Paul Rudnick

Here’s the current country hit from Miranda Lambert and Carrie Underwood. I
like both of them because they look like a couple of lively, bored checkout
girls at Target, and not just in this video.

This adorable racoon climbed into the microwave right beside a bag of popcorn, and what happens next will make you laugh and then hate yourself!

This overweight woman decided to zoom down the waterslide head first, and what happens next will make you forward this video to all of your friends, one of whom won’t think it’s funny!

This great white shark just wanted to say hello to the guy in the kayak, and what happens next will make you wish you didn’t own a computer!

When this little boy decides to jump up and down on his backyard trampoline until he makes himself sick, what happens next will make you question the fact that you knew what was going to happen next, but you kept watching anyway!

When this man wearing a clown suit on the subway decides to expose himself to a grandmother and her six grandchildren from Ohio, what happens next will make you pray that the clown makeup made you unrecognizeable!

As a chapter in my continuing celebration of American crafts, may I present some poodle projects. Actual poodles are an ideal crafting inspiration, as they seem like something which God came up with, after He’d purchased too much pink yarn. Poodles are one of the few animal breeds, along with bunnies and baby chicks, which people like to dye bright colors. I’ve always especially loved two specific poodle projects: first, the use of a crocheted poodle to disguise a roll of toilet paper. And next, the classic chrysthanthemum poodle. Both of these ideas seem jubilant and tortured at the same time.

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I once gave my friend Todd Ruff the most perverse gift of all time: I had found, somewhere, a ceramic decanter shaped like a poodle. There were at least six detachable ceramic shot glasses hanging off the mother poodle, and the shot glasses were molded and glazed to look like they were made out of poodle fur. This gift was so grotesque that it made Todd physically uncomfortable, and he immediately stashed it in a dark closet, and he finally claimed that he’d re-gifted it, but I have my suspicions. I wonder if Todd killed that poodle, and I wouldn’t blame him. In Todd’s honor, here’s a poodle-inspired greeting card:

Tragically, there is no photographic record of the original poodle decanter. But these photos will give you the general idea. WARNING: do not look at these photos right before you go to sleep.

I’m just going to say it, right out loud: I want a Transformer, because I think they’re adorable. They look like Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em robots combined with those expensive Dyson vacuum cleaners with the rotating ball. The latest Transformers movie is called Transformers: Age of Extinction, but it might also be named Transformers: An International Blockbuster Because CGI Destruction Is The Universal Language. Transformers also remind me of those garden ornaments which you can find at at any tag sale, where someone has welded together discarded iron gears, rusty fireplace tongs and flattened tin cans to create something which almost looks like a stick figure tipping its hat.

The racial politics of the Transformers are insane, because some of the robots wear vaguely tribal mechanical outfits and speak with cartoony ethnic accents; they’re like three-story-high American Girl dolls who can level entire cities. As far as I can tell, the good Transformers are the Autobots and the bad guys are the Decepticons, but this installment also brings us robot dragons and robot dinosaurs, although there still don’t seem to be any female Transformerettes. Basically, the Transformers are just another attempt in the great American search to develop dolls for little boys, while calling them action figures, so that those little boys, and their Dads, can feel more masculine when buying butch accessories for their Cabbage Patch militias.

In T:AOE, Mark Wahlberg plays an eccentric midwestern inventor with a barn full of junk, as if he’s waiting for the teams from American Pickers or Pawn Stars to drop by and make him an offer for that ancient player piano. As always, the female lead in any Transformers movie is played by a centerfold-ready hottie wearing Daisy Dukes and not much else; this character’s job is to constantly get into trouble so she can scream and require rescuing. This time out, Mark’s daughter is the babe-in-residence. When we first meet her, she’s just received a letter denying her a scholarship, most likely from Hooters. I kept waiting for Mark to wade into his mountains of debris and comfort his little girl by finding her a stripper pole.

For the first hour, T:AOE is really fun, because the characters banter and the robots are still mostly disguised as sportscars and big-rig trucks. The moment when a Transformer transforms, ingeniously re-engineeering itself from toaster to titan, is always magical – it’s like when the Fairy Godmother swirls Cinderella’s rags and tatters into a shimmering ballgown. But once the robots begin scaling office buildings and tossing Chinese cruise ships around, the movie starts to seem endless, and all of the Transformers blur into indistinguishable spare parts. I asked my husband Josh if he could tell which Transformer was which, and he rolled his eyes and snorted, “Of course I can, because I’m a guy. And guys know that the yellow sportscar turns into the yellow Transformer. Duh.”

