I should’ve mentioned this here a month ago! I’ve moved Midseason Replacement back onto my own servers so that I could exercise greater control over the look and feel of the site. You can find it at http://mellifluent.info.

I also have launched a new blog on WordPress, Worst Rapper of the Decade. You can find it at worstrapper.wordpress.com. It’s a new blog written by Ross Lincoln and me. It’s dedicated to our tireless quest to uncover the worst rapper of this decade.

Clearly, the correct answer is ninja: While, piracy has been responsible for ever-decreasing profits in the film, music, and apparel industries, ninja mortgages are largely responsible for bringing the worldwide economic system to its knees, giving us our worst economic crisis in a century.

Ninjas, FTW.

Once upon a time, we had tough guys as cops on TV, guys who could take a look at a mug and determine whether or not he committed a crime. That worked for a while until the 80s. Then our cops became a little less skilled, but at least what they had, they’d regained in cool cars. I guess back then a cool car, alone, could intimidate a crook into spilling the beans on a crime. Today, our TV cops have become completely ineffective. They lack toughness, cool cars, and even remedial police skills. They all rely on outside help to solve the simplest cases. It’s as if they took the Turner & Hooch theory of police work and expanded it to encompass all investigative tasks. The first line in the penal code is now “you must have an unorthodox helper to keep you from looking completely dumb.” Here are the least effective law enforcement agencies, as best as I can determine, from watching TV.

5. The LA Field Office of the FBI

TV Show: Numbers

Why They’re Weak: Each week, an entire branch of our nation’s premiere investigative force relies on the skills of a mathematician, Charlie Eppes, to help them either solve a crime that’s happened or thwart a crime about to happen. Are our G-Men that inept that they have to wait for a guy with a Texas Instruments graphing calculator in order to protect the homeland? Can they not get their own graphing calculators? Actually, Charlie seems to do most of his best work with a chalkboard. Do you remember how long it takes to write something on a chalkboard? I mean, Eppes may be able to figure out the appropriate angle to reduce chalk drag and decrease wrist strain, but all that erasing is still going to take up time while the agents are out in the field with a ticking time bomb. And let’s be honest. This is the L.A. field office. Eppes is probably wasting a lot of time writing spec scripts for The Big Bang Theory. Did I mention that Charlie Eppes’s older brother runs the LA field office of the FBI? Yep, he’s that bad at his job that he has to call up his younger brother to bail him out. EVERY WEEK.

4. The California Bureau of Investigation

TV Show: The Mentalist

Why They’re Weak: OK, before the mentalist you’d probably never even heard of the California Bureau of Investigation. They’re not exactly cracking open big cases. I think the biggest case they’ve ever handled was figuring out the Where Are They Now of Ice-T’s old band, Body Count (answer: At home watching Law & Order: SVU).

But we’ll just go ahead and accept the idea that there is a California Bureau of Investigation and they do worthwhile work. The premise of The Mentalist is that the CBI uses a mentalist, a guy who pretends to read people’s minds, to help them solve cases. His name is Patrick Jane. I bet I know his first trick. “I know what you’re thinking… Jane? That’s a girl’s name.” It’s as if the CBI got a grant from the government to just “try some stuff” and went to the county fair to hire someone. They passed on the tightrope walker because they just didn’t have enough aerial cases to justify that and settled on the Mentalist. Basically, he’s just a really observant guy. Shouldn’t that be part of the job requirement for being in a Bureau of Investigation?

3. The Las Vegas Police Department

TV Show: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Why They’re Weak: Apparently, the police officers and detectives of Las Vegas don’t do police work or solve crimes anymore. Instead, all law enforcement has been turned over to the Crime Scene Unit. Everything from stopping jaywalkers to beating criminals up is now under the jurisdiction of the crime lab. The police officers are just glorified door-openers. In fact, if the crime lab were granted skeleton keys, they’d have no need for the police officers anymore– except for maybe filing the paperwork after arrests were made. They have one detective, Brass, that they keep around just to laugh at whenever he walks out of the room.

2. Miami-Dade Police Department

TV Show: CSI Miami, Dexter

Why They’re Weak: First, See #3. But OK, let’s forget about the fact that the CSI is running things in Miami. There’s another show set in Miami: Dexter. Dexter is about a vigilante serial killer who works for the police department. That’s serial killer number one who operates under the police department’s nose. In the first season, we learned that Dexter had a brother who also was a serial killer. The Miami-Dade Police were never able to apprehend Dexter’s brother. Dexter did. So that’s two serial killers. A few weeks later, Dexter meets another serial murderer who falls in love with him. That’s three serial killers in that one little town, just running around offing folks! Come on, CSI: Miami! Can’t you stop these killers from killing?

