That is exactly what I would expect the most anticipated new movie at the Venice film festival to look like.

Liberty University, the evangelical private Christian school founded by dead apartheid-supporting bigot Jerry Falwell, received $445 million in federal financial aid money last year. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the way, received $420 million from the federal government.

I hope this will send a clear message to NPR and PBS that they need to drop the radical programming and get with the American agenda. Sayonara, Car Talk and Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Hello, Objectivist Dance Party.

So, Charlie Sheen is on a spoken word tour. Good for him! He clearly deserves it. The show debuted in Detroit last night and apparently it was not entertaining.

Charlie Sheen was heckled, booed and eventually abandoned by the crowd at his inaugural stage show, with many of the audience members chanting "refund" and heading for the exits even before the show abruptly ended.

Okay, that's not surprising. Even the most magical warlock in the universe could not put together an entertaining one-man show all by himself in 2 weeks. Professional comedians take years to develop a good hours' worth of material. 99% of all comedy films suck. It is not in the slightest bit surprising that a fairly talentless drug addict who has never demonstrated any creative abilities beyond playing himself on a shitty sitcom would put on an uninteresting show.

But what is surprising is the audience seemed to think Charlie Sheen actually does have magical powers. To wit:

Linda Fugate, who paid $150 for two seats, left the theater and walked up the street, yelling, "I want my money back!"

"I was hoping for something. I didn't think it would be this bad," said Fugate, a 47-year-old from Lincoln Park, Mich.

If you have enough disposable income to pay $75 per ticket to see Charlie Sheen rant just because you were "hoping for something," then you deserve anything you get.

I'll tell you what the scarier thing is about this phenomenon, though ... is that there are people in this world (at least 5,100 in Detroit, the capacity of the Fox ... this in a city that just reported a 25% drop in its population) who are unable to distinguish reality from entertainment. People watch the Charlie Sheen show on the news and Entertainment Tonight and on the cover of People and they think of it in the same terms as they would think of an actual, scripted piece of entertainment. It is only a matter of time before we see a tour of the Libya show, complete with live atrocities. Only no one will buy tickets to that one, because no one really cares about Libya.

You can check out part 1 right here and part 2 right here. Warning: it's pretty much the best new thing.

Earth could be getting a second sun, at least temporarily.

Dr. Brad Carter, Senior Lecturer of Physics at the University of Southern Queensland, outlined the scenario to news.com.au. Betelgeuse, one of the night sky's brightest stars, is losing mass, indicating it is collapsing. It could run out of fuel and go super-nova at any time.

When that happens, for at least a few weeks, we'd see a second sun, Carter says. There may also be no night during that timeframe.

The Star Wars-esque scenario could happen by 2012, Carter says... or it could take longer. The explosion could also cause a neutron star or result in the formation of a black hole 1300 light years from Earth, reports news.com.au.

Really? Two suns? No night sky? I mean ... pardon? Is there another planet I can transfer to? Because this one is really starting to SUCK.

JL: [Pauses.] Well, I feel like I’m very fortunate to be in movies at all, but I called it Trapped In Shit. I love Dana, and Nicolas Cage was great and we became friends, but the director [George Gallo] just wasn’t there. He wasn’t directing. It was a bad time in my life personally, because my father had just died Dec. 25. And I’m up in the snow with no light—we did night shoots for six weeks. It was like 25-below. Everyone was fine, but after six weeks, the whole crew started going crazy ’cause there’s no light. It really affects your mood. Then we moved to Toronto, so we’re shooting inside. It wasn’t fancy, but inside during the day, this was a luxury. It was like 31 degrees, but it felt like summer. So as soon as I worked during the daylight, my mood changed.

But the director would say, “Just do whatever you want.” He was bragging about what a great director he was before he hired us: “I’m as good as Rob Reiner and Martin Scorsese.” This is George Gallo. I said, “Don’t you think you should let other people say that?” We never even got to read the script. He’d go, “Well, let’s rehearse this.” I’d go, “Oh good, we get to rehearse.” And he’d start screaming at me, “Do whatever you want!” And I go, “Saying ‘do whatever you want’ is not direction.”

