Pop Culture Corner: We Consider the Fake Rahm Emanuel Account and the New PG-13 Cut of The King's Speech

We've always been vocal fans of fake Twitter accounts. Local and regional favorites include @EvilTurnerGill and @fakenedyost. And a highlight of last year was @EmperorFranzen, a fake account which helped deflate the hype surrounding Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.

The most recent fake account to gain a lot of publicity has been the Fake Rahm Emanuel account, which earns this piece of incredible praise from www.theatlantic.com:

"The profane, brilliant stream of tweets not only may be the most entertaining feed ever created, but it pushed the boundaries of the medium, making Twitter feel less like a humble platform for updating your status and more like a place where literature could happen. Never deviating too far from the reality of the race itself, @MayorEmanuel wove deep, hilarious stories. It was next-level digital political satire and caricature, but over the months the account ran, it became much more. By the end, the stream resembled an epic, allusive ode to the city of Chicago itself, yearning and lyrical."

The account's mastermind has now outed himself as Dan Sinker, founder of the legendary Punk Planet zine.

Read the full piece here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/revealing-the-man-behind-mayoremanuel/71802/

Let's take a look at a few of the @MayorEmanuel tweets and see if they are as brilliant as they've been declared:

"Watching Axelrod eat at Manny's is like watching Da Vinci paint the motherfucking Mona Lisa: a work of art."

"I've held the motherfucking pulsating heart of Chicago in my hands, and I know that it beats true."

"Now let's go dump some fucking Chico signs in potholes brimming with dogshit-infused rainwater runoff."

Richard: "Obviously, this is quintessential American poetry on the scale of Whitman and Sandburg yet combining the anarchic political spirit of Hunter S. Thompson. Can a Twitter feed win a Pulitzer? Let's hope so."

Chip: "What makes it great is the use of so many 'fucks.'"

---

And speaking of 'fucks', let's consider another current pop-culture story. In a (successful) effort to garner the film a PG-13 instead of its current R and make some valuable family-audience money, Harvey Weinstein is recutting Best Picture winner The King's Speech, muting a few of the 'f-words' in an important scene between Firth's King and his speech therapist played by Geoffrey Rush. Both Firth and the film's director Tom Hooper are on record as opposing the changes.

What's our view?

Richard: "FUCK this. I supported Weinstein's (successful) efforts to repeal Blue Valentine's NC-17 because that was a matter of artistic principle as well as financial concern, but this is just money-grubbing Hollywood bullshit."