1. Your Local Police Department

TV Show: America’s Most Wanted, The First 48, American Justice, Basically any crime show on A&E

Why They’re Weak: Local law enforcement can never solve a crime unless at least two decades have passed and at least one TV special has aired. Between Cops and America’s Most Wanted, alone, we see that cops are able to separate feuding spouses but are unable to solve any crime that takes detective work unless John Walsh hops in with his weekly telethon.

I’m not trying to be cynical, but every show on A&E seems to showcase the failure of local police. Either in real-time on The First 48 or in overwrought documentary on American Justice. It seems like we should just trade our police forces in and exchange them for a grab bag of students from the local Community College. Maybe there’ll be an observant guy, a guy with a calculator, a guy with a fingerprinting kit, and a couple of murderers who can combine forces to form the ultimate crime fighting team. That would be awesome.

Here’s the third installment in our viral video toast to TMZ. One more to go, and then maybe we’ll put together a whole show!

I don’t generally use this blog as a forum for talking about current events or politics in a serious way, but every now and then I do like to post a reality check. I can’t help but sneer when I hear John McCain and Obama talk about “sounding the alarm” about our mortgage problems in 2006. 2006? That was when the submortgage debacle hit the news in a big way, but it was by no means the beginning of our problems with excessive consumer spending, predatory lending, or unrealistic home values and ridiculous mortgages.

I recall, vividly, reading articles questioning whether we were in a housing bubble in the early 2000s. Here’s a Businessweek editorial from roughly a week before the September 11 massacres would make every other problem seem minimal.

Call it the double bubble. A housing bubble may be developing–right behind the Nasdaq bubble. Although overall stock prices are down 12% and the Nasdaq is off 25% since the start of 2001, average house prices are rising at an annual rate of 8%. In fact, falling equities have led many well-heeled investors to shift money into residential real estate. Robert J. Shiller, author of Irrational Exuberance, which predicted the Nasdaq crash a year before it happened, now warns that a psychological frenzy not unlike tech mania is gripping housing. It appears that the Federal Reserve’s dramatic rate-cutting campaign to revive the economy may be overheating housing.

That was seven years ago, and we all know what continued happening after that. House values continued to rise, and mortgages became easier to obtain and riskier to keep, especially for the people who could afford them the least. But let’s assume that that was too early to identify the risks associated with our housing bubble. In 2003, people like Dean Baker were continuing to sound real warning bells.

The Clinton boom was built on three unsustainable bubbles. One of them, the stock bubble, has already burst. The other two bubbles—the dollar bubble and the housing bubble—are still with us. The dollar bubble is starting to deflate, and the housing bubble is perhaps just now reaching its peak. These bubbles created the basis for the 2001 recession and the economy’s continuing period of stagnation….

This situation is frightening for two reasons. First, as a short-run matter, if housing prices fall sharply in some of the areas where the effects of the bubble are largest (for example the Boston, New York, Washington, and San Francisco areas), new home buyers (and those who recently refinanced their mortgages and took money out) could find they have negative equity in their homes. If someone borrows $270,000 to buy a $300,000 home, and the price falls by one-third, this leaves them owing $70,000 more than the home is worth. When this happens, there is a huge incentive to just let the mortgage holder foreclose on the home. If this were to happen on a large scale, the survival of many banks and financial institutions would be at risk.

So prior to our last Presidential election, the writing continued to remain present on the wall; we just chose to wallpaper over it with rapidly devaluing dollars. The New York Times’s Paul Krugman took Dean Baker’ baton and ran with it, continually addressing the idea of a housing bubble for the next several years. So, I’d like to know why it’s prescience that McCain and Obama began addressing the issue in 2006, after it had become front page and not just editorial page news. Neither McCain nor Obama can suggest that they were leaders on the issue. All they can fight over is who was able to more quickly hop onto the bandwagon.

Sarah Palin recently came under fire for not being able to name a newspaper she reads. In her defense, she probably didn’t know how Weekly Parade would go over with the press. Not that I blame her. I read it, too. Not only does it have timely information regarding the whereabouts of celebrities I liked as a kid, but it always has the most provocative Sudoku and crossword puzzles. Parade also features a column by Marilyn Vos Savant, listed in the Guinness Book for having the highest IQ. Getting through that column is the equivalent of a semester at Harvard each week! All that for just the price of the Sunday Paper? It sounds as if she’s already got the know-how to solve our economic crisis. Sarah Palin reads any newspaper that’s put in front of her, and that includes the Weekly World News when she’s ringing up her groceries. It’s just one of her vast variety of sources! What other sources have information regarding pieces of toast shaped like Jesus? Alaska isn’t some remote island, hours from the mainland, culturally separate from the country… like Hawaii. Alaska is a part of this country, and news of the weird makes its way there just as easily as it makes its way to Washington DC.

