How To Raise A Miley Cyrus Bong Bunny

I don't need to take a quiz to know that a Snooki is not the right pet for me, though I might feed it vodka on the porch. Enjoy the rest of 14's work at Gallery of the Absurd, at least until the Beliebers see this.

Previously on Popped Culture...

How Many Justin Biebers Could You Take In A Fight?

Nicolas Cage: Snow Monkey

Very Useful Celebrities

John Mayer Smoking Sexual Crack

Oh I get it now, sexual crack wasn't a euphemism but actually what John Mayer calls crack. And he wasn't talking about Jessica Simpson, that's just what he named his crack pipe. Celebrities, they say the darnedest things! Thank to the Gallery of the Absurd for clearing that up.

Previously on Popped Culture...
Bowl Full of Delusion
It's Not Easy Being Green
Cyborg Sex Machine

It's the Celebrity Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

My pumpkins have always been in the classic vein - triangular eyes and gappy, square-toothed grins. But over the past few years there has been a dramatic leap forward in pumpkin design. We have the technology, we can carve him.

Above is one of my favourites - someone's clever tribute to the classic Calvin & Hobbes snowmen. Below are some of the better pop culture pumpkins. Get more from Zombie Pumpkins, Extreme Pumpkin, PumpkinGlow and Pumpkingutter.

Peanuts & Homer Simpson

Wallace & Gromit

Statler & Waldorf

Buffy & Spike

Tom Cruise & Britney Spears as seen by Gallery of the Absurd

Schadenfreude Linking

It’s time for a little stroll through my blogroll, something I haven’t had much chance to do for a while. Here are some gems I found in the Schadenfreude section.

As always, Gallery of the Absurd never fails to cut to the heart of the celebrity condition. Meet Britocchio is an animated wooden puppet who longs to be a real girl.

While yammering on last week about the reason that talent-free hacks try out for American Idol, I suggested it was for the obvious reason that it works. Being extremely bad is a quicker way to fame and fortune than being moderately good. Tabloid Baby has followed the trajectory of Kenneth Briggs and Jonathan Jayne, otherwise known as Bush Baby and his fat friend. Watch out William Hung, they are after your crown.

The Gilded Moose introduces me to a new word for the week: cooteninja, which is defined in part as:

1. to be confronted with woman parts accidentally.
Used in a sentance : "Oh, damn, I was looking for hotel options in Paris, but I was cooteninja'ed instead."

Anyone who’s been reading celebrity gossip blogs lately has been cooteninja’ed.

I knew the Pandora’s box that was holding heirhead Paris Hilton’s most treasured possessions was opened this week, revealing far more than was ever found in Al Capone’s vault. With that in mind I decided not to look, just in case my eyes melted, Indiana Jones style. Oh how I wish I had kept that promise to myself. I Don’t Like You in That Way reveals the horrible contents: herpes meds, evidence she may have miscarried and loads and loads of nekid pictures. Shudder.

Cityrag was a little treasure trove, introducing me to Pretty on the Outside and one of the most disturbing pictures I’ve ever seen, even with the blurring: Kelly Osbourne in Playboy. Again with the eyes melting. Go to the site for much, much more.

Jossip translates a “serious media” story on Katies Holmes and shows why papers should stay far, far away from gossip.

For Thou Art Celebrity

May the blessings of Our Lady of Celebrity Worship, Angelina Jolie, be upon you. Celebs are modern day, secular religious icons – if the Renaissance masters were alive today their subject matter would be the same as People, Entertainment Tonight and Perez Hilton.

Artist Kate Kretz’s "Blessed Art Thou" features the holy Ms. Jolie floating in the clouds above a Wal-Mart, holding her newborn daughter Shiloh, with Maddox and Zahara at her legs. I used to think of it as a cult of celebrity, but it really has become spiritual for some people.

This isn’t the first religious depiction of celebs I’ve come across – it is a favourite topic of Gallery of the Absurd. See Saint Tom of Oprah’s Couch, Madonna and Child and the Brangelina Shrine. Kretz’s painting also reminds me of Chris Woods iconographic McDonald’s paintings, bur I suppose Wal-Mart is a better example of consumer culture. I hope we see more from her.

Addendum: OK, it may have been a bit over the top comparing, even indirectly, the painting to the work of Renaissance painters. That'll learn me to post while I'm tired. In reading more about the work it seems the main criticism is that the statement is too obvious, that it's not subtle enough. But nobody is disputing what it depicts.

Monster Mashups

There’s nothing better than spending a cold rainy day surfing other people’s blogs and posting your favourite finds in lieu of creating my own post.

I love pop culture mashups – the reworking and repurposing of entertainment icons until something new emerges fascinates me. It’s been going on for years of course – The Simpsons is built upon it, same with Family Guy, Robot Chicken and countless others.

Over at Worth1000.com there is a Photoshop contest of impossible tabloid couples, celebrities that could never have been together. Who hasn’t imagined Lauren Bacall, Johnny Depp and Marilyn Monroe out on the town? Or Elvis and Scarlett Johansson?


In (belated) honour of Friday the 13th and an early Halloween treat, there is Bubblegumfink’s set of trading cards for the first Friday the 13th movie. They are goretastic! They are all part of his series of cards that never were and never will be.

Popbytes pointed the way to Black Magic Thriller, a “spookylicious” mashup of Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Santana’s Black Magic Woman.







One of my favourite sites, Gallery of the Absurd, takes on the growing field of celebrity fragrances. Who wouldn’t want Britney Spears’ Le Fromage L'Orange? Smells like cheese, tastes like cheese.











And one last one to wrap up the day, from Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. What would happen if Fred Flintsone was in the mob? Meet the Dabba Don. (Thanks to The Hour for the heads up on this one.)

I'm No Celebrity

File these under Ways In Which My Life is Unlike a Celebrity:

•Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s lawyers have registered ShilohJoliePitt.com as a gift to the happy couple, commemorating the birth of their little one. I could be wrong, but I don’t think my lawyers will do the same for me this October. Oh right, I don’t have lawyers or my own domain either. Celeb kids, is there anything they don’t have? (Pic from Gallery of the Absurd)

• Is releasing a video of you floating about a pool the best way to confirm your pregnancy? If you are Anna Nicole, then answer is yes. Whatever happened to keeping things to yourself and retaining some privacy and dignity? Oh right, silly question.

• I don’t go to the hypnotist to cure my $100,000 in a day shopping addiction, like Lindsay Lohan does. I’m more worried about why I keep clucking like a chicken, which started somewhere around the time when I first saw a hypnotist. Maybe they can convince me yo replace the shirts I bought in university.

Bowl Full of Delusion

Celebrities as Sea Monkeys, it's so perfect, I don't know how I didn't see it before. It's clear that they don't live in our world, at least the we see them on the pages of tabloids and the gossip blogs.

This is from Gallery of the Absurd, an artist who is "fascinated and horrified by the alarming rise in celebrity culture." Make sure to check out the full-size version on her site.