Wow, lots of love for this poster created by OBEY for the Obama campaign. The screenprint was only released in a limited edition of 350 today and immediately sold out.

Minimates, block-styled miniature action figures created by Art Asylum, are available in some great flavors. Even though I need another collection like I need a hole in the head, I may have to start one because of this.....now on sale, a Minimates set based on the 1991 Academy Award-winning Best Picture “The Silence of the Lambs!” I can imagine toddlers all over the globe re-enacting this scene:

"Do you know what you look like, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. A well-scrubbed, hustling rube, with a little taste. Good nutrition's given you length of bone, but you're not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you? And that accent you've tried so desperately to shed: pure West Virginia. What is your father, dear? ls he a coal miner? Does he stink of the lamp? How quickly the boys found you. All those tedious, sticky fumblings in the back seats of cars, while you could only dream of getting out, getting anywhere, getting all the way to the FBl."

More from the weird food aisle...Strawberry Frosted Cheetos. Yes, you read it correctly. Strawberry Cheetos. They're really Cheetos and they're really from Frito Lay, but they are only available in Japan. There are also Chocolate Cheetos, if you're into that. Probably the perfect snack to wash down with an ice cold Cucumber Pepsi, also available only in Japan:

The fabulous Jan Hooks as faux religious broadcaster Tammy Jean Pickett on the Bill Tush Show, which aired on Ted Turner's Superstation TBS, circa 1981. "My eyes have seen it, and it is large."

Stewardess Nancy's first day, circa 1982. My, how customer service attitudes have changed on United Airlines! On our United red-eye flight to Florida to see my folks last Thanksgiving, the flight attendants were surly and then partied in the forward galley throughout the night, turning the light out and quieting down only when we were about to land in Orlando. It was as if we passengers were in the way of their socializing...I realize that they've taken pay cuts and lost their pensions, but really, there's no excuse for treating your customers like crap.

A fire on the roof of the Monte Carlo hotel-casino forced gamblers to flee and sent flaming embers raining down on the Las Vegas Strip today - where are Paul Newman and Steve McQueen when you need them??

The Center For Public Integrity has compiled a database of lies told by the Bush White House regarding Iraq since 2001, arriving at a grand total of 935. Of course, these little fibs are no small triviality...When the Bush Administration lied, people died. Over 150,000 Iraqis and nearly 4,000 Americans, to be specific.

Shocked to hear about Heath Ledger's untimely death. I liked his work in Brokeback, the portrayal of Ennis is exactly how I imagined the character in the short story.

Got a new toy over the weekend: an Apple TV unit. I was initially uninspired by this device, a digital media receiver designed, marketed and sold by Apple designed to play digital content originating from the iTunes Store or another computer onto a high-def widescreen television. It can store content on its internal hard drive or stream it across a network from another computer. I really didn't see the need for it, but the prospect of renting movies directly through the web without having to mess with Netflix tempted me. So far we are blown away by looking at our digital photo albums in high definition. The screensaver of floating pictures of your life while your favorite tunes are playing on the home theater system is quite compelling - we watched it for hours for the past couple of nights!

LOVING the new Jennifer Saunders sitcom "The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle." Created by Saunders and Tanya Byron, "Vivienne Vyle" follows the on-screen and off-screen life of the host of a fictional TV series modeled after Dr. Phil and Jerry Springer. Thank god for YouTube - there is no reason that BBC America cannot air this in a timely manner! It's already gone out in the UK - broadcast it here in the US!

Lots of cool new web-based applications for the iPhone coming out now. Some interesting ones include the French-language Audio Guide CitySpeaker, which outfits your iPhone with audio guides of 20 destinations; vFlashlight, which lets iPhone users brighten up their surroundings when a flashlight is needed; and ZAGAT.mobi, which supplies free restaurant, nightlife and hotel information for hundreds of cities, including address, phone number, and operating hours.

