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10. COMEDY
Human Giant Tour
Get ready to witness history: To gear up for the second season of their MTV sketch-comedy show, which debuts March 11th, New York troupe Human Giant are hitting the road, marking their first headlining tour — and the first time their bravest member, Rob Huebel, will attempt to trim his junk with pruning shears. Sophisticated humor? No way! For their stage show, Huebel, Aziz Ansari and Paul Scheer will play demented magicians called "The Illusionators," exploit a crew of tykes who get assaulted by prisoners, and attempt re-enactments of the re-enactments of Unsolved Mysteries-style crime shows. Not convinced? Let Ansari give you the hard sell: "It's a male version of Lipstick Jungle meets Cashmere Mafia meets Sex and the City," he says, "but for dudes."
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9. BOOKS
Lush Life
The best part of this riveting crime novel? Either Richard Price's gritty take on the gentrification of New York's Lower East Side or cinematic dialogue like this: "You are a self-centered, self-pitying, cowardly, envious, resentful, failed-ass career waiter. That's your everyday jacket. Now, add a gun and a gutful of vodka? I don't believe that shooting last night was an accident. I think you were a walking time bomb, and last night you finally went off."
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8. BOOKS
Superbad: The Drawings
If you ever wished you could spend a little more time with "Hang-Gliding Penis," "Sushi- Chef Penis" and all the other fantastical phallus drawings featured in Superbad, here's your chance. Drawn by David Goldberg, brother of the film's co-writer, Evan Goldberg, the eighty-two color sketches in the book include exclusives like "Penis Chanukah" and "Frankenpenis" that weren't shown in the film. In a foreword, Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, his partner on the script, suggest the film's obsession with drawing dicks comes right out of their real lives — "I could draw the shit out of Evan's dick," says Rogen. Goldberg explains why he left the job to his brother: "There was only one man with the talent, perversion and time on his hands to pull off this twisted assignment."
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7. INTERNET
Project Rungay
Project Runway? Still awesome. If we needed tickets to watch Christian, Jillian, Chris and Rami fight for fabric on the two-part season finale (on Bravo, February 27th and March 5th), we'd be waiting in line now in an asymmetrical Eighties-inspired outfit. The judges? Kind of hacky. So when we want real commentary about a dress made of licorice, we hit projectrungay.blogspot.com, where "two fabulously glamorous fags" rip apart every frock. Best of all: episode summaries done as cartoons, which demonstrate that it is possible for Christian, this season's twenty-one-year-old enfant terrible, to be more caricatured than he is on the show.
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6. INTERNET
We Need Girlfriends
If you're secretly too emo to watch Entourage, this awkwardly endearing buddy comedy is made for you. On weneedgirlfriends.tv, the fictional alter egos of writers Stephen Tsapelas, Brian Amyot and Angel Acevedo play board games, obsess over Mr. T and try desperately to get dates in a Web series that's earned so many hits on YouTube that CBS recently picked it up for a pilot. Our favorite episode: After Google-stalking his chaste ex-girlfriend, Amyot's alter ego "Tom" discovers her blog, titled "I Probably Never Loved Tom." Her new boyfriend's MySpace name? Looze It 2 Me.
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5. TELEVISION
Quarterlife
From My So-Called Life's creators comes another great underdog story. Rejected by ABC, this quirky drama, which follows blogger Dylan and her roommates as they survive life after college, debuted to much acclaim on MySpace, so NBC snapped it up. Catch it on television for the first time on February 26th.
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4. INTERNET
Fire Joe Morgan
The downside to the end of the Writers Guild strike: Michael Schur, writer for The Office, will have less time to update the hilarious sports blog firejoemorgan.com, where he and four of his pals eviscerate dumb sportswriting, smacking down fuzzy-headed nostalgia with statistics and sarcasm. The best insults may be reserved for shortstop David Eckstein — or as he's known here, "an adorable eleven-inch translucent man who cannot play baseball very well."
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3. BOOKSThe Bush Tragedy
And you thought a president who invaded a foreign country without a plan, ran up the national debt and shredded the Constitution was merely stupid? In The Bush Tragedy, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg drops a plumb line into W's psyche and finds a petulant narcissist with daddy issues (which you knew). And mommy issues (which you probably didn't). Sad thing is, back when he was just an underachieving drunk, he sounded like a pretty fun guy.
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2. VIDEO GAMES
Army of Two
Most shooter games leave you to fight — and die — alone. But this adrenal third-person actioner from Electronic Arts is all about the strategic co-op play. Team up with another warrior online, or let the computer-controlled "Partner Artificial Intelligence" cover your ass. The more destruction you wreak, the higher your "Aggrometer" jacks up — drawing the enemy's attention your way and letting your teammate sneak up unnoticed. For added Aggro, pimp out your choice of more than thirty weapons with customized bling, such as gold plating — because if enemy grenades get you, you might as well blow up in style.
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1. COMIC BOOKS
Captain America
Metaphors for the effects of the Bush presidency on the American spirit don't get any harsher than this one: Last year, Captain America, who had been fighting Nazis, supervillains and sometimes his own government in the pages of Marvel comic books since 1941, was shot dead. And now, in the series' latest sign of the times, a new, more morally compromised character has taken over the stars-and-stripes uniform: Cap's former kid sidekick, Bucky, who spent a few years as a brainwashed Russian assassin (don't ask; it's still comics) and is now a gun-toting killer. Ed Brubaker, the former indie-comics writer who's been working on Captain America since 2004, sees his riveting version of the comic as an "espionage thriller." "It's not meant to be totally reflective of the American psyche," he says. "But at the same time, I'm part of the American psyche, so maybe there is something of that seeping out there." In an even more directly relevant plot line, longtime Cap villain the Red Skull is now the head of a multinational corporation — and he's aiming to destroy the country by foreclosing on mortgages and driving up oil prices. Brubaker has been hoping to do that storyline ever since the Enron scandal. "How much of our country are we giving away to these vast corporations that have no one to answer to at all?" he says. "If there's any politics of my own in the book, it's that part."