Fans of the excellent satirical newspaper The Onion should be familiar with the name Stan Kelly. A fictional editorial cartoonist whose reactionary views on current events and the way things used to be in the “good old days” (he supposedly began working for the paper in 1957) are expressed with hacky, obvious writing and a crude, simplistic drawing style. I remember when I first saw his work in the pages of “America’s Finest News Source” years ago, I totally fell for it, believing it to be a real strip The Onion had picked up to display ironically, like when they used to run Cathy Guisewite‘s “Cathy” in Spanish. Eventually, though, I realized how unlikely it was that any newspaper anywhere would seriously run strips celebrating the deaths of beloved celebrities like James Brown, for example, and that Kelly’s political cartoons were a joke from the start.

The Onion recently confirmed this all over again with the new web series “Behind the Pen,” in which “Kelly” describes his artistic process and explains the thought process behind his awful, out-of-touch jokes, as if anyone who can read would have trouble understanding his points. In the first episode, “How Marriage Works,” he explains that he’s doing it “to reach the youngsters” with his message. These hypothetical young people are illustrated by archive photographs of at-risk teens, and even one African child holding an assault rifle. He then proceeds to explain his cartoon, “Holy Matri-Money,” complete with an absurdly unnecessary explication of his “last word,” in which his self-portrait alter-ego delivers the punchline. This is a feature of all Kelly’s cartoons, and each episode correspondingly features a “Last Word” segment.

The second episode, “Collective Wisdom,” features another segment entitled “Tips for Young Artists,” in which Kelly hilariously explains the subtlety of his technique: “If you wanna show somebody’s in love with somebody, you put a little heart next to ‘em.” Each subsequent episode (there are five so far, uploaded within the last two months) is better than the last, with Kelly increasingly going into angry tirades about his own family, especially his darkly comic explanation of his cartoon “Nanny State, Ninny State,” in which he skewers the Big Brother program by saying, “A kid’s heart oughta be calloused, it oughta be weathered.”

Kelly’s voice is wonderfully grizzled and mean-spirited – not unlike another brilliant Onion creation, the politician Joad Cressbeckler, who now has his own segment on the Onion News Network television series on IFC – and “Behind the Pen” shows great promise in continuing to develop this fascinating character. The more unhinged and apoplectic he becomes, the funnier he is and the more his character is revealed, so hopefully the series will continue in this direction, as it already seems to be doing.

Behind The Pen: ‘High’ Ideals

The lovely Nicky has quite a handful as she sports a brown leather bikini.

January.2012 (Photo credit: andendquote)

Casino gambling is a form of entertainment that is a lot of fun, but at the same time, has the potential to do some damage to your wallet.

There are thousands of online casinos across the Internet, representing almost every country in the world. At its start, online casino gambling was just for fun; a way to learn a game, maybe even join a chat room while the gambling was going on. However, online casinos today are fully functional casinos. Make sure you know what you are looking for in an online casino, as there are many ways to play.

GETTING STARTED

If you want to test your skill, study the game, play and learn and look into a no deposit required casino. Some of the online casinos require you enter a credit card number before you can start to play. With a credit card number on file, you can just keep playing and the casino will just keep taking your money. With a no deposit online casino, you are not required to give a credit card number, but you can still play for real money.

BUILD YOUR BANK

The casino will give you a small amount of money to start with. With this first pot, you are elligible for bonuses, giving you more money. There will also be hourly specials, giving you more opportunity to build up your available cash. Eventually you will have to pay money, but it is a great way to decide if this is the casino for you.

LEARN THE GAME

With a very small investment, you have the opportunity to play casino games along with other people on-line. There are strategies to staying in the game, and the online casino is the perfect classroom.

KNOW YOUR LIMITS

As with any type of gambling, knowing when to stop is the most important part of the game. Gambling is a great past time and there is a lot of money to be made. Remembering that there is just as much money to be lost will keep you in check, making your online casino experience exactly what you were looking for.

MAKING IT WORK ON THE OUTSIDE

Once you have perfected your game, you may want to visit a casino or two and try your luck. However, you may just find that the online experience is more than enough.

Yep, that’s right: much as I’ve done every summer since 2007, I’m coming to you straight from the Television Critics Association press tour. Unlike previous years, however, I’ve got my daughter with me this time around, since her birthday fell smack dab in the middle of the trip. As you can imagine, this is keeping me pretty busy, but I wanted to bring you at least a little bit of the TCA experience while I’m out there…and, rest assured, next week’s column will provide much of the same, since I’ll still be here then.

At this point, we’ve had panels for PBS, Fox, NBC, NBC’s subsidiary networks (Oxygen, E!, etc.), and a few locations on the web (Yahoo!, YouTube). I’m not in a position to go into great detail about everything I’ve seen and heard – I’ve got a little girls birthday to celebrate, after all – but you can find some key moments via my Twitter feed. I’ve had a few enjoyable close encounters here and there, talking to Sir Kenneth Branagh (PBS’s “Wallander”), William Forsythe and Zeljko Ivanek (Fox’s “Mob Doctor”), and Billy Burke and Giancarlo Esposito (NBC’s “Revolution”), and I’m looking forward to chatting with Lily Tomlin on ABC’s day and Kyle MacLachlan when CBS’s panels roll around. For the time being, however, I’ve pulled together some of the highlights from Fox’s panels. Hope you enjoy!

Nigel Lythgoe on why there’s never been a proper “So You Think You Can Dance” best-of DVD: “We’ve looked at doing it. It’s the music clearance is just really difficult, as well you know, in this country. There are no blanket agreements like there are in Europe. You can’t just use anything that’s been out there. If you want to use an Eagles track, you have to ask the publisher, the writer, every single Eagle. It just, at the end of the day, doesn’t make money because you’re laying so much money out on that early stage.”

