The opening play—Lemur Love, a jungle bro-fest between a nebbish lemur and a laid-back sloth—is the weakest of the bunch, toeing the line between theater and sketch comedy more than any of the other plays. It’s essentially one joke, extended for six or seven minutes: anthropomorphized animals have problems with women, too! While it felt more like a first draft than a finished piece, it still managed hilarity at times, in part thanks to the chemistry between lemur Richie Starzec and sloth Sam Sontag. A joke about grabbing onto the woman you love and never letting go—cliché advice according to the lemur, but meant literally by the sloth—is a standout, as is an obvious but still laugh-out-loud funny gag that has the sloth run from hunters in excruciatingly slow motion.

The next play, A Romantic Night (of the Living Dead) gets off to a strong start with a clever false-protagonist fake-out: it opens on a muscled action hero, only to have him almost immediately killed and eaten by the zombies who are the real stars. Zombies on a first date: it’s more or less the same kind of one-joke wonder as Lemur Love, but the premise is smarter and the piece holds up better. A Lady and the Tramp reference, with human guts instead of spaghetti, is a particularly fun moment.

Kirby Sokolow and Matthew Younger feast on the bloody innards of Bryce Hollingsworth in "A Romantic Night (of the Living Dead)"

Memoirs of a Virgin, the third play, is the first to reach for something more than just laughs. It features Chad, a comically-bearded dude whose wild loss of virginity story is interrupted by the living memory of his high school girlfriend, burst from within his mind to tell her version of the story. It’s a great concept, and the execution strikes a nice balance between humor and sweetness, but it loses its energy midway through with an unnecessary digression about how Chad’s bro friends can see and hear the girl in his memory. Steves introduces this conceit well enough that the audience has already bought it, and the further non-explanation is just distracting. But the piece goes out on a high note as one of the bros nervously comes out of the closet only to be completely ignored by his friends as the lights go down.

Dirty Kinky picks up with Family Values, a piece about a family of suburban contract killers who invite a victim, bound and gagged, to dine with them before his death. Values is helped by a number of great sight gags focusing on Michelle Agresti, as the Stepford-Wife mother, dumping spoons of macaroni into the unwilling mouth of duct-taped Matt Krakaur, and there’s a hilarious line in which father Joseph Gargan acknowledges the “surprising awesomeness” of his daughter’s gun.

Suburban mother Michelle Agresti spoon-feeds about-to-be-killed Matt Krakaur in "Family Values"

But it’s with the last two plays, Romeo v. Juliet and Levi Goldberg’s Totally Rad Bar Mitzvah, that Dirty Kinky really hits its stride. Romeo presents us with a middle-aged Romeo and Juliet, trapped in an increasingly unhappy marriage. The performances—Peter Cramer as Romeo and Danielle Springer as Juliet—are both fantastic, as is the modernized Olde English blend that is Steves’ faux-Shakespearean dialogue. Unfortunately, the world of the play is undercut by repeated cheap jokes about how the two protagonists have never read the play from which they originate, but the piece is saved by its unexpected, well-played ending.

Levi Goldberg is even better. A sprawling, multi-character epic, it presents us with a tableau of personalities all converged at, yes, thirteen-year-old Levi Goldberg’s bar mitzvah. Instead of following a straight narrative, the show fades Altman-esque between different groups. It’s an engrossing capstone to the rest of the show, helped by Solomon Billinkoff’s strong performance as Levi’s angry, divorced father and Matt Leibowitz’s pitch-perfect take on an obnoxious bar mitzvah DJ. The piece is weighed down by a clumsy attempt to tie the whole show together that has characters from the previous plays—Romeo, Juliet, and the contract-killer family, among others—all wind up at the bar mitzvah; it’s distracting, and those characters’ absurdism feels out of place in the realistically written and acted bar mitzvah scene. Still, though, Levi Goldberg ends the show on a poignant note, and it doesn’t lack for laughs. More than any of the others, it showcases Steves’ talent as a playwright.

