It's a Top Ten List Read It!: The Most Memorable Moments from Top Cobbler

10.
S01 E06: Artistic Expression
When the cobblers had to paint a realistic interpretation of “American Gothic” using only laces and shoe polish, lack of ventilation in the workroom proved stifling to more than just their creativity!

9.
S01 E10: Trench Warfare
The cobblers set out to make a sensible sandal using concertina wire and bricks. Many people don't realize how many scenes had to be ‘cut’ due to blood loss!

8.
S01 E11: In Shod Blood
In this spine-tingling episode, the cobblers had to make a shoe that would double as a shoe…for a murderer!

7.
S01 E13: I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Shoes
When Ben & Jerry paid us a visit to unveil their new flavor, "Sailing the High Heels," the cob-testants were tasked with making a heel that could double as an ice cream topping. Gerrie's winning shoe, a burgundy oxford braised in Burgundy wine, looked scrumptious!

6.
S01 E09: The Other Shoe Drops
Guest judge Ke$ha tasked the cobblers with making a stylish heel from found materials, so we sent the cobblers in gondolas down New York City's scenic Gowanus Canal to see what they could find. I think we all remember Gorden’s edgy styrofoam platform with condom upper that led to a win!

5.
S01 E07: Toe the Line
The cobblers had to make shoes for a woman with 11 toes...and only 4 of them on one foot!

4.
S01 E08: My Tongue and Only
When faced with the challenge of making a robotic shoe that would both tie its own laces and perform all functions of a Roomba, Jarad had a tearful meltdown while on the phone with NASA.

3.
S01 E14: Lace Up or Shut Up
In the season finale, a distraught Ginniver attempted to hang herself with the pair of shoes that cost her the title of Top Cobbler--only to remember that she lost because they were Velcro.

2.
S01 E12: Heart and Sole
In the show's first "high-stakes Quickfire (literally)," Markus was pitted against Brin. With Brin’s innovative use of raw chicken cutlets as shoe soles, she made it across the hot coals in a record 9 seconds! Markus went the route of bicycle tires, a disastrous choice--he was sent home, but not before he was sent to the emergency room!

1.
S01 E13: Things are Heating Up
When the cobblers had to make shoes out of only toenail clippings and barbecue sauce, Hansel lost control and locked himself in the panic room, naked, with only his bottle of A1. His mutterings about "nurse's shoes" and "the Belgians" are included as extras on the DVD of Top Cobbler: The Complete First Season, out this summer.

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Strong Opinions About: Koalas

From time to time, Oh Em Gee. likes to give those with strong minority viewpoints a place to share them, because of democracy and the Constitution and Barack Obama's freshman-year love letters. This column will be called "Strong Opinions About," and today it kicks off with an article that might be the very first piece of writing that both bodysnarks and slutshames koalas.

Hey guys, can we talk for a second about KOALAS??????

Since literally the dawn of time people have been all "koalas are my favorite animal they are so cuuuuttee!!!!"

Even National Geographic has some really sweet things to say about koalas: "The koala, cuddly symbol of a nation and one of the most beloved animals on the planet..."

DEAD WRONG have you Nat Geo fuckers even looked closely at a goddamn koala?

oh my GOD LOOK OUT

ugh

god EW

Check their nasty British teeth:

ever heard of a toothbrush lol

I'm sorry but what the fuck like this is fucking scary like this picture actually makes me sick to my stomach

Not to mention:

The male Koala, like many marsupials, has a bifurcated penis. The female has two lateral vaginae, a feature unique to the Koala, and it has two separate uteri which is common to all marsupials.

Ummmmmmmmm NO have fun with your two weiners and VAGINAE you sick fucks!!! I wonder if koalas QP. They probably do, they totally would. UGHHHH

Some colonies have been hard hit by disease, especially chlamydia.

Way to go, sluts. With all those damn genitals I'm sure it's spreading like wildfire.

and look at this fat piece of shit

ugh you guys koalas are the worst.