Mindy Kaling on headlining her own show, “The Mindy Project”: “It’s awesome. Even more (than I imagined it would be). I mean, like, every day I wake up and I’m, like, ‘Oh, I’m the star of my own show that has my name in it and I get to write it and hire people, actors that I’ve loved for such a long time.’ It’s amazing. I’m going to turn into a monster. Like, I can’t handle it.”

Zach Gilford on his lack of job security on “The Mob Doctor”: “I think on a show like this, if someone wants to get back at (Jordana Spiro’s character), they could take out one of us. So you’ve got to not be an asshole on set and say the lines just right, because we’re all expendable.”

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We had the chance to spend more time behind the wheel of a 2012 BMW 335i Sedan, and it was just as much fun as the recent week with the 335i Sedan. The weather was warm and the 6-speed melbourne red metallic 2012 BMW 335i Sedan handled like champ and left styling impressions wherever we ventured. Check out our review here.

Want a cool vacation instead of a crappy one?

Joel McHale, Ryan Seacrest and Kate Micucci are taking 100 all-new 2013 Ford Fusion to the awesome places all over the country and filming real people having amazing experiences. You can check this out by Visiting RandomActsofFusion where you can enter for a chance to win amazing prizes like trips to Ryan and Joel’s hometowns or 5-star vacation do-overs. Or sign up to see the all-new Fusion in your hometown. It has a completely new look that we think will be a hit.

The warm light from a Fort Lauderdale sunset glows on the beautiful Nora. She was such a great model to work with and we’ll always remember this pretty blonde from our early Bullz-Eye days.

There’s not as much variety this week compared to the rest of July, nor are there any titles that can be deemed must-see material, but today’s batch of new releases still boast a few Blu-rays that movie and TV fans should at least consider checking out, including Starz’s latest original series and yet another gem from the guys at Criterion.

Unless you’re really interested in politics, you likely won’t find much to enjoy about the Starz drama “Boss,” because while the show is a good idea in theory (it’s essentially a modern-day take on “King Lear” with a dash of “Citizen Kane”), it never amounts to more than a low-rent version of much better TV series. The storylines feel stale and melodramatic, the characters are mostly one-dimensional, and the shooting style is so distracting (with lots of extreme close-ups and bad camera work) that it takes you out of the story. Kelsey Grammer does some solid work as the crooked mayor struggling with a debilitating brain disorder, but it hardly warrants the Golden Globe that he won over more deserving actors like Bryan Cranston. And while the audience is asked to empathize with his character, he’s such a scumbag that you find yourself rooting against him more often than not. You don’t have to be a good guy to be engaging (see: “The Shield” or “Breaking Bad”), but it helps if your characters are at least likeable, and that’s something that “Boss” is really lacking.

Blu-ray Highlight: The two audio commentaries by creator Farhad Safinia are worth a listen, but the included featurette “The Mayor and His Maker” is even better, because it pairs Kelsey Grammer with Safinia for an interesting discussion about the show’s origins, how the monologues serve as the centerpieces for each episode and more.

If the psychological thriller “Silent House” had actually been filmed in one continuous take like the directors originally claimed, it definitely would have earned a little bit of my respect, even though it wouldn’t have necessarily made the movie any better. As it stands, however, this ill-fated remake of the 2010 Uruguayan import of the same name is just plain boring. The one-take gimmick loses its allure as soon as you realize it’s all a big lie (the cuts aren’t even hard to spot if you’re looking for them), while the story falls back on the same generic horror tropes that have plagued the genre for decades. Not even the twist ending is much of a surprise, and with the exception of a clever sequence later in the film where Elizabeth Olsen uses a Polaroid camera as a makeshift flashlight, it’s completely devoid of suspense. The actress just barely holds the film together thanks to another strong performance, but it’s not enough to make “Silent House” as effective as it probably could have been.

Blu-ray Highlight: Directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau (who also penned the script) are a little more forthcoming about how they filmed the movie on the disc’s audio commentary, explaining the logistics behind shooting the extended scenes (each one about 12 minutes in length) and then piecing them together to look like one long take.

I wasn’t aware of Whit Stillman prior to the release of his new film, “Damsels in Distress” (most likely because it’s his first movie since 1998), but Criterion has taken advantage of the writer/director’s long-awaited return by releasing two of his early features on Blu-ray for a new generation to discover. For those unfamiliar with Stillman’s debut, “Metropolitan” can be best described as a bourgeois Woody Allen comedy of manners, or even a Bret Easton Ellis novel minus all the sex, drugs and paranoia. The dialogue is sharp and witty, and although the cast is comprised of a bunch of unknown actors (most of whom never did anything else of note), they do a pretty good job considering their obvious lack of experience. And though Stillman’s own inexperience shows in his failure to give certain scenes room to breathe, the unconventional, montage-like narrative structure actually grows on you as the movie progresses. It doesn’t make its upper-crust characters any easier to relate to, but Stillman’s whip-smart script manages to hold your interest in spite of that.

Blu-ray Highlight: Though it’s a bit light on bonus material for a Criterion release, the all-new audio commentary with writer/director Whit Stillman, editor Christopher Tellefsen, and actors Christopher Eigeman and Taylor Nichols offers an interesting look back at making the movie, including casting, filming in New York City and more.

Blonde bombshell Carra shows off her impressive figure here while wearing only her lacy lingerie bottoms. The Hooters waitress was quite a find!