HOT: Creativity in Closed Captioning
During Kanye West’s performance at May’s Billboard Music Awards, over a minute of the Rap superstar’s performance was muted by ABC censors due to “objectionable” language. Those handling the closed captioning for the BBC during West’s anticipated/controversial performance at the Glastonbury festival last weekend had to get a little more creative, substituting things like “motherducker” and “ligga” (as in “Liggas in Paris”) for the real lyrics during his performance. But eventually, the caption writers appeared to just give up, according to screenshots making the rounds that read simply, “He raps,” at one point.
WARM: Perry v. Nuns
Katy Perry, you’ve just been named the highest-paid female celebrity by Forbes (coming in, overall, just behind boxers Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao)! What are you going to do with your millions? Apparently Perry’s answer is, “Buy a convent in Southern California and piss off a couple of nuns.” According to Billboard, Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez agreed to sell the convent to Perry, but two elderly nuns who had been living in the facilities — which overlooks downtown L.A. and the San Gabriel Mountains — think it’s theirs and they’ve signed a deal with restaurateur Dana Hollister to sell it for $15.5 million. Perry (who was to buy it for about $14 million) reportedly met with the nuns and (seriously) sang “Oh Happy Day” and showed them her Jesus wrist-tattoo (she even used to be a Christian Pop singer!), but they weren’t impressed, and it appears that the case will be decided in court.
COLD: Conservatives Grasping for Straws
It’s been a very bad couple of weeks for narrow-minded social conservatives. Even before same-sex marriage was legalized in all 50 states, Fox News’ talking heads had something else to get their panties bunched. After the apparently racially motivated murders in a Charleston, S.C. church and the reignited controversy over why a divisive symbol like the Confederate flag still flew atop the South Carolina statehouse, retailers from Walmart to Amazon decided to stop selling the flag in stores and online. This infuriated Fox’s Sean Hannity, who suggested the companies were hypocrites because they still sold albums by the three Hip Hop artists Hannity knows the names of — Jay Z, 50 Cent and Ludacris (Ludacris?).
This article appears in Jul 1-7, 2015.
