Oh Lena Dunham, I love you so hard.

I have mixed feelings about the mainstream success of Lena Dunham and her brilliant TV show, "Girls." On one hand, I think it's awesome that such an edgy and authentic program with an unconventional (and occasionally unlikable) female lead character has caught on with the public. On the other hand, I worry that its popularity could cause the show's writing and storylines to take a more conventional, "safe" direction over time. It's like when you sort of "discover" and fall in love with the work of a quirky author or a singer or band completely on your own, without anyone else's endorsement or recommendation--you just find them and you're like "YES! This is what I've been looking for! THIS speaks to me!" and then six months (or six years) down the line "your" band (or singer, author, etc.) becomes HUGE and you're happy and excited, but it's also a letdown, because they're not "yours" anymore and now everyone knows about them and things are never the same.

I'd rather be happy about it, though. I'm definitely happy for Lena Dunham, because I really love her work and what she's doing with "Girls." Perhaps I am blinded by my love and (as a writer) I could be dissecting the series too much, but one of the things that delights me about "Girls" is that it's like a big metaphorical middle finger to all the cliched crap Hollywood keeps pooping out that's supposedly aimed at women. One of the things that drives me nuts about romantic comedies these days is that they'll take a beautiful size-2 actress like Katherine Heigl and give her an impossibly gigantic apartment and a high-powered career and an expensive wardrobe and then they're like--"Wait, she needs some sort of flaw so that she's 'relatable.' Let's see....Oooh, I got it! Make her clumsy! Holy shit, that's genius!" Seriously, have the Hollywood committees who crank out that kind of bullshit ever actually met any women, or any human beings for that matter?

It's bad enough that they made her act with Ashton Kutcher

Then you have Dunham's "Girls" protagonist Hannah Horvath, a disheveled, tattooed ball of not-size-2 insecure awesomeness who can't keep a job, drinks too much, says things like, "My shoes match my dress! Kind of!" and seeks solace in awkward sex with her odd, emotionally distant sort-of-boyfriend/hookup who "treats (her) heart like it's monkey meat."

And did I mention that she's a frustrated writer?

Yeah, I have no idea why this character resonates so much with me.

I can't wait for season two. I sincerely hope that "Girls" (and Dunham, since she is also the show's creator, writer, director and executive producer) stays true to Hannah and the supporting characters, resisting any pressure to sweeten them up and make them more palatable to mainstream audiences. Seriously, I've had it up to my ass with palatable heroines.

Change we can believe in.

*******OBVIOUS BOOK PLUG GOES HERE*******

Okay, I'm seriously sick of this.

It seems like every other week some drooling psycho decides to shoot up a mall, a movie theater, a Sikh temple, a salon in Georgia, a day spa in Wisconsin, a signage company in Minneapolis, and a cafe in Seattle.

Of course, the massacres listed above only represent a handful of recent shooting sprees in the US, and that's not including the school shootings that happened this year. Those would be: Chardon High School (three students killed, February), Oikos University (seven students killed, April), Texas A&M (two people killed, August) and obviously the horrific Sandy Hook shootings last week (twenty children and six adults killed). If you want to depress yourself, here's a list of the all mass shootings that happened in 2012.

Good news: some politicians are seriously talking about banning assault rifles altogether, and stricter gun control laws. Bad news: with this country's weird gun fetish and the insane power of the NRA, who fucking knows if anything will actually change?

As far as school shootings are concerned, Columbine was just the tip of a very large iceberg, and this bullshit has happened again and again and again. Sandy Hook seems particularly brutal, because of the ages of the victims and the high body count. But does no one remember back in 2006, when that crazed shit stain stormed an Amish school house in Pennsylvania, lined up several female students along the chalkboard and shot them execution-style? Ten female students were shot, five of them fatally. And they were also young, between the ages of 6 and 13. Sure, there was a media shitstorm for about a week, then it was forgotten. Until the next one. And the next one and the next one and the next one and SERIOUSLY AMERICA, ENOUGH WITH THE FUCKING MASS SHOOTINGS.    

Oh, and the National Rifle Association can go fuck itself sideways.

That's all I got today.

Borrowed this from Everything Is Terrible, one of my favorite websites in the history of ever.



There are so many jaw-droppingly awesome/awful moments packed into this clip, I scarcely know where to begin.

• "Come on, don't put me on. I know you got a bowling ball. You became a champion bowlah! You joke with me, hah hah hah." Arnold sounds like he's reading from a script penned by Tommy Wiseau. You might say that Tommy Wiseau sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but you would be wrong. Arnold sounds like Tommy Wiseau.
• Arnold telling the children that the devil came to his house on Christmas. And then the tender violin music starts up in the background. (And then he banged the maid. The devil made him do it!)
• It's 1988 and that room is just teeming with Cosby sweaters.  
• Mike Tyson, future convicted rapist, singing to children. 
• Randy Travis, future butt-nekkid Trans Am-driving singer, is there too.
• Maria Shriver at 2:09 sporting some serious feathered hair. 
• Any time I see Danny De Vito in something, I automatically think "No no no De Vito!" (War of the Roses joke. Look it up, it's a good one.)