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Paula Food Market Profit Rises on Higher Plantain and Bud Light Tallboy Sales

Paula Food Market said Tuesday that soaring sales of its plantains, especially in nearby neighborhoods, nearly doubled its profit in the company’s fiscal second quarter.

Paula Food Market said it sold 400 plantains in the quarter, an 88 percent increase from the period a year ago. It sold 1,000 Bud Light tallboys, more than double the number it sold in the quarter last year.

For the quarter that ended March 31, the company reported net income of $21,000, or $0.0001 a share, compared with $17,840, or $0.00001 a share, in the period a year earlier.

Paula Food Market’s revenue was $34,000, up from $31,000 a year ago.

Paula Food Market previously told Wall Street to expect earnings of $0.00002 a share and revenue of $18,400 for the quarter. But as they do nearly every quarter, analysts viewed Paula Food Market's official figures as low-ball estimates and came up with their own more bullish forecasts. On average, analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected Paula Food Market to report earnings of $0.0001 a share and revenue of $20,400 for the quarter.

Investors in Paula Food Market had grown increasingly skittish about Paula Food Market's performance in the weeks before the earnings report, sending its shares down from a high of $0.0001 to $0.00005 at the close of regular trading on Tuesday. Among their chief concerns were research data showing weak sales of dusty off-brand cheese crackers and dented cans of Goya frijoles negros, and worries about whether plantain sales could keep up their momentum.

But immediately after the results from Paula Food Market came out, its shares shot up nearly 7.5 percent in extended trading. Even after the jitters of the last several weeks, Paula Food Market's shares are up 37 percent for the year and the company remains the most highly valued company on this particular corner.

One fear had been a repeat of a pattern from last year, when Paula Food Market said it lost some sales of plantains because of a steady escalation of rumors about the release of new, riper, less black plantains. Those rumors were accurate, as Paula Food Market showed when it restocked the plantain shelf in early October.

There is wide speculation that Paula Food Market will again replace the plantain selection in the fall and that consumers might simply wait for this so they can get the freshest produce. Plantains have become an engine of Paula Food Market's growth over the last two years, accounting for almost 40 percent of the company’s revenue during the quarter.

Paula Food Market, which has its headquarters in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, benefited strongly from inter-neighborhood sales during the quarter, which accounted for 64 percent of total company revenue. Apple executives have repeatedly identified adjacent-neighborhood markets as one of the company’s most promising growth opportunities. New plantains went on sale in Bedford-Stuyvesant on Jan. 13, near the beginning of the last quarter.

Of all its overseas market, the company said revenue from the Bed-Stuy/Crown Heights region grew the most, more than doubling to $3,000. Sales in the region now account for more than a quarter of total Paula Food Market revenue, compared with 19 percent a year ago.

[Thanks to the NYTimes]

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It's a Top Ten List Read It!: Don't Trust the B----

I saw the first episode of Don't Trust the B---- in Apt. 23 the other day. It was...fine. I'm sure it'll be comfortably clumped in with New Girl and Happy Endings as a totally adequate, objectively amusing, but not especially good show you watch when you're drunk and have to take frequent, un-paused breaks to pee and to look up your high school girlfriend on Facebook, and feel good about how much more hip and less fat you are than her fiancee and how you live in a better city that's farther away from the suburb where you grew up and how he's probably never even heard of Tanlines or whatever band is cool in your city right now and how it's definitely okay that you're alone in bed on Friday night because you'll definitely find a girl who's cuter and funnier and more interesting than her anyway oh god you miss her so much.

Anyway what's weird about Don't Trust the B---- in Apt. 23 is that you can totally say the word "bitch" on TV. They do it all the time! Jesse Pinkman says it like once an episode on Breaking Bad, which is a clever reference because the star of Don't Trust the B---- in Apt. 23, Krysten Ritter, played Jesse Pinkman's girlfriend on Breaking Bad. Maybe it's because Don't Trust the B---- in Apt. 23 is on ABC or whatever, and because the word "bitch" would be in the title? It's not even like it's that great of a title to begin with, that they'd bother with a censored name instead of just calling it "My Crazy Roommate featuring James Van Der Beek as Himself" or something. So in a really just fun blogger twist, I decided to make a list of things Don't Trust the B---- in Apt. 23 might refer to that actually you should totally be careful around. Here we go!