(Quick primer for those of you who are not super-into Supreme Court minutia: right now there are four conservative justices on the Court [Antonin "The Angry Italian" Scalia, Clarence "Never Speaks" Thomas, Samuel "Not Harriet Miers" Alito, and Chief Justice John "John" Roberts] one conservative-leaning swing vote [Anthony "No Relation" Kennedy], and four liberals [Sonia "Wise Latina" Sotomayor, Ruth "The Jewish One" Bader Ginsburg, Steven "Who?" Breyer," and John Paul "No Nickname Out of Respect for His Just-Announced Retirement" Stevens.)

Justice Stevens, looking like a baller in his pimp bow tie.

The answer starts with the fact that the Supreme Court does not work the way you probably expect it does. From afar, it might seem like the justices hear the case and then do a simple up-or-down vote on which way they think the Court should rule—but this really isn't the case at all. In reality, the Court is full of behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing. As an institution, the Supreme Court presents itself as impartial, aloof, and above all the dirty miscellanea of politics, but the truth is that the Court is an inherently political institution.

Even if Obama nominates a justice who would vote exactly the same way as Stevens did on every issue (and that's a big "if"—the front-runner, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, is less liberal than Stevens), future cases wouldn't automatically have the same outcome as they would under the current Court. Stevens is currently the longest-serving justice on the Court, and he's used his time to cultivate personal relationships with many of the other justices, which he often uses to secure their vote.

More importantly, as the oldest justice on the Court, has the power in many cases to decide who gets to write the majority opinion—and justices love to get their egos boosted by writing these opinions. (Chief Justice Roberts holds this power when he is on the side of the majority; it falls to Stevens otherwise.) Stevens has frequently bargained with Kennedy, offering him the opportunity to write the opinion in exchange for joining the liberals' side of the decision.

"WHAT?" You say? "Anthony Kennedy, a justice in our highest court of the land, would make his voting decisions in part based on pure issues of ego? Say it ain't so!" Well, yes. He would. (For a much deeper look into these machinations, and an explanation of why such horse-trading isn't actually a horrible thing, this New Yorker article on Stevens' retirement is a must-read.)

But it'll take years for the new justice, whoever he or she is, to build the kind of personal relationships that Stevens used to great effect. And thus the Court tilts ever rightward.

(If that thought's too depressing, make yourself laugh by reading this insane Wall Street Journal article suggesting that Obama might quit the Presidency and nominate himself[!] to the Supreme Court. Spoiler Alert: He won’t.)

I think we can all agree that Israel should change their policy and open up Shuhada Street. Regardless, that’s not the problem here. The problem is that this blockade is a terrible way to effectively raise awareness of this issue—and, even if some kind of blockade could have been, in theory, a good idea, this particular blockade was incredibly poorly thought-out. Here’s why:

Pissing people off is not a good way to get them on your side. Let’s face it, not being able to go up the main stairs is annoying. Sure, it’s not that annoying—you could just go up the side stairs—but it was still a little bit annoying, especially at lunch, when students are often in a huge rush to wolf down disgusting amounts of grilled cheese sandwiches before dashing hurriedly off to class. Obviously, I get the parallels between the blockade and the Shuhada Street situation, although it’s not a very clear parallel (for something really daring and thought-provoking, how ’bout only letting the Jewish-looking kids past the blockade?) But the bottom line is that this was a campaign to raise awareness of an issue, and by irritating people, the students running the blockade turned many peoples’ conversations from, “Wow, that Shuhada Street thing is really terrible” to, “Wow, that stair blockade is really annoying.”

Keep in mind that I’m not approaching this from any kind of moral or ethical standpoint—I’m not saying it was wrong of them to block the stairs, and of course, having to walk an extra ten feet is nothing compared to what thousands of Palestinians go through every day. Look, maybe it is douchey of us, the privileged, bourgeoisie students, to get annoyed about a tiny little stair blockade in the name of justice. But that’s not the point, because regardless of whether people abstractly “should” or “shouldn’t” get annoyed, in actuality, people were annoyed. From a purely practical, realpolitik standpoint, if you’re trying to get people to be on your side of an issue, inconveniencing them is not a good way to start.

