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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.

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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.
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Freed from his duties managing The Wonders (neé The Oneders), Tom Hanks — who has already definitively chronicled World War II, AIDs, space, 9/11, World War II again, volcanoes, and Meg Ryan’s vagina in his various projects — is bringing that unique Playtone feel to a different, lighter project: a movie about JFK getting shot in the head.

OR SO THEY WANT YOU TO THINK.

Playtone principals Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman are set to produce Parkland, an indie drama about the assassination of John F. Kennedy that will mark the directorial debut of scribe Peter Landesman.

Pic chronicles the events leading up to JFK’s assassination and Abraham Zapruder’s famous documentation of the event. (Via)

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Today is the 48th anniversary of the JFK assassination, and while I think it’s pretty obvious that the mob did it, conspiracy theories still abound (I don’t really consider the mob a “conspiracy theory” per se). With the number of theories increasing every year, acclaimed documentarian Errol Morris took a different approach this short (which you can watch below), choosing instead to focus on the idea that the more you focus on one strange aspect of a story, the more sinister it can become as you get further removed from the event. He uses as an example of this phenomenon the “Umbrella Man,” a man standing along the parade route on November 22nd, 1963 who was photographed from a few different angles holding a big, black umbrella, even though it was clearly a sunny day. WHAT’S WITH THE UMBRELLA, FREAKSHOW? ARE YOU ALLERGIC TO AWESOME TANS?

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Scientifically speaking, I believe that if Stephen King doesn’t write at least 100 pages a day, he’ll start biting himself like a shark (sharks do that, right?). One of his most recent works is the not-yet-released 11/22/63, a thousand-page tome about an English teacher who goes back in time to stop the Kennedy assassination. But that’s not all, he also discovers A TREASURE MAP HIDDEN ON THE BACK OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE! Okay, not really, but he does party with Elvis and bang a librarian. The movie rights have already been picked up by Jonathan Demme (Philadelphia, Rachel Getting Married). What do librarians do these days, anyway? Do they just give jerk-off lotion to hobos?

The Oscar-winning filmmaker (The Silence of the Lambs) will write and direct as well as produce the adaptation.
The tome, all 1000-pages of it, is set to hit stores in November and centers on an English teacher who goes through a time portal in an effort to stop the Kennedy assassination. He finds himself dealing with luminaries ranging from Elvis to JFK and meets a high school librarian that becomes the love of his life.
Ilona Herzberg, who produced Demme’s last dramatic feature, Rachel Getting Married, is producing the project, which is not set up or financed. King will exec produce if the movie gets off the ground. [THR]

I hope they change the English teacher to black secret agent Wesley Snipes, and he gets to the book depository with only seconds to spare, finds Lee Harvey Oswald and yells, “ALWAYS BET ON BLACK!” and kicks him out a window. And then Marty McFly pulls up in the Delorean, pulls down his sunglasses and he’s all like, “That’s heavy, Doc!” And then a dog nearby covers his eyes with his paws for some reasons.  But that’s just me.

[In other Stephen King news, The Stand is getting a multiple-film adaptation from Warner Bros]