Warren Spector, creative director of the firm developing the frighteningly three-dimensional Epic Mickey game, explains that everyone's favorite balloon-head is getting the My Scene Barbie treatment:

"I wanted him to be able to be naughty - when you're playing as Mickey you can misbehave and even be a little selfish."

The sexual creepiness here is subtle, which almost makes it worse, because you start wondering if maybe it's all in your head, and you're just the kind of perv who reads a sentence about an "adventurous, enthusiastic and curious" child-like character and suddenly starts wondering, wait, what is the third G in GGG? And: Well, his feet are pretty big. And: In retrospect, he always did dress a bit like a Chippendale dancer.

But seriously, ever since "naughty" crossed paths with "nurse" and "maid" and every female on Hugh Hefner's dance card, it should really just be off-limits to people whose jobs involve children. Luckily, Spector assures us that "Mickey is never going to be evil or go around killing people," mostly because the imagining of him as a coyly naughty-but-nice seducer is psychically troubling enough for one generation.

But the clearest sign of Epic Mickey's rapidly approaching failure is was a bad idea is the fact that it was "dreamed up" by "a group of interns" in 2004. I will do my best to refrain from drawing a gross generalization of what this corpus of Disney video game interns may be like—and what sort of sexual energies they may or may not be subconsciously channeling into their summer projects—but if you have ever entered a room (preferably in a darkened basement) where four, five, perhaps six male video game aficionados were fragging their way through a digitized slumber party, you will know that there is a particular odor of gamey, over-testosteroned adolescent male je ne sais quoi that will attack your sinuses and gag you as though a sweaty gym sock has just been stuffed down your throat. And that will be the scent of Epic Mickey: Stale, festering horror.

Could there be a more appropriate place for The Today Show to introduce their new hire than Cowboys Stadium, the citadel of hideous American excess, out in that vast expanse of glorious, cement kiln soot-laden sprawl midway between Dallas and Fort Worth? (Wikipedia notes that Arlington is "the largest city in the world without a fixed bus route system of mass transit." Everyone's carbon footprint is bigger in Texas!)

Jenna Bush, whatever, she is fine. She is, like most of the children of the ruling elite, a useless leech on society who's produced nothing or value to anyone, ever. And she was forced into an arranged marriage with a second-generation party hack after her allotted few years of hanging out with Gays and drinking too much. But on the whole, she is harmless. She certainly does not need or deserve a job as a journalist, but The Today Show itself has no use for journalism.

And here she is interviewing some precocious young public speaker, in a cutesy, meaningless feel-good segment. And, hah, she "plans to keep her part-time job as a sixth-grade reading resource teacher." You gotta keep busy!

Meanwhile the other one, not-Jenna, the one who went to Yale, she is doing god knows what with her time. At some point one of them will have to step up to the plate and become a Liz Cheney being of pure hackery, probably, but until then let us continue forgetting about them.

Well, we don't actually know if any parents are boycotting it, but a crazy email is demanding that they do so!

On September 8, Barack Obama will deliver a speech to schoolchildren on the importance of education. The speech will be broadcast live at noon on the White House website, and principals across the country have been encouraged to encourage their teachers to encourage their children to watch it, which is just like how did they did in Soviet Russia when Stalin told them to do their homework or get sent to the Gulags!

First the chairman of the Florida GOP gave a carefully considered and reasonable statement about how "taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology," and now we have this awesome viral email about a national day of protest.

Word is traveling fast on the internet, between bloggers and twitter, the choice is clear : No school for kids on September 8th due to the beginning of Socialist Indoctrination of Americas children.

Hah. See, this would be one of the very few times when it'd totally kick ass to be the child of a Glenn Beck-watching bitter white teabagger. Also their suggestions for what to make your child do instead of school—"Take a day of vacation. Go to the zoo."—are a fine suggestion for any parent, on any occasion. One day of school is nothing compared to the memory of a magical day at the zoo with your parents. (As long as it's not one of those government-funded socialist zoos.)

And in conclusion:

NOTE TO OBAMA :

LEAVE OUR KIDS ALONE !!!!

He's not trying to touch them or anything guys! Christ!

(It is funny to see all these dudes being all anti-authoritarian now, right? Not really "ha ha" funny, but still.)

So, what does 11 year-old Obama interviewer Damon Weaver—whose journalistic role model is Wolf Blitzer, he says—think of our president?

TIME: At the end of the interview you asked Obama to be your homeboy, and he said yes. How does it feel?
Damon: It feels good. It feels the same, though.

He is already more insightful than Wolf Blitzer.


