realize that you know.

NP: He's a walking installation.

CK: And I think that Banksy, Shepard and Invader's reaction to Thierry's success, they're a bit ambivalent about it. Because on the one hand, this is the most democratic of art forms, anyone should be able to have a go. It requires nothing more than a spray can and a wall. At the same time, Thierry's success seemed to signify the very thing that actually Banksy in particular had hoped that Thierry would kind of puncture, which is the commercialization of it. It was inadvertent, but nevertheless, he somehow felt that Thierry was not exactly personally responsible for it, but was definitely part of adding to that feeling of it being commercialized.

I know that Banksy hoped that his film would be the leveler at a time when it was getting out of hand, and the galleries and the collectors were suddenly buying work. Banksy probably feared that the soul was going to get sucked out of this very democratic movement by money, in the same way that it did for the graffiti scene in New York in the '80s. Yet Thierry obviously manifestly failed to do that with his film because it was just very strange and unwatchable. But then inadvertently through his art show, he actually, I feel, contributed to the further commodification of art, hence, I think, Banksy's decision to call the film Exit Through the Gift Shop, which is obviously a big comment on that. But through it all, Banksy is still very fond of Thierry. I think everybody is.

NP: Have you met up with him recently?

CK: I haven't seen him since we finished the film, because he's so busy. He's had a huge exhibition in New York.

JDC: He doesn't have time for us anymore.

CK: He's a really major artist now. In fact we had a screening in West Hollywood last night, and, because he only lives in Hollywood, we had hoped he would be able to come along afterwards for a Q&A. But he said [puts on French accent], "I'm too busy. I'm in Miami at ze Basel Art Fair. I cannot come for your little film." I mean he's sold work to Silvio Berlusconi and numerous collectors, and he's had major exhibitions in New York and in Paris, so he's an art star. He does love the film - we know that. He may have slightly more ambivalent feelings now that he is a major art star, and his perspective of himself may have changed somewhat, but you know...

NP: When you got around to editing and putting the film together, how much input did Banksy have in the process?

JDC: Banksy was incredibly involved in the whole process, from the original conception to the absolute detail of every part right at the very end...We were in the cutting room for a year with Chris, and then another six months after that. It was a very long, but always collaborative process.

Banksy had to leave us alone for a bit while we cut his interviews into the piece, because as a contributor he couldn't be deciding what bits of his own interview went into the [film]. So he gave us space. Also Banksy's a busy guy. He's got other projects going on, so he'd go missing to New Orleans to do the Katrina stuff, he did an animatronics pet store in New York, he's always off doing weird little missions.

NP: You must have had lots of amazing footage that you just couldn't weave into the film.

JDC: There's some great things. For example with Barely Legal there's some really hilarious stuff where all these big celebs turn up...Thierry's camera is literally about an inch from Keanu Reeves, Jude Law, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's face. Of course, we thought that's got to be in the film. But I think Banksy didn't want us to have it just full of celebrities, so we reigned back on that a bit...Ultimately we had to cut it down to a manageable narrative.

CK: Banksy was very, very clear on this; that this wasn't just going to be a film for street artists. When we knew it was a film, it was clearly going to be something that would have a wider appeal. Thierry was the conduit by which a mainstream audience and a not necessarily aware audience would be able to learn about street art. His enthusiasm as he first gets into this world is very infectious. We realized that Thierry was the way to draw a crowd that maybe didn't know about street art into this world. If you digressed too far from the narrative, and went into in-depth potted histories of these artists, it just slowed it down. Thierry's story, the fact that it is the story of a man and a relationship, is what gives the film it's momentum and it makes it very easy for everyone to understand.

NP: It's going to be interesting if you do win the Oscar, because it'll put this underground art form in the glare of a very bright spotlight, and that changes intrinsically the nature of it.

