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Nine Minors Trapped in Shaft August 5, 2002 |
St. Petersburg, FL Junior Bacon Teen Mariel Lindemeur provides a cell-phone lifeline of hope for boyfriend J.J., trapped inside
The pounding and cries of “What the fuck, man?” created “a glimmer of hope” that the teens, who had paid $1.75 each to see the disappointing 2000 Samuel L. Jackson vehicle Shaft Sunday afternoon, were safe, said Betsy Mulroony, a spokeswoman for Gulf Coast Cinema.
“It is a race against time because the movie is still playing in there,” she said. “The last thing we want i...
ine Florida teens were trapped in a St. Petersburg dollar theater Sunday after local hooligans wedged numerous pennies between the theater doors and doorframe, theater officials said. Pounding noises and loud complaining from inside the theater indicated at least some were alive as theater employees wandered around and stared at the ceiling in a vague attempt to rescue them. The pounding and cries of “What the fuck, man?” created “a glimmer of hope” that the teens, who had paid $1.75 each to see the disappointing 2000 Samuel L. Jackson vehicle Shaft Sunday afternoon, were safe, said Betsy Mulroony, a spokeswoman for Gulf Coast Cinema. “It is a race against time because the movie is still playing in there,” she said. “The last thing we want is for these kids to have to sit through the film’s gratuitously violent, unsatisfying finale. We’re doing everything we can to get those doors open.” Theater employee Jared Wenham first realized that something was not right when he walked by the theater doors at around 3:30 p.m. and heard a loud pounding noise. Jared attempted unsuccessfully to open the doors, then brought the problem to the attention of his supervisor, Dickie Nelson. Nelson recalled hearing the pounding upon passing the theater doors minutes earlier, but had assumed the noises were part of the film’s THX soundtrack. “Like I’ve seen fucking Shaft,” Nelson explained, obviously annoyed by the implication. Nelson pounded a tentative “shave and a haircut” on the theater door, and when the answering knock came back “two bits,” his worst fears were confirmed. Nelson went outside for a smoke break, then came back inside fifteen minutes later to begin coordinating the rescue efforts. The theater’s three employees proceeded to work in shifts to free the teens, alternately tugging at the door handles and putting their weight into trying to push the doors open, as no one could recall whether the doors swung in or out. While one employee worked on the doors, the other two stood nearby to shout encouragement and tactical advice such as “lefty loosey, righty tighty,” that was of little practical value. After twenty minutes of concentrated rescue efforts, the theater employees were taking a hard-earned Icee break when approached by local teen Brandon McFie, who told a harrowing tale made even more chilling by the theater’s overzealous air conditioning system and the freshly squeezed Icees. McFie explained that he had been one of the nine teens trapped inside the theater, but he had managed to escape after noticing the lighted exit signs to the left and the right of the screen, which indicated doors leading to the theater’s parking lot. Theater employees raced against time to relay this new information through the jammed doors to the teens still trapped inside, but their task was made nearly impossible by the film’s pounding soundtrack and frequent gun battles. Morse Code was suggested as an ideal solution, but was then scrapped when minutes later it was discovered that “S.O.S.” was the only message the on-hand personnel knew how to signal, and this wasn’t especially useful given the situation. Workers resorted to old-fashioned yelling and eventually succeeded in conveying the news. The eight remaining teens emerged from the dark theater to the scattered ironic applause of theater employees and derisive comments from a topless man wearing jogging shorts in the parking lot. “I thought we’d never get out of there, yo,” said 16 year-old Ricky Niebolt of their 80-minute ordeal. “I had to piss like a racecar.” “Man, I wasn’t even here to see a movie,” insisted acne-scarred Chad Runion of Brooksville. “Especially not this Shaft bullshit. I was on my way over to knock up some little 15 year-old slut or some shit, you know? Gettin’ my thang on, ba-bang. I just came up in here cuz I thought it was a condom store. Yeah. Not like I use the things though.” Though the teens all escaped the theater unharmed, authorities are looking at suspects in the theater door penny-jamming, and are investigating Gulf Coast Cinemas for taking advantage of the poorly informed and suicidally bored by charging admission to see two year-old movies that are readily available on cable and as gas station rentals. Observers site the incident as the worst movie theater mishap since dozens of people were extremely bored during a screening of Gremlins 2: The New Batch in New York in 1990, when theater employees thoughtlessly left several large trash bins in front of the exit doors. the commune news has also been rescued by idiots countless times when faced with a terrifying deadline. Thanks, Bush Administration. Ramon Nootles didn’t really want to hurt you, but 80’s pop star or no, that’s his spot on the elevator.