Sarah Palin believes that women who have been the victim of rape or incest should avoid having abortions, and why not? Abortion is a traumatic experience. Rape frequently is preceded by at least a dinner and possibly a movie; Incest is a family activity. Abortion on the other hand takes place in the cold, dark office of a doctor you’ve probably never met before. Sarah Palin should be congratulated for having the compassion necessary to spare young girls that experience. America’s young girls will have the rest of their lives to get undressed in people’s offices. Why force them to grow up now?

There is a question of whether Sarah Palin is enough of a heavyweight to be our vice president. Well, that assertion is simply sexist. We would never question the weight of a man running for office. Of course, the automatic response is “we meant intellectual heavyweight.” Well, I would dare say that’s worse. Isn’t it, after all, a veiled suggestion that a woman who is a fat nerd is unprepared to run the country? I suppose if she were a hot nerd, otherwise known as a sexy librarian, that would be OK! Well, I denounce that sexism and suggest we just give her the Vice Presidency and flowers as an apology. Everyone knows that when you wrong a woman, it’s best to apologize quickly and profusely or you’ll have to listen to her whine until you do.

America is the kind of country where a woman can go from wanting to be a sportscaster to running for Vice President, regardless of her qualifications. That’s what makes us unique as a nation, and if you can’t support that, then may I suggest moving to a country ruled by serious people of distinct caliber?

Tags: sarahpalin, vpilf, election, wasilla, alaska, john mccain, republicans, msm

There are a lot of games that have been skipped over for consideration for film adaptations. Most of the time, it’s because there seems to be no reasonable way to adapt the games for the big screen. Well, if there’s no reasonable way, how about unreasonable ways? Here are some video games that probably never should be adapted for the big screen, adapted!

Pong

The game that started it all. In Pong, you move a small rectangle up and down the screen, knocking a large pixel back and forth across the screen in a simulation of tennis. Long before Wii Sports came along, this was the tennis simulator that families crowded along their wood console televisions to play. Sad, huh?

How it Could Work:

This could be a surprise sequel to Deathrace. After the nation tired of watching prisoners drive cars around, prisons began forcing prisoners to play tennis, pushing the nations’ boredom level one degree higher. The prisoners are average at best, so the prisons wire the prisoners so that they can be controlled by the guards in the stands, with plans for the home audience to be in control in the future (if the cable companies ever get that last stretch of fiber optics done). The hero of our movie is Shigeru Miyamoto 3000, whose army of gorillas goes bonkers, throwing barrels at the prison guards, releasing the prisoners from the remote-controlled deathgrips, giving them just enough time to lodge constitutional complaints against their incarceration.

Starring: Mark-Paul Gosselaar as Shigeru Miyamoto 3000.
Directed by: James Cameron

Pizza Party:

I don’t know if anyone other than the kids in this commercial have ever played Pizza Party. It looks like the sort of game that could turn a rainy day into a suicidal afternoon. I imagine that the conversation between the director and the kids in the commercial went something like this:

“Okay, guys, I want you to really look like you’re having a great time.”
“But we’re pretending to put cardboard circles on a pizza?”
“Yup! Now, when I say action I want you to laugh hysterically… why are you yawning?”

But maybe a horrible game could become a slightly less awful movie?

How It Could Work

In the post-apocalyptic future, all that remains in a pizza parlor in Minnesota. Or what used to be Minnesota but is now the Republic of Pizza Emporium. Three men, all pizza makers, rule the only building left standing without compassion or consideration. Anybody who wants shelter in Pizza Emporium must make pizza, never mind that there are no customers. One kid recognizes that while he and the other survivors are alive, they aren’t really living. He leads a bloody revolt, slicing up the oppressors with a pizza slicer, only to realize that the only way he can keep everyone alive is to keep making pizzas. He has become his own worst enemy.

Starring: Haley Joel Osment in a suprise comeback.
Directed by: Alan Smithee

Our second TMZ spoof! They haven’t really taken off yet, but somebody out there’s gotta like ‘em!

The first of our TMZ spoofs for Stupidvideos.com.