The BP Oil Leak Disaster rages on, spurting bajillions of toxic oil into the Gulf! Several goofily-named attempts to seal it have failed. Now what?! Like all good disaster movies, the solution to the oil spill might be to blow up the problem with a nuclear bomb:

First, however, BP needs to assemble a ragtag bunch of losers, oldsters, and rebels into a lean, mean, oil-well-nukin’ machine.

Harrison Ford as the grizzled veteran oil man who retired in shame after a similar accident ten years ago!

Shia Lebeouf as the newbie looking to prove himself!

Max Wright as the evil bureaucrat!

Owen Wilson as the computer expert!

Sean Connery as the wheelchair-bound marine biologist! (His character is cajun, but doesn’t bother to change his accent.)

Gérard Depardieu as the French cork expert brought in against the team’s wishes!

Justin Bieber as the stowaway!

Megan Fox or any other interchangeable young actress as the eye candy/”love interest” (in quotes because, let’s face it, these flicks are all about the love that dare not speak its name)!

Stan Lee as the obligatory cameo!

This movie practically makes itself! We can see it now…just before the big climax, this bit of dialogue from the article plays out:

“Probably the only thing we can do is create a weapon system and send it down 18,000 feet and detonate it, hopefully encasing the oil,” Matt Simmons, a Houston energy expert and investment banker, told Bloomberg News on Friday, attributing the nuclear idea to “all the best scientists.” Or as CNN reporter John Roberts suggested last week, “Drill a hole, drop a nuke in and seal up the well.”

Hollywood, we await your call.

With all the upheaval in the late night talk show world, well all the upheaval at NBC’s The Tonight Show, the Van Gogh-Goghs decided to hold a draft for their Late Night Talk Show Fantasy League. The draft was an 8-round snake draft and participants had to pick the following:

1 show host, 1 second banana or band leader/band or featured player, 2 guests, 1 musical/comedy performance guest, 2 comedy bits, 1 show host for a follow-up or lead-in program

Once  a person or bit is picked they/it are unavailable for the rest of the draft. The draft order:

Charles

T. Mike

Galen

Alan

Jason (Jason was unavailable for the draft, but he was allowed to pick his team from the scraps left over from the others’ choices)

Round 1:

Charles: David Letterman

T. Mike: Johnny Carson

Galen: Arsenio Hall

Alan: Dick Cavett

Predictably the first round went to lock up the host slot for each of the shows. Big surprises in the first round: neither Conan or Leno are picked.

Round 2:

Alan makes sure he has a strong second banana with his second pick of Andy Richter.

Galen looks to the comedy bits in this round and chooses Triumph the insult comic dog.

T. Mike gets his follow-up show host locked in with Conan O’Brien.

Charles ends round two by choosing Top Ten Lists to go along with his Letterman pick.

Round 3:

Charles starts round three by rounding out his comedy bit picks with Carnac.

T. Mike tries an Ed Sullivan move with his third pick and books The Beatles as his musical guest.

Galen finishes his comedy bit picks with Stupid Pet Tricks.

Alan rounds out the 3rd round with his first comedy bit pick Marlon Brando (as played by Chris Elliott).

Round 4

Alan’s fourth pick is another comedy bit, Art Fern.

Galen uses the fourth round to to start working on his guests. Guest number 1: Barack Obama.

T. Mike finally gets around to his comedy bits and picks Viewer Mail as his first bit.

Charles’s fourth round pick for guest number 1 goes to Jonathan Winters.

Round 5

Charles goes to the follow up show host category to lead the 5th round and finally Jay Leno is picked.

T. Mike finishes up his comedy bit picks by picking Letterman’s suits made of weird stuff.

Galen picks his number 2 guest and takes Robin Williams to bring some humor to his guest chair.

Alan’s 5th round pick causes a bit of a debate, leading to the Van Gogh-Goghs throwing out his first pick: Throbbing Gristle featuring Miley Cirus. Since this pairing has never happened it couldn’t be picked. So Alan picks De La Soul for his musical guest.

Round 6

Alan begins the sixth round with a surprise, but solid, pick for his first guest: Fidel Castro.

Galen finally gets around to his musical guest act and picks Prince.

T. Mike’s sixth round pick goes to Steve Martin as his first guest.

Charles goes with musical guest in this round and threatens to throw a party on his show with P-Funk.

