This Week In Terrifying Hybrids

1. Life philosophy based on archery accoutrements + lack of birth control + the strongest uterus in the world + an apparently endless supply of "j" names = The Duggar Family

Oh, you're pregnant again? Considering that you've already had 17 kids and that your adult life has essentially been one long pregnancy, it would be more newsworthy if you weren't pregnant, Mrs. Duggar. Where is the Today Show segment about that? Mother Of 18's Uterus Finally Empty.

I'm surprised one of the kids didn't start sobbing uncontrollably when they announced their latest pregnancy.

In case you're unfamiliar with the Duggars and their horrific Discovery Health Channel Show, they're a family made up of two thoroughly spacey and marginally evil parents, 17 essentially interchangeable children, more garbage than a small city, and they're basically the cause of global warming. That last part isn't exactly true, but if they ever discover a hole in the Ozone layer directly above Arkansas, it's probably because the Duggars were constantly running their washer/dryer for 35 years in order to have clean laundry for the 18 kids on their compound.

Every news story about the Duggars focuses on zany math of their family: 100 bananas a week! 200 loads of laundry a month! 9000 diapers a year! 1,000,000 loving glances from the kids unreturned by their incredibly distracted parents! But the giant, empty-eyed elephant in the room is insanity: no one mentions how totally insane you would have to be to think that having 18 kids is a good idea (though they sometimes mention how totally religious you'd have to be--the Duggars are part of the Quiverfull movement). The first question that anyone asks the Duggars should always be: So when did you first realize you were crazy?

Another issue that is constantly overlooked in the coverage of the Duggars: they name all their kids "J" names, but why would they make up a name like "Jinger" (the name of their 14-year-old) before finally getting around to an obvious name like "Jennifer" (the name of their current youngest)? Weird.

2. The Kardashians + political awareness + dressing rooms = The most tonally weird PSA about Burma

Where is the FunnyOrDie logo? This is a joke, right?

When you're talking about raising money to stop government-sponsored rape, you should probably use a different inflection than when you're pronouncing a Herve Leger dress, "Sexy." Unless, of course, you're kidding. But the Kardashians say they're totally NOT kidding, so unless this is a parody of something (of life, maybe? That's what Keeping Up With The Kardashians is, right?) then this is probably a pretty ineffective PSA.

3. Meat Loaf + AT&T + Tiffany + the uncontrollable urge to put your fingers in your ears and never take them out = Go Phone Commercial.

A cell phone commercial is actually a pretty appropriate avenue for a Meat Loaf song: the showiness of Meat Loaf really meshes well with the relentlessly annoying aspects of all cell phone advertising. It's a seamlessly irritating combination that is really hammered into your temporal lobe, due in no small part to the fact that this commercial airs at least 100 times a day. "Let me sleep on iiit!" is now constantly ringing in my ears, and I can't stop buying Go Phones just to throw them at my television. So kudos, AT&T.

This week, MTV unveiled the nominees for this year's towering, glittering, shiny-popcorn-filled monument to idiocy: The MTV Movie Awards—which is the only awards show not sponsored by Maxim to single out both Jessica Biel’s nuanced performance as Girl Who Flirts With Fake-Gay Adam Sandler in I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, and Megan Fox’s studied turn in Transformers as Token Love Interest. Other films vying for a sweaty-palmed high-five from MTV include Disturbia, Step Up 2: The Streets, and National Treasure 2: Treasurier—small, largely unseen movies that truly deserve all the accolades they can get.

This year marks the 17th time that MTV has shouted “Woooooo!” in the general direction of Hollywood, but in those 17 years I still haven’t figured out exactly what the point of the MTV Movie Awards is—besides, of course, to draw celebrities to the show in order to garner ratings and advertising dollars, like any old awards show, and to give Chris Brown the shout-out he totally deserves for his role in This Christmas (he texted with such believability!).

Mark Burnett, the show’s producer, said that he thinks the MTV Movie Awards are “the most relevant movie award show in America today.” And who knows more about cultural relevancy than the creator of My Dad Is Better Than Your Dad? Burnett also added:

This show honors the movies that millions of young Americans go to see.”

Unfortunately there’s already an award for that, Mark. It’s called money. Young Americans have already honored those movies with the millions of dollars that they spent to go see them. It’s not as if young people are a reclusive minority whose voice goes largely unheard by the entertainment industry. Who do you think they made Disturbia for? Why else would there be an Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem?

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a useless awards show. I mean, obviously there is something very wrong with that, but it isn’t abnormal. Most, if not all, awards shows are useless: The People’s Choice Awards, The Golden Globes, The Oscars, all of them can be distilled down to a fine vapor of meaninglessness and Us Weekly Fashion Disasters pages. But some of those awards have at least the sheen of importance. The MTV Movie Awards do not.