Furthermore, this particular blockade was run very poorly. It wasn’t at all clear what was going on—some big signs or banners might have been nice—and I overheard a number of people wondering if the dining hall was closed for the day. When I attempted to talk to one of the blockade-runners about what was going on, he simply shoved a flier in my hand and pushed me out the way. Okay, no big deal—but the flier is not an effective flier, because it doesn’t tell you anything about what you can do to help! Seriously, even after the annoyance I was ready to sympathize with the cause and maybe help out a little bit, but only such info on the flier is a link to an online petition. Why not have an actual petition available to sign in front of the steps? Or something else? I’m not sure exactly what we can do about this whole thing, but that’s the point: of course I, a random, uninformed student, have no idea. If you’re going to blockade the stairs, at least tell me what I can do.

Anyways, I don’t mean to go “against” the students in charge of the International Day of “Acton.” I mean it as constructive criticism: maybe next time, they’ll find a way to raise awareness without annoying everyone—it would, I think, be a lot more effective.

Then it hits you: CNN! Their frequently-updated newstastic web site will be the perfect spot for me to find out what’s going on in the world today! So you head to their web site, let’s say, at 12:30 p.m. today, to see what you find:

LIVE: Biden remarks on economy. Hmmm… okay, sounds good so far.

Ticker: Romney threatened on airplane. Not really relevant, but I do like news about bad things happening to Mitt Romney, so we’ll let it slide.

Is your baby too fat? WTF?!?!?!?!?! And there’s a video link attached to that story!

Yes, despite having fairly-okay articles, CNN is home to perhaps some of the most preposterous, irrelevant headlines in news history. Below, a smattering of some of the most outrageous offenders:

Except then some people started to look a bit more closely at the video of the speech, and they noticed something: Sarah Palin was reading notes off of her hand. Seriously. She wrote notes on her hand.

(If you can’t read it, the list says: “Energy, tax cuts, lift American spirits.”)

Predictably, the Jew-controlled liberal blogosphere is now making relentless fun of Palin, because, well, writing notes on your hand is kind of pathetic. It’s one thing to read the entirety of a prepared speech from a teleprompter (a comparison that a conservator blogger at NPR, of all places, is making), but if you have to consult your cheat sheet just to remember that you want to lift American spirits, then maybe you’re not the best person to be in charge of lifting American spirits. (And besides, everyone knows that a much better method is to store the information in your graphing calculator.)

Finally, it’d be impossible for me to conclude an article about Tea Parties without including this video of Anderson Cooper making a hopefully-intentional dirty joke about the movement’s unfortunate choice of the verb “teabagging.” Watch till the end—it’s worth it:

Well, it’s a lucky day for those of us who want to know as many icky, repugnant details about Edwards as possible, because his former aide Andrew Young has just released a tell-all book called The Politician. And boy, does he tell it all. Some choice details:

– After visiting state fairs, Edwards would whine about he hated all the “fat rednecks.”

– Edwards cut out the labels of his Armani suits and replaced them with “Made In America” labels from other suits.

– Edwards promised his mistress that they would get married after Elizabeth Edwards died. That’s bad, but it gets worse: Edwards said he’d get the freakin’ Dave Matthews Band (!) to play at their wedding.

– After news of the affair came out, Bill Clinton called Edwards to ask him how he got caught.

And, of course, the absolute kicker, the crème de la crème: EDWARDS AND HIS MISTRESS MADE A SEX TAPE, which Andrew Young has.

Let me repeat that again, for full impact: SOMEWHERE OUT THERE, THERE IS A VIDEO WHERE YOU CAN WATCH FORMER VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE JOHN EDWARDS BANGING SOME CHICK!!

I know, random guy from Google Images. I’m surprised too. But this mean anything at all? Well, not really. Edwards’ political career was pretty much over anyways—he’s so 2004—and even these new revelations have only barely catapulted him back into the public eye. And besides—we have a new Sexy Senator to focus on. Now there’s a sex tape I’d pay to see.

