Whore-Off

The holy trinity of whores

You know it’s gotten bad when Chaotic was the best you’ve looked in years.

Remember when Chaotic, Britney and Kevin’s “home movie” reality show, aired on TV and we all thought “Wow! Britney is a dumb, trashy, skank!”? Well that was only an appetizer for the skanky trash display we were about to see. Britney continues to amaze me because, every single time she seems to have hit rock bottom in her life and I’m certain her career is over, she discovers an entirely new low point.

I remember watching Chaotic and thinking, “I’m shocked her people let her release this because it makes her look like a bumbling moron who is getting played so hard by Kevin Federline.” It was true. She looked totally ignorant. Kevin looked like those white kids that hang out outside of Footlocker and wear oversized Iverson jerseys so black people think they’re “gangsta” and treated her like crap in every single episode… and she followed him around like a puppy. It was almost sickening to watch.

On top of that, she seemed like a 10-year-old trapped in the body of a pop star. It was like something out of Big or the Jennifer Garner movie Thirteen Going on Thirty where she is suddenly transformed into an adult even though she retains the mind of a 13-year-old. Britney seemed like your typical former child star. She had grown up and now she was a hot chick, but her brain was at the level of most 6th graders.

She showed off her ignorance and stupidity at every turn. In one episode, it became apparent that she knew nothing about Europe, including the fact that it consists of many different countries, when she kept referring to it as “overseas” as opposed to stating which nation, or even which city, she was currently in. In another episode, she decided to analyze some art hanging in her room and explained that the image was “a woman on top of the world and in love with [the man in the picture]… but he’s gonna break her heart, or put something through it.” And let’s not forget the infamous line, “They look like boobs, but they’re not, they’re my knees!” which was followed by moronic laughter. It was like she and Jessica Simpson were in some kind of battle for the title dumbest blonde pop star on a reality show.

Chaotic made her look bad, but if we compare her then and now, it made her look like Princess Diana.

I feel like right now, Hollywood is in a gigantic trash competition, a whore-off if you will, where trainwreck celebrities like Britney, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and of course, Tara Reid, compete to see who can sink to the lowest low. Who can be the sloppiest drunken whore? Who can flash their beaver to the most photographers? Who can be forced into rehab the most times? Who can do things that would make most insane homeless people blush and still pretend they’re a role model for little girls? Paris used to be the front runner in this contest (because she seemed to invent this game) but lately Britney’s been going for the title.

It all reminds me of that episode of South Park called “Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset” where all the little girls in South Park idolized Paris Hilton and strived to be the stupidest and most spoiled whore in town. They threw crazy drunken parties, made sex tapes, and wore hoochie clothes as they prostituted themselves for attention. In the end, the girls discovered that it was stupid… oh, and Mr. Slave shoved Paris Hilton up his ass.

These girls are the biggest attention whores in the world. It’s only a matter of time before one of them sets herself on fire just to get her picture on the cover of Us Weekly. I wouldn’t be surprised if right now Paris Hilton is trying to figure out how steal the spotlight from Anna Nicole Smith. Maybe she’s asking around and trying to see how she could overdose and die, but still watch herself on Entertainment Tonight.

Our hands aren’t clean in this matter either. We pay attention to these whores, thus fueling their desire for even more attention. I know I’m totally to blame too. I did create TRASHwire.com after all and we spend all our time ferociously following the Anna Nicole drama as it unfolds or watching the latest reality tv abortion. However, we understand the difference between a trashy star and a real one and we can appreciate real art at the same time as loving total garbage for it’s guilty pleasure factor. We might be the only people on earth who like The 400 Blows and The Janice Dickenson Modeling Agency.

Still, the battle for sloppiest celebrity whore rages on. Britney has pulled into the lead these days, but I’m sure we’ll see Lindsay or Paris gain some ground in the future. Fortunately for you, we’ll read about it so you don’t have to. When you’re looking for your trashy celebrity fix, all you have to do is click over to Trashwire.