JDC: Yes, but it's presented honestly as a movement, if you want to call it that, which is sort of altruistic. Not always, a lot of the people are just there out of the usual graffiti ego and vanity. They're writing their names in big letters on walls because they want to get known. But overall, you're seeing why people did it, that it was an underground thing that was about filling public spaces and walls, the different motivations that street artists had. So even if it did get anywhere near the Oscars, I think that it's a true, honest and proper representation of what the scene actually was about, and not just a mainstream view of it.

NP: It’s interesting to see how attitudes to street art are changing. In England, the local authorities would see a bit of graffiti and white wash over it as a matter of course. But now they actually have to assess the art first. I know there's been some cases where local governments have realized they've white washed over a Banksy piece, and they've actually had to bring high end art experts in to restore it.

JDC: The lines get completely blurred by that, and I think that's a very interesting theme. Again that's not a theme that we really dwell on in the film, but the concept that street art would be stolen and sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars to bankers - that's something that sounds like someone's worse nightmare. Particularly for a street artist because, A, they didn't do it to be sold, and B, they're not even selling it.

When you read about those stories where people are demolishing walls and restoring them - that's theft. But I think that kind of chaos that the street art world descended into, of it all becoming about money and headlines about street artists making fortunes, I think that's one of the motivations for Banksy to want to make a film, which is actually just to show that this is a very honest and simple art form motivated by passion and the need to answer back. As Chris said, there is a conflict there, which is actually it can be very selfish because you're writing your name in huge letters on somebody else's property...

NP: Well it started out as tagging, but became about something else.

JDC: Basically I think the initial motivator for street art is say hello, here I am, I'm here, I exist. Here's my name, here's my voice, recognize me.

NP: Does it upset you when people speculate that the film is a mockumentary or some kind of hoax?

CK: It was funny, [at the Berlin Film Festival Banksy] said, "Everything in this film is true apart from the bits where we lie." Because after Sundance, there'd been immediate speculation that Thierry was played by Sash Baron Cohen and the whole film was directed subversively by Spike Jonze, and it was all made up and a big hoax. For a while we all thought that was quite funny, but it went on for so long. It was a bit disappointing when it became basically accepted as fact, that it was all just a silly hoax. I felt it was a shame that the whole thing was going to be dismissed like that really - because we knew it was true.

JDC: The fact that it provokes intriguing debate is great, and we welcome that. But when it's actually on the record that this is a mockumentary, that it is a hoax, that's not acceptable really. I don't think you can state that as fact, because we're stating it as a clear fact that it's a true documentary. I mean it is a crazy film, and it does stretch your credulity. That's why the film has power because it's an absolutely fucking crazy story. But the fact that it's crazy doesn't mean it's not true. There's been so much speculation about it, and I think that it's good for them to ask the question, and now we are able to answer that question. It pisses me off when you read in serious newspapers that the film is a mockumentary. That's not true.

CK: And it's done in a fairly kind of dismissive way, which is why we certainly felt that we needed to come out and answer that properly and set the record straight. It's just lazy journalism I think. Because film critics - I'll be wary about what I say here - but they aren't necessarily investigative journalists. They'll go and watch the film and have a reaction, and they may be aware of what's going on in the blogosphere or online. They may feel that they don't necessarily want to put their reputations on the line by saying it's real if they're suddenly noticing activity online which is saying that it might be a hoax. They don't want to get egg on their face.

NP: They don't want to feel that they've been hoodwinked.

JDC: There's a very obvious irony here, which is because some journalists have been terrified that they would look stupid by believing the film and therefore would have been hoodwinked by Blanksy, by going the other way, they've actually been hoodwinked into believing it's a hoax.

We never intended to do that. But journalists who claim that it's a hoax, they're the ones that are going to look stupid in the long run because actually the film is true. Also I think the filmmaking, anyone's whose made a film would look at that and go, you just can't make that shit up. If we were clever enough to make that up, we should be here in Hollywood full time working on blockbusters. It's fantastical. It defies belief that the thing's been made up, so the simplest explanation is the truth. It's real.

CK: It's a classic example of reality being stranger than fiction definitely. And I personally think it is better that it's a true story. I mean we still get it a bit, but hopefully it's died down. I think the fact that we now have been nominated and honored by very prestigious documentary institutions should have actually put that to bed. We'll see - hopefully it has.


