“Recently, a graphic designer from Moscow, Lenivko Kvadratjić, made a bold move by reimagining the iconic Simpsons family living their most miserable lives somewhere in Russia. The designer was born in Siberia in the late USSR and later moved to Moscow to get his degree. “The Simpsons has a great influence on me and people all over the world. Many famous persons made intros for The Simpsons. I always wanted to make some parody version too with my country’s local flavor included. So I made it one day”

I assume “Lenivko Kvadratjic” is a pseudonym that implies Lazy Square, which is the English name of his YouTube channel, in a sort of Slavic mash-up language. I’m not a scholar in the Slavic languages, but he seems to play around with several of them to give his work a generic Slavic feel. He’s Russian, but the credits and captions in his Simpsons parody seem to be in the Czech alphabet rather than Cyrillic. Lenivko is the actual Bulgarian word for “lazy,” but it’s recognizable to Russians as well because the very similar ленивый is the Russian equivalent. I think kvadratić or квадрат, or something very similar, is recognizable as “square” across the Slavic world.

“First Playmate” is a trivia question that will win you many bar bets. Most people think it was Marilyn Monroe. You can also win bets on the first centerfold, also not Marilyn. You all know that Marilyn appeared in Playboy #1 in December of 1953, but the magazine never applied the term “Playmate” to her (MM was the “Sweetheart of the Month”), and she was not a centerfold, having appeared on pages 17-19. The main color picture was presented vertically, as shown in the link above.

  • An obscure model/actress named Margie Harrison became the first “Playmate” when she was so called in the second-ever issue of the Bunny-oriented publication. Margie also became the first woman chosen as a Playmate twice, when the magazine pictured her again a few months later in the June, 1954 edition. Unfortunately for her, the picture was not identified as Margie at the time. It was not until two years after her appearance in Playboy #2 that Playboy’s readers learned her identity.

Brainscan covered her in Lil From Brazil in part 4 of his brilliant overview of Grindhouse Films.

  • The first actual centerfold (two-page) was Janet Pilgrim (Miss July for 1955)
  • The model for the first three-panel fold-out centerfold was Marian Stafford, Miss March for 1956.

Find more Playmate trivia here.

One site pictures every one of them!

By the way, you can find a replica of that first Playboy online. It was primitive!

The second issue was somewhat more professional in appearance, but was still rudimentary, and was still predominantly black-and-white.

Backlash? Who could have guessed?

“The independent film stars Bella Thorne and “is about a street-smart party girl with a Jesus fetish who gets mixed up in a violent drug deal and finds a possible way out — by masquerading as a Nun.”

(The same way I got out of Vietnam, by the way.)


It may have a way to go before challenging the weirdest portrayal of Christ, in Greaser’s Palace, one of the oddest movies ever filmed.

GP centers around Jesus returning to the earth in the old west, into the shabbiest, most run-down town in any dried-up gulch. (Well, I suppose Bethlehem was no Paris either.) He’s on his way to Jerusalem to be an actor/singer/dancer, and he’s a whiz at performing 1940’s boogie-woogie. Jesus, aka “Jessy,” is wearing a black and gray striped 1940’s zoot suit and a big pink hat, and looks pretty much like Jim Carrey after he puts on The Mask.

God the Father is a crusty lookin’ old cowboy greybeard. The Holy Ghost wears a cowboy outfit except for the bed sheet over his head with two eyeholes cut out, and he’s upset because The Father never gives him a chance to do anything important. Here’s the Holy Trinity:

Seaweedhead Greaser is the guy who runs the town, and he has constipation problems. He can’t move to action unless properly spurred by mariachi music, so his quartet follows him around in case he needs them. Like all movie strongmen, he has a wimp of a son, and he kills the kid, Lamy Homo Greaser, in the first scene, but Jesus later brings him back to life like Lazarus, and …

Let’s see. Tattoo from Fantasy Island plays a tiny homosexual cowpoke who makes a move on Christ. And there’s a 90 year old man playing a character named “Petunia”, clad in pink gingham drag. And there’s really no way to describe this without going through every discontinuous scene. It was directed by the supremely odd Robert Downey Senior, and will give you a clear hint that Downey Junior’s early drug problems may have been inherited.