The SEC (college football yall, LOOK IT UP) is trying to somehow keep a monopoly on all of its content by banning any bloggers or other unsavory types from posting real-time updates on games or game video. Good luck with that.


Let's have one of those sunny newspaper news roundups! Newspaper ad revenue hasn't been as low in real dollar terms since 1965. Newspaper stocks have seen a recent bump, but it probably won't last. And newspapers are protesting off-the-record briefings en masse, but it probably won't work.


ESPN Magazine is selling yearlong subscription renewals for one dollar! I'm renewing even though I have to admit that ESPN Magazine is pegged to a readership no smarter than Stephen Smith. One dollar!

Yes, America is being overrun by the unclothed children of "progressive" parents. What's wrong with these people, these surely-communist progenitors acting as benelovent pacifists to tyrannical children who obviously can't control their sick, carnal desires to run around in their naked flesh? Are they, the parents, simply incapable of screaming "Put on some Goddamn clothes Pancho!" in the general direction of their little hedonistic snot-monsters? Don't they know that the olds of America simply aren't capable of handling such assaults to their delicate senses, or do they just not care?

Rachel Sarah, 36, a writer and mother in East Bay, Calif., said that until her 9-year-old daughter, Mae, turned 7, she liked to wear only a T-shirt in the summer, a preference that Ms. Sarah found healthy, but that Mae's grandparents could not accept. "My mom and stepfather were very insistent on her having clothes on for everything," Ms. Sarah said.

Although most days Mae ran half-dressed through the sprinkler or played with friends under a hose, she had to accept different rules when her grandparents were around. "Their view, I would say, is that little girls need to have their clothes on unless they're taking a bath," Ms. Sarah said.

And who could possibly be even more traumatized by the exposed nether bits of spoiled moppets than the olds? The gays, naturally!

Kevin Allen, 45, who used to work as a personal shopper, still recalls with horror the afternoon more than a decade ago when he was at a client's house, and the woman's two young granddaughters came into the room and began changing outfits.

"I was extremely uncomfortable," said Mr. Allen, who estimates the girls were 5 and 6. "I know the grandmother well, but I didn't know the children."

When asked to reflect on the source of his discomfort, Mr. Allen, who is gay, said he feared the situation could all too easily be misinterpreted. "Being gay, you're already thought of as a pervert by some people," he said. "If you look the wrong way at them or something like that, people are going to think you're having some kind of lascivious thought. So it's kind of not appropriate even in your own house. When other people are around, you should have modesty."

You see, the youngs have converted the olds into accepting this horseshit and now the olds are terrorizing the gays with their naked grandchildren. Good God this must be stopped! Bill O'Reilly, do something man!

Why Do They Need A Fig Leaf [New York Times]

Like all men, Barack Obama hates children and loves football. So yesterday he fake-invited a group of Virginia kindergartners to the White House just so he could watch them cry when he turned them away to hang out with the Pittsburgh Steelers.

A group of 100 kindergartners from Stafford County, Va., were supposed to tour the White House yesterday, but were turned away when their bus was late. They say they were shut out because the Superbowl-winning football team was visiting Obama. This is very important news that is very revealing about who Obama really is, and the White House press corps should be praised for getting to the bottom of it.

"Here we have President Obama and his administration saying, 'Here we are for the common, middle class people,' and here he is not letting 150 5- and 6-year-olds into the White House because he's throwing a lunch for a bunch of grown millionaires," Stine said.

The parents claim that they were only 10 minutes late, and that it's not their fault because their chartered bus hit traffic, which usually never happens on I-95 between Fredericksburg, Va., and Washington, D.C., so how could they have known? The White House says it was more like an hour, and they held the gates open as long as they could, but it is the White House, you know? Things to do, etc.

Obama invited the kids back for another shot, the damage has been done and these kids have already lost their faith in America and will probably just go visit an Al Quaeda training camp next time:

Parents say it's probably too late. The school year ends in a few weeks and they doubt the tour can be made up in that time.

Because a trip to the White House during the summer can be so inconvenient, what with soccer practice and camp and stuff. And next year they're in first grade, so obviously they'll be too busy.

Kindergate is the second outrage over Obama's invitation to the Steelers: Linebacker James Harrison refused to show up yesterday because Obama didn't really want to meet the Steelers. He just wanted to meet the Super Bowl winner! "He would have invited Arizona" if they had won, Harrison said, incomprehensibly.