Exit Through the Gift Shop is released on DVD and Blu-Ray on December 14.

Baba Booey. Fa-fa-fooey. Ta-ta-toothy. Ma-ma-monkey. Gary Dell’Abate goes by many names, but his job has been the same for over twenty years: he’s the guy who runs the Howard Stern Show, booking all the guests, running the show’s back office, and when necessary running interference between Howard... more

Baba Booey. Fa-fa-fooey. Ta-ta-toothy. Ma-ma-monkey. Gary Dell’Abate goes by many names, but his job has been the same for over twenty years: he’s the guy who runs the Howard Stern Show, booking all the guests, running the show’s back office, and when necessary running interference between Howard and upper management. He’s also one of the show’s most recognizable on-air personalities, thanks in no small part to his iconic nickname “Baba Booey,” a moniker which stuck to him like glue after an on-air slip-up in July 1990, in which he repeatedly mispronounced the name of his (professed to be favorite) cartoon character, Quick Draw McGraw sidekick Baba Looey. Since that day, the name has spread like a virus throughout pop culture, popping up as a punchline everywhere from comedy shows like Saturday Night Live and The Late Show with David Letterman to news shows like Larry King Live and Peter Jennings’ ABC newscast, thanks to the efforts of dedicated crank callers. The title of his new memoir, which recounts some of his personal and show-related drama, says it all: They Call Me Baba Booey.

Dell’Abate was there throughout Howard Stern’s signature run at New York’s K-ROCK radio in the late '80s and early '90s, appeared briefly in the autobiographical Private Parts, and continued on long enough to see Stern finally escape his much-hated censors in FCC-controlled radio when he departed for the artistic freedom of Sirius Satellite Radio in 2005. He’s also outlasted many other show notables, including Jackie ‘The Joke Man’ Martling, ’Stuttering’ John Melendez, and blue-collar comic Artie Lange, whose run on the show began to deteriorate in 2008, due in part to the comedian’s admitted struggle with heroin addiction. A vicious on-air spat between Lange and Dell’Abate in 2009 was one of that year’s many uncomfortable Artie moments, before Lange was dismissed in December 2009, and subsequently attempted suicide. As if that weren’t enough drama, the Stern show is now barreling towards what may be its final two months on the air, with both Stern and Sirius bosses playing chicken over the terms of his potential re-signing. Gary Dell’Abate recently called up SuicideGirls to talk about his impressive run on America’s most popular radio show.



Ryan Stewart: I was a little surprised that the A.J. Benza fight story didn’t rate a mention in your book. You got punched in the head!

Gary Dell’Abate: You know, it’s just not that kind of book. The book is more about my personal life, growing up, some of my trials and tribulations and how it sort of led me to the show. And then some funny moments from the show, but it’s not really a show book. So, that’s why stuff like that wouldn’t necessarily end up in there.

RS: You didn’t feel the need to compile every great ‘Gary moment’ from the show.

GD: Yeah, I just sort of didn’t go that way. As I was writing the book what came into my head is sort of what got put in there. If you read the whole book, you can see that the show stuff is just sort of dropped in where it’s relevant, because I didn’t want to just crowbar in every single story. The story of how I met Howard is relevant, because that’s how I met Howard, you know? How I got the name Baba Booey is obviously relevant to the book, and I also thought the video tape story was relevant, quite honestly, just because I can’t believe how many people still ask me about that. And also, it’s a story about me, and I tried not to put in stuff just because it was a cool story about Howard.

RS: Is there a show-only book in your future, you think?

GD: I’ve had offers to do that for years and years, and for tons and tons of money. It’s something I don’t think Howard would want me to do, and it’s also something that I wouldn’t be comfortable doing. If I did a book with all the stories about what goes on behind the scenes, I think I’d have a difficult time in the future. I know that I wouldn’t hire a guy who wrote a book saying a bunch of mean shit about people, if he was going to then come and work for me.

