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Rob Lowe Tells the Origin of ‘Literally,’ His Parks and Rec Catchphrase

The way Rob Lowe pronounces the word “literally” on Parks and Recreation is nothing short of magic. It’s not like when people say nuke-u-ler when they mean nuclear; that just makes us stabby. When Chris Traeger says LIT-ruh-lee, it takes on great importance, underscoring just how excited he is about literally everything. (“Every time I cleanse, I can literally feel the toxins leaving my body!”) So how did this signature word come to pass? We cornered Lowe during a recent visit to the Parks and Rec set to demand his origin story.

“I think I just leaned into that word really hard a couple of times and it made [showrunner Mike Schur] laugh,” said Lowe. “The next thing you know it just became one of Chris’s things, but it was never designed that way. It was merely a word in a sentence. I think I just took a really big, probably very embarrassing swing at it and it stuck.” And did he know specifically what he had done differently? That, in fact, he was ignoring the “e” entirely? “It’s funny, I have no idea what I’m doing when I’m doing it … But it’s very exciting to be so far down the road in this business and to finally have a catchphrase. It’s one thing I can tick off my career to-do list. I don’t think it’s as good as ‘What’chu talkin’ ’bout, Willis,’ but it’s up there.” Lowe knows it’s made it into the lexicon because people won’t stop saying it to him. “They point at me and they say their full name. They say ‘Literally!’ They say ‘Ann Perkins!’” he said. “I dropped my son off at college back East this week and every person that came up to me, they didn’t want to talk about The West Wing or Austin Powers or Tommy Boy. Every single one wanted to talk about Chris Traeger. I figured out who’s watching Parks and they’re all in college. We own the campus.”

Of course he’s become a bit sensitive about using the word when he’s not in character. “I find myself going, ‘I’m telling you, that guy is li— … absolutely the worst person I’ve ever seen.’ I’ve tried to banish it from my personal vocabulary for a while,” he says. It seems to require some real effort. When we asked about his new Lifetime movie, this one about Casey Anthony, Lowe said: “It’s not what you expect. It is lit— … did you see what I did there? Did you? I’ve developed a mid-life stutter!”

Read more posts by Denise Martin

Filed Under:
rob lowe
,parks and recreaton
,tv
,creation myths

via Vulture http://www.vulture.com/2012/09/rob-lowe-literally-parks-and-recreation.html

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The Velvet Underground Loses Banana Lawsuit To The Warhol Foundation

bananan2nananananan2ana

A while ago, members of the Velvet Underground filed a lawsuit against the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for using their iconic album cover’s Warhol banana on schwag, among other complaints. They were particularly unsettled by the extensive licensing the foundation had planned for a series of Apple accessories. A federal judge has just dismissed the banana bit of the lawsuit, but the lawsuit goes on.

Sure, the ripe yellow fruit “became a symbol, truly an icon, of the Velvet Underground” for generations of fans and revivalists, but the Velvet Underground never officially copyrighted the banana. Neither did Andy Warhol. It was up for grabs. The Foundation, in turn, never sued the Velvet Underground for their peddling of the banana, but now our well-aged cultural heroes will have to live with their fruit garlanding iPhones and iPads.

So… really. Whose banana? Who’s more famous? Who will Nico come to avenge-haunt these days?

The post The Velvet Underground Loses Banana Lawsuit To The Warhol Foundation appeared first on ANIMAL.

via ANIMAL http://www.animalnewyork.com/2012/velvet-underground-loses-banana-lawsuit-to-the-warhol-foundation/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+animalnewyork+%28ANIMAL%29

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Bill Murray on Playing F.D.R. in Hyde Park on Hudson and His Disappointment Over Losing the Oscar

via The Latest from VanityFair.com http://www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2012/09/bill-murray-hyde-park-on-hudson

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Nipples on New Yorker Cartoon Prompt a Facebook Ban

 About 83.4 percent of the time, The New Yorker’s cartoons aren’t funny. Yet despite that, it’s difficult to find something wrong with them, because they’re odd and vaguely interesting. Facebook, however, has little trouble picking something upsetting about New Yorker cartoons: Nipples. The New Yorker’s cartoon page on Facebook was temporarily banned from the site because a cartoon featuring tiny nipple’s on a woman’s body violated Facebook’s community standards.

As The New Yorker notes, it wasn’t the man’s nipples that got it banned; male nipples, according to Facebook, are fine. Something called “female nipple bulges” and female nipples, are not.

Please take this into consideration the next time you’re posting pictures from a party. If The New Yorker can get banned for cartoon nipples, anything can happen.

