205) Kellie Pickler and Kid Rock? Sure, okay. Whatever.

We were actually in favor of this sort of thing when it involved John Mayer and Jennifer Aniston. After all, when the two blandest* (and, for some reason, two of the most ubiquitous) people on Earth got together, it made our lives a lot easier. Like consolidating debt: sure, you don't want it around at all, but at least this way it only irritates you in one lump sum.

But for some reason, while this makes perfect sense to us, the rumored year-long-to-date secret union of Kellie Pickler (former American Idol loser; is to county fairs and anything sponsored by Sean Hannity as Carrie Underwood is to the Grammys; not smarter than, nor even remotely as smart as, a fifth grader) and Kid Rock (former 2nd place runner up to Pamela Anderson's standards; best known for whatever the hell he does; pretty much what most people who don't live in America think of when they think of America, hence all the resistance to being invaded) somehow makes both of the worse. It's like having a stupid blonde tumor on your brain, only to find you've developed a stupider, blonder, 15-year-younger tumor right on top of it.

And sure, it makes it easier on us, since we don't have to write about them separately, but that's like saying it's easier to explain to that orphan why you accidentally killed his puppy (and only companion in the world) and not-as-accidentally now have to knock down his orphanage to build a condo for wealthy families (dog friendly) in the same form letter from your secretary. Either way, it's still going to make our veal taste a little less tender.




*They broke up because of Twitter, people. Twitter! A website where people just say whatever the fuck comes to mind for no particular reason was more compelling to John Mayer than was Jennifer Aniston. Poetry.

204) Reverse Racism

Not the thing - which isn't even a thing at all - but rather the term, which (par for the course for our widespread cultural affliction for needless noun-qualifying) is actually pretty racist, since it inadvertently carries on the sad history of white people assuming that being white is the "default" or "normal" state of affairs, and thus that racism must be directed towards non-white people, and thus racism directed toward non-non-white people is the "reverse" (and actually what they mean to say incorrectly is "inverse") of racism, when, in fact, the reverse of racism is not be an elitist with an unearned entitlement complex (or, to put it another way, a racist).

This is "reverse racism":



Also, reverse sexism:



Reverse homophobia:




Reverse non-sham marriageism:



Reverse democratically elected leaderism:



Reverse journalism:



Reverse anti-Gokeyism:




(in case it wasn't clear, what you should be taking away from this post is that white people are totes awesome)

Obligatory Michael Jackson Post

By the time I was in kindergarten, I had Michael Jackson "Thriller" gloves. I even remember the little tag, with MJ in soft focus lying against a black background looking all sexy and badass. They were for kids, of course, so basically they were just nondescript white gloves, except, unlike other white gloves, they were endorsed by Michael Jackson, and were therefore awesome.

In fourth grade, my class had a one-page homework assignment: If you could meet anybody in the world, who would it be? After the third straight essay about Michael Jackson, our teacher asked us if anybody didn't write theirs about Michael Jackson. Four kids raised their hands. One of those four had written about Michael J. Fox, no doubt after a long, painful deliberation on who would be edged out for the honor.

For the first 13 years of my life, Michael Jackson was the be all and end all of fame. When Macaulay Culkin, the most famous kid on Earth, teamed up with Michael Jackson for the "Black or White" video, it was like the second coming of Jesus for anybody below the age of sixteen. It's not to say I, or anyone else, was obsessed with Michael Jackson, because that would be like saying someone was obsessed with water or shelter. It would be illogical, impossible to have an obsession with something so ubiquitous and superhuman. Michael Jackson was just everpresent. You didn't want to be him. You just wanted to know him. You wanted him to rule the world. You wanted him everywhere. Every kid in America wanted to take choreographed walks down the halls of every school in America accompanied by "Beat It" or "Billie Jean".

Michael Jackson was spoken about in the same conversations as Superman, Luke Skywalker, and Knight Rider. He was as cool and as all of them and broke the barriers of reality with as much ease. Except Michael challenged the imagination in a much more tantalizing way, because we knew he, unlike Superman, was real. When I would play as Michael in the "Moonwalker" arcade game and got to shoot lightning out of Michael's hands or turn Michael into a superhero armored robot fighting machine, nothing about this struck me or anybody else as unreasonable. In our minds, Michael Jackson could shoot lightning out his hands as easily as he could dance on stars, move planets with his hands, or walk on the moon.