RS: One of my favorite books of the last few years was the oral history of Saturday Night Live. I think that would be a great format for your show history as well.

GD: It would be an amazing format, I think you’re absolutely right. Oral histories are my favorite books. I actually read a similar one about Richard Nixon. I think the reason why those books work is the same reason why The History of Howard Stern shows on Sirius work so great, because you get five different people giving perspectives on the same story. It’s great hearing everybody’s different angles on things. I do think that would be a phenomenal format to do a history of the show, someday.

RS: You certainly take a diplomatic line in this book, except for an expected word or two about Don Imus.

GD: I did sort of settle one score, and I wonder how it’s all going to shake out, because now Howard 100 News is trying to get a hold of this person and speak to them. It’s a woman that I worked with who was a traffic reporter at NBC.

RS: Roz Frank?

GD: Yep. I think I gave it to her a little hard. It’s pretty straight-forward, but she may not recognize that that’s the way it went down. And I was joking with somebody and I said, you know, if that would have been five years later I probably wouldn’t even have written it in the book, but that was such an important time for me. I was scratching and clawing my way into the business, and I was taking all this shit, which was very reminiscent of the shit I had taken from my mother.

RS: Like you said, the origins of Baba Booey is a key story in the book, and all the subsequent goofing it led to. It’s amazing that you ended up hiring Sal Governale, who was a superfan who lived to goof on you. Howard used to let him on the air just to torture you.

GD: Here’s the deal with that: he did really well in the contest [to win the on-air sidekick spot vacated by Stuttering John in 2004], and he didn’t win, but Howard said “I really like him a lot.” And the funny thing in dealing with him for the contest and all the other stuff is that except when he was busting my balls in those particular instances, he was actually a pretty okay guy. The thing that became funny to everyone involved is that once Sal started working with us we came to realize that all the stuff Sal used to say about me was really about him. He was the one who was a pussy-whipped guy. He was the one in a marriage where his wife was breaking his balls and he couldn’t do anything about it. So, I went from not really being afraid of Sal, but being leery of Sal, to really being more sympathetic to Sal. And my wife didn’t fully understand that at first. I remember we were laying in bed one night and my wife goes “How are you going to have that guy there every day? How are you going to live with that?” and I said to her “I gotta tell you, I can hang out with him, he’s sort of a good guy.” And she goes “That’s impossible.” But I do, I like Sal, I like him a lot. He can be goofy and he can be a nutjob, but he’s also got a really big heart. I’ve gotten along with him wonderfully from the day he started working here.

RS: The stuff with his wife is radio gold.

GD: [laughs] It’s not that hard to get it out of him, which is why he’s so great.

RS: Did allowing people to goof on you in general ever threaten to undermine your authority as the show producer? Do people understand on-air/off-air?

GD: I think most people have understood that, and most of the people who didn’t…there’ve been times that I had interns who probably thought I was a douche because Howard was treating me like a douche, but they come and go, you know? And there were times that I felt I was being undermined with Stuttering John, but it wasn’t really because of that, because John would be on the back-end of that too. It was more that John sort of knew that Howard loved having him on the air, so he really didn’t have to ever listen to me in the office. He knew that I couldn’t fire him, because he was really good on the air. John was excellent on the air, and really not a great worker in the office. But I felt much more embarrassment from when Howard played the videotape of me [begging an old girlfriend to get back together]. I just felt like a tool, you know? And I felt like everyone in the office was looking at me as such.

RS: Would you have handed over that tape eventually, just for the show, without the money Howard and others put up?

GD: No. I am a complete and utter whore, and I am here to say right now that I would never have done that, if not for the money.

RS: When they played it on the air, it definitely made for a classic show. Another classic would be the 9/11 show, when Howard stayed on the air throughout the chaos. What part did you play in keeping things on track that day, keeping the show on?

GD: I played a part in the sense that I followed Howard’s lead. I knew that we were staying on the air. I knew we were going to shift gears in the way that we did the show. We were taking a lot of phone calls in the back from people, and I was trying to make sure that the right people and the right information were getting through to Howard as quickly as I could. It was almost like we suddenly went from doing a comedy show to working in a news room. Howard was the anchor and I was the guy in the back trying to feed him the right information.