Larry Sr. trotted out Larry Jr. on his show this week, and said that he didn't meet his son until his son was 33 years old—despite the following clues that his son existed:

• He was married to the kid's mother.
• "She told me if it's a boy, I'm gonna name him Larry King Jr."
• "I knew there was a Larry King Jr. out there."
• If you think really hard, the name itself is a clue: Larry King Jr.

Officials in Mumbai say that Ismail's family house was demolished as part of a pre-monsoon season clean up effort, and that his family had no legitimate claim to the land. The family received no prior notice, and were awoken by the bulldozers, having only minutes to grab belongings and flee the premises.

Officials claim that those who lost homes to the demolitions will be relocated to government housing, though those places are usually far from the city center, making commuting to jobs extremely difficult. There is, of course, the trusts and housing that the producers of the movie set up for the kids, but it looks as though the positive effects of those efforts have yet to materialize.

So where things stand now: One of the child stars of a movie that won eight Academy Awards and has grossed over $300 million in ticket sales just had his shanty house razed by the government and his mother is forced to sit outside with a small plastic bag of her belongings saying "I don't know what I am going to do."

Yeah, I don't think anyone does.

[AP]

When the first cell phone rang, during a discussion about photos of U.S. servicemembers abusing Iraqi detainees, Gibbs mildly admonished the class to "just put it on vibrate, man." After the second interruption, he demanded that the offender hand over the phone, which Gibbs then casually tossed to someone offstage. When CBS News' Bill Plante's phone rang, Gibbs just cold kicked him out of class. You know what they say about teachers: Their reward is in heaven.

Here we have, you know, big ass butts, pimping food to children. Which is totally wrong, which is, of course, the whole point, because SO COOL ad agency Crispin Porter Bogusky, the inventors of all the weird Burger King ad shit, did this ad, and they just love doing things that people will say is too weird and also wrong, because it generates "Buzz," just like Midtown Manhattan. The point is Sir Mix-a-Lot is teaching obesity and sexuality to your kids and you're really okay with that, deep down, because you love Whoppers.

[via Adrants]

After they were sent on a whirlwind tour of Disneyland and Universal Studios on Oscar weekend, the real-life Mumbai slum kids, who, really, are the movie (sorry Dev and Freida), faced the prospect of returning to their homes, situated near open sewers or consisting of one rotten mattress shared by the whole family. But now Danny Boyle, the film's director, along with one of the producers, has announced that the kids and their families will be moved into apartments worth about £20,000 (that's seven hundred billion American dollars). Then the government said "fuck it, let's give 'em houses" because they're national heroes and, careful, white people are looking—some say it's a political maneuver done in a lead-up to elections, but whatever. The kids will also have trusts set up in their names and be provided with guaranteed rickshaw transportation (seriously) between home and school. The hope being, of course, that they'll get a proper education.

So, yeah, good. I guess. It reminds us of those poor kids in The Kite Runner—that film about hope and dreams and Afghanistan and kites. They were plucked from obscurity in Kabul, then threatened with death after the film was released, partly because one of their characters was raped in the film. Then Paramount swooped in and saved the day, ferrying the children to a new life in Dubai, estranging them from their parents. There was a small outcry—they rarely get very loud when they're about poor brown Muslims—and people demanded that since Paramount had exploited them in pursuit of really authenticity, they owed it to the children to support them in whatever way they required. That was two years ago, though, and now we don't really hear anything about those lost people.

And now it looks as though the Slumdog kids are getting the same worried, hand-wringing treatment. An NGO worth about £500,000 is being set up by the producers and distributors of the film to help all the children of Mumbai's disastrous slums. And I guess there really isn't any other answer here, other than that in the end, Danny Boyle and the rest will go home, and will have to hang up their hopes for these kids on some out-of-the-way hook. So they can keep on with their lives. Because what else can you do. As my boss said, at least Boyle and company didn't blind the kids before putting them to work. No, they left them young and cute and opened a strange side door to a new, tenuous future.

Image of Rubina Ali from AP

First Suleman was ditched by her Los Angeles publicists, who had received threatening calls and letters.

Now Ambassador, a Christian talent agency in Tennessee, is making sure everyone knows it is not handling Suleman. Ambassador's president told Access Hollywood the company just lent the recent mother of octuplets some advice:

One week ago, a friend of our agency requested Ambassador's help to advise on the protection and licensing of the Suleman family photographs to safeguard the security of the children. While providing this pro bono advice, we explored whether agency representation would best serve the interests of this family.

Wow. If a pro-life agency isn't going to represent Suleman, in the middle of an economic collapse no less, then who will? Perhaps a desperate agency hungry to prove its mettle on a hugely challenging client.