And as such, the truth is that Michael Jackson didn't really die last night. Yes, the heart of the man he became may have stopped beating. And that man may have not been recognizable as the walking, talking, living embodiment of raw, unfiltered electricity we all loved. And still the person he became makes a certain kind of sense: nobody can defy humanity and reality the way Michael Jackson did for so long and to such lengths forever and really expect to land on his feet after the fall (ask Gollum). And yes, we should be saddened by his fate and his early death.

But the man behind the greatest music videos of all time, a man without precedent, unequaled in his or any other time and a permanent and inexorable part of the fabric of an entire generation, an entire era, the entirety of popular culture, and the landscape of music itself; that man will live forever.

He was larger than life, larger than his own tragic fall, and he will surely be much, much larger than death.



Michael Jackson is survived by Marty McFly, Punky Brewster, ALF, and Swatch watches.

203) Packaged Bagels

Those of us who live in New York have all, at one time or another, gone through the harrowing ordeal of some person we know being like, "Who wants bagels?", only to reply, "Yeah, awesome. I'll have a bagel. Bagels. Delicious!" And that's when it happens: the person in question goes to his or her fridge, the temperature in the room drops with a cold, damp chill, and your will to live briefly though nightmarishly subsides as the horrific taste of chewy, bready non-bagelness slowly but unceasingly floods even the as-yet-unexplored corners of your mouth.

Newsflash: bagels aren't really very good for you.

They are, however, ostensibly awesome.

But here's the hitch: bagels aren't intrinsically awesome

So, in other words, if you just make something that qualifies as a bagel, this does not guarantee its awesomeness. A bagel's value is directly related to the context in which it is presented. So, for instance, if the bagel was made within, say, 6 hours of consumption and within, say, 5 miles of Manhattan, then there is about a 93% certainty of awesomeness, which trumps the 100% certainty of not really good for youness.

The stark truth, however, is that there is no middle ground. A bagel that only adheres to one of the two criteria above yields a much lower probability of awesomeness, and one that adheres to neither ensures a shocking 0% percent awesomeness rate and only ever can be judged on a scale of edible-at-bestness.

202) Artie Lange

The obnoxious coke-head fat guy routine has been done already, and done well, by the likes of comic talents like John Belushi and Chris Farley (though, to be fair, Farley's was the subtly different "awkward coke-head fat guy" routine). Which makes Artie Lange, who is not a comic but an actual obnoxious coke-head fat guy desperately hoping someone finds him funny, all the more deplorable.




Look, if you can sit in front of Joe Buck and say all the things that any sentient human being who has ever attempted to sit through a baseball game he has "called" would naturally want to say (almost as though you're merely reciting the inner monologue a person watching FOX's Saturday afternoon baseball), and, somehow, you end mustering not just sympathy for the guy, but an overwhelming desire for revenge beat-down at the hands of Paul Rudd and Jason Sudeikis, then you must be the least-likable human being on Earth.

It'd be like if you finally got a magical flying bicycle with rockets and laser attachments for Christmas, and that creepy fat guy who won't stop dropping by your house was like, "Yeah! Let's go kill us some puppies and Dumbledore with that baby! WHAT!" I dunno, man...the bicycle would lose a little shine. A little shine.

Now we know why Howard Stern hired him: one, it makes him look like a comic genius, and two, by some miracle it makes him more "likable".

A lot of amazing things happen in these videos, which is excruciatingly NSFW:
- Artie Lange says "I'm a Yankee fan" and "I'm from Jersey", and somehow has no idea just how much truth he is telling in those two statements
- Joe Buck evokes sympathy (see above) and actually says some pretty awesome, nasty shit
- The above counts, like, 78 times, so that qualifies as a lot

Enjoy (?)

201) Rachel Ray

What's the angle, here? A hapless train wreck of an anthropomorphic owl teaches Americans how to turn one cheeseburger into two cheeseburgers, thus allowing them to consume twice the calories and saturated fats in half the time, while occasionally checking in on what Jessica Simpson has been up to lately*? It's like watching a Kraft-sponsored antidepressant laboratory experiment adorned with blenders, only to find it's about .1% as fun as that description implies.


Also, she's a terrorist, because she's wearing that terroristy-looking scarf. We know this as a fact. Because of our serious journalistic integrity.

And yet, still, the premise is slightly more appealing than I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, which takes the trend of mislabeling marginally-famous people as "celebrities" to hilarious new heights.



*By the way, Rachel: the answer is "trying not to be fat", and you're not helping.

The Daily Hated is proud to have just become the internet's first ever Rachel Ray-centric post that does not contain a reference to the "words" yumm-o or EVOO. True story.