1. Don't Trust the Blue-Ringed Octopus in Apt. 23. Because they are one of the most poisonous animals in the ocean and there is currently no antivenom available. That's way worse than a roommate who eats your carefully-labelled yogurt.

2. Don't Trust the Benign Tumor in Apt. 23. Is it really benign? You're not a doctor. You spent your college years not understanding Foucault and smoking new and exciting strains of pot, when you could have been learning about useful things like biology or how to pay your taxes.

3. Don't Trust the Belladonna in Apt. 23. Belladonna, also known as "deadly nightshade" or "Devil's berries," which are both better names but which don't start with the letter B, is a shrub that was used to murder people in the Middle Ages. It's related to other nightshades like the tomato, potato, and eggplant, all of which are delicious.

4. Don't Trust the Barbados Nut in Apt. 23. The Barbados Nut is the seed of a Central American plant that is apparently both incredibly poisonous and incredibly tasty. Fuck you, nature. That's not fair.

5. Don't Trust the Bivalve Shellfish in Apt. 23. We are pro-shellfish here at Oh Em Gee., all of us except Executive Editor/Unpaid Intern Lisa who is from Wisconsin, where there is no ocean, and so she fears the ocean and everything in it. But maybe her primitive midwestern fears aren't so off after all, because a few times a year, shellfish eat a whole bunch of gross stuff and become poisonous. Also if they die before you cook them, they can be poisonous. What a weird animal, that you literally have to murder it and watch it die with your own eyes, for safety.

6. Don't Trust the Borrowed Cigarettes in Apt. 23. Sometimes they're menthols.

7. Don't Trust the Box Jellyfish in Apt. 23. The box jellyfish, the scariest species of which are found in, where else, god damn Australia, are possibly the deadliest animals on the planet. Also they don't even have brains, or even a proper nervous system. They only have something called a "nerve net" and probably wouldn't understand the TV shows you want to watch. "Wait, Raylan Givens' dad is in Boyd Crowder's gang? When did that happen?" "Shut UP, box jellyfish. That is a well-established plot point. Maybe if you paid attention you'd evolve a real brain."

8. Don't Trust the Botulinum Toxin in Apt. 23. Botulinum toxin causes botulism. Awful, awful roommate.

9. Don't Trust the Buccaneer in Apt. 23. It sounds kind of dashing, but buccaneers were just mercenary bloodthirsty pirates and, ech, a lot of them were French. Also, this doesn't make them worse potential roommates, but did you know that the Buccaneer lifestyle among Tortugans involved lifelong male partnerships, in which the two men always slept in the same bed and did everything together? I definitely did not know that.

10. Don't Trust the Blogger in Apt. 23. HA HA HA

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Squirrels Eating Pizza

Squirrels kind of terrify me. They're skittish, rabid, and just have a general creepy attitude I really don't appreciate. But I am delighted to report that something has changed recently. They have begun to endear themselves to me. They have begun to eat pizza like humans.









Like, get the fuck out of here squirrels! You are fucking killing me. In the best way! Let's have a party. Imma buy you some Papa J meat lover's special. Y'all want cheesey bread? Do you think you could dip your pizza crusts in that garlic butter sauce? That would make my year. Luv u squirrels.

For more articles about animals doing specific things, see this post!

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The Back Catalogue: Radiohead's "OK Computer"

The Back Catalogue is a column that attempts to plug the holes in our pop-culture knowledge, and then write about the results. It is probably the column on this site with the least appeal to anyone besides its author. I will try not to write too many of these.

