The World O' Crap Archive

Welcome to the Collected World O' Crap, a comprehensive library of posts from the original Salon Blog, and our successor site, world-o-crap.com (2006 to 2010).

Current posts can be found here.

Saturday, December 25, 2010

September 22, 2003 by s.z.


I Want His Intestines On a Stick, With a Side Salad and Mashed Potatoes

       Mel Gibson presumably wants Frank Rich dead (again), his cat dead, and his lungs on a skewer after reading Rich's NY Times column of the 20th (The Greatest Story Ever Sold), in which Rich accuses Mel of baiting Jews to spark controversy to sell his movie.  Rich also scoffs at Mel's Bill O'Reillyish claims of being in danger from his vast collection of powerful enemies:
Mr. Gibson says that he trimmed a scene from "The Passion" involving the Jewish high priest Caiaphas because if he didn't do so "they'd be coming after me at my house, they'd come to kill me."
Who is this bloodthirsty "they" threatening to martyr our fearless hero? Could it be the same mob that killed Jesus? Funny, but as far as I can determine, the only death threat that's been made in conjunction with "The Passion" is Mr. Gibson's against me.
The New Yorker did, though, uncover one ominous threat against the star: "He's heard that someone from one of his hangouts, the Grand Havana Room, a Beverly Hills smoking club, said that he'd spit on him if he ever came in again."
Heard from whom? What is the identity of that mysterious "someone"? What do they smoke at that "smoking club"? Has the Grand Havana Room been infiltrated by Madonna's Kabbalah study group? I join a worried nation in praying for Mr. Gibson's safety.
Along those lines, alert reader Wes posted some intelligent, thought-provoking and really funny comments and questions regarding our original story about Mel's threats against Rich's bowels (go here: Intestines and read the comments for that day to see them in their entirety).

And while I am no expert on the new Hollywood fad of eating the viscera of NY Times writers, I did find information speaking to some of Wes's remarks, and will provide them (some of the comments, and the data I uncovered) here for your edification:
Wes writes: I was especially impressed by Mel's "intestines on a stick comment." I mean, any self-respecting superstar in a public spat can rejoin with the same-old boring, logical rebuttal against a critic, but it takes a really graphic imagination to demand a critic's "intestines on a stick."
Makes one wonder about the inspiration for that request. A scene (reluctantly) cut from Braveheart? A delicacy served up in one of Hollywood's more, uh, offbeat restaurants? Was Mel ticked off about losing the Hannibal Lecter role to Anthony Hopkins?
I think the answer is revealed in that same New Yorker piece in which Mel made his famous remark about dead dogs and sticks and such.  I found a copy of it at Free Republic (The Jesus War), and was struck by this passage:
It is not surprising, perhaps, that in the service of realism the signal trait of “The Passion” is its relentless violence. When Gibson directed the Oscar-winning 1995 film “Braveheart,” about the folkloric Scots hero William Wallace, he reshot only one scene -- and that was in order to more graphically depict the image of enemy horses impaling themselves upon sharpened wooden stakes.
So, Mel just has a thing about sharp wooden objects and impalement.  (To learn just what caused this fixation in the first place would take a psychiatrist and years of therapy, but I'm guessing a weenie roast gone horribly wrong.)

Also, in the same article Mel said:
I've always wanted to make a Viking movie.  You've got Alfred the Great in Wessex, this English king, saying, 'All the Danes are coming up the river here, we've got to defend ourselves.' And these guys hop off the boats and they're all hairy and they're scary and they've got axes, and some of them are berserkers and they're doing flips and twirls and they just wanna rape and kill, you know?
And since his passion for authenticity wouldn't allow Mel to have a horde of Viking show up, do flips and twirls, and then kill and rape the bastards who crucified Our Lord, he had to vent his berserker rage on Frank Rich's internal organs. 

Plus, there is this passage in the New Yorker piece:
In Anaheim, Gibson showed a trailer of the film to a convention of the Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship, and received a standing ovation.  Afterward, the daughter of the organization's president laid hands on Gibson and asked Jesus to “bind Satan, bind the press, we ask you, Lord.”
So, it's apparent that Rich, by being a member of the press, is in league with Satan, and we all know that Devil's Food Cake makes mighty tasty eating, and so, presumably does Spawn of Satan's Food Guts.
Wes continues: And why did Frank Rich in particular inspire the "intestines on a stick" request? I know that Frank Rich was knocking Mel and all, but is there something that sets him apart from the other New York Times columnists in the shish-kebabbed jejunum flavor department?
Good question.  I can only assume that the other writers' viscera had been already spoken for.  Ann Coulter presumably gets Maureen Dowd's liver because Maureen dissed the Pres by implying he really isn't smarter than Ann.  Bill O'Reilly has had dibs on Judith Maslin's kidneys ever since she gave Al Franken's book a positive review.  I don't know about the other columnists and the comparative tastiness of their organs, but I did find this information in a piece about the health risks of eating Philippine street food (Pinoy Health):
IUD is skewered chicken intestines, grilled until it becomes brown in color.  [Note: I never knew that's how they made IUDs.]   A close relative is the isaw, which is the local name for grilled pork innards. IUD’s and isaw can be had from 3 to 5 pesos per serving on a stick.  
Between isaw and IUD, it is more hygienic to eat pork intestines. Chicken intestines are so small that some vendors don't seem to care about cleaning it.  Chances are, you get a taste of intestines spiced up with chicken feces.  This author had the misfortune of unwittingly having to taste the succulent sweetness of milky chicken manure creeping right inside those grilled chicken innards.   
So, it's probably something like that.

Back to Wes : Somehow, I'd never before been prompted to contemplate the culinary virtues of newspaper columnists' viscera. Yes, I know, Mike Tyson pioneered this whole sample-your-opponent thing with that fight against Evander Holyfield a while ago but, alas, we must remember that Iron Mike was merely gnawing on Evander's ear-- an *external* organ. Mel Gibson, in contrast, has raised the bewildering prospect of internal organ barbecues.
Yes, but per the New Yorker, right after Mel made his famous "I Wish Frank Rich was an Oscar Meyer Wiener" remark, Paul Lauer, Mel's Marketing Man, immediately chimed in with:
“The thing you have to understand is that the distance between Mel's heart and his mouth is greater than the distance between his imagination and his mouth.
I think what Lauer was trying to say is that Mel's eyes are bigger than his stomach, and so even though he might WANT Rich's intestines on a stick, he couldn't eat them all, and would end up having to take some of them home in a doggy bag (along with Rich's dog).
At the very least, the columnists at the New York Times will have a new, highly personal issue to debate amongst each other.
Very true.  And also some uneasiness about accepting any invitation which begin "We'd like to have you for dinner." 
So, thanks, Wes, for giving us all something to think about if we ever aspire to being a NYT critic.  And also some interesting new ideas for Thanksgiving.

4:17:40 AM  

No comments:

Post a Comment