Brian Atene, Bad Audition Boy and the reason YouTube exists

Yep: to make sure we can never, ever live down our most embarassing moments. Here’s what Defamer has to say about this four minute and thirty-two second glimpse straight down the gaping, gibbering maw of Hell itself.

Please, Stanley Kubrick has cast weirder 

In 1984, or so the YouTube blurb legend goes, the late, great Stanley Kubrick “placed ads throughout the U.S. for young aspiring actors to send in audition tapes” for his upcoming project, Full Metal Jacket. Whether or not the director ever saw this submission–and we think the less we tell you about it the better–we cannot say.

I can say, though, and I say that if he had seen it, he’d have died right then and there.

Brace yourselves; he went to Juilliard. But then, so did Robin Williams, and I bet he’d make a more plausible Outsider.

There is also an hilarious new video which claims to be the 2006 Brian Atene, also addressing Mister Kubrick (Mister CUE-Brick!) and re-enacting a scene from Full Metal Jacket. It must be seen to be believed: Me so hoooooorny! Me love you longtime!

the T factor: cocktease edition

where the customer comes first

or twattease: we are, after all, very evenhanded and all Feminista here on the ol’ raincoaster blog.

The Guardian reports that the most famous and historic brothel in the world has just re-opened, but don’t pack your prophylactics quite yet. The reportage, while Bad boys, bad boys, whatchagonna do?factually unassailable, omits some of the most critically relevant information tourists require before booking their vacation time, lathering themselves in strawberry-flavoured viscosity and chucking the carefully-powdered latex bodysuits into a duffle bag.

Read it for yourself:

The “wolves’ lair” – ancient Pompeii‘s biggest, best planned and most richly decorated brothel – yesterday reopened to the public after extensive restoration.

They will let you in. They will take your money. And then they will shaft you.

this way, suckers!

I’ll always have Paris…hell, anyone can have her for the asking!

Stole this from Frontier Editor, who got Dublin. I figured I was a shoo-in for the same, for genetic reasons, but it musta been my choice of “Cosmopolitan, yet quaint, and a little snobby” that made the difference. Either that or it’s that I said I’d write a novel. Which I’m supposed to do starting in five days. Gah. Meanwhile, anybody got a passport?


You Belong in Paris


You enjoy all that life has to offer, and you can appreciate the fine tastes and sites of Paris.

You’re the perfect person to wander the streets of Paris aimlessly, enjoying architecture and a crepe.

What European City Do You Belong In?

Michael J. Fox, come home!

But the best headline of the day award has to go to Fark, which announced Bob Geldof‘s opening of a new stem cell research centre in Toronto with the words:

Tell me why I don’t like fundies.
Tell me why I don’t like fundies.

Geldof, self-deprecating about his scientific knowledge, said that staring at cells through a microscope, “you know absolutely that the secret of those desperately traitorous illnesses that so defeat us is in there. And these microscopes and these brilliant men and women are going to get at it.”

Among those brilliant men and women referred to by Geldof is Gordon Keller, who is coming home to Canada to head up the McEwen Centre after spending 16 years in the United States.

One of the world’s foremost stem cell researchers, the native of Melville, Sask., has spent the last seven years at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where his lab has performed groundbreaking research generating various types of cells from embryonic stem cells.

Well, if he’s as smart as he seems, Michael J. Fox has got to be double-thinking his decision to become an American citizen. Even Metrotown‘s gotta be looking pretty good to a nouveu Yank facing six-figure medical bills and the certainty that, should a cure for Parkinson’s emerge from the most promising area of research, it is already illegal in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Grave of Democracy.

enjoy studying great tits? Have I got a report for you!

Joan Collins, during the reign of Queen Victoria 

Researchers at the EGI have been studying great tits in Wytham, Oxfordshire, since 1947.

Presumably some of their original subjects aren’t quite as great as they used to be, Joan Collins excepted, as always.

Here is the full report, which also explains why they can be different sizes. Bonus!

UPDATE: Metro claims in the comments that these are his tits, and that I should give Miss Cellania credit for them. I can only conclude that I do not know Metro as well as I thought, and that Miss Cellania must be a talented plastic surgeon as well as journalist.

What you don’t know about your friends, eh?