Crazy-ass Tom Cruise's recently leaked in-house Scientology video. Watch it and discover that he is truly insane - what is it about super-celebritydom that makes you lose all your marbles?? Mostly posting this just so it remains propagated around the Internet. Hopefully this will stem the flow of new movies from this nutcase. A former Scientologist commenter at RADAR provides definitions of Cruise's Scientology-speak:

• KSW (short for Keeping Scientology Working): A policy written by Hubbard in the 1960's that requires all Scientologists to follow his words and his rules exactly.
• Orgs: Orgs is an abbreviation for "organizations" and describes all churches of Scientology throughout the world.
• David Miscavige: The current leader of Scientology and the equivalent of the Pope to the Catholics.
• Out-ethics: any behavior that violates any of Hubbard's rules of conduct.
• Put ethics in on someone else: make others conform to Hubbard's rules of behavior.
• Criminon: Scientology front group that tries to recruit through the prisons.
• SP: Suppressive Person. Anyone that doesn't like Scientology and/or criticizes Scientology.
• PTS/SP: another bogus Hubbard term to define behavior that goes against Scientology rules.
• LRH technology or "tech": all the Scientology policies, rules, mandates, procedures.

We watched a Netflix rental the other night - the charming Irish musical "Once." Set in Dublin, the film stars musicians Glen Hansard (of popular Irish rock band The Frames) and Markéta Irglová as fictional struggling musicians. Collaborators prior to making the film, Hansard and Irglová composed and performed most of the original songs used in the movie. I've found myself repeating the main theme "Falling Slowly" over and over in my head ever since.

I hope my brother (who works for Budweiser) does not condone this - a new product from Anheuser-Busch called Chelada is a mixture of beer and clam-flavored tomato juice. Which is worse, this foul brew or something I saw in the grocery store today: Chocolate-Cherry Diet Dr. Pepper.

I am in love with the new KitKat White. It's so dang good - the white chocolate is smooth and creamy, while the crunchy vanilla cookie center acts as a great counterpoint. It takes extreme self-control not to consume three or four packages at once.

Now here's a scenario for the next "Airport" film: a passenger hacks into the plane's computer network and threatens to bring it down... From Wired.com: "Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner passenger jet may have a serious security vulnerability in its onboard computer networks that could allow passengers to access the plane's control systems, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. The computer network in the Dreamliner's passenger compartment, designed to give passengers in-flight internet access, is connected to the plane's control, navigation and communication systems, an FAA report reveals." WOW! Get Karen Black on the phone, STAT!

I met Andy B. Sharp on the number 2 bus in Los Angeles. It was 1989 and I rode the trusty number 2 from our apartment in Silver Lake to my job in Westwood every day, 50 minutes each way. (Contrary to what most Angelenos would have you believe, public transit in LA is actually very good, with routes taking you anywhere you want to go, including Disneyland, the beach, museums, etc. We lived in LA for over 10 years without a car, but I digress.) I would see Andy every afternoon waiting for the bus at the place where I caught it too - right outside the UCLA campus entrance. He would eye me coyly while smoking a cigarette, his left leg cocked ever-so-slightly inward in a come-hither pose. When the bus would pull up, I usually walked past him and smiled as I boarded, then headed to my favorite seat just in front of the rear exit doors.

One day, instead of just smiling, I asked him to sit with me as we crossed the city. We became instant friends as we chatted about my recent relocation to LA, his childhood in Arizona, his job at the UCLA medical library and a million other things. As I talked about Philip, he somehow got the impression that my partner was black (I think this was a bit of wishful thinking, Andy was trying to imagine himself in Philip's place). When I got home one night a few weeks later, I announced to Philip that I was inviting someone over for dinner. "Who?," he wanted to know. "A guy I met on the bus," I said. "Are you CRAZY?!?" was his response.

No, I wasn't crazy. Andy did come for dinner, and Philip loved him like I did. In fact, we liked him so much that he basically never left our side for the next seven years. He became one of our closest friends, spending every holiday, birthday and vacation with us. He was smart, funny and sometimes just plain wacky. He was afraid of the water, passionate about food and a happy-go-lucky guy. "What does the B stand for in your name Andy?" I would ask. "It just stands for the letter B, my mother liked the letter B," was a typical Andy answer. I miss him still.