And since they have no hope of appearing important, or of celebrating a movie in a meaningful way, the MTV Movie Awards should just fully embrace their meaninglessness. How? Increasingly meaningless award categories. MTV is already off to a good start with “Best Villain,” “Best Fight,” and “Best Summer Movie So Far.” But those categories aren’t inane enough. Here are a few suggestions for MTV Movie Award categories that will really hammer home the meaninglessness of the whole thing:

Best 'Splosion

Awesomest Dude You Would Most Want To Hang Out With In Real Life

Johnny Depp Award (given annually to Johnny Depp)

Best Use Of Eyebrows To Demonstrate Evil

Best Fucked Up Shit

Best Movie Outfit That You Would Totally Buy If Someone Told You Where You Could Buy It And It Wasn't Too Expensive

Best Acting By Non-Actor (This year the award would either go to Chris Brown in This Christmas, or Shia LeBoeuf's Strokes T-shirt in Transformers.

Greatest Product Placement

Best Superbad

In my 8th grade Biology class, we had to breed fruit flies with different eye colors for some kind of experiment about genetics. It was not very exciting. I don't remember much about it except how difficult it was to stare into jars teeming with tiny bugs and accurately count the number of red-eyed ones. Of course, had my teacher gone the extra mile and rented some giant fruit fly costumes in order to graphically pantomime the fruit fly sex act in front of the class, I'd probably remember everything there is to know about fruit fly reproduction—but then my teacher was no Isabella Rossellini, whose enthusiasm for weird bug costumes, insect humping, and hilarious entomology-related pornography knows no bounds.

Isabella Rossellini is now not just your de facto hero, she's also the perviest amateur entomologist you know who also starred in Death Becomes Her. (Bruce Willis, with those rumors of his depraved bee-keeping is the second most pervy, while Goldie Hawn's noted collection of earthworms in skimpy bikinis earns her the third most pervy spot.)

You can watch all of the Green Porno shorts here, and I highly recommend that you do. But be warned: after watching Green Porno, the buzzing of bees starts to sound less like humming and more like Isabella Rossellini yelling, "My penis would break off!"

By now, you've probably been made aware of Wall-E, Pixar's upcoming attempt to kill us all with overwhelming, radiating cuteness. And Wall-E, the lovable, wide-eyed scamp of a robot at the center of the movie is very, very cute. He looks like Johnny 5 from Short Circuit, but smaller, less vocal, and without the troublingly close relationship with Steve Guttenberg--all of which makes Wall-E possibly the cutest movie robot ever, despite the fact that his story takes place in the aftermath of some kind of horrific, cataclysmic, and unexplained event that forced all living humans to evacuate Earth.

Watching him happily wheel around the giant, rusting junkyard that dominates the landscape of future Earth, you don't even think about the ghosts of the long-dead people who used to inhabit the place before their civilization came crashing down all around them and they were forced to abandon their lives and their planet under the threat of imminent danger. Wall-E's adorable little meeps and moops as he roots through piles of trash looking for something to play with, totally drown out the imagined terrified screams of human evacuees and the deafening silence of an abandoned Earth. And when he picks up that ancient bra from the garbage and hilariously places it on his innocent robot eyes, it's easy to forget that that bra was once worn close to the beating heart of a living, breathing woman who was probably separated from her children in the wake of the unnamed disaster, and who now has to live in exile, far away from Earth, haunted by the knowledge that had she just held onto their hands a little tighter, maybe they would all still be together, even if that meant drowning in the mountains of waste that gradually overtook Earth's surface.

Seriously, post-apocalyptic Earth has never been more precious. You win, Wall-E.

Remember when Tom Cruise was a movie star and not some weirdo who leads his wife around in a two-hand grip like an arresting officer sternly walking a suspect to a waiting squad car?

No? Well, Tom Cruise does. And he wants you to remember that Tom Cruise used to be a movie star first, crazy second. So today he launched TomCruise.com, a personal Internet shrine to himself and his movie career complete with movie trailers, a "25 years of my life in film" montage that feels about 25 minutes long, and a photo gallery that might as well be called "Tom Cruise: Portraits Of Intensity (With Eyebrows)."

Because, truly, nothing says "I'm a movie star, dammit" better than vast displays of narcissism set to bombastic music.

Still, despite appearances, TomCruise.com isn't about Tom Cruise. It's about you, dear reader.

From the Message From Tom:

It is almost impossible for me to believe that I am celebrating the 25th anniversary of the release of Risky Business, my first starring role in a film. In celebration of this occasion, and my 27 years of making movies, I created this site as a thank you, to you, for sharing the journey with me and to invite you to continue to explore what the future will bring.

This is for you. Enjoy!

I think he meant, "It is almost Mission Impossible 1-3 for me to believe..." but still, isn't this nice of Tom Cruise? To make a website about Tom Cruise: Movie Star, so that we can remember him in a positive way, back when the craziest thing he did was star in a Ron Howard epic about Irish immigrants that involved wearing a ceramic bowl over his genitals for an entire scene? Just think about the sacrifices he has made to produce this website for us, all of us, to enjoy. He's basically Jesus--or whatever the Scientology spaceship equivalent of Jesus is.