Round 7

After a head fake and making T. Mike think he was going with Ed McMahon, Charles goes with Paul Shaffer as his second banana/band leader.

T. Mike, feeling threatened, snags Ed McMahon to fill the seat next to his Carson.

After a little confusion over whether Charles’s Shaffer pick also takes The World’s Most Dangerous Band off the table, Galen goes with Doc Severinson.

Alan finished the next-to-last round with his second guest pick of Bill Murray.

Round 8

Alan’s final pick is follow-up host and he goes political with presidential offspring Ron Reagan (yes, he had a talk show).

Galen also is left with his follow-up host as his final pick and  also goes political with Bill Maher.

T. Mike only has his second guest left to pick and goes political as well with John F. Kennedy.

Charles rounds out his team and finishes off the draft with his second guest and gets two guests for the price of one with Penn and Teller.

To recap the Late Night Talk Show Fantasy League shows picked in the draft:

Charles: David Letterman with Paul Shaffer, Top Ten Lists, Carnac, Jonathan Winters, Penn and Teller, P-Funk and Jay Leno as the follow-up host.

T. Mike: Johnny Carson with Ed McMahon, Viewer Mail, Suits Made of Weird Stuff, Steve Martin, JFK, The Beatles and Conan as the follow-up host.

Galen: Arsenio Hall with Doc Severinson, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, Stupid Pet Tricks, Barack Obama, Robin Williams, Prince and Bill Maher as the follow-up host.

Alan: Dick Cavett with Andy Richter, Chris Elliott’s Marlon Brando, Art Fern, Fidel Castro, Bill Murray, De La Soul and Ron Reagan as the follow-up host.

Jason: Zach Galifianakis with Chris Elliott, Crushing things with an 80-ton hydraulic press, The Fugitive Guy, Andy Kaufman, Fred Phelps, GG Allin, and Jimmy Kimmel as the follow-up host.

Travel back in time with us from 2009 to 1999 with the hot new reality show The 1999 House, which follows an real-life modern family living in a house painstakingly restored to late-’90s conditions. Watch them struggle with decade-old technology as they learn to cope,  learn to care, and learn a little something about… themselves.

Today’s post is to help celebrate Bastille Day, the day of the French Revolution when the French triumphantly stormed the hated prison, and proudly emptied it of its forgers, lunatics, and the Marquis deSade. And what Frenchman speaks to us so loudly across history but that famous French mime, the Ur-mime Marcel Marceau (1923-2007). And yet mime was only one of his many talents. You know, like how David Hasselhoff thinks he can sing, or have a non-Knight Rider-related career. Welp, Marceau also saw himself as a visual artist. Below is a bizarre, epic, apocalyptic drawing he did that appeared in a program for one of his shows in 1973. Despite a certain “I am 12 years old” quality to the drawing, it appears to have been done in 1961, when Marceau was about 38. Hmm.

Also, sorry ’bout the rusty staples in the center.

click to embiggen

Here’s the left and right pages in extry-huge format so you can really appreciate the fine detail.

(click pix to embiggen)

Allow us to try to narrate Marceau’s dark vision, his “Marceaucalypse,” if you will: As a massive earthquake causes mighty skyscrapers to lean and teeter dangerously and a tornado and fires ravage the city, and a large ocean liner sinks in the background, the terrified populace plunge to their certain deaths from the buildings or rush into the streets where they are attacked by bats and escaped zoo, or quite possibly circus, animals. Under a sky filled with strange planets, angry and helpless soldiers futilely throng the streets colliding with impromptu religious parades of every stripe, where citizens turn to a nonexistent God to save them, moments before they stumble into a river of hungry crocodiles. While silent movie star Charlie Chaplin cavorts in the crowd, the twin angels of comedian Harpo Marx and Bip (Marcel’s everyman mime character) begin their happy ascension to heaven under the gaze of several large, floating, disembodied eyes with great lashes. Also, there’s an owl.

Enjoy!

Dammit. Yesterday we made our election prediction that NO howler monkeys would be elected. We honestly thought that now-Senator-Elect Ook had no chance of getting elected. Looks like the American public was more fed up with the Republican Party than we thought. Also, don’t bother emailing us about Congressman Ooohaha, he’s a spider monkey and was a shoo-in for re-election. That’s why we specified no howler monkeys.

Dammit.

Tip number 105: When you’re buying liquor for your shower, remember:

Buy your spirits in plastic bottles, because the tub can get really slippery and you’re drunk.

