It looks like Tbogg has taken the pledge too. He’s all over the new Big Hollywood recruit, Jude, who turned in a spectacularly incoherent first post at BH. One of the first lines is:
Drink, and let us hope the ‘morrow has mercy, because they won’t.
There’s something about the combination of literary affectation and flawed verb-subject agreement that always amuses me (update: it’s possible that “they” refers to liberals). From there, it devolves into a 500 word rant about McCain’s green screen.
Tbogg finds this in the new guy’s bio:
Jude has also penned the main title songs for The Ellen Show(2001), the 2nd season of VH1’s Surreal Life, and ABC’s critical smash, Cavemen.
The whole bio is worth a read.
Reverend Dennis
So what’s the over/under on how long it will be before Big Hollywood reluctantly announces that it’s folding while vowing to fight on against whatever the hell it’s fighting against?
Mazacote Yorquest
We should have a "Jude bio" contest for various fields, from sports to politics to entertainment. String three sad-sack items together, making sure to laughably inflate the importance of the last.
___________
Mazacote Yorquest was Animation Production Assistant for "Press Your Luck" (credited with "Boy George Whammy"), designed the cover for "Algebra 2: An Incremental Development," and arranges the marquis letters at Fayetteville’s world-famous Community Theater. He is applying to be head of development at Pixar.
Zifnab
Whenever the right-wing beau funding this operation decides to pull the plug. Could be weeks, could be decades. Just depends on how crazy and nihilistic BH’s sponsors are.
At a certain point, I’m betting they’ll live on just because they’re so cheap to support.
cosanostradamus
.
WAIT!
I writ the themus musicalus from "Cavemen"!
But prithee, aye…
Nope, it were "Cavewomen," a video done but in the Valley. Alas…
The check it did bounced!
Curses!
.
TheFountainHead
Is anyone reading Big Hollywood who isn’t openly mocking it?
I’m guessing the vast majority of their traffic comes from here, Tbogg, and S,N!
DougJ
I’d say four months.
kid bitzer
man, i hate being charitable, but is there any chance that the verb-subject agreement is really okay, because the "they won’t" refers back to some earlier, plural subject? (some merciless plurality–i dunno, maybe steelers fans).
i know, i know–i could check just by clicking the link. but then my mouse would get all…dirty.
Scott
Dammit, why do people like this get a paycheck for writing so much crap. Aren’t there people out there who aren’t idiots who need a paycheck more? (Me, he answered.)
Incertus
@Scott: Are these people getting a paycheck? Or are they doing it gratis a la The Huffington Post? I’d be surprised if they’re getting much if they are getting paid.
Sinister eyebrow
Cut the guy some slack. It’s a typo. He obviously had his fingers on the wrong keys when he typed "Critical smash." It was supposed to be "Critical debacle."
Damn liberal QWERTY keyboards.
Zifnab
@Incertus: They’re probably having web fees and other support costs covered. So there’s a (possibly right-wing) IT manager who banks off this whole affair.
Incertus
@Zifnab: Yeah, you’re not going to get someone to do that for nothing, and I’d imagine whoever passes for a managing editor at that joint is getting something, but if the people who are providing content are getting paid, they’ll blow through their startup capital quick-like.
jibeaux
The whole TBogg is worth a read too.
Awesome.
DougJ
That goes without saying. Having already linked to it twice in the post I didn’t want to flog it too hard.
kid bitzer
wait–you mean the merciless plurality is *liberals*??
oh for….
yes, those notoriously cut-throat, ruthless, implacable…liberals.
man, we got a lot of problems on my side of the aisle.
but a lack of ruth ain’t one of them.
jibeaux
Somehow the formatting on the Jude post was messed up on my screen, but I don’t think its coherence would have been improved by being able to read the last three words of each line anyway. I get the vibe from the comments: McCain lost due to poor production values and Republicans not being "cool".
My schadenfreude levels are off the charts today. What do you take for that, jell-o? Lime jell-o?
Anton Sirius
@Sinister eyebrow:
I assumed Jude typed "Critically smashed", and the end of the words just got truncated.
Joshua Norton
Someone’s bragging they worked on "Cavemen"? That show has the unique distinction of being the only show to jump the shark before it ever aired. It jumped during the Geico commercials.
Since they’re mining TV commercials for show ideas, how about a reality show about the sexiest people in the world who have herpes?