You never know where you are going to find your next best friend...maybe I should put my car in the garage, buy a bus pass and see who else is waiting out there to enter our lives...

Was she ever gone? Last night Mrs. Clinton pulled off a stunning (according to our increasingly insufferable news media pundits) upset in the New Hampshire primary, with 39% of the vote to Barack Obama's 37%. Today, bombastic commentators on MSNBC are screeching that "shock waves are reverberating throughout the American political landscape...her campaign was dead!!!" Really? After coming in third in the very first primary caucus???? Uh, her husband came in third in most of his early primaries and STILL nabbed the nomination. My head hurts and its 10 months until the national election. I like this picture, though...she looks thrilled. And the genuine response to a question from a New Hampshire voter on "how she gets up and gets going every morning" may have turned the tide for her campaign by showing us her human side:

Kinda late in posting this from last year, but since series two is going to premiere simultaneously in Britain and here on BBC America at the end of this month, it's worth revisiting. Created by Russell T. Davies (creator of the original "Queer as Folk"), "Torchwood" is the wildly successful 'Doctor Who" spinoff that centers around the activities of the Cardiff branch of the fictional Torchwood Institute, an agency that deals with supernatural occurrences. This clip, from near the end of series one, features perhaps the most genuine same-sex kiss ever put on film. In it, protagonist Captain Jack Harkness is trapped by a time rift in a 1941 dancehall, where he falls for a fighter pilot that he knows is doomed to die the following day.

Must have been super-successful: BBC's promotional tagline for the new season is "Who's Jack Kissing Now?" Series two premieres on BBC Two January 16 and on BBC America January 24.

Even though I am WAY over "Lost" and could not care less about the upcoming "rescue from the island" teaser commercials, I do appreciate the marketing campaign for the new season that promotes imaginary airline operator Oceanic Airlines. That airline has to be the WORST in the world, since in addition to that missing jet in the South Pacific, they are also the company involved in that incident with a 747 full of terrorists and poison gas headed for Washington, DC ("Executive Decision"), a flight highjacked by terrorists that slammed into the U.S. Capitol ("Last Resort"), and a plane of theirs was struck by lightning and forced into an emergency landing at O'Hare International ("Category 6: Day of Destruction"). Fake billboards and commercials for Oceanic have been popping up all over the globe, touting their return to service and trips to "Places You Never Imagined," like Ames, Iowa and Tustin, California.

Kool-Aid and Reebok are teaming up to bring you fluorescent-colored sneakers with scented soles in six different flavors. Expected to hit stores in June, along with color-coordinated hoodies. I MUST have a pair of lemon-limes!

Michael Buckley is poised to be "America's New Favorite Gay." In his weekly YouTube video blog "What the Buck?!," he constructs fun rants about entertainment, and naturally he has caught Hollywood's attention. I can't imagine what it must be like to be his partner, though...

To commemorate Dame Edna’s fifty (!) years in show business, the Victorian Arts Centre in Melbourne, Australia has created a brilliant new online retrospective of her career called “Virtually Edna,“ a website complete with original podcasts. Mr. Humphries is unbelievably funny.

I question the financial viability of the companies responsible for the following 2008 calendars:

Well, I began the new year by coming down with the flu, and I have been in bed ever since my head hit the pillow on New Year's Eve. I did not see the Rose Parade and I did not eat a nice holiday dinner...instead I spent much of the first week of 2008 either in bed or in the bathroom. I have experienced every possible symptom, and have essentially become a weak-kneed mucus-producing machine that can barely function. The dry and crispy Christmas tree, once a thing of beauty, droops in the corner. Purging Xmas from the house will have to wait....Oh, and now that I have enough energy to actually sit at my desk for a few minutes: Happy New Year!