If you need to, you may wish to consider decanting your spirits from their glass containers into a plastic bottle, such as a Mrs. Butterworth’s bottle, who’s pleasing feminine form allows for a good grip.

Just another helpful tip from your friends at vgg.com.

While you’re voting, take a moment to reflect back to six years ago, when the Van Gogh-Goghs held the 1st online election for Movie President of the United States of America. Our nigh-prescient election had Alan Alda winning the election. Alda, as California Senator Arnold Vinick, would have won the 2006 election on The West Wing, if John Spencer, the actor playing his opponent’s vice presidential candidate, had not died in real life (See this article.) So with such a record under our belt, we feel free to prognosticate again. This time, we’re going out on a limb and say absolutely NO howler monkeys will be elected.

Hello I’m Charon. You might know me as Pluto’s “moon.” I’ve remained silent in the planet/not-a-planet controversy regarding Pluto, but I can remain silent no longer. The International Astronomical Union has decided to demote my life partner Pluto and take away his status as a planet. This blatant, divisive, and cruel discrimination can not stand.

Pluto and I are no strangers to controversy. Our very discovery was controversial. Percival Lowell’s outer-solar system witch hunt first outed us in 1930 due to the public’s panic about a supposed gravitational “influence” over Neptune. Well, now the truth is out there- our supposed “influence” on Neptune is minimal, people: minimal. Neptune is his own planet, and he lives his own life. As for us, we could live with the strange looks and being snubbed by space probes. But this time the astronomy establishment has crafted an arbitrary definition of “planet” simply to exclude Pluto. This is discrimination at its worst.

Am I not a planet? Do I not orbit the Sun? Am I not rounded by the gravity of my own mass? What more could you want? Yes, our orbit has been described as “eccentric”– but I’m here to tell you that this is an astronomy codeword for “inferior.” You can dress it up in all the euphemisms you want, astronomy, but it is still the language of hate. It’s time we stood up and proudly proclaimed that our orbit isn’t eccentric- it’s QUEER!

Obviously, panicked, conservative astronomers no longer want Pluto and I in the list of planets where children would have to be taught about us and our lifestyle. By demoting us, they think they can sweep us under the rug, out of sight, and pretend that moons orbiting planets and planets orbiting suns in neat little ellipses in the same plane is the somehow the “natural” order of things, despite the reality of the universe.

What they find even worse is that I don’t orbit Pluto. And Pluto doesn’t orbit me. We orbit EACH OTHER. We are not a planet and moon, but a double planet! Our relationship is an EQUAL partnership, and it is this fact that so frightens the establishment. Our existence challenges the so-called “traditional values” of the planet-moon relationship where the moon is always in the inferior position, and “knows their place.”

It’s sad that the astronomy establishment sees our equality as a threat that must be suppressed. A threat so great they feel they must revoke our status as planet. The IAU will no longer legally recognize our partnership, and will deny such recognition to all future double planets, or even, “God forbid” triple planets. But we’re here, we’re queer, we’re Kuiper! And we’re not going anywhere- in fact, our numbers are growing. Sedna, Quaoar, Varuna, – sure our names may not be from classic Roman mythology, we may not have the topography and atmospheres the “establishment” says is proper, but we all orbit the same sun as you.

The IAU has chosen to discriminate against Pluto by assigning it a status separate from the “classical” planets, and calling it something other than “planet.” Separate is not equal. Especially when the separate status thrust upon us is “dwarf.” Dwarf? We’re not dwarfs- YOU, you the astronomers, are the dwarfs- dwarfed in spirit, dwarfed in mind, dwarfed in imagination. Your hide-bound, outdated, antiquated prejudices have left you unable to see that all planetary bodies are created equal. Your plutophobia sickens and disgusts me.

There’s no need for it to be like this. Dark matter is 90% of the universe; regular matter, the type of matter that makes up planetary stalwarts like Jupiter, Earth, and Mars–is the very same stuff that makes up Pluto, myself, and a whole host of bodies you’ve probably never even taken the time to be aware of. We’re all part of the same, precious 10%. And it’s high time we all saw that.

We all orbit one, solitary star. Let’s try to remember that.

So even though they ignored this about five years ago, the good people at McSweeney’s finally relented, and I’m in! Via kind of a backdoor, as it was a contest, but screw it, I won.