It would be a step up from what he’s done already.
mark r
I got to the paragraph where he-started-doing-this-over-and-over-for- (gotta stop) three lines of very small text. I did read the bio though. That dude must get a hard on every time he looks in the mirror.
Andrew
I just want to step in and defend the cavemen as a concept. The show apparently sucked, but some of the commercials are simply the greatest bits of absurdist modern art. The recent motorcycle commercial is just brilliant.
Pasquinade
Jude’s Wikipedia page needs to be updated. ;)
jake 4 that 1
Critical, as in heart monitors, ventilators, somber discussions about organ donations…
cminus
I actually own Jude’s album "No One Is Really Beautiful." Despite what any reasonable person might guess from his writing on Big Hollywood so far, it’s actually not a bad album — a little bit thinned-out with filler tracks in the middle, perhaps, but with some legitimately good music too. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find out that Jude’s a conservative, though; some of his songs (even one of the good ones, "I’m Sorry Now") do betray the sort of Nice Guy ™-with-ulterior-motive attitude that so reliably gets Amanda Marcotte’s goat.
Jennifer
I still say that everyone should be referring to that site as Big Hollywood Butthurt.
D0n Camillo
Take care lest yon door strike thine ample buttocks as thou parteth.
Fwiffo
Actually, it makes substantially more sense with the formatting error.
After cutting his teeth as pest control officer in the French Foreign Legion, Fwiffo served as assistant editor for the Tandy 1000 user manual and junior software engineer for the PointCasttm Network. He’s currently campaigning to be appointed senator from New York State.
I actually think they’re all pretty good as far as commercials go, but the motorcycle one is just perfect.
ricky
The work of Jude will be a treasure as long as it lasts.
His first post was classic. Unfortunately, he left out the quotation marks for the second and third sentences in this passage, which makes it read like thoughtful introspection instead of a sneaky interruption from his editor.
Of course all of this could have been avoided if he did not write Hemingway style.
ricky
DOn Camillo is close to it.
J.D. Rhoades
I’m with Andrew on this one. The show had real potential, but in execution it totally sucked ass. And I think I have a clue as to the reason. From one of the reviews TBogg quotes:
IIRC, the show was originally supposed to be set in Atlanta. So my guess is network suits got in and started making changes to make it more "accessible", and as usual, just succeeded in making it incoherent.
ricky
Sorry, the editing function threw me. I think I fixed 28 so it works for the Jude I think I perchance will never meet.
blogenfreude
@TheFountainHead: The hits from people mocking them might be enough to keep the site going. So what do we want – the site to fold, or a continuing supply of Grade A wingnuttery to feed this and other blogs?
xochi
My favorite line:
Essentially, he was a conservative while he was a candidate, then he won and had to govern, and all of his problems were because he was a closet liberal. That’s how it works. It seems that Tom DeLay is about the only conservative who’s remained a conservative after leaving office.
Persia
There are some fun True Believers in the comments, too.
Jude I think has a bit of a point, but it’s hard to find among all the incoherence: The visual medium matters, there are professionals who can do this well, and if you want to look as awesome as Barack Obama, you have to pay those professionals, not just cross your fingers and hope your best friend’s second cousin really will work out okay.
Now shit dressed up in a pretty box with a bow on it is still shit, but at least we wouldn’t have had the hideous green screen to mock.
Tom Hilton
For some reason, the IMDb doesn’t even have an entry for Jude…unless he’s this guy, who appears to have worked exclusively in porn.
Fructose
Bah!
Grumpy Code Monkey
@J.D. Rhoades:
I actually liked the show itself; the humor was dry, which is why I think it had trouble finding an audience, but there was some good stuff in there. Nick, of course, was my hero.
DougJ
For the time being, the latter. But when it starts to get old, I’d like it to fold.
dlw32
Re: Cavemen. I never watched it. I find sitcoms in general horrifyingly boring. One based on a commercial would never have stood a chance with me.
I did like the commercials, but like every movie ever made from an SNL skit, somethings that work very well in a short format just don’t have the legs for a longer format. I had assumed that was the problem with the series.
The Grand Panjandrum
New BH topic:
These guys have too much time on their hands.
Pasquinade
@Tom Hilton
IMDb has him listed as Jude Christodal
wolfetone
So, I tried to read Jude’s post and I seriously couldn’t finish it. I lost the narrative somewhere when Jude started talking about soundboards–WTF? Is incoherence a prerequisite for all wingnut writing these days?