Six weeks in, Dana and Nicolas took over. We were doing this scene where we had to take these trash bags out from the trunk of a car and change clothes, and it was complicated. Nicolas was like, “What do you want?” And George goes, “Do whatever you want.” Nicolas said, “No!” Nicolas ended up basically directing that scene, because we had to choreograph it. It’s too much stuff in action; you can’t just do whatever you want. You have to shoot a master, then you shoot coverage—you have to match everything. You have to plan it out. It’s absurd.

And the movie did horrible, but people like it. I’ve done a lot of movies where I thought, “This will be fun” and it’s a disaster but then people like it. So you never know. But what made me angry was the director started blaming us and said I didn’t know my lines, which was complete bullshit. I was on the set and I asked him, “Is this the scene where…?” Because when you’re doing a movie, they shoot out of sequence. So we’re shooting in the middle of this empty field and there’s nothing. I asked the director, “Is this the part of the scene after we steal a Lexus and it goes over the cliff, and we’ve climbed up the hill, and it’s starting there?” He goes, “I don’t know! I don’t have time for these questions! You have to know the script!” He was right—I should have known it better, and I hadn’t looked at it enough—but it turns out the answer to my question is “yes.” So I knew it enough. And he wrote the thing! It was like, “You don’t know where we’re starting the scene from?” I mean, he didn’t know anything.

I don’t care, I’ll tell everybody: He wouldn’t even come out of his tent. It was freezing cold, we’re out there shooting this scene and there’s a problem on the set, and he’s 50 yards away in his tent. We go, “George, what do we do? There’s a problem.” And he goes, “I’m looking at fucking Jupiter.” It was ridiculous.

Ha! "I'm looking at fucking Jupiter" is the second best quote of the decade, right after Bronson Pinchot's quote from Tom Cruise in another A.V. Club interview:

He was tense and made constant, constant unrelated homophobic comments, like, “You want some ice cream, in case there are no gay people there?” I mean, his lingo was larded with the most… There was no basis for it. It was like, “It’s a nice day, I’m glad there are no gay people standing here.” Very, very strange.

But what's with all this doomsday talk? I've got a baby on the way! Time to put on my optimist hat! And I promise we'll be back with A) news, B) movie challenges, and C) Faith Projects to tickle and delight your senses soon!

And here's a sweet video by Hot Chip that I just discovered while buying shoes.

Haaaa ... it's real! First of all, Sterling's Gold: Wit and Wisdom of an Ad Man is the best fake book name of all time. Second of all, they shouldn't have put that band around it: those who get it, will get it. Third of all, awesome.

(Via Boingboing.)

I am just a poor boy, though my story's seldom told.

But nonetheless, we live in Los Angeles, so we have 2 cars. One Honda Civic that sees a fair amount of road time, and one Ford Focus that sits unused 300 days a year. It's kinda like having a spare bedroom for the 1 week a year when your parents visit. Ever so often, I'll have to drive somewhere to meet Sarah or run some errands on my own. But really, I could accomplish pretty much 95% of the things I need to do with a bike and a tiny bit of motivation.

Today was one of those days that I needed the car and the car needed gas. This only happens about once every two months, on account of how seldom I drive. I had one rule when it came to getting the gas: do not buy from BP. There's a reason for this, and it has to do with the news. Have you heard about the news? It's an information-distribution system whereby you can learn about things that are happening in the world. Sort of like a sitcom, but real. If you have heard of the news and you watch or read the news, then you probably know that there's some kind of oil disaster happening right now. And BP is the company responsible for this oil disaster.

