In the spring, a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, and indeed folks, this is my last Friday Buzzkills as a single man. Next week I'm taking the plunge and finally marrying my long-suffering girlfriend, who puts up with my constant negativity and cruel mind games like a real trooper and thus deserves something for her troubles. Anyhoo, after today, Friday Buzzkills will be taking a two-week hiatus while we celebrate our connubial bliss, so enjoy this one last screed from the cyber-pen of an angry young man, because when I return, it will be as a flaccid, easy-fit Dockers-wearing married schmo. (If that's not a Buzzkill I don't know what is.) To love!
– You may have heard that scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted, starting with plans to replace all over-the-air television broadcasts with digital signals in 2009. Unfortunately, bureaucracies like the FCC are still going to be as archaic and slow as a wooly mammoth according to market research firm Centris, who just released a report saying that after the switch around 9.2 million households will not receive a signal even if they do everything the FCC tells them to. All those with antenna-based TV sets had previously been assured that picking up a digital-to-analog converter would solve all their problems and drag them kicking and screaming into a glitch-and-freeze-filled tomorrow. "Nuh-uh!" says Centris, who estimates that millions of viewers in 10 different markets won't see anything due to geographically defined "receptivity gaps." Fortunately, the affected markets are just little shitholes like Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington D.C., Seattle, and New York, so really, who cares? Guess those hicks will just have to learn to read, amIrightfolks?
– Those TV signals should be loud and clear for the still-rebuilding New Orleans, however residents there shouldn't expect to see a broadcast of Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Trouble In The Water anytime soon: The acclaimed documentary about African-American survivors of Hurricane Katrina is apparently having trouble finding a distributor because it is, in the words of ever-eloquent studio executives, "too black." On his blog, indieWIRE editor Eugene Hernandez relates an anecdote of one studio head asking the filmmaker, "Why aren't more white people in the film?" Indeed! Why did you have to put so many black people in your movie about black survivors of a catastrophe that affected primarily black people, Mr. Blacky Black Filmmaker? Couldn't you at least have put in some of the footage from when Sean Penn singlehandedly rescued the city? Or maybe digitally inserted some Caucasian faces in those Superdome crowd shots so white audiences wouldn't be uncomfortable? That's not racism–that's just good marketing.
– Speaking of questionable tributes to beleaguered Africans, let's have a little Friday Buzzkills poll: Who would you pick to headline a concert honoring former South African president Nelson Mandela? (Provided Bono said no and Bob Marley were still dead.) If you said, "I would think that a man whose name has become synonymous with the crusade for racial equality, freedom, and peace would best be feted by a white guy rapping about strangling his wife and raw-doggin' 15-year-old girls," then congrats–you think just like the organizers of Mandela's 90th Birthday Bash, who recently picked Eminem to headline the June 27 Nelson Mandela tribute at London's Hyde Park. Eminem–who these days may or may not be all fat and gross and stuff–will return to the stage after a three-year absence, closing out a day of performances from confirmed acts Queen, Annie Lennox, Razorlight, and Stevie Wonder, while Will Smith and wife Jada Pinkett-Smith play host (what, no room for Wicked Wisdom?). This, of course, begs the question of which is a crueler punishment: 27 years in prison, or three-and-a-half minutes of "Just Lose It"?
– The fact that Eminem still commands respect and a ridiculously high-profile stage slot after dropping a lame album and then falling off the face of the earth for several years must be pure torture to his spiritual ancestor Vanilla Ice, whose life by contrast only gets more and more pathetic. Last night the man his wife calls Robert Van Winkle when she's begging the cops to arrest him was jailed on a battery charge after Laura Van Winkle told police he had kicked and hit her (possibly to the extreme). Laura later retracted the story, saying he had simply pushed her after he "started yelling at me for going out to buy a bedroom set," but told investigators that she "just wants a divorce"–not much of a surprise, considering this is Ice's second arrest for spousal abuse. Ice can now only have contact with his wife over the phone, and can only see his kids through a neighbor, which is actually pretty depres–hey, who wants to dance?!