Geeks Do It Better

Ok, so some of them are socially awkward, but I don’t understand what’s so wrong with the geeks on Beauty and the Geek. Yes, there are a few of them that are so far out in the geek universe that they can barely carry on a conversation with a normal person (Niels, Paio, and Matt) but there are also geeks (like Mario or Nate) that are smart, funny, and cool.

Let’s look at Mario and Nate for a minute. While both of them might not be Brad Pitt, their conversations have been much more interesting than the crap you see between the pretty air-heads on Laguna Beach or The Real World. They have personalities and brains of their own and they’re not vapid morons like you see on most reality TV. I find it pretty funny that someone wouldn’t want to get to know a person just because they own 25,000 comic books, like Mario, or they’re in a Star Wars band, like Nate.

Honestly, people, who would you rather date, Talan from Laguna Beach or Nate from Beauty and the Geek? Think about it. You have to go to dinner and make conversation, or catch a movie, or talk on the phone and generally interact with the person. It might be different if I asked who you’d rather sleep with, but I’m talking about who you’d actually want to be your boyfriend. I know if I was faced with the choice of a super hot guy that had absolutely nothing going on upstairs or a less attractive geeky guy who could actually carry on a conversation, I’d pick the geek in a second.

Besides, most of the coolest people are geeks. Hollywood heartthrobs aside, the majority of the writers, directors, musicians, etc. who I really like were geeks at some point in their lives. Matt Stone from South Park, for example, has said that he was a geek in school and he’s one half of the funniest duo in the world. Tons of people go crazy for Elijah Wood, but he’s got more in common with your average nerd than he does with the quarterback of the football team. Gerard Way, lead singer of My Chemical Romance, might be one of the most intriguing and attractive guys in the music industry and he was a major dork in school. There are countless others who might have played D&D, sat alone in the cafeteria, sucked at sports and never went on dates that are now talented and well-respected professionals in the entertainment industry. I’ll bet that for every one pin-up pretty face, there are a dozen others who never had it easy and worked their way to the top.

When I watch Beauty and the Geek, I laugh the hardest at the geeks’ comments and I’m annoyed and horrified at the things that come out of the “beauties” mouths. I’d rather watch a group of nerds talk about Wrath of Khan for 20 minutes than listen to a bunch of dumb girls giggle about which pink outfit to put on their Chihuahua… and I don’t think I’m alone.

Chances are that most of us have been geeks at some point in our lives and that’s why we have depth to our personalities. I would guess that most people who watch the show identify more with the geeky guys than the buxom blondes. If you look at the media, geeks are getting more respect and publicity. People are not afraid to let their geek flag fly anymore and that’s a good thing. So, to all my geeks, I leave you with a quote from Goonies, “It’s our time down here!” If you’re a geek, be a geek. Chances are you’re going to end up happy and successful while the popular kids that torture you end up becoming bloated coked-up train wrecks who ditch rehab and have babies with their no-talent back-up dancer husbands.

I’m scared of Vail

I’m in Vail for this business thing and I’m in the hotel hanging out.

It occurred to me that I’m actually terrified of this town. I think I’d feel more comfortable walking around outside the MCI Center in DC at 2AM than I feel strolling the streets here.

Vail is like some horrible experiment. It’s so isolated from the outside world and so up its own ass that it’s almost astonishing. People here don’t have a clue about anything besides themselves and skiing. It’s like there was a high school that somehow got showered in cosmic radioactivity and grew at an exponential rate into this huge mutated monstrosity. No one here acts like they’re older than 17 and the clique mentality is in full swing, even for the aging Baby Boomers who reside here. It’s like some horrible beach community in Orange County, only scaled back a bit in terms of wealth and plastic surgery. The people are still on the attractive side, all thin and tan and very Laguna Beach, I will give them that. But who would ever want to really have a conversation with these brain-dead sheep? I doubt half of them could even tell you who the president is.

Basically, like all little resort towns, it’s just not a good idea to live here and try to raise a family here. The parents are vapid alcoholics and Vail kids are like teen movie stereotypes. They’re rich, they’re pretty and they probably make anyone who doesn’t fit in feel like crap. Seriously, it’s like mindless, spoiled, Children of the Corn out here. If it takes a village to raise a child, this is not the village you want.