Mark Wahlberg is always fun, because he’s like a soccer Dad on a rainy day who still won’t accept defeat. Kelsey Grammer and Stanley Tucci also show up, but most of the human cast members end up yelling things like “We’re out of time!” or “We have to get to the warehouse!” There’s also a wonderful actor named T.J. Miller, who’s a regular on HBO’s Silicon Valley as well; he specializes in playing slow-moving couch creatures who imagine they’re irresistible studs. I’m not sure what T.J. is playing in T:AOE, but once he was gone, I really missed him.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that by midway through this movie, no one involved, including the director and the screenwriter, could remember what the plot was. Everyone probably would just show up for work, and someone would say, “Okay, what if the Transformers blew up a secret government lab?” and then someone else would say, “Yeah, let’s do that!” And then someone else might whisper, “But didn’t we do that yesterday?” but everyone would ignore him.

Still, I need a personal Transformer, which I would use as a stapler, a shredder and as an especially gifted Swiffer product, to dust ceiling fans. The Transformers are like gadgets which you could order from Hammacher Schlemmer or the old Sharper Image catalogue, because you’re not sure what they do, you don’t really need them, but they might be useful for sorting loose change or trimming nose hairs. And besides, it’s hard to hate any movie which includes lines like “Release the mini-drones!”, if you ask me.

I have a Shouts&Murmurs piece in this week’s New Yorker, which deals with the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision, and its impact on the crafting community.

In honor of Hobby Lobby, today I’d like to share some images of one of my favorite crafting subsets: bowling pin transformations. When I was a Cub Scout, I was assigned to paint a bowling pin to look like a uniformed Cub Scout, with a yellow crepe paper neckerchief (sadly, no image of my handiwork exists.) While I loved my bowling pin, even as a child I found the idea disturbing, because aren’t bowling pins designed to be knocked down?

As you can see, savvy crafters have created bowling pin cats, bumblebees and poodles. Bowling pins wearing little hats and scarves is a popular motif, which makes me wonder: do bowling pins get chilly?

And don’t the ghost bowling pins remind you of Edvard Munch’s The Scream? If Munch had worked with bowling pins?

Whenever characters on TV shows discover a dead body, or when another character dies in front of them, the living character tends to fall to his or her knees, reach imploringly towards heaven, and howl, “No!!!”
This may be where many people acquire their notions of appropriate grief.

The Meryl Streep movie, A Cry In The Dark, was based on the true story of Lindy Chamberlain, an Australian woman whose baby disappeared from a campsite. Lindy was an extremely reserved and even a chilly person, and her lack of obvious, histrionic grief was used against her, and she went on trial for murdering her own child. It was eventually proven that a dingo, which is a kind of vicious Australian coyote, had in fact killed the child (this was the movie which turned “A dingo ate my baby!” into a punchline.)

Elizabeth Smart was the Mormon teenager who was kidnapped and molested by a religious psychopath and his wife. When Elizabeth escaped, after months in captivity, she seemed extraodrinarily capable, aware and well-adjusted, after such a horrific ordeal. At the time, Smart’s behavior, and her religious faith, caused a certain wariness in the public, because Smart was refusing to perform the role of a tearful victim, and while she eventually wrote a book and made the rounds of various media, she seemed unwilling to fully exploit her own suffering. She’s since become an activist, working to fight sex trafficking and abductions.

A few days ago, another psychotic gunman, in Texas, whose wife had left him, killed his in-laws, including both parents and four children. Another daughter, a teenager, survived because, while wounded, she pretended to be dead, and she was able to alert the police, who tracked down the killer. This teenager appeared on TV today, speaking at a memorial for her family. She was fresh-faced and articulate, and even smiled and laughed, and quoted a passage from Harry Potter. At first, this struck me as odd, until I thought: under such hideous circumstances, how should she behave? What would be the “correct” or “appropriate” response? What are grief and shock supposed to look like? That teenager had to not only endure the deaths of her family members, but now her affect would be judged by the rest of the world, including me.

At funerals and memorials, some folks cry buckets, while others don’t, and it’s dangerous to grade the depth of anyone else’s grief, on the basis of a public display.

