Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Listen on the player above, or download this week’s episode as an mp3 here (right-click, “save as.”)

This week on the Frotcast, we welcome back San Francisco comedian/bon vivant Jason Dove, who, in addition to being the holder of 17 arcade world records, is quite the JFK assassination buff. He tells about the recent event he hosted featuring Lee Harvey Oswald’s former girlfriend (who currently lives in hiding in Croatia) and the son of E. Howard Hunt, as well as offering background on competing conspiracy theories. This naturally leads to other, crazier conspiracies, such as David Icke’s Lizard Theory, Alex Jones on Piers Morgan, the hollow Earth, and the episode of Jesse Ventura’s Conspiracy Theory about Humanzees. Jason and Brendan trade Ventura impressions. And from there? You guessed it, poop stories.

IMPORTANT USER PARTICIPATION: What would you like to hear on the best-of 2012 Frotcast? Tell us in the comments.

UPCOMING SHOWS: I’ll be doing comedy at Milk Bar on January 29th as part of SF Sketchfest. Jason Dove will be at the Punchline in San Francisco on Wednesday January 16th.

Subscribe on iTunes (RATE THE PODCAST!). Download the Stitcher App and stream the Frotcast to your iPhone or Android device.

Email us at frotcast@gmail.com. Voicemail us at 415.275.0030. Follow me on Twitter. Follow Jason Dove on Twitter. Follow Ben on Twitter. Follow Bret on Twitter. Fan us on Facebook.

Time-stamped episode notes below, courtesy Adam.
Read the rest of this entry »

Mini-Update, Monday, 5:34 pm ET: According to the actuals (as opposed to the estimated numbers they release on Sunday), final box office numbers show 2016 ahead of Premium Rush, $6.5m to $6m.

I know most of you hate it when I cover politics, and I feel your pain, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that 2016: Obama’s America, a documentary directed by an Evangelical, Indian-American former Reagan advisor named Dinesh D’Souza, is already the sixth all-time highest-grossing political documentary, and trailed Premium Rush by less than $100 grand this weekend, despite playing on half the screens. Pretty good for a movie most of us probably hadn’t heard of before a few days ago. Though it does help when people can just take a bus there from church:

Exhibitors were reporting busloads arriving at theaters around the country in pre-organized trips to the pic. It also employed much of the same marketing techniques used to garner attention and support for faith-based films, understandable since the audience is overlapping. Its campaign included advertising nationally over the past two weeks on talk radio and cable news channels including Fox News Channel, A&E, History and MSNBC. ”I didn’t believe it when I first saw the film taking off in pre-sales on Tuesday,” an exhibition insider tells me. “Because there’s not a lot of new product that’s taking off.” [Deadline]

So what the hell is it actually about? Well, the trailer (which you can watch below) has the batsh*t wingnut trifecta of dramatic music, a spider-web graphic connecting places and dates (CONSPIRACY!), and vague mumbo jumbo about the founding fathers. But it also throws in Muslim music playing over an Obama speech, and the coup de grace, an explicable b-roll shot of a black family fighting during a Monopoly game. The basic thesis of the documentary would seem to come from an article Dinesh D’Souza wrote for Forbes a few years back called “How Obama Thinks.”

Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.

Well sure, America’s policies can all be traced back to Obama’s dead Kenyan father, and not, say, Goldman Sachs, who give him billions of dollars and occupy all the major regulatory positions. That all sounds perfectly rational. Here’s my favorite clip I found:

Read the rest of this entry »

TMZ deserves most of the credit for this image juxtaposition

While Megadeth singer Dave Mustaine hasn’t been musically relevant in years, his fame as a curio of batsh*t psuedo-celebrities continues to grow. After endorsing Rick Santorum earlier this year (who could’ve guessed one could be simultaneously pro-life and mega-death?), a few days ago he told an audience in Singapore that Obama had “staged” the Aurora theater shootings. This during his “Th1rt3en World Tour” (yes, Dave Mustaine is worse at naming things than a Final Destination producer).

Well now, a victim of the Aurora theater shooting has responded publicly, telling Dave Mustaine not to blame Barack Obama for shooting her during The Dark Knight Rises. I swear to you the Family Guy manatees did not write that last sentence.

TMZ spoke with Carli Richards … who sustained multiple gunshot wounds when James Holmes opened fire during a screening of “Dark Knight Rises last month.
After watching the footage of Mustain blaming Obama for “staging” the Aurora shooting to push an anti-gun agenda, Richards is lashing back … telling us, “Some people think the President is a good scape goat but he didn’t shoot me.”
Richards adds, “It’s obviously kind of absurd and people who make up conspiracies just want attention.”
“Everybody is emotional at this time and needs to blame somebody I guess. I don’t think they realize the consequences of not being responsible for your own actions and James Holmes needs to be held accountable for his, to whatever way the justice system deems fit.” [TMZ]

Seems pretty logical to me. But it seems some of the TMZ commenters remain unconvinced…

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey, remember our friend Marie Cotillard, the best actress oscar winner who’s naked all the time?   Turns out she has some theories.

Referring to the two passenger jets flown into the World Trade Centre, Miss Cotillard said: "We see other towers of the same kind being hit by planes, are they burned? There was a tower, I believe it was in Spain, which burned for 24 hours.  It never collapsed. None of these towers collapsed. And there [New York], in a few minutes, the whole thing collapsed." 

Did I miss something?  Are there planes being flown into towers all the time and I just haven’t been hearing about it?  What the hell, you guys! 

Miss Cotillard suggested that the towers, planned in the early 1960s, were an outdated "money sucker" which would have cost so much to modernise that it was easier to destroy them. 

It’s true.  My father is a wealthy businessman and he always tells me, “Son, the cheapest way to demolish a building is to get some Arabs to hijack a plane and crash it into it.  Those guys who drive the big trucks with the ball attached to a long chain?  Forget it, they charge a billion dollars a second."

Turning to America’s space programme, she said: "Did a man really walk on the moon? I saw plenty of documentaries on it, and I really wondered. And in any case I don’t believe all they tell me, that’s for sure." [Telegraph]

It’s true, there are just some things the government and big media don’t want you to know.  Like that my semen cures aging, for instance.  If everyone blew me, what would all the cosmetics companies and funeral directors and plastic surgeons and 60 Minutes reporters do?  They’d be out of a job and the economy would collapse – it’d be a disaster.  But, baby, you don’t wanna be like all those other sheep anyway, do you?  [Thanks to 'RoboPanda' for the tip]