In today’s Mystery Science Auditorium, I invite you, Dear Reader, to watch a couple of commercials with me. It’s one of the great paradoxes of advertising: marketers make us trust them by acting utterly trustworthy (babies, American flags, puppies), except when they don’t—when they sell to us by acting completely untrustworthy. Phony. As Jennifer Wicke has argued [...]
This week’s Mystery Science Auditorium is devoted to the past week’s most popular YouTube video—if I didn’t know better, I’d almost want to call it “viral.” It is, of course, 24-year-old Taiwanese television talent-show contestant Lin Yu-chun, singing Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.” Or rather, singing Whitney Houston’s version of Dolly Parton’s “I Will [...]
[Starting today and continuing for the next two, I'm republishing an essay that first appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education last September, assuming that most readers of fake chinese rubber plant aren't also subscribers to the Chronicle. Hope you enjoy! --KD] At my high school—Taft High, Woodland Hills, Calif., also the alma mater of Jane [...]
I’ve not to this point followed the Adam Lambert saga closely, though the sophisticated and erudite readers of fakechineserubberplant will, I think, know the general outlines of his story: a finalist in the eighth season of American Idol, Lambert’s chances to win seemed to evaporate precisely at the moment that pictures of him making out [...]