 | Michelangelo's Magna Doodle DiscoveredMagnetic drawing toy, possibly worth $12 million, discovered in coatroom of New York's Cooper-Hewitt museum July 22, 2002 |
The doodle in question looked a lot like this, only brilliant
Magna Doodle drawing determined to have been done by Michelangelo himself may be worth between $12 million and a kajillion dollars, according to students at Art Lowenstein's School of Art Appraisal in Hoboken, NJ. The doodle was unearthed among assorted art-related toys from the Renaissance period in what used to be a child's rumpus room, according to officials at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. The unsigned doodle is of a half-man, half-bear — some call it a Manimal — standing on a three-dimensional see-through box, beneath a sky filled with different-sized eyes and concentric triangles, according to officials. The Manimal has a river of snakes flowing somehow magically out of his armpit, and the single word "Gwyneth" is scrawled mysteriously near the border between several squiggles. Experts place the time of the doodling in the mid-1500s, making it one of the oldest Magna Doodlings on record.
The Magna Doodle was plucked from a chest of toys in the museum's coatroom, formerly a child's rumpus room when the museum was home to a family of Austrian squatters in the late 1800's. Such a discovery is considered to be "a fucking mind-blower," Cooper-Hewitt Director Paul Thompson said in a telephone interview. "I didn't even know they made those things back then."
The Magna Doodle was found in a chest of toys that also included a Magnetic Wonder Whiskers toy that may have belonged to Michelangelo, and an unidentified drawing toy that involved using a solid plastic pencil to draw on a sheet of static cling film that was erased when you peeled the sheet away from the backing, Thompson said.
The museum, part of the Washington-based Smithsonian Institution, purchased the Magna Doodle within a group of five magnetic art toys in 1842, for $1. The purchase was ridiculed by some at the time, but honored as it fulfilled the wishes of then-Director Hyram McWinter, who often said "If it's artsy, I want it." By often we mean like every five minutes, it drove people crazy.
Museum scholars guessed the work might have been done by a 16th century magnetic artist Benny del Bacon, who often fobbed off his doodles on the art community of that day as "pre-surrealist deconstructionalism." Somehow it got into the wrong box and was almost sold at a museum garage sale, only to be saved by a demanding child who lived in the Cooper-Hewitt at the time.
"It's the old cliche: Renaissance master doodles a masterpiece on a child's magnetic toy, museum buys it on accident and almost sells it for nothing before snotty little Austrian kid steals it off the nickel table and hides it in his toy chest for 100 years," Thompson said.
It was first identified as a Michelangelo in April by Sir Clifford Buford, director of the National Galleries of Scotland or something, during an unauthorized surprise inspection of the Cooper-Hewitt. Buford, an Italian Renaissance scholar and air hockey freak, was rummaging around the coatroom of the design museum looking for a nice umbrella when he came across a toy chest simply labeled "Piss Off." One particular toy inside the chest caught his eye. 'My Crap, this is a Michelangelo!"' he exclaimed, not anticipating being quoted later.
While the experts agree on the artist, there is no agreement on how the doodle fits into the larger body of Michelangelo's work.
The Manimal's genitalia is only inferred, but the doodle clearly shows where they should go, said Sarah Lawrence, the museum's expert on the Italian Renaissance magnet-based arts. However, a cat doodled in the background features an alarmingly oversized penis, raising questions about Michelangelo's state of mind at the time of the doodling.
"You recognize a Michelangelo as you recognize a friend," Buford said by courier fox from Florence. "If you're familiar with a friend, and you're walking down the street, you wave to them. They may wave back, or they may duck into a shop to avoid being seen with you on the street. I rather think Michelangelo's doodle waved back. Either that, or these things here are ass cheeks; probably this Gwyneth person's. Though I'd always heard he was gay."
The Magna Doodle will go on display at the Cooper-Hewitt museum in about a year, next to a wild scratch-paper doodle Picasso did while on the phone with his mother, Thompson said. the commune news drew a great picture of a horse once, and the commune news doesn't care what anyone else thought about it. Ivana Folger-Balzac is apparently impervious to bullets, knives, and any insult known to man.
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 August 5, 2002 The Story of the UnidsYou see, there were these teeny tiny people who lived in a doll Tamara bought at the mall and though they were quite peaceful and kind, when they came out to introduce themselves she thought they were fleas and sprayed the whole lot of them with an industrial de-lousing agent that really was chemically harsh and probably not something pregnant women should get within 50 yards of.
The people, who were called Unids, by the way, didn't die from the spray but rather developed a thick tolerance for the stuff, like French people with sarcasm. As the old saying goes, that which doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, but the part they left out is that it also gets you high as shit. When the Unids finally came down after a fantastic three days of psychedelic reverie and a full-body ...
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You see, there were these teeny tiny people who lived in a doll Tamara bought at the mall and though they were quite peaceful and kind, when they came out to introduce themselves she thought they were fleas and sprayed the whole lot of them with an industrial de-lousing agent that really was chemically harsh and probably not something pregnant women should get within 50 yards of.