As a Jew, I of course treasure this video of Texas Governor
Rick Perry, dancing at Chanukkah with Orthodox Rabbis:

Although my favorite part is this: when I looked for this video
on Youtube, it was listed as “Rick Perry Dancing With Rabies.”

Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, recently lost his bid for
re-election, and there’s now the distinct possibility of the
Republicans having no Jewish representation in Congress for the
first time in over 50 years, although there are currently 30
Democratic Jewish congresspeople. Beverly Goldstein, a Republican
donor from Beechwood, Ohio, bemoaned this state of affairs
after a meeting of the Republican Jewish coalition in Washington,
telling the New York Times, “Sometimes a Jewish person just
wants to be able to go to Congress and speak with a Jewish person.”

Overheard during such conversations:

“What is it with Boehner and the tanning? He looks like my
Aunt Marjorie, in Boca. And she’s a smoker.”

“Hillary? What kind of a name is that? Why doesn’t she
just call herself Shelley the Shiksa?”

“When people attack Sarah Palin, just because she’s an idiot,
do you know what I tell them? She’s still a very pretty girl.”

“I think we need a Jewish Tea Party. We could name it
Coffee Talk.”

“Call me crazy, but Hobby Lobby is the most gentile-sounding
business I’ve ever heard of. Why didn’t they just call
it Goys’R’Us?”

“Why can’t George Clooney marry a Jewish girl, just to help
the situation in the Middle East? Would it kill him?”

“Why does he have to be named Chris Christie? Why?”

And now all of the Crumbs bakeries have closed. Of course, I blame myself. I just didn’t eat enough cupcakes. I tried. I visited branches of the Crumbs franchise all over this country. I bought John Crumbs gift cards on more than one occasion. John and I had just celebrated the cat’s birthday with a Crumbs layer cake, which was moist and delicious. Some people have griped that Crumbs cupcakes could be dry, but this was rarely my experience. I never ate the more elaborate Crumbs efforts, like the cupcakes with half a Snickers bar emerging from the top, or the Passover cupcakes with edible Stars of David, but I was glad they existed, along with that frightening full-sized cake shaped like a giant cupcake.

If America can subsidize farmers and medical research, and bail out the banks, why can’t we save the brownies?

There was once a great bakery on West 4th Street in the Village. The couple who owned this bakery went through a nasty divorce and the bakery was sold, so that the profits could be divided as part of the settlement. This couple was violently selfish. Why couldn’t they have stayed together for the sake of the lemon squares?

There was a small chain of downtown bakeries called Taylor’s, which closed after 9/11, because the chain’s central bakeries had been destroyed.

Cupcakes are not a trend, doomed to extinction. They are simply experiencing what Wall Street might term a market recalibration. I expect Banksy to stencil a defiant cupcake image on the wall of some corporate headquarters.

Every time a bakery closes, an angel sighs and looks for another bakery.

I didn’t see this last revival of Godspell, but here’s a
terrific clip of Hunter Parrish singing the Stephen Schwartz
song, Beautiful City, at a recording session:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXezjFLTl-c

If a foreign government ever kidnapped me, duct-taped me to a chair, and threatened to torture me unless I revealed certain secrets which would imperil everyone in the Unite States, the foreign agents wouldn’t have to start hacking off my fingers or clamping electrodes onto various tender areas of my body. If they wanted me to tell everything I knew, without a second’s hesitation, they would just have to make me try and do math.

On my SATs, the discrepency between my Math scores and my Verbal scores was so great that the testing organization questioned the result. It was as if while I’d personally taken the Verbal portion, a raccoon had taken the Math.

When I was looking on Wikepedia to see if there was a word for an all-pervasive fear of math, the entry began with a discussion of math anxiety, which is caused by just thinking about math. I found this so upsetting that I couldn’t finish reading the rest of the entry. Although as far as I could tell, there is no technical or Latin term for this condition. Which made me feel even more pathetic. It’s as if Wikepedia informed me, “Oh, we believe the word you’re looking for is STUPID.”

My Dad was a Math major and he was incredibly kind and patient, as he tried to very slowly and methodically walk me through, say, geometry. He would ask me something like, “So if B equals C-squared, and then we carry the 12, the result would be…?” I would stare at him, as if I was a dog waiting to hear a familiar word, like “leash” or “food.” There might be a micro-second when I actually grasped what a theorem was, but then that revelation would vanish, never to return. My Dad refused to give up, even when I would beg him to hit me in the head with a crowbar, because it might help.