200) The Six Flags Marketing Department

Exactly what precedent is being cited when they assert that the number of flags something has is directly proportional to how fun it is?*


Umm. Nyuuuuugh.

And just how drunk were they at the board meeting when the entry-level associate suggested a good mascot might be a sexually ambiguous old child molester with penchant for late-90s technopop?





*The Soviet Union, for instance, had a full 15 flags.

199) Phish

Apparently, last night in New York there was a "concert" by a "band" called Phish. For those of you who wash your hair regularly and believe in things like soap, Phish is a bunch of ugly, scruffy dudes who have mastered playing the same song over and over again and are thus worshipped by stoners who haven't yet figured out that a) Jerry Garcia died a while back, b) Trey Anastasio is not Jerry Garcia, and c) it is not actually the 1960s, and it is stupid to romanticize a period in history you didn't actually fucking live in.

Once in college I very briefly dated this dude who was into Phish. (He was also into some band called The String Cheese Incident, a name that clearly only some people who were baked out of their minds would ever have thought was clever.) He and his friends would do this shit where one of them would put on a Phish live CD that they recorded off a recording of some show somebody's cousin's friend totally went to, and within the first five notes one of them would be like "Oh, this is August 7, 2000 in Tacoma" or "This is totally March 22, 1998 in Wichita" and the other hippies would be all "Yeah, dude, that show was so amazing," even though they never fucking went to it.

198) Speidi

The only people in America who can make you go, "Yeah...never going grocery shopping again. That's just off the table"

Confession: I don't really know what "The Hills" is. I've never seen an episode of "The Hills". But I still am pretty confident about the following things:

-It's on MTV.

-It's been on MTV for some time now. I would estimate between 3 to more than 3 years.

-It's MTV's answer to MTV's "Real World", except instead of casting unknown poor kids who never knew each other before filming began, it cast unknown rich kids who did know each other before filming began, and instead of the editing the show to make the cast look like terrible, terrible people, as "The Real World" does, "The Hills" simply casts terrible, terrible people who require no editing, but are still treated to a script and editing nonetheless (<--- I'm actually surprising myself with this knowledge. Sort of like how I surprised myself the other day with my strength and agility when I saved an attractive young family from a burning car and some terrorists on my way to volunteer at the orphanage in between shifts at the clinic for adorable puppies with cancer. Ladies?)

-An IMDB search reveals it stars one person I've heard of and vaguely know what she looks like (Lauren Conrad), one person I've heard of and have no idea what she looks like (Audrina Partridge, but for the time being, I'm going to assume she looks like a young Susan Dey), one person I've never heard of and whose inclusion in the cast list I can only assume was a typographical mistake on the part of the IMDB (Whitney Port?? WTF?), one person whose last name I hear all too often, but whose first name is pretty much alien to me (Stephanie Pratt), and, finally, two people who, through no fault of my own, I can't escape: Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt. Or "Speidi", as they are brilliantly, brilliantly known.

You know how in "Fight Club" (which you've seen, and if you haven't, then you've at least told people you've seen it, and if you haven't, it turns out Bruce Willis was dead all along) Tyler Durden keeps popping up for like a quarter second all throughout the movie, and you keep thinking "Wait, WTF? Did I just see Brad Pitt for like a quarter second, or am I just going crazy?"

Heidi and Spencer are sort of like the real life Tyler Durden Pop-ups, inexcorably woven into the fabric of the pop cosmos, such that even if you've never watched "The Hills" (as I promise I never have) and only vaguely even know who these people are, they still manage to find their way into your day as you struggle to know as little about these people as possible. And still, their Tylerdurdenitationality* will leave with the following impressions/feelings/facts/homicidal inclinations:

-Spencer Pratt is awful/douchebaggish in a way that, to date, still lacks an appropriate adjective to really do the whole human trainwreck on display here any kind of coherent justice, which can be frustrating.

-Spencer Pratt looks like a (again, there's no approriate metaphor here, but let's imagine for a second that "The Island of Doctor Moreau" was real, and we'd be getting somewhere).

-Heidi Montag is exactly the sort of person people are referring to when they refer to people the world would be better off without. I've never actually heard her say anything, though I have read comments allegedly attributed to her, and I'm thus imagining the first-hand experience is something close to what happens when you put a microphone too close to a speaker while being stabbed in the genitals.

-Something about virginity, purity, and Christianity, all of it bullshit.





