Prince on SNL (last week)

Prince was on Saturday Night Live last weekend, promoting his new album (which I like a lot), and his performance kicked all kinds of ass.



The song he performed, called "Fury," is one of the better ones off the album- note the wicked DEVO riff at the beginning of the studio version.

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Food as cartoons

From Japan, of course... visit the site and just keep scrolling down.

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Call Bill Napoli

Memo to our female readers: next time you're faced with a personal decision, why not call Bill Napoli?

This woman did.

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I Ching poetry generator

What a cool, entrancing little toy:

Words within the poem are generated behind the viewer. Slowly, each word comes into view as it travels a path through three dimensional space, in real time, as controlled by the observer. The words eventually destabilizes after traveling into the distance. Destabilized words behave erratically and fly off into oblivion.

Pick five points around the circle, and you'll see the "state" it repesents, along with its I Ching "symbol." Your poem will start to fly past you... you may have to move your mouse pointer around a bit to see all of it.

Click "enter exhibit" to get started.

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I remember when...

First, this goes into the "some people have too much free time" category-- it's a timeline of world events as presented in the movies. Starting with:

A long time ago... Luke Skywalker and Han Solo lead a rebellion against the evil empire(Star Wars) 26,000,000,000BC Los Angeles (and everywhere else) - The Earth's crust begins to harden (Adaptation)

and going to:

30,000,000 Earth frozen by an eclipse, intelligent life wiped out, day and night now the same (The Time Machine) 865,427,810 Alexander Hartdegen briefly arrives from 802,701 (The Time Machine)

Second, a subversive campaign that places empty speech balloon stickers on ads in the public environment -- which practically beg people to fill them in with whatever they feel is appropriate. For instance, a speech bubble on a male model holding a laptop in an IBM ad says, "I use it to download porn!" Ha! I saw these when I was living in NYC.

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Creative Coffins

I found this story about a funky, imaginative coffinmaker in Ghana. It seems appropriate that Africa would do this... When I die, I want to be buried in a giant pink fish! This is so cool. I mean, how can you not love a picture with the caption, "Here, an unrepentant heavy drinker has chosen to be buried inside a beer bottle."

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Jane Smiley's "Notes For Converts"

Bruce Bartlett, The Cato Institute, Andrew Sullivan, George Packer, William F. Buckley, Sandra Day O'Connor, Republican voters in Indiana and all the rest of you newly-minted dissenters from Bush's faith-based reality seem, right now, to be glorying in your outrage, which is always a pleasure and feels, at the time, as if it is having an effect, but those of us who have been anti-Bush from day 1 (defined as the day after the stolen 2000 election) have a few pointers for you that should make your transition more realistic.

Awesome.

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Cagle Newsletter

I've always liked editorial cartoons. I don't recall how I discovered this site, but I took a chance and signed up for the Editorial Cartoon Newsletter on Cagle. I have not been disappointed. Every day, if I feel like it, I can check out the editorial cartoons on a bunch of issues. The list keeps growing all the time. Excellent site.

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Under A Billion Suns

So, I've been a fan of Seattle band Mudhoney since around the early-90s days of Seattle's (and more to the point, Sub-Pop's) dominance of the music scene. When I heard recently they had a new album out, I picked it up immediately, knowing it would be good.



But I didn't expect it to be SO DAMN GREAT. More, plus some songs, in the complete post.

Mudhoney always showed more of a garage-rock, fuzzed-out attitude than their heavy-metal-lovin' peers in bands like Soundgarden and Nirvana. Under A Billion Suns sounds like it should have been released in 1966 instead of 2006... loud, sloppy, but still intricate, this is punk in the Stooges/MC5 vein. And, it fuckin' ROCKS. This is my favorite album of the year so far (and since the Belle & Sebastian one is so good, that's saying a lot).

Check these out:

Where Is The Future?, in which singer Mark Arm wonders why all those Cold War-era dreams of flying cars and floating cities didn't happen.

Endless Yesterday, which is longing over either a love affair that bombed, or a nuclear bomb that dropped, or both.

Hard-On For War, because as that line in the movie Toys put it, "War is the domain of the small penis."

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Follow the thread....

From SimCity to The Sims to this... Spore (official preview site, kinda sucks), a game which starts at the cellular level, literally in the primordial ooze, and lets you evolve your own creatures.



Better yet, they live in a world inhabited by creatures that OTHER players have evolved in their own games. Atlanta-boy-done-good Wil Wright gives an amazing demonstration of the game here (Google video, watch this one!!!), with a longer speech here about procedural content... defining actions instead of objects, as I understand it. (This is exactly how The Sims and The Sims 2 work- the game defines the actions, but the player sets up the environment and the characters which inhabit it.)

As if I wasn't already addicted to all of Wright's sim-creations... this looks so addictive, I'm scared for my job.

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Really freakin' strong MAGNETS

Wow!! This sounds like it'd be incredibly cool to play with- assuming you could manage to keep from losing a finger or something. Ultra-strong magnets that can affect objects all over a room. Click on the above link and scroll down to "super magnets." From the warning on the site:

Beware - you must think ahead when moving these magnets.
If carrying one into another room, carefully plan the route you will be taking. Computers & monitors will be affected in an entire room. Loose metallic objects and other magnets may become airborne and fly considerable distances - and at great speed - to attach themselves to this magnet. If you get caught in between the two, you can get injured.

Oooh! :)

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Kure Kure Takora, Part II

This is a bit of a follow-up on this post, but it contains somethin' cooler than just an mp3 of the full version of the theme song! Actual VIDEOS! Neato! I'm downloading them now, courtesy of the WFMU Beware Of The Blog, and I'll check them out in a little while, but, man, if y'all were wanting to see a bit of this, now's your chance!

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Little Desktop of Horrors

Grab a set and grow your own collection of feared and famous carnivorous plants. This deluxe set has seeds from over ten varieties of carnivorous plants! Watch these fascinating plants grow into bug-eating monsters and delight in creating your own authentic bog with the included peat planting mix, blue Swamp Rocks, three Bog Buddies and full color decals. This rare and unusual collection of carnivorous plants will flourish for years in this specially designed terrarium with proper care...

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Get Your Own AK-47!

With the illegal arms trade sneaking around here and there lately, Amnesty Internatioal has responded by making a twisted shopping channel parody, but with a difference, they're selling AK47s instead of nose hair clippers. Maybe you think they're wasting your charitable donations by having posh dinners with ad directors, but they do have an agenda: the ad is part of their campaign to sort out the arms trade. There's a number for the UK viewers at the end of the film.

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R.I.P. Darren McGavin

Actor, Night Stalker, and leg man Darren McGavin passed away last week. He was 83.

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