Every music dork has a weak spot, a band or even a genre they just know nothing about. Sometimes it's something well-established, so it's embarrassing, something you just try to ignore and hope it goes away. For me, that's Radiohead.

I'm not sure exactly what happened to keep me so thoroughly in the dark; most of my friends went through a serious Radiohead phase, worship OK Computer and Kid A and pay hundreds of dollars for shitty tickets in stadiums (ugh, stadiums) to see them live, even today. But I never really listened to them. I think I might've been going through a jazz fusion phase while my friends were listening to music that's actually pleasant to listen to. It took me longer than most to get really heavily into interesting pop music (indie or otherwise), and by the time I did, it seemed like everyone was already a long-established Radiohead fanatic. I just kind of let them go, listened to other stuff, and by the time I graduated from high school, just after the release of Hail to the Thief, I probably couldn't have named one Radiohead song.

For the sake of full disclosure, because such ethereal ethics are definitely important while writing a self-important article about listening to an album everyone likes, I listen to In Rainbows sometimes. I heard one of the songs on the radio or something and realized maybe Radiohead isn't as epic/angsty as I thought, because both "15 Step" and "Bodysnatchers" are pretty great pop songs. OK Computer still kind of made me nervous, because it's one of those intimidating career-making epic albums that I don't usually like for the same reasons I don't like hardly any of those sweeping Great American Novels, and also it's from 1997 and basically nothing from 1997 is any good. Still, I'm really curious about this thing I know nothing about that means so much to everyone who's my age and also white and upper-middle-class and from the suburbs, so here are my track-by-track impressions.

Track 1: "Airbag"
This is real alterna-rock sounding. Distorted power chords, simple 1-5 progressions, "I'm not trying too hard" vocals, slurred delivery. Seems like it's building but it never really goes anywhere--I was expecting some kind of anthemic chorus that never came. Pleasant enough but this is a very familiar sound to me and there's nothing about this song that really sets it apart.

Track 2: "Paranoid Android"
I know this riff. Where did I hear this riff? I feel like some other band played it in the middle of one of their songs and everyone around me was probably like "oh I get that reference, I will nod knowingly" and I probably stood there with my neck stock-still, like an idiot. Anyway this is okay. Better than the first track. Has that late-'90s thing that I always associate with Everclear where they play the riff kind of softly and acoustically and you just know at some point the guitarist is going to stomp on a pedal and all of a sudden that little acoustic riff will become a big rock riff, and then he does it and you're like yeah! and maybe you nod your head harder.

But I'm also starting to think that I wouldn't have liked this in high school very much. I'm still waiting for hooks; I know from my limited listening of In Rainbows that this band can write a hell of a hooky chorus, but I haven't heard one yet and it sort of sounds like that's not what they're going for. I can't imagine why someone would withhold hooks if they are capable of writing hooks. It's like a chef saying "No, this dish is experimental. That's why there's no salt."

Track 3: "Subterranean Homesick Alien"
Lololol at that track title. I like Thom Yorke's voice in this one a lot more. The wavering whiny thing is kind of grating and he's doing a lot less of that here. This sounds like an Eels song to me. That's a compliment; I like Eels a lot. Think it'd be better if E from Eels (my god, let's just lololol at the '90s in general. E from Eels!) sang it, though. If I don't get angry comments for that it'll definitely mean that nobody is reading this site.



Track 4: "Exit Music (For a Film)"
Sounds like Eels again. Which band came first? I guess Beautiful Freak came out the year before OK Computer, but Radiohead had certainly been around longer. Who here was not a basically a fetus in the early '90s and can answer the question of Eels vs Radiohead? I like the fuzzed-out bass in this song a lot, and I like the way it builds, but it peters out way too soon. I don't like this tendency to just elevate the volume and distortion but not really change the melody--it makes it sound like the song is going somewhere but it's ultimately not very satisfying.

Track 5: "Letdown"
I like this! This is a pop song! I could definitely have played this at night while 16 years old and thought about how terrible my pretty great suburban life was. It sounds like that band Keane decided to make an entire career out of ripping this song off twelve times per album.