[Image via Mick Stevens/The New Yorker]

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

via FishbowlNY http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/nipples-on-new-yorker-cartoon-prompt-a-facebook-ban_b67776

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NBC’s ‘Today’ Skips 9/11 Moment Of Silence For Kardashian Interview

At 8:46 AM, in New York City and at the White House in Washington DC, there was a moment of silence to remember when the first plane hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In New York, the NYPD, FDNY, Port Authority Police and the families of the victims were present, while in Washington the President and the First Lady led the moment.

The cable networks all carried it, with ABC’s “Good Morning America” and “CBS This Morning” carrying it as well. The only national general news program to not carry the moment of silence was NBC’s ‘Today,” which, in an odd bit of counter-programming, opted to air an interview with “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” star Kris Jenner, who talked about the new season of the reality show, and her breast implants.

After the moment of silence ended, ABC went right to an interview with actor Richad Gere, while CBS went straight into a commercial break.

Here in New York, NBC did show the moment of silence, as WNBC broke into “Today” to carry locally-produced special coverage.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

via TVNewser http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/nbcs-today-skips-911-moment-of-silence-for-kardashian-interview_b145281

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Today’s Influence Ads: Hustler Magazine Wants Romney’s Tax Returns

Hustler Magazine has a new ad today announcing that the publication and Larry Flynt are offering a cash reward of up to $1 million for information about Mitt Romney‘s unreleased tax returns, bank accounts and business partnerships. The magazine claims it wants to publish the information.

The International Franchise Association‘s new ad calls for extending all current tax rates in order to promote job growth; the Bipartisan Policy Center‘s new ad warns against automatic across-the-board cuts and tax rate increases as a way to deal with America’s long-term fiscal situation; and the Renewable Fuels Association‘s new ad cautions against waiving the Renewable Fuel Standard, claiming that doing so could slightly decrease grocery bills but would increase the amount Americans spend on gasoline.

American College of Rheumatology, American Society for Radiation Oncology, CIT Group, Univision, WellPoint, Women in Government Relations and Zurich also have new ads out today.

Those with continuing ads, per Kantar Media’s Washington Eye, include: Altria, American Society For Radiation Oncology, Bell Helicopter & Boeing, BP, Chevron, Goldman Sachs, McDonald’s, Musicians On Call, Northrop Grumman, Nuclear Energy Institute, Ogilvy and WTOP.

via Homepage http://influencealley.nationaljournal.com/2012/09/todays-influence-ads-hustler-m.php

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George Will Is Definitely Not Ready for Some Football

George Will is a longtime hater of liberalism, and a longtime hater of football, so it makes sense that he would try to align his hatreds and write a column arguing that college football is an expression of liberalism:

College football became a national phenomenon because it supposedly served the values of progressivism, in two ways. It exemplified specialization, expertise and scientific management. And it would reconcile the public to the transformation of universities, especially public universities, into something progressivism desired but the public found alien. Replicating industrialism’s division of labor, universities introduced the fragmentation of the old curriculum of moral instruction into increasingly specialized and arcane disciplines. These included the recently founded social sciences — economics, sociology, political science — that were supposed to supply progressive governments with the expertise to manage the complexities of the modern economy and the simplicities of the uninstructed masses.

Football taught the progressive virtue of subordinating the individual to the collectivity. Inevitably, this led to the cult of one individual, the coach.

One flaw with Will’s thesis here is that the regions of the country most enamored with college football are least enamored with liberalism. College football is most popular in the Deep South, followed by the Midwest, followed by the West Coast, followed by the Northeast. The popularity of liberalism by region is that list in reverse.

The obvious solution here is for George Will to tour the Deep South explaining to rabid football fans that they have been taken in by the sinister hand of progressivism.

Read more posts by Jonathan Chait

Filed Under:
the national interest
,george will

via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/09/george-will-is-not-ready-for-some-football.html

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Flying Putin, Fired Editor

How Putin’s latest PR stunt cost me my job.

via NYT > Most Recent Headlines http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/flying-putin-fired-editor/

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High-resolution image of Berlin at night facilitates light pollution research

Researchers from Berlin have published an 878 megapixel aerial mosaic image of Berlin at night. With one pixel per square meter, the resulting map is the highest resolution image ever published of a city at night. The ecologists used the image to measure how much light comes from different types of land use areas, such as streets or parks.

via ScienceDaily: Latest Science News http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120910082302.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29

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Taliban Threaten to Kill Britain’s Prince Harry

Just days after the British Crown announced that Prince Harry was headed to Afghanistan to man helicopters for four months, the Taliban announced that it would do everything in its power to kidnap or kill the 27-year-old prince, Reuters reports.

“We are using all our strength to get rid of him, either by killing or kidnapping,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters.

Queen Elizabeth’s grandson, known as “Captain Wales” in the military, is stationed in the volatile Helmand province, at the forefront of NATO’s fight against the Taliban.

via Homepage http://www.nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/taliban-threaten-to-kill-britain-s-prince-harry-20120910