Now, let's get one thing straight: all oil companies are evil. Oil is evil. It's what they call a "necessary evil," because no one has taken the time to establish an alternative system to extracting it from the ground and using it to power things. These alternatives do exist and could, with relative ease, be implemented to make the use of oil less necessary -- "relative ease" in terms of, say, "wiring the entire country for electricity," mind you, not relative ease in terms of choosing between butter and margarine at the grocery store (team butter, holla!) -- but as of this writing, plans to implement these alternatives have gotten about as far as the nacho delivery service dreams of a hungry stoner. We've known for quite some time that oil is evil and dangerous ... decades, even ... but we have still not put much effort into fixing the system for reasons that are unclear to me but probably have something to do with Americans' innate distrust of things that are natural and people who remind them of hippies.

The point that I'm getting at is, I don't know that BP is any worse than Shell or Valero or any of the rest of them. The process of removing oil from the Earth and turning it into energy is messy and hazardous and should come to an end. The BP disaster just happens to be a particularly nasty example of why this process is a bad idea. But regardless of their relative evil in comparison to other oil companies, they are still the current leading representatives of a Thing that is Quite Bad, and therefore, they deserve to be made an example of. This oil spill presents people like me who are not particularly fond of the oil-into-energy system with an opportunity to have a small say in what happens when companies do egregiously bad things to our planet. That small say comes in the form of a boycott.

Theoretically, anyway. I had one rule this morning, and I broke it. I did not break it knowingly. Well, not at first, anyway. I pulled into the Arco gas station, stuck my card in the card thing, agreed to pay the $.45 fee for using an ATM card (further evidence of evil), and began to pump my gas, when I noticed a little sign on the pump that said something to the effect of "Arco, a division of BP."

If I was a committed activist, I would have immediately taken the hose out of my gas tank and driven elsewhere. But I did not do this, because I was already in the middle of filling up my tank and did not really want to go through the whole process over again. Note: as I mentioned earlier, I only do this process about once every 2 months. Moving to another gas station would have tacked an additional, at most, 5 minutes to my commute. On top of that, there was another gas station right across the street.

There is no excuse for my laziness, but I can try to rectify it by preventing others from making the same mistake. Knowledge is the solution. If I had known Arco was a part of BP, I would have never gone in, and would have never put $40 back in the pockets of the fat bastards who are currently hard at work doing nothing while their giant, unsealable tube fills our oceans full of dead, gelatinous dinosaurs.

Clearly, this BP shit is ridiculous. It's beyond ridiculous. And what's even more ridiculous is that as far as I know, there has been no major boycott of this company so far. They are responsible for the single worst environmental disaster to ever befall America, and people (like me) are still lining up to buy their product, even when there is another gas station right across the street. It is insane. If we can't even stop ourselves from giving the biggest public enemy in America our money, then we are doomed.

Just so you don't make the same mistake I did, here's what BP owns. I would encourage you to not give these establishments your business any longer. It's kind of literally the least you can do.

BP Owned Companies
BP (obviously)
Arco
AMPM
Castrol Motor Oil
Amoco

Also, to at least balance out my idiocy, I gave $40 to the Greater New Orleans Foundation. That's another remarkable thing about this whole disaster ... there really doesn't seem to be a concentrated place to donate money. I guess it's because it's hard to tell just what our money can do ... it's not like we could fix the ocean if we only had enough money. But the G.N.O.F. seems like a respectable organization, and they have kindly volunteered to erase my guilty conscience for a small fee.

The part of this story that is the best part of the story but doesn't not really have anything to do with the story is that, as I was filling up, the guy at the pump next to me took off with the hose still in his gas tank. I heard a loud "pop," and looked over to see gas spilling all over the ground. He got out of his car, picked up the now nozzle-less hose, tossed it toward the gas pump, and then got back in his car and attempted to drive away. The BP police managed to stop him and get him out of his car before he could leave the parking lot. He walked toward the office with a smile, like, "okay, you guys caught me." I would've thought it was an act of civil disobedience if he didn't have such a dumb-looking beard.