ISSUE 08-24

Pretentious Rock Star Poses, #4



Can you believe there’s a sub-genre of indie rock called “post-shoegaze”? Huh? But it sounds kind of cool, so we, the band known as Silversun Pickups, will embrace it all the way to the bank, or at least the Wal~Mart clearance bin in late 2009. Fame is not something that matters to us, really. In fact, if you look at the far left side of this picture, you’ll see that one of us wasn’t aware there was a photo shoot going on. Really, even with the rest of us doing our "too cool to pose" poses for the camera, even with the photographer mere feet away, even with the extremely bright lights and general mayhem of a photo shoot, he simply had no idea. None. Nada. Zip.


Pretentious Actress Vanity Projects
Gwynnie say: be happy!

In an unprecedented act of generosity, Gwyneth Paltrow has bestowed the world with her secrets to living a successful life. Aren’t you excited? Go on, take a look…

“Make your life good. Invest in what's real. Cook a meal for someone you love. Pause before reacting. Clean out your space. Read something beautiful. Treat yourself to something. Go to a city you've never been to. Learn something new. Don't be lazy. Workout and stick with it. GOOP. Make it great.”

UPDATE! Gwynnie’s original website concept did not test-market quite as well…

“Castrate a turtle. Bulldoze a shopping mall. Give a hobo a ‘happy ending’. Marry a douchebag. Make your life seedy. Invest in Chinese sweatshops. Cut people off, in conversation and on the road. Tell someone to whom you’re indifferent to jump off a building. Go to a small town you’ve never wanted to go to, and then burn down the mom-and-pop grocery store. Unlearn the alphabet. Don’t be curious. Eat donuts until you puke. POOP. Life is… meh.”


Suspected (but never charged) in over 300 small-town grocery store arsons


From the archives (and I came up blank this week): 2004/06/17
Bloc Quebecois Candidate Struggling

EASTEND, SK - Andre Lambert hates door-to-door canvassing the most.

“I tell them who I am, and they look puzzled,” says the Bloc Quebecois (BQ) candidate running in the upcoming federal election. “They wonder what I’m doing there, or they swear at me, and then they slam the door.”

Lambert is the only BQ candidate running outside of Quebec. He is trying to unseat the incumbent MP in the riding of Cypress Creek, Saskatchewan.

Preaching Quebec separatism in the Prairie breadbasket, Lambert’s message often falls on deaf ears.

“Sometimes they do let me speak,” says Lambert, who lost several nomination contests in his home province. “They ask me what I would do about the farm crisis, the BSE scare and so on. And I tell them I will have no time for that, because as their member of parliament, I will be busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest, trying to separate Quebec from Canada!”

“Some people, they have punched me in the face,” says Lambert, sporting a crooked nose and two black eyes. “But these fools, don’t they read the papers? As a committed sovereigntist and member of the Bloc, I have no time for their petty concerns!”

BQ spokesman Daniel Biron-de-Lafayette says the party has “grudgingly” offered support to Lambert, even though he has little chance of winning, and even less chance of helping the Bloc’s cause should he win the Saskatchewan seat.

“He is so revved up to do this, and I think we’re morbidly curious more than anything,” says Biron-de-Lafayette. “We gave him some gas money and a perdiem allowance. He got into his Citroen 2CV and headed west. If we ever seem him again I will be very surprised.”

Lambert sleeps in the driver’s seat of his tiny car. He subsists on a diet of stale French bread, cheap red wine, and Gitanes cigarettes. He is wistful about his chances of winning, and about his life expectancy.

“I am prepared to die for my cause,” says the bruised and battered Lambert as he tries to toast the heel of a baguette with his car’s cigarette lighter. “Throughout our history, great patriots have been persecuted for their beliefs. For example, some teenagers out here, they shaved my eyebrows and gave me a, how do you say, an atomic wedgie. But I will fight on, even with pancaked testicles.”

Area residents plan to complain among each other about that beret-totin’ pansy, passively calling for his expulsion from the region. Petitions will be organized, meetings will be held, and Lambert will go nowhere. Quietly, residents will pray that Crazy Ted Wabash, a committed redneck and former Alliance Party candidate, will finally get early parole, come home, and kill the little French f***er with his bare hands.

But Wabash’s early parole will be delayed a few weeks, because he stabbed a guard last Thursday during an attempted escape. And Lambert has learned a moving target is harder to kill.

“I never park in the same place two nights in a row,” says Lambert. “Last time I did that, some kids, they threw flaming dog poop onto my front seat. Let’s see if they’re still throwing feces when I’m their MP. Or should I say, when I’m their MP, will they still jettent la merde de chien flamboyante?”

Lambert then did that chuckle, the one that smug French bastards do, and drove to his next campaign event, a dine-and-dash at the Pizza Hut in Swift Current.


And finally!
This picture begs for a caption…

The Super-Duper, Four Picture, Extra-Special Twig And Berries Edition!
Please cite the picture number when entering your caption.

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