The people, who were called Unids, by the way, didn't die from the spray but rather developed a thick tolerance for the stuff, like French people with sarcasm. As the old saying goes, that which doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, but the part they left out is that it also gets you high as shit. When the Unids finally came down after a fantastic three days of psychedelic reverie and a full-body buzz, they no longer cared about uptight square concerns like whether the inside of the doll was a mess or if they had a contingency plan in place in case the vacuum cleaner came around again. They cared about one thing and one thing only: gettin' some more of that happy juice.
For a while, this was easy, since all they had to do was pop out of the doll when Tamara was around and wave their arms around. Before you could say "Louse in my house!" they were swimming in the good stuff like bennies from heaven. It was wild, I'm talking high on the hog like the '86 Mets. They'd call it the "Salad Days" if salad came with crack as a dressing option.
But the problem was, before too long, Tamara figured out that the Unids weren't fleas at all. Nor mites, nor any kind of vermin she'd ever seen before. After a few weeks the shock wore off and she started looking at the Unids a little closer, and that's when she realized that they were kind of cute. Sort of like tiny little wooden dolls with stylized, painted-on faces. Pretty happy-looking really. And once she'd figured that out, well, then there surely wasn't any reason to de-louse the poor little buggers, was there?
Big, big problem for the Unids. Their connection had dried up like an Arizona housewife hitting menopause. Their future wasn't so bright as to require the wearing of shades, but they wore them anyway, to hide their bloodshot, bugged-out eyes. The Unids were going cold turkey like a third grade class on a picnic field trip to the North Pole, and they liked it about as much as they liked Sarah McLaughlan. Which is to say, not at all.
Finally one day one of the Unids, who shall remain nameless since none of them ever had any names, so why should we start now? They didn't have telephones or fax machines or anything, so they hardly had use for names, "Hey you!" always did them fine and they hated the stuck-up little prick types of little tiny people like the Omits who insisted on everyone calling them by their absurdly long snooty full names, like Alexandarium Mananavicholious Tooterflute.
Anyway, one day one of the Unids figured out that the only way they were going to score again in this lifetime would be if they all put their heads together and came up with some really freakin' scary costumes. If they could manage to scare Tamara bad enough, she just might send some of that sweet, sweet de-lousing spray their way in a panic, and then my friends, the train would be made of gravy. That's what he said anyway, I'm not sure what the train thing supposed to mean, some kind of cultural slang thing that doesn't translate well probably.
So anyway, this is how the Unids honed their now-legendary costuming skills. First, they were dressed as fleas. Then, when Tamara got wise to that, it was skin mites. Then ticks, then moose fleas. I don't think there really is any such thing as "moose fleas," but Tamara didn't know that so I have to give them some points for creativity there. Before long, word got out that the Unids made some pretty wicked costumes, and they soon went into business for themselves and did well enough that they could buy their own delousing spray and they nodded off happily ever after.
A pretty heartwarming story, true. But if you ever get any of those little junkie pricks living in your beanbag chair, you might as well just throw the thing away, because it's just going to stink after that. º Last Column: Shinto the Pintoº more columns | 
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Quote of the Day“Upon being stopped by the Customs Officer during my trip to America, he asked: 'Have you anything to declare?' I burst forward, telling him, 'Only my genius!' I was promptly beaten to a piteous pulp and subjected to a humiliating search. Needless to say, they found my weed.”
-Wildman Oscar DaviesFortune 500 CookieBy next week you will not believe what passes for a blowjob these days. Guess how many quarters I have in my left pocket and I will be quite surprised. I said don't cauliflower last week? I did? That doesn't sound like something I'd say. Remember, trust no one. Including me. If you believe that, you're a fool.
Try again later.Top Worst Opening Lines to Novels| 1. | It was the best of times, no question about it. | | 2. | Call me Crenshaw, Ishmael's brother. | | 3. | I had been up for three days doing coke, paranoid they were going to catch me after I sunk the company with my idiotic business practices; then, my fa | | 4. | I have only eaten three people in my life—this is that story. | | 5. | So I said to my friend Charlie, "Hey, I'm going to write a novel where nothing at all happens," so welcome to it. | |
|   Bush Wishes Everyone Liked Tool As Much As He Does BY roland mcshyster 8/5/2002 Hey hey hey, America! A very Fat Albertesque greeting goes out to all of you out there today. The dog days of summer are upon us, but we're hangin' tough in the most real sense of the phrase, not like a bunch of pampered fifteen year-old singing poofs with their names magic-markered into their underwear elastic. Not like that at all. We're savoring the last month of summer's bounty while preparing to grit our teeth through the movie theater Death Valley that is fall. You all know I've never been a fan of dicking around any longer than is necessary or fashionable, so let's get on with the savoring!