Track 6: "Karma Police"
This is an important song, right? This is like The Song from this album, I think. It immediately sounds different than the other songs--tighter, more cohesive, not rambly. It's a thoughtful, structured pop song, which makes it way more up my alley. I know the chorus, too. I didn't recognize anything up until then but I know that chorus. It's pretty catchy. If "chorus" is even the right word; Radiohead isn't doing traditional verse/chorus/verse/break structure, but they're also not breaking it in any kind of experimental way, like Soul Coughing or even Neko Case does. They just kind of take an eight-bar snippet and repeat it, building in volume and instrumentation, then break, then do the chorus. I'm not sure I'm sold on that being a better way to do things than verse/chorus.

Track 7: "Fitter Happier"
"Hey guys I just found this tangerine iMac, let's make it say my shitty poem out loud. Now put that cat on the piano keys and hit record while it stomps around."

Track 8: "Electioneering"
Where did this song come from? It sounds like an electric La's song or a noisy Blur song or something. It's okay I guess but a song with that kind of classic electric guitar riff has to have a hell of a catchy melody and this one doesn't. Also somebody shut that fucking cowbell up.

Track 9: "Climbing Up the Walls"
I hate this song. There's not a single thing I like about it. It's everything that was wrong with amelodic alterna-rock: it settles into a painful screeching groove and repeats for the entire length of the song, with various distorted elements swelling and shouting and scratching behind it. If I wasn't trying to do this professionally I would have hit the next track button after 20 seconds.

Track 10: "No Surprises"
I know this song too. Again, sounds like an Eels song. It has that sweetness, that nod to classic pop, that makes Eels great, but the pacing and tones of the guitar and bass are total late-'90s, which is a good thing. Thom Yorke's voice is maybe at its best here. My favorite song on the album so far.

Track 11: "Lucky"
Mopey, man. This whole album is mopey. I was expecting it to be more, I dunno, sad/soaring, I think, than straight up mopey. A lot of people were depressed in the '90s, I guess. This whole album has a really low beats-per-minute rate, which probably contributes to the mopery. Really hurts the songs when they try to do a breakdown at the end, like in this song. Hard to rock out when you're stuck at like 80 BPM.

Track 12: "The Tourist"
This song is boring.

I'm sort of confused by OK Computer as a whole. I didn't really like it very much, to be honest; like a lot of music in the late '90s, it's got this slow trudging sadcore thing going on that I guess is hard to connect with outside of that era. I don't really know what else was going on in 1997; I was 11 years old at the time, so it's not like I was aware of broad shifts in alternative rock music, and that kind of thing is hard to rediscover afterwards. Maybe the fact that it sounds quintessentially '90s is testament to its impact.

In their review of Radiohead's followup album, Kid A, AllMusic wrote, "multiple plays are necessary just to discern the music's form, to get a handle on quiet, drifting, minimally arranged songs with no hooks." OK Computer isn't really quiet or minimally arranged, but I'm starting to understand why I never got into this band in the first place. There is nothing about that description that sounds like something I'd be interested in--it sounds like a demonstration, not an album that you want to listen to. There are a couple of nice pop songs on this album, but even if I had listened to it back in high school, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have liked it much. I'll just stick with my pop music, thanks.

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House of Fuck You

House of Lies, Showtime's newest comedy, is the worst new show I've seen this year. That might not make it the worst new show of the year; I haven't seen either of those shows about how hard modern American life is for straight white males, or that other show about how hard modern American life is for straight white males that also includes improbable cross-dressing, because I know those shows are bad without having to suffer through them. But House of Lies stars Don Cheadle, and Ben Schwartz (Jean-Ralphio from Parks and Recreation), and Kristen Bell (Veronica Mars from Veronica Mars), and it's on a premium channel that theoretically has less restrictions and is able to take the medium of television in new and exciting directions. The reality is, it's on Showtime, America's channel for people saying "fuck" and also for tits, and holy christ it is terrible. Its crimes are as follows:

