THE WEBSITE IS DOWN: Funny short film about working tech support. Not particularly safe for work, but funnier than The Love Guru with significantly fewer penis jokes.

DUMB DORA'S MAKING A COMEBACK: Yes, get ready to match the stars--Sarah Silverman, Norm MacDonald, Super Dave Osborne, Scott Thompson, Rashida Jones, and Niecy Nash as we play the star-studded big money Match Game 2008! And, now, here's the star of Match Game 2008--Andrew Daly (best known for playing Benjamin Franklin on The Office).

IS OUR CHILDREN LEARNING? These excerpts from AP American History essays may provoke that question. I'm also reminded of the write-on papers I graded for law journal writing competition as a 3L--the subject that year was the regulation of digital/artificial child pornography--one of the essays began with the statement "Child pornography often provokes a negative response."

SUMMER COCKTAIL SERIES #3

This week's summer cocktail series comes from Maggie. If you (yes, you!) want to provide a recipe for a tasty summer beverage and an amusing anecdote, send it along to the contact email and we'll put it up.

TAKE ANOTHER SHOT OF COURAGE:

When my parents moved into their new house, my dad was able install the grill of his dreams. Last summer, he planned a cookout just to showcase his grilling skills. He casually mentioned his newly acquired margarita recipe, which he got from one of "his guys." We thought he was joking because (a) my dad is not a laid back margarita kind of guy (he's more Boston Brahmin than Parrothead) and (b) he's known for his strong traditional cocktails - Manhattans, martinis (Bombay Blue Sapphire with blue cheese-stuffed olives), gin and tonics, etc. In fact, his cocktails, frequently served in over-sized glasses, have been the downfall of many a significant other meeting our family for the first time. Seriously, one sister's (now ex-)boyfriend fell off a chair during Thanksgiving dinner because no one told him that you have to keep adding ice or pouring some down the sink to avoid getting plowed.

Anyways, we though it was so cute that he was trying to cater to my college-age sister who had not yet acquired the taste for martinis, so egged him on. Two hours and 4 pitchers of margaritas later, my entire family was smashed (but in a good way). These margaritas are now a staple at family events (summertime or otherwise). My dad loves that we request them whenever we're home and we even made them this Thanksgiving to accompany the turkey my mom let him grill.

Maggie's Dad's Margaritas
16 oz white tequila
8 oz triple sec
4 oz key west lime juice (regular lime juice is okay, but not optimal)
12 oz limeaid frozen
1 beer (slid in at the end)
salt (optional)
lime wedges

Pour the tequila, triple sec, lime juice and limeade in a large pitcher. Stir until the limeade is thawed. Carefully "slide" the beer into the pitcher so it doesn't foam too much. Serve on the rocks, with a lime wedge, with or without salt.

Be careful - these are more potent than they seem at first sip. The key lime juice and the beer put them over the top.

GURU IS DOO-DOO: That's what the Seattle Times headline reads, and as it turns out, the opposite of The Love Guru is neither hate nor indifference; the opposite is "funny". Ebert:

What is it with Mike Myers and penis jokes? Having created a classic, funny scene with his not-quite-visible penis sketch in the first “Austin Powers” movie, he now assembles, in “The Love Guru,” as many more penis jokes as he can think of, none of them funny, except for one based on an off-screen “thump.” He supplements this subject with countless other awful moments involving defecation and the deafening passing of gas. Oh, and elephant sex....

Myers has made some funny movies, but this film could have been written on toilet walls by callow adolescents. Every reference to a human sex organ or process of defecation is not automatically funny simply because it is naughty, but Myers seems to labor under that delusion. He acts as if he’s getting away with something, but in fact all he’s getting away with is selling tickets to a dreary experience.

Tony Scott, NYT:

[The repeated Mariska Hargitay "joke"] might sum up “The Love Guru” in its entirety but only at the risk of grievously understating the movie’s awfulness. A whole new vocabulary seems to be required. To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious. The word “unfunny” surely applies to Mr. Myers’s obnoxious attempts to find mirth in physical and cultural differences but does not quite capture the strenuous unpleasantness of his performance. No, “The Love Guru” is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again.

And this is, come to think of it, something of an achievement. What is the opposite of a belly laugh? An interesting question, in a way, and to hear lines like “I think I just made a happy wee-wee” or “I’m making diarrhea noises in my cup” or to watch apprentice gurus attack one another with urine-soaked mops is to grasp the answer.

Perhaps Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune had the nicest thing to say: "[W]e're talking 15 or 20 minutes of decent material. The movie runs a little longer than that."

e.t.a. One more, as we approach Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio-level bad. Via Slate's Dana Stevens: "There are good movies. There are bad movies. There are movies so bad they're good (though, strangely, not the reverse). And once in a while there is a movie so bad that it takes you to a place beyond good and evil and abandons you there, shivering and alone. ... the most joy-draining 88 minutes I've ever spent outside a hospital waiting room."

SELF-SELECTION OF THE FITTEST: There's an interesting experiment underway at LAX (Terminal 1, anyway). At the security-checkpoint bottleneck, there are now two lines: one for "expert travelers," and one for everybody else. The only instruction on which line to use is something like "don't use the expert line if you don't know what you're doing." The non-expert line snakes around six or seven times; the expert line is probably 1/3 as long. In addition to being shorter, the expert line moved faster (because everybody knew enough to untie their shoes and have their laptops out of the bag before reaching the front of the line).

Surprisingly, most people chose the non-expert line. I only saw one cheater -- there's always one; this one didn't know that you couldn't take a water bottle through security, that they'd make her take off her shoes, or that she didn't have to unzip her bag for a manual inspection (what is it with airport line-jumpers that makes them think that after getting caught cheating, a public "whoops, I'm cheating!" is going to endear them to everybody else? I think the appropriate punishment here is extra security attention).

It's possible that this experiment was only working because people didn't understand what was going on. It's also possible, though, that people will actually self-select into the proper category (like 10K runners getting into into starting groups depending upon how fast they expect to run the race). I don't know -- is this going to work?

NOT A GIRL, NOT YET A WOMAN, BUT DEFINITELY A MOMMY: In procreation news, 17-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears had a baby girl this morning in McComb, Mississippi.

Maddie Briann Aldridge and Jamie Lynn Spears will be starring in the remake of Gilmore Girls, premiering in 2024 on the WB.