If Suleman was believed to be worth much money, in terms of book and reality show deals, she'd probably have better luck. Even ruthless dictators like Moammar Qadaffi have been able to find flacks when they can pay. Prospective reps are either betting against her or hitting a wall during pay negotiations.

Joann Killeen and her husband and partner Mark Furney have decided to drop their high-profile, extreme IVF client after receiving threatening phone calls and letters. Killeen told the Los Angeles Times:

The American public has just lashed out. I think it has to do with the economy, healthcare ... there are not a lot of jobs, people are unemployed and are trying to take care of their families.

This doesn't bode well for anyone (including Nadya?) hoping for a reality show version of this whole ugly circus, as the court of public opinion coming down so harshly doesn't really equal high ratings, especially for a feel-good network like supersize family aficionados TLC. A rep for that network says that they're "waiting to see what happens next." Though, we kinda already know, don't we? Oprah! It's inevitable. And then a cheesy, terrible book. Or maybe book first. Oh how will it go??

I don't think they will give her a show at this point. It's just too much. Though, they do employ that crazy Duggar family. So who knows.

[Unique Daily, via Videogum]

The boy we saw this past week (and the boy who chief New York Times critic Ben Brantley saw) was a fellow named David Alvarez, a beguilingly accented young son of Cuban defectors raised in Québec. He's a revelation in the ballet bits, an angry smear of slight imperfections in his tap, and a multi-culti trilingual 13-year-old trying his best in the show's more dialogue-heavy stretches. We mean to say he's terrific and pure and now well-reviewed by the biggest newspaper in the land and... what about the other two? Will they be forced to forever play catch up? Essentially they're all fighting to become... what? The next Andrea McArdle? What's sad for the fey American boy and the sternly pretty Soviet bloc chap who play Billy in rotation with Alvarez, is that their Cuba-fro'd counterpart has actually already won.

They'll all be nominated for Tonys together if they're nominated at all (as is what happened in London and Sydney when the show opened in those cities), they share interview time, and a thick veil of secrecy is kept under which Billy will be going on what night. But still, man. Alvarez bled into his shoes for all the critics, for the all the glory (and the big, pretty Times Arts page photo). The American kid tappa-tappa-tappa'd for the big Opening Night and the blonde comrade performed on The View, but you'll only get that one critics' night. And the rightful son took the mantle that evening. Which makes the show uplifting. And makes the show really, really sad.

This song is about fucking:

This isn't so much inappropriate as much it is astoundingly weird:

Anyway, this will mark TLC's second foray into the overgrown-clan genre. Jon and Kate Plus 8, another show about two parents with way too many babes, has proved successful for the network - even stirring up some controversy from those who believe "raising children is not theater." But why do audiences tune in to see screaming parents and whining tots?

It's the "how the fuck do they do it — and why?" quotient. I mean, these people have got to be straight-up clinically insane, right? How do they pay for all of the spit-up rags and dollies and bottles? How do the husband and wife not kill each other after bickering constantly? (Lots of make-up sex, perhaps?) Why do they want so many kids - are they weird and religious or just super charitable and giving? And most importantly: how the hell did that woman pop so many out? Oy.

Be the answers what they may, the best part about watching these shows has to be that when those sweet 30 minutes are up, you've got to feel so much better about your own spoiled brats. For your sake, we hope there are only a few of them.

• 17 Kids and Counting [TLC]

Mariotti and Tribune "talked about television, about the Internet, about the newspaper,'' he said. Mariotti said that discussions about working for Tribune Co.'s Chicago Tribune newspaper became a stumbling block. "The Sun-Times' lawyer threatened me with a lawsuit in 64-point type. Things sort of stalled,'' he added.

Gosh, that is big type. Let's recap: Mariotti, one of the most reviled sports columnists in America by fans, colleagues, and athletes alike, suddenly and without warning quits an outrageously lucrative newspaper job—one of the rarest commodities in all the media. Because he saw people at the Olympics "writing for web sites" and figured he should, too. Does he then start a web site? No, he goes to his former employer's biggest rival begging for, essentially, the same job he just quit.

Could you squeeze one more appalling quote into this story in order to cement your idiocy for us, Jay?

"It's not your father's Tribune,'' Mariotti said, speaking about new management in the wake of Tribune Co.'s deal late last year to go private under a deal led by Sam Zell. "I enjoyed dealing with them. I think they have a great future.''

Jay Mariotti: as savvy about the newspaper business as he is about sports.

[Chicago Tribune]

Ha ha, just kidding. We didn't make up this part, though: "Kaitlin Silva, who acted as the duck in the story, said she enjoyed Mr. Baldwin’s visit."