Tits and Fuck.
Showtime is allowed to show nudity (female nudity, obviously, and maybe a male ass cheek as a punchline or something) and broadcast whatever foul language they want. This sounds like it'd be freeing but apparently all of Showtime's writers and showrunners are forever trapped in a lucite prison of FuckTits from which there is no escape. I have the total tit count at 12 in the pilot episode, which I should add is only 30 minutes long. The first use of the word "fuck" comes at 1:30, the second at 2:45, and then I stopped counting until the first time a child says fuck (30:45). There are lots in between, though, so for all of you living in the as-yet-unreleased third Crank movie in which you cannot survive unless someone says "fuck" every 60 seconds, this is a good show for you to watch.

Other stats:

1. First reference to drugs: 1:35
2. First tit shot: 0:45
3. First girl-on-girl sex scene: 19:55
4. First HILARIOUS use of a risque sexual term in a public place in which everyone around stops eating their fine white-person meals and falls silent and stares at the utterer of said risque sexual term: 22:25
5. First non-ironic use of the word "panties," further made useless by the fact that this is applied to two men and one woman, the latter of whom (without getting into heteronormative undergarment theory) probably is actually wearing them: 7:08

Nobody Cares About Your Premise.
There are many jobs or situations that are inherently interesting. Drug dealer! Lawman! West Wing staffer! Doctor! Chef! Professional rich English countryperson! All interesting. House of Lies is a show about management consultants. Problem 1: nobody knows what the fuck that is. Problem 2: once they figure it out, nobody will care about it. And yet House of Lies treats the who-gives-a-shit world of management consulting like it's a secret world we've all been curious about. It gives us the structure of a typical job. It explains pay grade. It reveals what kind of person gets into this kind of work. And it defines the terms of the trade, even though the terms are not interesting or funny and actually have very obvious cognates in regular English that everyone would understand.

After someone says "We really can't afford to get counseled out on this job," Don Cheadle pauses time (yeah.) to say "Counseled out. That's consultant for 'fired.' It's not good." Let me break that down for you. That phrase adds nothing to the show. It is already useless. But it's also not hard to understand in its current form. Literally everything that is said on any British show is harder to understand than that. But okay, Don Cheadle explains that it means "fired." Fine. BUT THEN HE EXPLAINS THAT GETTING FIRED IS BAD. He defines the phrase, then defines his definition! Fuck you, Don Cheadle's writers.

As far as I can tell, this job, which nobody cares about, seems to mostly consist of "trying not to get fired" and "billing lots of outrageous expenses," which in the laziest possible way is demonstrated by having our noble leads go to a strip club. There's sort of a bigger problem here in that the show can't really decide if it's satirizing these characters, sympathizing with them, or glorifying them, Entourage-style. Really it's the latter, with a couple of nods to the former two options I guess out of recognition that in 2012, or 2011, 2010, 2009, or 2008, for that matter, it is ridiculously tone-deaf to have a show about useless bajillionaire management consultants who help despicable companies overcome their crimes to become successful enough to presumably commit more crimes and be despicable once again. But that's a bigger discussion, and I am too angry to remember any of those helpful terms I learned in my cultural studies classes in college that might be useful in discussing this, so I will keep my focus instead on how fucking awful this show is.

The show makes the mistake of giving its characters long soliloquies about business strategy, two lines into which every single viewer will be reaching for their iPhones, but which also make no sense and which would fool no reasonably intelligent humanoid businessmonster. That strategy to make one of those evil subprime mortgage lending firms a paragon of business ethics? THAT WOULD NEVER WORK. Because 1. it won't work, and 2. those businessghouls don't even want it to! They are the soulless riverbed-dredging catfish of our society. They make lots of money and they basically can't get arrested because nobody besides Matt Taibbi understands which crimes they've committed and his job is to come up with new fun similes to describe these people, not to arrest them or whatever. The strategy is obviously bullshit and nobody would ever fall for it. And yet that plan is the sole evidence we've seen that these consultant idiots are good at their job and thus the masters of the universe.