Anyway, enough hating on Vail for now.

Parallels blows my mind.

If you’re not a Mac user or a bit of a geek, you probably won’t care about this post. You can amuse yourself elsewhere, perhaps by reading my comments about VH1’s new reality series, I Love New York. If you are a Mac user or a geek, then stick around.

I got a MacBook about four months ago and I loved it right away. For one, it looks cool and the glossy screen produces some really beautiful images. It’s also thin and portable and the battery lasts a lot longer than my other laptops. My very first computer was a Mac (a Performa 575 way back in 1993) and I’ve liked their operating systems ever since. While there was a long period in middle school and high school when I had PCs, I switched back to Mac in college and got an iBook. It was a great computer, incredibly light and portable, so I took to to class with me and used it constantly. It was also affordable thanks to Apple’s educational discount. The only problem with my little iBook was that there were some programs I just couldn’t run on the Mac OS. Our school would give us software for classes, have us access and download things online, or use files and applications that were for Windows only and either involved a zillion steps and extra money to run on a Mac, or were just plain out of bounds to Mac users.

When I heard that the new Mac laptops with Intel chips were going to be able to run Windows, I was intrigued. Macs have been running Windows for years through the use of programs like VirtualPC, but all the reports were saying that with the new Intel Macs, you could run Windows without some of the limits of those programs. I started hearing a lot about Parallels Desktop, an application that let Mac users run both the Mac OS and Windows at the same time and switch back and forth between the two. I was way psyched. The program I use to edit Trashwire.com is only available for Windows, so anything that let me run that from my new MacBook was right up my alley.

I got Parallels and installed it and Windows XP. From the second I accessed Windows and saw that familiar Start Menu at the bottom of the screen, I was excited. I played around with Parallels and switched between the windowed mode and the full-screen mode, which makes your Mac desktop look like any PC desktop. It was super cool. My PC programs all worked with ease and I could share files between my Mac and Windows through shared folders.

I was convinced that Parallels was already one of the coolest things I’d ever seen when I picked up a copy of Macworld and saw that there was a new improvement in the works for the already amazing software. With the new beta, you can now run Windows in Coherence Mode. In this mode, you don’t even have to switch back and forth between the two operatins systems, it puts open Windows applications and folders right in with your Mac applications and folders. This means that I can have an open window with my sitebuilder application right next to my open Mac web browser and I can even drag and drop things between them. This is awesome because it eliminates the need for shared folders. I can just open the folder I want in Windows and drop something right in from my Mac. No more moving the file to a shared folder, switching to Windows, moving the file from the shared folder and then using it. I takes way less time and creates way less clutter.

The whole thing is amazing to me and I’m convinced the people who make Parallels must be aliens or people from the future or something. Why hasn’t anyone made things this easy before? There was an episode of South Park where Randy was tring to explain the Wal-Mart business model to Stan and he said, “It’s simple economics, son. I don’t understand it at all…but…God I love it!” That’s the way I feel about Parallels. I have no idea how it works, but damn am I happy that it does work. If I had to pick my favorite technological breakthrough of 2006, I’d pick Parallels Desktop for giving me the ability to have the computer I really want and not panic about limited applications for its operating system. I hate to sound like a Mac whore, but now that there’s Parallels, why would anyone ever want to buy a PC again?

The first post of ’07

I’m in the process of revamping all the blogs that are associated with Trashwire, and that includes my blog. I know a lot of you will probably ask, “Just how many blogs does one person need?!” and the answer to that question is… 42. While I don’t actually have 42 blogs, I do have a lot of free time and no patience. This means that I start a blog, I write a few things and then I start a new blog for other ideas I might have that don’t really fit in to the initial blog. In my case, I started a blog via Blogger and got a little bored with the visual style of it, so I branched out and started a WordPress blog via my personal site, AlexisGentry.net. I have no idea how many people will read it, but I’m going to start jotting down my ideas, links to funny sites that I find, quick reviews of movies or TV shows, and other thoughts that pop into my head during the way while I’m bored at work.