RS: Did you have a sense even then that it would be maybe your most important show?

GD: I don’t know that I knew it that day, but I knew it not long after. As the show went on, the mood went from ‘Wow, a plane crashed into the World Trade Center, that’s crazy,’ to something else. I think the defining moment of the day was when I was sitting on the couch [in the studio] and Howard was sitting at his console and suddenly the second plane hit the second tower. You know, I’ve heard it said that when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald that was one of the first times that news stations had ever done an instant replay. They just reran the tape and people watching were thoroughly confused – they thought multiple people were getting shot. And I remember looking at that second tower going down and not being entirely sure that it really was the second tower, and that I wasn’t watching some sort of weird replay. And then we recognized it, and Howard looked over at me and said “We’re under attack.” That’s when it hit me. I was like, oh my God, we, this country, are under attack. Only then was it really driven home to me what was happening.

RS: Have you ever thought of putting out a sort of box set of the definitive shows?

GD: Well, I don’t think we’d ever commercially release it, but what we do have is History of Howard, and people can listen to that. And we’re actually making our way up to the 9/11 years now. I get a copy of that stuff on DVD and I put them in a drawer, and I feel like one day when my kids are older and I’m gone I can have handed those over and it’ll be like ‘This is who your father was.’

RS: And what about the Channel 9 shows? You guys have been trying to buy those back forever.

GD: You know, I’ve never really been in the loop on what that’s about, but it appears that it’s never going to be resolved, from what I can tell. I mean, if it hasn’t been resolved by now then who knows if it ever will be. And I almost wonder how those shows would hold up, although I suspect they would hold up pretty well. But you have to put those shows in perspective – they’re twenty year old shows. They would probably seem tame in comparison to some of the stuff that’s on TV now, but for what we were doing at the time, they were completely radical and innovative.

RS: Is there anything about your off-air conversations with Howard that people might find interesting or surprising?

GD: It’s funny, I was just talking to someone else about this earlier, but Howard and I communicate in a very odd way. There’s never been a time when he’s sat down with me and said to me “Hey, I think you’re a great producer.” I mean, he’ll say stuff like “You did a great job” and stuff like that, but we’ve never sat down and had, like, a heart-to-heart talk where he’s said “I think you’re a great producer” and then I said “I think you’re a great boss.” But through the way we speak about each other in interviews and on the air and through emails, we know it. I don’t need him to say that. I know how he feels about me. But we certainly don’t have these crazy heart-to-heart conversations off the air.

RS: People always ask if Howard is the real guy on the air, or if that’s an act. Do you think of yourself as having a radio persona?

GD: Well, I developed a radio persona in the sense that….I don’t think I act any differently on the air than I otherwise would, but because I am on the air I get to say shit that I wouldn’t get to say if I was a CPA. If someone comes on and I say “God, that chick is ugly, I would never have sex with her,” well, if you said that at a party you probably wouldn’t be invited back to any more parties, but it’s perfectly acceptable to say it on the air, you know? I’m not saying stuff on the radio to try and be outrageous, I just get to say things that I usually wouldn’t get to say.

RS: There was a recent on-air bit where you played an IQ game and you ended up mispronouncing the word machine as ‘mac-hine.’ When you’re doing something like that, are you thinking to yourself: if I don’t screw this up, then where’s the bit?

GD: No, no, I really didn’t know that I was walking into that one, it just sort of happened. I mean, look, I did the IQ test. And I was just talking to another person on our staff about doing one and he doesn’t want to do it. He said “It’s a losing proposition!” and I said, “Listen, brother, nobody could take that test who had more to lose than me. I’m the producer of the show. If my IQ test comes in low, I’ll never live it down. I’ll never be respected again.” So, I do think I’m a willing participant in the fun. The IQ test was proof of that.

