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Friday, May 30, 2008

Holy Cow

Down 8-0 in the fourth inning and still trailing 9-1 in the sixth, the Cubs came back to beat Colorado 10-9.

I am bad at / have no interest in any kind of sport whatsoever (except zorbing) but that's pretty crazy.

Even as I type this, Mayor Daley is taking the Red Line over to Wrigley Field to affix the Brass Erection to the Harry Caray statue oustide the stadium.


(as is tradition)

By the way, w/r/t the title, don't email me and tell me that's a Phil Rizzuto line. Rizzuto stole the catchphrase, "Holy Cow" from Caray.
But as Caray said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

Baseball People steal catchphrases from each other = the joke I was going for there, I guess.


Hey! We all know that the moon is not made of green cheese. But what if it were made of barbeque spare ribs, would you eat it then?
I know I would. Heck! I'd have seconds and then polish it off with a tall cool Budweiser.
I would do it. Would you?

Friday, May 23, 2008

Louis Armstrong: Closet Scrapbooker

I like these collages that Louis Armstrong did to decorate his reel-to-reel boxes.

Or, I guess, I like the story that he did it, plus the four sample collages out of one-thousand that are shown on the Paris Review site. If you want to see more, you have to click a link and the link takes you to a place to buy the magazine.

Tricky! But surely there are not 996 Louis Armstrong collages in the Spring 2008 Paris Review.

Paris Review, you are trying to grift us! We're not going to buy your magazine, unless the other 996 collages are in it, and also if there is a picture of a Miley Cyrus wrapped up in a sheet. As you may recall, buying a magazine is the only way to see that.

I will also accept George Plimpton wrapped in a bedsheet.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

is this real? I hope this is real

Just saw this in the comments for a post in The L Magazine about their Fourth Annual Literary Upstart Competition:


I have a good one: parody of "Hills Like White Elephants", the girl is the chick from Juno and the guy is that masturbating kid from Squid and the Whale.

(not 100% but I think the commentor is Alice Munro.)

Friday, May 16, 2008

Drive Friendly

I had never seen this anti-crack PSA featuring Van Silk & Melle Mel because I am from suburban Texas where we had neither crack nor rap.

But that is not to say that suburban Texas is without problems (you may be surprised to learn), and in fact we did have indiginous problems + our own musicians fighting those problems: Witness the Murderer's Row of Texas singers (and Matthew McConaughey) (and Shamu) who desire that Texas, the messing of with, you don't.

And yet, if you are looking at this list and you were in suburban Texas during the 80s, then right now you are saying, "Where are Johnny Dee and the Rocket 88s and the impossible-to-judge-the-ironic-distance-with-which-to-view/listen-to-them-that-follows-them-around?"

And the sad answer is that the Ceti Alpha V Ceti Eel Larvae in your ear that is Johnny Dee and the Rocket 88s' take on the Don't Litter campaign is not really anywhere on the site that is clickable (I mean, I guess you can click but nothing happens) (metaphor for life in suburban Texas in the 80s? INVESTIGATE), but thankfully JD&tR88s themselves have come to everyone's rescue; here is the video on the band's own website that will make you not litter in Texas... on the beach. But also don't litter anywhere.


Except it's OK to litter in Lady Bird Lake as long as you are littering pieces of paper that say, "Lady Bird Johnson didn't want you to name this lake after her, so I'm just letting you know that I'm still going to call it Town Lake."

(Lady Bird Johnson loved her ironies.)

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Due to an (apparent) 150-character limit to the titles in Blogger, the title I wanted to put here was too long, so you have to read it below.

This was going to be the title:
  • In Retrospect, What I Should Have Replied When, In Response To My Overhearing Him Discuss A Formatting Problem in Excel That He Had Been Trying To Crack For Several Weeks and Telling Him the Way to Fix It, My Co-Worker Said To Me, “I Love You In A Non-Homoerotic Way.”
And this was going to be the post:

  • (elaborate shrug) Make it homoerotic, if you like.

And then I was probably going to type a funny afterthought really small like this:
  • Greetings, people googling "homoerotic excel"!
Sorry it didn't work out the way I wanted it to, everyone. TTYL!
~ P

The Derma Bums

Easily the most popular post on this site since I started tracking which posts are popular (via TECHNOLOGY) is Skin Disease: A Survey, which was sort of a psych experiment in that I linked to kind of horrifying pictures for each of the skin diseases I listed, daring You the Reader to click through. Like, far and away the most popular, statistically dwarfing everything else to the point where if I had to represent it graphically, I would draw a blue whale for that post and then like for everything else: a bunch of smurfs. (I just typed that off the top of my head but now I realize both are blue so I only have to use one color of marker, giving me extra time to pursue my dreams, does this make me a genius?)*

It is my dearest hope that it's just the fact that linking to 14 other sites in a single post does something to some algorithm and that is why it is such a popular post, rather than Everyone on the Internet is a Huge Fan of Marjolin's Ulcer or something.

NEVERTHELESS, as George Jessel, Red Skelton and Ray Davies all said, simultaneously, give the people what they want and something something that's why we have George Lucas now, so Here You Go, Internet: this is a link to a quiz I just saw on Mental Floss:

SKIN DISEASE OR DUNGEONS & DRAGONS CHARACTER?