Sheer Laziness.
1. There are constant music and sound effects, like we're watching a Dreamworks animated picture about an anthropomorphized river otter who just wants to see the ocean even though river otters, despite their name, often live in coastal areas, which Dreamworks would know if they read Wikipedia once in awhile. When Don Cheadle tosses a cardboard sign aside, there's a whooshing sound. When a man bites into an eclair, it goes SQUISH. There is never not music playing. It is tremendously distracting.
2. At one point, in the strip club, Don Cheadle is supposed to take a shot off a stripper's ass. It sounds like the kind of thing someone who has never seen a stripper or an ass would think you would do in that situation; from a practical perspective, it seems really difficult to balance, and after a second Don Cheadle just picks the shot glass up and drinks it. You can practically hear him think "fuck this stage direction."
3. Jean-Ralphio, as he writes his name on a sign-in form, says "and this is my mobile, feel free to call." Then he literally makes one small circle and taps the paper twice with his pen. I have deduced that his phone number is "0..". Feel free to call and ask about the logic of that shit.
4. The show uses the word "paradigm" as an example of "indecipherable jargon," cribbing from Dilbert comic strips circa 1998.
5. There is an uptight blonde society woman who hates her husband, with tight pulled-back hair and a big chunky pearl necklace. Because that is a new type of character that I am definitely intrigued by.
6. Somebody crashes through a dinner table.

7. The final shot of the episode is Don Cheadle staring at himself in his bathroom mirror while shaving, in the cold fluorescent light of morning, wondering at last if the choices he's made have oh jesus fucking christ
8. Don Cheadle's son has some HILARIOUSLY ambiguous sexuality. In case you didn't understand that from his, you know, purple tights and neckerchief and miniskirt and you know what everything he's wearing is shades of purple, he does the least balletic twirl I've ever seen within the first 90 seconds of the episode. Then he mentions musicals, Olivia Newton-John, and shoe-shopping, and is catty towards another child in his children's school for small children, within the next 90 seconds. Later he will sing beautifully.

Wasting Talent.
There is only one brief glimpse of Jean-Ralphio dancing. It is the most transcendent moment in the entire show. Ben Schwartz was basically hired to be, like, a successful version of Jean-Ralphio, or like what Jean-Ralphio thinks he is, except the writers of House of Lies are, as we know, really bad at their jobs, so the only time he doesn't look like a grainy photocopy of Jean-Ralphio is when he's dancing.

Veronica Mars is utterly wasted, as she has been in just about everything since Veronica Mars.

Don Cheadle, I don't really have many thoughts about him, since he has a knack for picking movies other people like and I am not interested in, but I just saw him in Ocean's 13 and now it sounds like he's doing an American accent even though I'm pretty sure he's American. All those hard growled Rs, I think. "It was harrrrd worrrrk."



Oh, Right. That.
This show fucking has a time out conceit. Don Cheadle will turn to face the camera, and the world will freeze behind him as he explains what exciting business terms like "after-work" mean. Then someone calls "TIME IN!!!," silently, and the world begins to move again. Yes, it is just like Zack Morris on Saved by the Bell. But with weirder sound effects; at one point, he calls time out and birds flying overhead freeze in mid-air. Then when time in is called, the birds continue flying, only now you can hear them flap-flap-flapping, really loudly. Clearly there are some things I don't understand about the science of freezing time in order to explain things nobody cares about.

The entire episode is available on YouTube, for free, with the tits and cursing taken out. Showtime clearly thinks that they are losing nothing by doing this; you can practically hear executives say, "Don't worry about it, bro. If they can't see the tits, they'll only watch for a minute or so. Then they'll come crawling to their cable service provider." I do not recommend watching it. It is infuriating. But here's the episode, for completeness's sake.

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