Or maybe everyone will be super excited about something much, much lamer: using it to read.

That’s right—word on the street is that this mythical unicorn of an Apple device will quote-unquote “revolutionize reading” the same way the iPod quote-unquote “revolutionized music.” But wait, you say: didn’t Apple CEO Steve Jobs say only three years ago that digital readers like the Kindle were doomed to be failures because “people don’t read anymore?” Well, yes, he did. But apparently he’s changed his mind, as HarperCollins and the New York Times have both been reported to be in negotiations with Apple. Plus, there was that awesome digitized Sports Illustrated demo designed for “an unknown future tablet device.”

There’s still a lot more questions than answers about this thing. Will it be called the iSlate? The iTablet? The iPad? Does anyone at Apple realize that “iPad” sounds like a tampon? Will it have a 6-inch screen? 8 inches? 10 inches? Isn’t it less about the size and more about how you use it? Stupidly-named electronics site Gizmodo has an exhaustive rumor roundup that I attempted to read but quickly got bored with, since it’s full of impenetrable tech jargon and weird diagrams of people with disturbingly warped hands.

So, the Apple Tablet: gallant savior of magazines and books, leading them fearlessly into the digital age like a modern-day Ponce de Léon? Or just a last, desperate gasp of air from the dying old man that is print media?

Apple’s scheduled an announcement for January 27, a day when they’ll be sure to dominate the news cycle since there’s nothing else of any importance going on. So I guess we’ll find out then. In the meantime, I leave you with this: the crazy-ass Japanese version of one of those “Get A Mac” commercials:

Holmes stars Robert Downey Jr. as the title character, who smirks his way through the film like a British-ized Iron Man in an even more preposterous outfit. Actual Brit Jude Law co-stars as Watson, Holmes’ partner in sleuthing and, for most of the film, in life. Watson’s plan to marry his fianceé, played by the not-famous-as-far-as-I-know Kelly Reilly, and move out of their shared Sherlock Home (sorry, couldn’t resist) provides a delightful subplot—the camaraderie and rapid-fire banter between the detective and the doctor borders on sexual tension.

Without consulting the Wikipedia summary, however, the best summary of the main plot I can muster together is this: the evil Lord Blackwood, having been hanged for a number of murders, apparently rises from the dead. He becomes the leader of an underground, Illuminati-like sect which may or may not have magical powers. Holmes attempts to stop him from bombing Parliament—I think—while flirting outrageously with his on-again off-again American lover, played by Rachel “I Wrote You Every Day For A Year!” McAdams, who may or may not be double-crossing him. Also, there are a number of slow-motion fight scenes involving an eight-foot-tall Russian guy with a Fred Durst beard (that’s a picture of Durst, not the Russian guy). Holmes’ fondness for alcohol is kept from the original stories, but his compulsive cocaine use (seriously) has been excised. Really, though, the plot makes absolutely no sense. It’s not helped by Downey’s mumbling British accent which, although it fits the character, makes it virtually impossible to understand anything he says in the first ten minutes of the movie.

The movie is beautiful, with picturesque swoops across 18th-century London, and the borderline-schizophrenic quick-cut editing works well for the action scenes, which provide the meat of the film. One sequence in which Holmes’ lover is threatened by a meat-slicing machine amongst a huge number of decaying pig carcasses is masterful and could stand on its own as postmodernist short.

So, should you see it? Definitely. Just don’t expect to have any idea what the hell is going on.

“But wait,” you say. “I’m confused. What exactly is the filibuster?”

“Gosh darnit, all this here talk about guvern-mint sure is makin’ me confused!”

Don’t worry, Charlie (I decided that guy’s name is Charlie). Here’s a quick primer:
There are 100 Senators. To pass a bill, a majority of them must vote for it. This usually means 51+ votes, although sometimes Senators abstain from voting, and sometimes—although very, very infrequently—there’s a tie, in which case the Vice President can cast the deciding vote (this is basically the Vice President’s only official power).