Using the method of Marginally Informed Blind Guessing, I got a 94%, which is exactly the percentage I always got in high school when I was perfecting this method,** which is why to this day I am "unmotivated" and "not much of a self-starter" even when I am given extra time to pursue my dreams.

But for real I really got a 94:

* Answer: No, because it is hard to draw the hats on Smurfs without it looking like it's Dress Like a Penis Day in Smurf Village.

** Mrs. Morris and Mr. Dewar in particular: I am sorry I didn't try harder.
But at the time I was suffering from and/or doing battle with Erysipelas.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

it's sort of funny

Because her husband always knew when to pull out.


someone's probably made that joke already
WEST VIRGINIA, YOU MADE ME MAKE THAT JOKE

Monday, May 12, 2008

automobile?

Ke Huy Quan was referenced twice on the Shia LaBeouf episode of Saturday Night Live (1, 2). (and sort of three times, because he also appeared in a clip in the Vinny Vedecci sketch.)
This, plus All Things Considered's recentish Gedde Watanabe story (which, please see the Adrian Tomine "The Donger and Me" supplement they posted) (but to read the actual story, go to NPR.org and do a search for "donger") (seriously, just do this; I want to see what happens) might mean that the new Zeitgeist is:
Casual Racism Toward Asians in the Mid-80s Reassessed [Mostly by White People]
Get on it, White People. Let me know what was up with all that.

Topic for further discussion:
The problematic William Hung Christmas album "Hung For the Holidays"

I know I know it came out in 2004 but WTF?

Friday, May 09, 2008

Steampunk Dirigibles the Shark!

The Times had an article on the Steampunk genre/movement/aesthetic yesterday! The article is so behind the curve, that I'm a little surprised they didn't go with the "Backlash to Steampunk" angle, but whatevs: the result is we get to watch a subculture panic about potential irrelevance on their blogs.
OK First: AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHA.

But Second:
People! Do not get your health corsets in a twist! There will be more Maker Faires! You may continue to casemod your Circuit City purchases so they look like they went through a Brundlepod with a clarinet! The future is still then!

For: the target audience of the article is presumably someone who (1) reads the Times but (2) doesn't know about Steampunk, and would therefore have to be the octogenarians on the Upper West Side who actually have actual dates-to-the-Edwardian-period stuff in their apartment and won't care.

Too: the pictures in the article don't really sell it in a way that makes it "desirable in any way", so your design ethos remains safe. (e.g., I don't think Christoing your TV in burlap makes it Steampunk?) (I think it just messes up your TV?) (AND YOUR BURLAP?)

(Also: looking at the first few pictures of the slideshow, my brain was like, That doesn't really look like Steampunk. It looks more like "54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment Punk".)

(Dear Diary. Today I realized my brain is probably racist.)


Just kidding. It's over.
Just as grunge fonts begat Apple Minimalism, time to jump ship: I am shorting Steampunk and going long Cold War Industrial.

Good luck, Sillof's Workshop, I'll miss you most of all.



v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^
update (6/10/08): AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHA!

Thursday, May 08, 2008

GTA IV

I don't have an Xbox or a PlayStation and although my kids are named Sam and Max, I am fairly terrible at video games (also: I have kids), but I totally want to play this because all of the reviews talk about how it recreates [a satiric representation of]* 4/5 of the boroughs, including many of the restaurants, and as irritating a Midtown was, I find myself missing it at times (mostly when I'm trying to find decent food in The Loop), and if this game allows me to drive over to the crêpe lady at the Cyber Cafe on 49th and 8th one more time, for old time's sake, it would be totally worth it.

NOTE WELL: I promise I will not shoot her after she makes me crêpes just to get my money back, because then: no more crêpes.


* w/r/t the "satire", from the little I've read it sounds like how National Lampoon used to get away with "negro jokes" because they were both "jokes themselves" and "jokes about the kinds of people who tell those kinds of jokes".
Which: when Jesse Thorn talks about "New Sincerity" I think he really means "Being Younger than 25" but if it means not having those kinds of jokes maybe it's 20% OK?

I mean, it's obviously too late for me; I came of age reading Suck. That's why I want to play Grand Theft Auto and not like Katamari Damacy or Viva Piñata or something.

ATTN: 14 year olds looking for Lola Del Rio: you are barking up the wrong tree!
Crêpes are totally New Sincerity.

Hook me up, Shearn!

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

longshot

Remember in Back to the Future II when Biff stole the DeLorean and gave a sports almanac to his earlier self so that he could gamble and win at various sporting events?
Well, what if Earlier Self Biff instead just got a job writing secretly ironic headlines for MSNBC?

That might be a good movie too.

Unrelated:
Kentucky Derby Hopefuls Take Their Final Shot


oh man; poor dead horse. Although this probably bodes well for sales of Chicken Soup for the Horse Lover's Soul II: Tales of Passion, Achievement and Devotion. Totally the best book title ever!

ImprovEverywhere People: you should all buy this book and do something wacky related to it!