It’s true and everyone knows it: as an adult, you will never need math. There will always be someone nearby, often someone with a computer, who can do fractions. One of the many reasons why I love my partner John is that, at a restaurant, he can always calculate the correct tip.

Feminists became justifiably outraged when a Barbie doll was once manufactured with a microchip which said, among other things, “Math is hard.” BARBIE WAS RIGHT.

Whenever a handsome, hunky young actor appears on the scene, the following groups of people, without a shred of evidence, will announce that this actor is gay:

1. Straight guys, who don’t want the competition

2. Gay guys, who are desperate to believe that they’d somehow have a chance with this new dreamboat

3. Straight women, who don’t want to be burned again by falling for another gay guy

Only lesbians seem immune from this syndrome. And as a rule, no one ever cares about outing character actors.

Here is the unassailable proof of the star’s gayness, which members of the above groups will offer, both online and everywhere else:

Their cousin went to college with a guy who slept with a guy who slept with the actor.

The actor is married to an older woman and/or has adopted children, which are all dead giveaways.

The actor has turned down gay roles, for fear of being outed.

The actor has played gay roles, far too convincingly.

The actor has nice hair.

The actor works out.

The actor has good manners.

Oh come on, please, everyone knows the actor is gay.

Here’s the only problem with all of this:

The big-name closeted movie stars have been trailed by endless photographic evidence and lawsuits, so there’s not much of a mystery there.

Tom Cruise has been a huge international star for thirty years. If he was secretly gay, does anyone really believe that some ex-boyfriend wouldn’t have sold his story by now?
And yes, years ago, a desperate gay porn star sued Tom Cruise; this suit was instantly dismissed and was clearly nonsense.
I’m not quite sure why so many people have a visceral need for Tom Cruise to be gay. This need can turn ugly and oddly homophobic. Isn’t it healthier to celebrate all of the many wonderfully talented, openly gay performers?

And yes, bringing your Mom as your date to the Oscars or the Golden Globes can look a bit suspicious, but it’s never definitive.

Deciding not to buy something, or trying to buy something and discovering that it’s no longer available, or no longer available in the right size or color, is just another form of death. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross once coined her now-famous five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depresssion and acceptance. Here’s the eBay version:

1. Denial: WHERE DID IT GO? The listing was here two seconds ago! Is there something wrong with my computer? I’m sure it will be re-listed by tommorrow! I bet that the Small fits like a slightly snug Medium, right? Which is how people are wearing everything nowadays, right?

2. Anger: I haven’t bought anything in almost TWO DAYS, I fucking DESERVED that new-with-tags yogurt maker, even if I fucking HATE yogurt! I hope whoever bought it before I could has an UNDIAGNOSED YOGURT ALLERGY and DIES! Why is everyone so fucking concerned about Syria when I didn’t get my fucking YOGURT MAKER! I hope eBay DIES!!!

3. Bargaining: If I give ten dollars to both Unicef and to fight fracking, then I’ve earned that new leather jacket, right? I held the door for two people at the cash machine today, which I only did because it was the right thing to do, but wouldn’t it be cool if those shoes I wanted just happened to go on sale on the SAME DAY? Wouldn’t that restore my face in the universe, huh? Okay, I’m going to pray for my grandma’s fibromyalgia to respond to that new medication she saw on TV, which gives me an existential bonus coupon which I can redeem for a new iPad, even though my old iPad still works perfectly fine, right?

4. Depression: If I can’t have that new pair of earrings, then why should I even try, at my job or my marriage or anything else? Without those earrings, my whole life is just an endless trudge to oblivion, so why don’t I just cut off my ears with a Swiss army knife, it’s not like I need my ears anymore, not without those new earrings. Did you see that new study where researchers have found that people who don’t buy new earrings are 34% more likely to stop exercising and develop blood clots? If I develop blood clots and die I’ll have to be buried in a closed coffin so people won’t see that I’m still wearing those old, tired, ugly earrings.

5. Acceptance: My life is completely full and satisfying without another perfect white t-shirt, even though it was really the most perfect white t-shirt I’ve ever seen. I don’t need another navy blue cashmere sweater from J.Crew to be happy. Just looking at the sweater online makes me happy, many times a day, when I’m supposed to be working. Even if I never own the best independant label, perfectly cut black pants, which would make my butt look amazing, I can still contribute joy to the world. Just not as much joy. Or any joy at all, ever. No, I’m fine. Really.