But it’s not that simple. While only a majority vote is required to pass (or defeat) a bill, 60 votes is required to end debate on a bill and actually go to a vote. This in effect means that 60 votes are required to pass any major legislation, because if fewer than 60 Senators support a bill, the others can allow debate to continue forever (see sidenote). Eventually, the other Senators will get frustrated and table the bill. This rarely actually happens, though, as the Majority Leader—they guy who decides what legislation is voted on when, among other things—usually tries to make sure enough Senators will vote for a bill before he actually brings it up for a vote. (It’s embarrassing when a bill outright fails.) Thus, it’s usually the threat of a filibuster that kills or changes legislation, not an actual filibuster itself. Filibustering has been in the news recently because of good ol’ Joe “Everyone Pay Attention to Me!” Lieberman who, through the threat of a filibuster, single-handedly eliminated the Medicare buy-in proposal from health care reform.

(Sidenote: And when I say forever, I mean forever. Strom Thurmond, a former Senator and flaming racist once filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes. He rambled on about random shit including his grandmother’s biscuit recipe, and went on for so long that cots were brought in for the other Senators to sleep on. What horrible piece of legislation could cause such vehement opposition? The Civil Rights Act of 1957, which tried to give more African-Americans the right to vote. Good job, Strom.)

Pretty much everyone agrees, at one time or another, that the filibuster is unfair and undemocratic. Democrats want to get rid of it now, Republicans wanted to get rid of it a few years ago. But at any given time, the very people who don’t want the filibuster to go are the same people who, through the use of the filibuster, can block any efforts to eliminate it. And so it looks like we’ll be trapped in a filibuster stalemate forever…

But NOTHING is forever…

Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a New Republic writer with an unpronounceable name, has a proposal: pass legislation now to end the filibuster in 2017. By that point Obama will be out of office and every sitting Representative and Senator will have faced re-election at least once. Thus, no one knows who’ll be in power then. It could be anyone. Democrats, Republicans, Tea-Partiers… even ROBOTS.

Is it a good idea? Definitely. Will it happen? Probably not. Oh well…

…that’s the government for ya.

#1 – Governor Charlie “Oh-Christ-That’s-Good”

In today’s accidental sex-related news, preternaturally tanned Florida Governor and probable closet-dweller Charlie Crist (no relation to Jesus) accidentally gave out the number for a phone sex hotline instead of the number for KidCare, the state’s child health care program. Amazingly, the sex line number, which was given in a pre-recorded message which played when Floridians dialed another, less sexy number, went unnoticed for a whole two months.

Check out an example of the call, recorded by the Palm Beach Post (skip to 0:53 for the good stuff):

#2 – Senator Max Bonked-Us

Continuing our sex theme, Montana Senator Max Baucus and Senate Finance Committee Chairman just admitted that he nominated his girlfriend, Melodee Hanes, for a position as a U.S. Attorney. However, she eventually withdrew her name from consideration over obvious ethics concerns (which evidently were not obvious enough for the couple to have noticed them earlier in the process), so all’s well that ends well.

Besides, I can’t blame him — she’s hot for an older woman! Check out her facebook page.

#3 – Joe Bidin’ His Time

And finally, no list of political gaffes would be complete without good ol’ gaffe-tastic Joe “Tactless” Biden. What’d he do this time, you ask? Did he inadvertently threaten to shoot Barack Obama? Did he tell a man in a wheelchair to “stand up”? No, this one wasn’t quite as horrifically inappropriate as either of those two.

All he did was walk on stage for a speech he was supposed to give at a D.C. Marriott while the current speaker was in the middle of introducing him. Realizing his mistake, he very obviously hid behind a curtain while the introduction continued.

What makes this so classic is the blinding, kid-in-a-candy-store smile on Biden’s face as he peeks out from behind the curtain. Check out the video:

Well, that wraps it up for today’s gaffes — but don’t worry: knowing U. S. politicans, I’m sure another one will be made any minute now.