*real word

The Internet Sucks - "Is this thing, that's clearly a thing, a thing?"

Apparently so unwilling to label clearly-gay Adam Lambert as gay (as he clearly is), E! submitted this stunning work of popjournalistic acrobatics (apparently written by the 1950s) which includes terms like "sexuality speculation", "male companion", and "danced to songs like 'Poker Face' by Lady Gaga".

The "article" also includes a picture (at right) of Lambert and his clearly gay possibly gay companion in a comically stereotypically gay pose outside of a popular Los Angeles men's clothing store.

E! will now resume its long-running and award-winning investigation into whether or not "Star Wars" is a movie, as many have long speculated, in light of such telling attributes as having a box office gross, winning awards, and being a movie.

Anyway, here's E!, wasting everybody's time.

197) Lines

In a world that allows someone in Wisconsin to send a message to someone in French Polynesia* in fractions of second, or where everybody on Earth can instantly be alerted anytime someone with the last name "Lohan" does something crazy, illegal, or recreationally-lesbianish, it's unforgivable that we still lack the technology to eliminate the ungodly amount of time and human traffic that separates a person from his or her god-given right to own the newest model of iPhone or "Grand Theft Auto" installment.




*The Daily Hated's research team has determined that French Polynesia is, in fact, a real place, and not just a far-away sounding place made up entirely on the spot by its writer.

CORRECTIONS:
-The American Mathematics Organization has informed the editors of the Daily Hated that we're technically referring to a "line segment". The Daily Hated regrets that people like this exist.
-We have been informed that, contrary to implied popular reasoning, owning a new iPhone or "Grand Theft Auto" installment is neither a god-given right nor a right of any kind. The Daily Hated rejects God.

196) Flash Photography

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a picture taken with the flash on is worth a thousand words like "moist"

Anyway, here's a picture of a squirrel. Memorial Day and all.

TDH's Least-Anticipated Movies of Summer!

[Reader participation: insert magazine-voice-sounding intro about how summer and movies go hand in hand. Recommended words include "doldrums", "air conditioning", "sweltering", "blockbuster", "big-budget", and "Katherine Heigl"]


Slightly less than meets the eye

5) Transformers 2: Rise of the Machines or Whatever

It's really hard to articulate how much we can wait for this movie. Consider the following: all the original Transformers movie had to do was spend as much time as possible on giant robots and mindless action, include the real voice of Starscream, and, like the series, spend as little time as possible on human characters. It failed on all these accounts, and instead tried to include cool sci-fi "plot" that made no sense at all (So, Megatron landed on Earth thousands of years ago because his master plan was to harness Earth's technology and convert it to Decepticons? Uhhhhh...Okay. "Wheelbarrowatron, Stickbot...Attack!") And when you throw in what happened the last time Michael Bay made a sequel to a terrible Michael Bay movie, the result was Bad Boys 2. Yep.


All your favorites return, including Mammothy, Slothguy, and, um...Panthro

4) Whatever Installment of Ice Age This One Is

What is this, like, the 9th Ice Age movie? Whatever, it feels like it. How come these aren't going straight to video, like The Land Before Time, 2-14? Maybe this will turn out to be this year's Kung-Fu Panda (read: a quality animated feature that does not include the involvement of John Lasseter), but we think it's far more likely it'll be this year's Ice Age.


Yawn

3) Public Enemies

Michael Mann, Christian Bale, and Johnny Depp are just dreadfully overrated, and putting them all together in one movie just guarantees it will drown in its own pretentiousness.

HAHA! Just kidding. They all totally own. This is going to be like the best movie ever.

Is Katherine Heigl going to be in something this summer? 'Cause if so, replace this entry with that.


Pretty much a safe bet to say it's this year's "Alvin and the Chipmunks"

2) G-Force

Guinea Pigs save the world. The cast is so awesome, it goes so far as to include Loudon Wainwright III. And no movie with a great cast has ever been terrible, right? And this is about talking Guinea Pigs. Who save the world. Favreau! Buscemi! Rockwell! Cage! Cruz! Bill Effin' Nighy! In a movie about Guinea Pigs. Talking ones. Who save the world. World-saving Guinea Pigs.

Guinea Pigs.


Bumper cars! How quirky!