RS: I was going to ask why your Afghanistan USO trip didn’t make the book, but it occurred to me that you made that trip with Artie, and maybe you’re laying off the Artie stories for now.

GD: No, it’s funny that you say that because I was thinking about that as well the other day. The writer and I sat down and went through it and it just didn’t fit into that part of the book, but I’m actually keeping a list for a paperback slash second book if anybody is interested. And I think just having some distance…I mean, you can go on my website and see where I have a story written up. It just didn’t end up in the book. And I think I’ve been pretty brutally honest about what happened with Artie while we were over there, and everybody else. So, it is there if anybody wants to see it.

RS: Was 2009 a tough year in general on the show? I remember that incredibly personal fight between you and Artie, which was really a no holds barred situation.

GD: I don’t know if 2009 was a tough year, but I wasn’t really hurt by the accusations that Artie was making so much as I was hurt by the fact that he knew he was purposefully saying something that he knew would hurt me. It was like Artie knew what my Achilles heel was and he just went for it. That was more difficult for me than the stuff he was actually saying. I was afraid of [not performing well at USO stand-up] before we went there, but by the time we got back I knew that I had done a decent job. Not a great job, but I knew I had done a decent job. And I knew that Artie was just going there because he knew that it would upset me.

RS: Joking that he was glad Dave Attell had less time on stage so you could perform, and so on.

GD: Yeah, and listen, Artie could have brought along another comedian who was more talented than me. The other guys who were on the bill were incredibly talented, but what I found out there was that it’s not all about the shows. I wouldn’t say the shows were a minor part of it, but they were really just one element of what it’s about, the reason that you go over there. The bigger reason is the eight or twelve hours a day that you spend walking around, talking to people, hanging around with them, that’s the real gift that’s being given, not only to the people there, but to us as well. When you hang out with those people you find that they’re just grateful that somebody is coming to visit.

RS: Speaking of comedy, are you still out hunting for new talent these days? Lots of people who’ve gotten a break on the show are doing very well.

GD: You know, I used to go to the comedy clubs once in a while, but I was never really on the ground looking for talent. Once in a while somebody would say “You’ve got to come and see this comedian” but it wasn’t the main way that we got guests. Even though in the past we have broken some new talent like Sam Kinison and people like that, it’s not really the format of our show. And the great thing is that you really don’t have to go out anymore. I don’t have to go to comedy clubs, I’ve got people saying “Here’s seven links to my client on Youtube,” you know? That’s the way that you see them. And people might say that it’s not the same thing as being in the club, but you can get a pretty good feel for somebody off of that. I find myself watching a lot of DVDs at home and watching a lot of Youtube videos and listening to a lot of CDs in my car and also listening to stuff on my iPod that people have sent me.

RS: Artie recently did some stand-up at a club, I read. He seems to be getting back in the swing of things. If he decides to tell his story on another show is that okay with you?

GD: I think I’d be a little bummed out. I mean, listen, I think telling it to us would certainly be the most interesting way to tell it. We are the other pieces of that puzzle. Artie could tell us what was going on and we could tell him what we were thinking and what we believed at that time. So, I do think it would make for the most interesting interview.

RS: But Howard is resisting it.

GD: I don’t know that Howard is resisting. I just don’t know that everybody is ready to pull it together.

RS: If the Howard Stern Show is done in eight weeks, do you feel like you guys have done what you set out to do in radio?

GD: God, yes. Howard was in the history books even before he went to satellite radio. And I think that going to satellite radio just cemented that forever. When we showed up to Sirius Satellite Radio they had four hundred thousand subscribers. Now, with the company merged, they have twenty million subscribers. It’s a very viable format that was not very viable before Howard Stern got there. If Howard had gone to XM instead of Sirius, Sirius would have probably just gone out of business. I mean, just the fact that Howard went to the company with the lesser amount of subscribers and managed to actually overtake the other company? Holy shit. In the last twenty-five years of radio, who has had a bigger impact than Howard Stern? I’ve been glad to be a part of that. And I’d love to go on. I want to keep going.




They Call Me Baba Booey is available in bookstores November 2nd..