I hit the Fox Business studio yesterday to talk with Brian Sullivan about Obama’s plans for high speed rail. Just imagine if we could get around the U.S. without having to sit in some airport purgatory breathing re-processed air and downing earwax-flavored food. Yeah, I can’t really imagine it either.

Behold today’s guest editor for The Infrastructurist. Look mom, aren’t you glad I did that whole law school thing?

There are a couple types of bad movies. Well, 2 types really. There are movies that are simply bad — bad acting, bad plot, bad dialogue, bad effects, or simply an overall melange of badness that seeps through every aspect of the film. Then there are bad movies that are incurably bad, but still manage to be entertaining — “good-bad” films, I like to call them. A lot of monster/ghost/vampire movies fall into this latter category — they manage to be bad but still somehow good, since you have something to root for. Disbelief can be willingly hung from the rafters, and you can lose yourself in the total silliness of a giant anaconda doing its damndest to eat Eric Stoltz (my favorite good-bad movie of all time).

The thing is, when a movie TRIES to be good-bad, chances are it winds up transcending bad into pure awful. Which is what happened with Daybreakers, Willem Dafoe or no. To read my Horror Chick review, click here.

Happy Non-2009! Congratulations on surviving with sanity (presumably) intact! O brave new year that has such capacity for craziness in’t! (With apologies to Aldous Huxley, and Shakespeare for that matter.)

Given that we’ve moved on to a new decade, the editors at The Awl have been running a fascinating “End of the ’00s” series by more writers than I can count. So I took the opportunity to rant about the decade in horror movies, from Saw to Rob Zombie to chicks with chainsaws. Since the rest of what happened in the aughts — pop culture’s soul-killing descent, the economy tanking, the labor market hemorrhaging, the steady decline of the U.S. as a superpower — was just too depressing. To read the latest Horror Chick, click here.

Oh well — at least I’m under Brian Williams and Katie Couric:

Notable Quotable Awards for 2009: Nominees for Long Live Camelot Award

UPDATE: Turns out I won this shit. At this point, nothing to do but laugh. It’s what Mary Jo would have done! (Have a blast with that one, right wing.)

A few, er, weeks ago (hey, there was a national holiday somewhere in between) we brought you the Part One of the top ten most gut-wrenching Unintentional Horror movies. Here are the Top 5. And damn are these movies scary.

(And yes, it is true, I cannot watch Kramer vs Kramer — too disturbing. Give me torture porn any day.)

I traveled to Dubai earlier this year, and was astounded by the place. I never did get around to writing about it at the time, but leave it to a financial crisis to get me off my arse. So here’s a column I did for Mediaite about the arguable inevitability of the flashiest Emirate’s troubles.

(This post is in response to John Carney’s Annual Guide to Holiday Romance)

• Avoid any guy who lists “blogger” on his resume. The reasons to do this are too numerous to list.
• Avoid any guy who starts a sentence with “If you Google me…”
• Avoid any guy who quotes Judd Apatow and/or refers to his friends as “my buddies.”
• Avoid any guy who watches Gossip Girl.
• Avoid any guy who crashes the office Christmas party. He’s there to bang secretaries. Unless he’s unemployed, in which case he’s there to shmooze, pound free booze, and then bang secretaries.
• Avoid any guy who is a lawyer. He’s either about to lose his job or desperately wants to, so he can have an excuse to start that baseball card trading business he’s always dreamed of. In the meantime, he will expect you to support him while he “gets back on his feet.”
• Avoid any guy who keeps old Victoria’s Secret catalogues in his bathroom. Find some respectable Internet porn, for chrissakes.
• Avoid any guy who saw “The Road” and liked it. He’ll never commit.
• Avoid any guy who lives on the L train.
• Avoid any guy with more than 500 followers on Twitter. His virtual ego will be inflated to levels his physical existence can’t match.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I’m not ranting about slasher movies or toddlers in stripper heels, I do occasionally do some legitimate sit-in-an-office work (though it still involves writing and futzing around on the Internet, so it’s tough to really call it “work” — somehow that term seems reserved for, well, stuff that sucks). Anyway my new gig is running an excellent and click-worthy blog, The Infrastructurist, which is a daily conversation about how we get around (and how we’ll continue to do so over the next 50 to 100 years). I suggest you bookmark and read it obsessively.

On that note, happy and safe holiday travel!

What does it mean when one of the most famous three-year-olds in the world is toddling around in high heels and designer coats? Nothing good, my friends. Nothing good. Check out my piece in today’s New York Post to read the full rant.