1) Management

Taking the formulaic romcom to the next logical, suffocating level, Management incorporates several formulae to yield a new, never-before-seen, even more formulaic formula! Jennifer Aniston plays the sweet, affable, slightly clueless Jennifer Aniston-type in the typical Jennifer Aniston romcom role typically given to Jennifer Aniston (or sometimes Kate Hudson). Jennifer Aniston's Jennifer Aniston Character is down on love, in that Jennifer Aniston sort of way, until one day she meets the sort of off-beat, forcibly quirky character that Steve Zahn tends to play in forcibly quirky indy movies (Steve Zahn). In this forcibly quirky indy romcom, Steve Zahn's Steve-Zahnish character charms Jennifer Aniston's Jennifer Anistonish character with his forcibly quirky charm. Will they find love, or be prosecuted for manslaughter for the deaths of the hundreds and hundreds of innocent people who choked on their flooding out pour of dullness and quirk?

Woody Harrelson appears thanks to whatever court order forced him to appear in a supporting role in three such movies per year (probably something to do with pot).


On the other hand, we're totally looking forward to:

Whatever scene in Terminator: Salvation is the one during which Christian Bale totally went ballistic
According to Bale, it's the "emotional center" of the story, which means it'll be pretty easy to pick out: it'll be the one scene where robots aren't blowing shit up and Christian Bale isn't shooting the everliving, motherfrakking hell out of them. And the best thing is that you can just replace whatever stupid, dopey love-dialogue is coming out of Bryce Dallas Howard's mouth by replaying Bale's "Oh, GOOD FOR YOU!" rant in your head. It'll make the scene funny and watchable, and won't detract from the nonstop yelling and explosions you just paid $12 to see.

Pixar's return to Pixarishness with Up
Nothing against Wall-E. Wall-E is a perfectly great movie. It's just not necessarily great in the way that we love Pixar movies to be great. Which is to say, we don't really need Pixar and Peter Gabriel to lecture us on the fact that obesity is problematic, and that man's impact on the planet has been, in some cases, not 100% positive. So no more of that, please, Pixar. Let's get back to telling great stories about crazy things: talking cars, BFF toys that come to life, rats that cook French food, ants that rid the world of Kevin Spacey, that sort of thing. What's that? A crotchety old man ties balloons to his house and flies away and a fat-kid Cub Scout is his unwitting stowaway? Hilarity ensues? And the old man is Ed Asner?! Bliss.

Bruno
Sacha Baron Cohen shows the world how stupid gullible Americans are. Again. And, better yet, Borat references will finally, FINALLY taper off.

The Half-Blood Prince
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the "Harry Potter" series or have not read the books but only seen the movies, this is the installment where Ron dies. Can't wait to see how that plays out on the big screen!

Public Enemies
Mann! Bale! Depp! Mobsters! OH MY GOD ARE YOU KIDDING ME?????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Best. Movie. Ever.

The Internet Sucks: Worst Endorsement Ever

[Note: Look out for more "The Internet Sucks" installments in future Daily Hated posts]




From the IMDb, here is a rousing endorsement for Tyler Perry's "House of Payne", which, it should be noted, has an overall 1.1/10 user rating. Here, presumably representing the 11% of those IMDb users who are both familiar with and retain a favorable opinion of "House of Payne", one user tells us why he or she loves the show so much, and for some reason presents the argument that the "south" in "South Carolina" need not be capitalized (which is odd since this presumably comes from someone who, y'know, lives there) but that it is of critical import that "House of Payne" be broadcast there (is there no TBS in South...or, sorry, south Carolina? I'm confused. Also, how come "south" should never be capitalized, but "Wonderful" must always be? This person must be some kind of genius).

Anyway, here it is in full. Take note of the way the author addresses such key issues as:

• Whether or not Tyler Perry should or should not keep up the good work
• Whether or not the characters on the show are such great actors
• Whether or not the father character is named Curtis
• Whether or not drug use is favorable or unfavorable, and, if unfavorable, whether or not this is a topic that should be addressed in Tyler Perry's "House of Payne"

wow! i love this show. i laughed so hard. i wish it aired world wide. it needs to air in south Carolina as well.Tyler please keep up the great work! the characters in the show are wonderful actors and actresses. i love the father (curtis). you cant get any funnier that him. i didn't want the show to end. come on Tyler! you just have to air the show in south Carolina. this show to me beats out all the black sitcoms that are on TV today and it truly gets my vote. (Wonderful....just Wonderful).i like the fact that the show deals with real life situations.one episode dealt with drugs and thats one topic that needs to be heard. people need to see where the use of drugs will take a person.it not only effects that person but the entire family. so again, please keep up the great work!

The Daily Hated would like to thank the Internet Movie Database for not suing us.