As the workload is heavy, blogging this week will be light. So here, have something fun!

I’m sure everyone in the world has seen this already, but still: for whatever reason, I like the Drunk History series. (Minus the ones that show barfing. Come on, people, there’s no need.) My favorite is the Oney Judge episode below; there’s something so earnest about it, and the hiccups are amazing.

But the best part of this is the hand-smacking “SHE. LIVED. IN. THE WOODS,” because now my sister and I can use that whenever things are terrible, and no one around us knows what’s going on. Except, now, all of you. Keep that under your hat, everyone.

Way back when, I mentioned a bizarre pop starlet named Lady Gaga. Since then, she’s broken through, and is now everywhere, all the time. The sun never sets on the Gaga Empire.

In a remarkable show of consistency on Lady Gaga’s part, everything I said in that entry still holds true, especially the part about false social constructs and the part about her music burrowing its way into your cranial folds so that during important moments -- say, addressing the United Nations -- you will stand before the throng and say, “I promise this, promise this. Check this hand, ’cause I’m marvelous.” (And if movies have taught me anything, the UN will give you a standing ovation and/or break out a dance party over the credits, depending on whether you’ve been in a drama or a road-trip comedy.)

I’m checking in with her now to run down her crib notes for her latest video, “Telephone.”

WHAT THE ACTUAL SONG IS ABOUT
- Girl in a club on the phone with her boyfriend, who has called several times that night.
- She’s out dancing with friends, and she’s sick of him trying to reach her.
- She tells him to stop calling, presumably breaking up with him.

THINGS THAT HAVE NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH THIS SONG
- Russ Meyer girls-in-prison pulp movies
- Truck stop diners
- Unlawful fugitive road-trip movies
- Living on a sheep farm
- Cooking shows
- Mass murder
- Tiger suits with exoskeletons

Gaga made this list, looked it over, and said, “We don’t have time to find sheep. Let’s just film the rest.”

Below, the NOT SAFE FOR WORK ten-minute video for “Telephone.”

Say what you will about this video (and I actually don’t like it, for several reasons), she still managed to turn in a product that widens her image. She’s previously existed in the space-alien realm, but she hit the Russ Meyer trash-movie rockabilly revenge angle as hard as she hits everything, taking genre trappings (women-in-prison, greasy spoons, cigarettes) and pushing them into the absurd. The lit-cigarette sunglasses in particular made me groan, then laugh, as I’m pretty sure is their purpose. (If we are supposed to take them seriously, then she and I need to talk.)

Best part: at the 6:21 mark, one of the backup dancers slides across the bottom foreground of the frame, listening to the head of lettuce he has pressed to his ear. That right there? Is ART.

Found on ONTD – there is a new Oscar category for Best Thing in the World, and this person is the ONLY NOMINEE:

“Cinema 2009: 1 Year, 342 Movies, 12 Months of Production, 7 Minutes.”

I don’t know if anyone knows this, but I love movies a lot? Anyway, this is basically what the inside of my head looks like, all the time, awake or asleep. (This also explains why I forget real-life stuff – you notice there is no frame in here that says YOU ARE OUT OF MILK, for example.)

Dear person who made this: you are a genius.

Tango is strange; danced socially, so much of the nuance is in the feeling between partners that what seems to you like a spectacular dance can look relatively low-key to other dancers. To casual observers, it can look dead boring.

There are things that are easy to notice. In the video below, it’s clear that the embrace is fluid, opening and closing a few inches as needed. You can see the perfect balance of each dancer (wheeee!); you can see her articulate adornments that accent the music; you can see the skill and precision of their footwork.

What I can’t know any more is what else comes across, things that I didn’t know before I started dancing it; the invisible third axis created in the space between partners? The ease of long partnership in the way their chests always meet, even in the wider embrace? The way he adjusts the embrace before the complicated steps when he knows she’ll need his support? The drawn-out pauses that highlight the melancholy chorus? How GOOD they are? How much they love it?

P.S. If social dance in New York was anything like this, ever, I wouldn’t have stopped dancing. I couldn’t have; just look at them.

My freshman year in college, I was with a group of friends eating lunch in the cafeteria. Above us, the TVs were blaring music videos. Shakira’s “Whenever, Wherever,” came on, and one by one, all the men in the cafeteria stopped eating, their eyes fixed on the TV. Then, all the women.

Afterwards, there was a long silence, the sort of bizarre and awkward silence that happens when half your table is fighting a hormone surge that would cripple ordinary men. Finally, one of the guys broke the hush.

“Dude. What the hell?”

And that’s the thing about Shakira, right? Sure, she’s totally sexy and sells it relentlessly. But somehow she’s never had the “sleazy” tag appended (unlike the Britneys of the world), maybe because her songs seem so upbeat that the sexual thing comes off like a funny mistake, like it’s 1996 and she’s the exchange student that will change Dawson’s life forever with her carefree topless outfits? I don’t know. It’s clearly all sex all the time, but whenever I see her I’m just like, “Oh, Shakira,” like she’s trying to get me to decoupage my coffee table or something.

She has a new video out, “She Wolf.” I saw a clip of it that confused me and thought no more of it until my friend E. said, “No, you have to see the whole thing.”

You guys, Shakira rolling in mud in front of a herd of horses was vaguely eccentric. This video is fucking loon behavior.

I’m not even talking about the naked cage part. The cage part is obvious and hilarious and a blow to feminism and a boost to nude-leotard manufacturers the world over and at one point she circles one of her legs like it’s a tail, but at least all that makes sense. The rest of it is just – she’s dancing in a colon? One of the lyrics is, “A domesticated girl, that’s all you ask of me/Darling it is no joke, this is lycanthropy”? Then she sees a wolf that’s really a woman, so she puts on her samba outfit and goes up and performs her So You Think You Can Dance solo on the roof? And one of the lyrics is, “I’m starting to feel just a little abused, like a coffee machine in an office/So I’m gonna go to my closet and get me a lover and tell you all about it”? (Wait, WHAT?)

Then she falls into her closet and goes to sleep, which, fine, all of us have fallen asleep in strange places. Also she enters the room from the doorway, then lies down facing the doorway and looks out the window at the moon even though that’s not physically possible and seriously, can we talk about the giant sparkly colon again? Seriously.