But in one sense, Hugh was never really alive, at least not in the way that we normally conceive of life.

He would have been a perfect choice for one of those “Is he alive or dead?” quizzes. I probably haven’t thought about Hugh Downs in decades, and had no idea that he was alive.

“’The Guinness Book of World Records’ recognized Downs as having logged more hours in front of the camera than any television personality until Regis Philbin passed him in 2004.”

Sacha is a genius! It was basically a reprise of his famous “Throw the Jew Down the Well” stunt.

The comedian got the rally’s conservative crowd to sing along with him about injecting Obama, Dr. Fauci and others with the “Wuhan flu.” According to event organizers, Baron Cohen first disguised himself as the leader of a PAC that wanted to sponsor the rally and then hired his own security – to block them from getting him off the stage or cutting off the power once he had started performing.

More of the song here.

Catchy tune, I was singing along.

Obama, what we gotta do?
Inject him with the Wuhan flu

Hillary Clinton, what we gotta do
Lock her up, like we used to do.

Journalists, what we gotta do?
Chop them up like the Saudis do

Chinese people, what ya gotta do
Nuke them up like in world war two

Scientists, what ya gotta do
Feed ’em to the bears like the Chechens do

and so on

I watched it last night. The movie is way too long to begin with. Many of the acts, which might have been good for a laugh in snippets, go on for the entire duration of a song, thus dragging the film out for more than two hours. The basic thrust of the plot is almost completely predictable, and the jokes are too far apart. It’s an 80-minute comedy conveniently padded out with 45 minutes of bad singing.

The problem is that the Eurovision competition is one of those things that’s almost impossible to satirize, like Tiny Tim or The Gong Show, because it is already self-satirizing. It’s weird and campy and over-the-top. It’s more than a little creepy, and after all these decades, the acts still seem to take place in 1974. What can you really say about a contest where the contestants dream of being as good as ABBA? It’s like deciding to do stand-up in the hope of someday being as good as Pauly Shore.

Having noted all that, I’ll add that the woman who dubbed Rachel McAdams’s singing is pretty darned good, Demi Lovato has a solid cameo, Iceland looks like a pretty cool place, and I did get a few laughs from a weird sub-plot about how Icelandic elves are real.

Was keeping it quiet but since everyone else is sharing, I feel like it is my responsibility to share this PSA: YOU CAN GET COVID-19 MORE THAN ONCE!” Braxton wrote on Twitter. “I had it back in early March and then thought I was invincible after I recovered. Not true. Don’t be dumb like me.”

“Brooklyn Nine-Nine is going back to the drawing board in light of the recent nationwide protests against police violence.

The NBC cop comedy is already set to return for an eighth season, but cast member Terry Crews told Access Daily that the writers are scrapping all the episodes they’ve written for next season and starting from scratch. “

There is one true and lasting cultural legacy that he left. I know because it was mentioned in every single obit I scanned: he added nipples to the Bat-suit.

He had an eye for talent, and a career almost anyone would envy. He made a great living by writing and/or directing a crapload of other films that rarely, if ever, involved Bat-nipples.

I never really gave it any thought, but now I realize I was not a fan. As I looked through his filmography, I realized that I’ve seen almost every film he ever made, and could not find a single one that I want to watch again.

Farewell to the ultimate supporting player. He was Bilbo in the Lord of the Rings films, and played Napoleon more than once. If I can name a favorite movie, he was probably in it: Henry V, Lord of War, The Sweet Hereafter, The Fifth Element, Brazil, Alien, Robin and Marian …

Although he may have been the greatest supporting actor of the past 40 years or so, he never won an Oscar for his efforts. He was nominated only once, long ago, for Chariots of Fire. He was nominated for six BAFTAs, but won only once, and that was 52 years ago (!!), for The Bofors Gun.