In Theaters
Blood Work
Note to the last three desperate fanboys out there who are still arguing...
Hey hey hey, America! A very Fat Albertesque greeting goes out to all of you out there today. The dog days of summer are upon us, but we're hangin' tough in the most real sense of the phrase, not like a bunch of pampered fifteen year-old singing poofs with their names magic-markered into their underwear elastic. Not like that at all. We're savoring the last month of summer's bounty while preparing to grit our teeth through the movie theater Death Valley that is fall. You all know I've never been a fan of dicking around any longer than is necessary or fashionable, so let's get on with the savoring!
In Theaters
Blood Work
Note to the last three desperate fanboys out there who are still arguing that Clint Eastwood isn't getting old: His latest thriller revolves around the premise of waiting for blood test results to see if his character does or does not have Alzheimer's. Can you handle the suspense? Was his recent pantsless serenade of the president's daughter the result of neurofibrillary tangles and senile plaques in his brain, or has he just been out on the range too long? And if it isn't the former, can he remember the number for his defense attorney? Meanwhile, a sadistic killer is leaving Eastwood clues at the crime scenes that may allow him to crack the case wide open… or is Clint just forgetting to pick up after himself? And who changed all the presets on his car stereo?
Full Frontal
With all of the premiers and screenings and special viewings that Hollywood movies have these days, it's often necessary for a director to watch his own movie up to a half-dozen times, whether he likes it or not. Usually this isn't a big deal, but since Steven Spielberg's last movie was the eight-hour floater A.I., I had to wonder what effect this would have on him. The answer is clear in Spielberg's latest film, which can be best described as a valentine to the lobotomy. America's favorite talking reindeer, Julia Roberts, stars as the film's lobotomized heroine who discovers that life, network sitcoms and popular music are all a lot more fun once you've had your cerebellum neutered. Roberts drools her way through the role with an intensity I thought she reserved only for People magazine photo shoots.
Love and a Ballet
Love and Basketball director and "funniest pseudonym" award winner Gina Prince-Bythewood tries to double-dip that chip and gets burned bad in this terribly conceived urban drama. Rap star Treacle stars as a hip-hoppin' mad black ballet star who falls in love with a French ballerina and must learn to do ballet by the rules, something that goes against all of his trash-talking street-style ballet instincts. Once again, Hollywood overestimates urban America's taste for ballet and rap stars in tights. If somebody doesn't get shot at the premiere, I'm going to call and ask for my money back.
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio of Disguise
Lately it seems like everybody is trying to cash in on the unexpected success of 1999's Being John Malkovich by grafting a real celebrity onto their own half-assed pot brainstorm. This time the premise is that the chick from Robin Hood is dressed up as Dana Carvey, playing herself in drag in a movie about an Italian waiter. If you're confused, don't feel bad: they had to film the movie in sections with three different crews so nobody would try to figure out what it was supposed to be about, which became necessary after three gaffers exploded during pre-production. In the end, the film is just a run-of-the-mill mindfuck, about on par with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Beaches.
Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Diaries
Everybody's favorite anonymous preteen Latino superspies go AWOL and give up the spy game when they discover a secret island crammed to the gills with kids' diaries, stolen by the evil chimpanzee minions of Professor Nosprabloom. Can their crotchety 30 year-old parents convince them that saving the world is more important than laughing their asses off all day while they read the private confessions of every kid alive? The parents come armed with stacks of US Weekly and People magazines as a form of eavesdropping methadone, but will it be enough? The franchise is back with another worthy installment that's a big improvement over Spy Kids Breakdance Fever and Spy Kids and Mary Kate & Ashley's Best Sleepovers. Everyone's as good as you'd expect them to be, but to be honest I don't think they can get away with casting Cheech Marin as a ten year-old much longer.
XXX
Oscar winner Tom Hanks is out to sabotage his typecast image as a bedwetting malcontent in this gruff action thriller cut from the same cloth as Buford's Beach Bunnies and Jeff Speakman's With a Grenade Crammed Up Your Ass. Don't let the title get you too excited, though, all three of the X-es refer to Hanks' three ex-wives, who have hatched a diabolical plan to mess up his shit and take over Eastern Europe as a side-note. Many in the audience won't even recognize Hanks, who put on over 100 pounds of beef for the role and pulls off the monotone part so well you'll think he can't act at all. Easily Hanks' best "against-the-grain" role since he played that scary-assed clown in Stephen King's Itshay.
That's all she wrote, boys and girls. Be sure to swing back this way in two weeks to see what's washed up, dead and bloated, on the shores of entertainment. You can bet Roland will be there, poking it with a stick and taking detailed notes. Until that time, watch one for me, America.   |
