Which is more awesome: the Fantasy Critical Mass Hand Daggers on the left (“the Ultimate in hand protection” for $95) or the scorpion-like Fantasy Death Stalker Knife on the right (surely a bargain at $69)? I can’t decide.

Nancy Franklin, on my favorite fake reality show, in the, uh, New Yorker:

“I have yet to hear any character on the show say something interesting or funny (though there are a couple of moments that call up bits in Jessica Simpson’s reality show several years ago, such as her breaking her head over the conundrum of “chicken of the sea”) or see anything that expands my sense of what it’s like to be a young person in Los Angeles. But “The Hills” isn’t aiming to stimulate or inspire; I think people watch it mostly to figure out why they’re watching it.”

Someone over on ohnotheydidnt scanned in EW’s preview of the upcoming X-Files movie, I thought this was the most interesting bit:

“Whatever happens, Carter and Spotnitz both believe the real key to The X-Files lies in Mulder and Scully’s relationship, which promises to be a big part of the new film. The series ended with the duo in love and on the lam, and Carter says the movie will be “true to the stories that we’ve told, and to that final episode.” But just like here in the real world, time has passed. “Mulder and Scully have not been frozen in ice,” Duchovny says. “They’ve been leading some kind of life, together or apart, in some parallel dimension. They’ve had experiences that we’ll never know about.”

I started watching the show when it first came out, literally half a lifetime (my lifetime) ago, so as you can probably imagine I’m both terribly excited and completely terrified to see this movie. I can’t believe Chris Carter gave it such a stupid name; you’d think he’d have learned his lesson from Fight the Future, but I guess that was too much to hope for? In the parallel dimension where I have a kajillion dollars and could buy him out, this movie would be written and named by Darin Morgan instead.

angry asian man did a great interview with John Cho recently; this is my favorite part, Cho explaining why he thinks Harold & Kumar resonated so strongly with Asian American moviegoers:

I think there’s something, from a racial standpoint, an attitude that feels accurate… And I think it might be the fact that it addresses race as we do—as people of color do—that we’re aware of it, that we live with it, but it doesn’t consume us. And sometimes, white media thinks that we’re obsessed with it, and then Asian American films… we make films that obssess over our race. It’s an hour and a half of people talking about what it means to be Asian.

But Harold and Kumar addresses it, then doesn’t, then addresses it, then kind of addresses it, then laughs at it… and then somebody smokes pot. You know, which kind of feels like life, which feels accurate.

Which brings me to Stuff White People Like, which lots of people—most, if not all, of them white—sent me all throughout March. if you’re wondering why I never talked about it here, it’s because it really ticks me off and I couldn’t articulate why until Adam put his finger on it, in a conversation with someone else:

me: it’s all over because it’s by white people for white people and it doesn’t challenge them on race
bexns: so white people trying to make fun of themselves?
me: it’s a celebration of whiteness pretending that it’s a critique of whiteness

Bingo! So of course, one of the top posts on there is entry 11, asian girls, and the person that sent Stuff White People Like to my alumni mailing list was a jackass I briefly dated who turned out to have a raging asian fetish. Ugh, so gross.