A few days ago, I expressed legitimate concern for Morgan’s newfound love of terrorizing her parents with slobbery attacks (like a baby pirate would do, I assume). Ali took it upon herself to turn my concern into one big joke. A pirate joke that is! But don’t take my word for it.

“I think pirate jokes are the funniest of all jokes.  Why you ask?  Because they are inoffensive (unless you’re a pirate), and they are so terrible that they make everyone crack a smile—even if it’s just out of pity.

My favorite pirate joke ever is as follows:

A pirate walks into a bar with a patch on his eye, a hook on one of his hands and a peg leg.  The bartender says, “oh no!  What happened to your leg?” The pirate responds, “Argh, we were out at sea and we got into battle.  A cannon ball took me left leg right off.  The doc patched me up and I’m good as new! Argh!” The bartender took a look at his hand.  “What happened there?” he asked. “Shiver me timbers!  We were at battle and it got sliced right off with a sword.  Argh!  The doc, he set me up with this hook and I’m fine.” “And the patch?” the bartender asked. “Well, I was at sea – ARGH! – and I look up and a bird sheet in me eye,” the pirate explained. “Surely bird shit wouldn’t blind you,” the bartender said. The pirate, looking rather sheepish, responded, “Argh… I was new with the hook.”

Is this Morgan’s future??

Amanda Lepore—a “model” and trans-icon who could probably win an award for “most artificial materials contained in a living person”—is launching her own perfume. I don’t mean to be insensitive or anything, but who exactly is this perfume being marketed to? And by “who” I mean, “what gender of person”? And what I really mean to say is, who wants to smell remotely like how Amanda Lepore looks? The fact that the perfume costs a ghastly $950 is almost besides the point and should only be used as a secondary argument to why this would be a terrible, terrible purchase. Also, I suspect Ariella will be angry about how close I’ve placed a picture of Amanda Lepore to Morgan. Oops.

When babies attack, it’s cuter than when animals do. It’s like a hug with lots of saliva, even though they mean to harm you. But the cutest is if a baby animal attacks. If that happened, my head would explode. But enough with the philosophical scenarios. All I know is this: judging from this picture, Morgan would make a great pirate for Halloween.

An interesting thing happened at work today. We received an envelope from the Federal Bureau of Prisons with a copy of the most recent issue of American Photo inside. Apparently an inmate in Arizona has a subscription, but since this special Annie Leibovitz issue contains quite a bit of nudity, the inmate is not allowed to have it. So they returned it with a letter. I have the issue with his name on it. I tried googling him to see what he did, but nothing came up. Perhaps it was petty crime. Here’s hoping.

For anyone who doesn’t understand why I love Hugh Jackman so much, please refer to the opening number of the 2009 Academy Awards. It is miraculous that the same guy who plays Wolverine can also do Kraftwerk-y electronica dance moves and look this adorable as a ‘lil baby. Also: remember when he was in Kate and Leopold?? The man has range. Maybe I just feel like I can relate to him because I didn’t see The Reader either. Whatever the reason, this post was just an excuse to publish a picture of Hugh Jackman with a baby’s body.

Awhile back, Dan invented something he likes to call the “Retrospective Oscar.” In theory it’s an Oscar for performances and movies that have been overlooked. The RO would—years later—fix the awful faux pas of inadequate Academy recognition. Usually though Dan bequeaths questionable (oft-terrible) movies with an RO. See: Tommy Boy, Die Hard, and Monkey Bone (JK on the last one Dan!).

I like the idea of the RO to honor things that were overlooked because they didn’t quite fit into the conventional categories. So in honor of the recent ceremony, I present to you my first nomination for a Retrospective Oscar: Eastern Promises (director: David Cronenberg) for Best Choreography. Because, holy shit, there is an entire fight scene in a Russian bath house where Viggo Mortensen is stark naked, and you never once get a good look at his junk! That is masterful. Any other nominations?

On a side note, I was going to link to a clip of the fight scene (which, by the way, is extremely gruesome, to the point where you almost forget that Viggo is naked at all), but I instead found this amazingly inappropriate fan video about the nonexistent romance between Viggo and Naomi Watts. Seriously, why did some girl think it was a good idea to make a romantic video about an extremely violent movie? She even inexplicably includes clips of the fight—with Hoobastank’s “The Reason” playing in the background. Naturally. This ranks very high on my list of best fan videos ever (best = most ridiculous); it’s right up there with “Daniel Radcliffe is TOXIC!” Another side note: there are several videos called Daniel Radcliffe is toxic…

An embarrassing retraction: Thor isn’t the comic book character that underwent a sex change during its series (as I wrongfully assumed in a previous post), but rather Thor’s enemy, Loki [see: the creep in the above picture]. I can only cringe when I think of how the comic-book constituency of this blog must have mocked me. POP Effect regrets the error.

I’ve decided to live blog the Oscars*. I want to keep thorough notes detailing when Hugh Jackman is awesome, as well as when he’s totally great. But since I’ll be away from my computer, I’ll just write blog posts on paper while I watch, then scan the pages. I figure it’s essentially the same thing. So after you watch the ceremony, come to POP effect for an analysis of Jackman’s presumably brilliant performance. If there is chest-baring or allusions to him being an Australian cowboy/mutant with knives between his knuckles, my posts will just be a series of exclammation points.

*Not really.

Awhile back, I went to visit Ryan at the Conde Nast offices. I was required to have my picture taken for the guest pass—you know, for safety purposes. If I actually did something wrong, I like to imagine the conversation between two security guards would go down like this:

Guard One: OK, the culprit is a female, mid 20s.
Guard Two: What does she look like?
Guard One: Difficult to say… I think she’s white.
Guard Two: OK.
Guard One: But honestly, let’s not rule out the possibility that she’s Hispanic. Or an albino who darkens her hair somehow. Now, she does appear to have hair, so that rules out a few people.
Guard Two: Eyes? Nose? Lips?
Guard One: It’s likely she has those, yes.

Let me begin by saying that opening a wine bottle by using a screwdriver to push the cork in (instead of pulling it out) is not a good idea. But it will work.

The other night, Beth and I were set on opening a bottle of Cabernet to drink with dinner, but when we went to open it, we remembered that we broke the corkscrew the night before. It was the most horrific epiphany ever. But with the wondrous knowledge the internet has to offer, we were able to find a few solutions to our corkscrew problem:

First method: use a screw driver to insert a screw into the cork, then use the back of a hammer to eke the cork out.
Problem: we didn’t have a screw. And a nail didn’t sufficiently grab onto the cork.

Second method: somehow push the cork into the bottle (which doesn’t necessitate piercing it).
Problem: the only item sturdy enough to accomplish this was our screwdriver. I managed to push the cork in, but wine splashed out.
Not a problem: the table cloth happened to be the exact color of the red wine.
Oh wait, problem again: the screwdriver attachment/head fell off and into the bottle, firmly secured in the cork.

So in the end, we drank a bottle of red with our steak and warm chickpea salad. But, we dirtied a table cloth, bent several nails, and broke a perfectly good screwdriver. So depending on how badly you need to get crunked, it may not be worth the trouble. (That’s a trick though; readers of this blog always need to be crunked.)