Word: popped
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...course, it's easy for me to be sanctimonious: I'm a pop-culture columnist, not a campaign reporter. The logistics of disclosing votes would be a problem; no one wants to slog through countless articles giving the writers' electoral history back to college. But the online magazine Slate handled this by doing a poll of its staff before the 2000 and 2004 general elections. It is the sort of thing websites and blogs are made for. The main reason it won't happen with the mainstream media soon, however, is simple: the other guy isn't doing it. Ultimately...
...glut of comic references - to movies of the '50s (The Thing from Another World) and the '70s (Apocalypse Now) - that should probably be deleted from the anything-for-a-joke book. The movie also briefly and unnecessarily invokes the voices of Henry Kissinger and JFK. But ransacking pop culture is what cartoons do, and not just the gag-strewn Shrek movies. Clampett's Horton Hatches the Egg has a Katharine Hepburn bird, a Peter Lorre fish (that commits suicide!) and the Horace Heidt novelty hit "The Hut Sut Song." Even the more restrained Jones ended his Horton with a twist...
...Today, school curriculums that had focused on Chinese history and geography center on Taiwan. Learning a local dialect such as Taiwanese, Hakka or aborigine - languages the KMT once banned in the classrooms - is now compulsory in elementary school. Today's youth and pop artists have also sparked a movement that embraces local culture. An ethnic slur, taike - which Taiwan's mainlanders used decades ago to describe the uncultured locals they found on the island - has become something cool. Taike now means a "Taiwanese character" (as in "that guy's a real character"). In his hit rap song I Love...
...Tussaud's imparts a lesson to the schoolkids and tourists who tramp through its labyrinthine exhibits, it's about the pre-eminence of pop culture, and the random nature - and transience - of fame. Hollywood A-listers, sports people and British royals hog the limelight. There are 400-odd figures on show, but all scientific endeavor is represented by Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, Charles Darwin, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and TIME's Person of the Century, Albert Einstein, who share a small annex with Vincent Van Gogh, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. In the dim light of the first gallery...
...crew - and chances are he will (Tussaud's has been rebuffed only once in its history by a would-be subject, and that was Mother Teresa) - he can expect to be poked, prodded, kissed and possibly abused. In a world where fame is valued more highly than respect and pop stars take precedence over playwrights, it's an opportunity not to be missed...