I'm not entirely sure what genre the guys from The Mighty Boosh were going for, but about half the time the episodes span the distance between whimsical daydream and chilling night-terror. We're all familiar with that bizarre but funny enough "Old Greg" skit, but this episode I saw recently about the "Crack Fox," delightful animation aside, gave me the heebs.
crack fox
Thursday, April 30, 2009
The B-Town Robin
Were you aware of the existence of Bloomington's premier satire/humor paper/blog (it's transmedia!)? Lots of amusing people write for it, and I even know a couple. Oh also I wrote a little something for it, which is of course why I've known about it for some time but I'm only linking to it now.
Narcissist!
Hey You
Do you like punk rock? Do you like forties? Do you like pictures of Brittany Asam? It appears that Fithers has a blog. It's mostly media presented with little or no comment, but if you're like me, you don't hear/read the phrase "totally harsh" as an expression of approval anywhere near often enough, and Fithuz gotz the remedy.This blog also contains an intriguing reference to "Sriracha Shits," next to a picture of town hottie and seemingly friendly individual (full disclosure: I don't actually really know him) Michael Hodges* (as seen above).
Oh and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't impressed by the fact that he appears to own his domain name. No ".tumblr" bullshit for Fithers, no sir. It makes the rest of us look lame, which may or may not be the point anyway.
*am I correct in remembering that it was this noble hero who went all Hulk Smash on Elliot Whatshisface (he of the guitar and the pajama pants and the collins quad) with little (possibly no?) provocation, just because he intuitively knew it was what everyone wanted to do but were afraid to get their skinnies dirty? I just remember seeing him launch himself shirtless across a porch and taking that kid out. This is definitionally heroic, and he should be regarded as the champion of the apathetic. He is basically our Achilles.
Morning Musings
It is beautiful here, even when it rains; the trees are exploding into bloom, and the smells of freshly-mown grass, burning charcoal, flowers and spilt beer are ubiquitous, but only barely cut through the delirium induced by the approach of summer. The entire town is sharing the compressed giddiness one experiences when attempting to hold in an inappropriately loud laugh. The air is thick with pheromones and everything on campus is mating with wild abandon, constantly, everywhere. Jean shorts are back in, and the monstrous gangs of dumb skanks wearing huge, stretched shirts over leggings and high tops have returned to share the sidewalk and wary, sidelong glances with the hipsters, who if anything look dirtier than I've ever seen them.
Image via Molly Burkett's Flickr
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Does Not Play Well With Others
David Faris suggests we allow nasty old Texas, the sandy, sweaty crotch of Red America, to take its toys and head on home.
Related: Fuck the South
Texas should be given the option of taking neighboring Oklahoma, Alabama and Louisiana with them. These states are reliably deep red, and are also three of the biggest tax drains in the country, raking in federal dollars while kvetching about Obama's tyranny. In return, the U.S. gets to keep the liberal oasis of Austin, like the little swath of Azerbaijan surrounded by Armenia and Iran.Hat Tip: Yaz
Related: Fuck the South
Get It Right or Pay the Price
Let's get one thing extremely clear. Fainting is what happens when you overheat and don't breathe properly, for example if you're wearing a corset in a tanning bed. These people are swooning-- they are so overcome with ecstasy that they temporarily take leave of their senses.
SPACE
Did you know that a mirror is a sort of time machine?
Did you know that light travels at a speed of like 963 million trillion miles per second, so it's really not?
Did you know the light from the sun is nearly 1200 years old before it reaches earth?
Did you know that just by looking up into the night sky we can see the past and the future, and we already know how and when the worlds gonna end and even who's gonna be there because we have pics?
Did you know that the only interesting thing the moon ever gets to see is that lame Great Wall in China that's been there forever? And maybe those awful lights in NYC?
Oh, also, other weird things are happening in space:
Lyman-alpha blobs are an astronomical mystery that may be primordial galaxies. "The consensus is that these are enormous protogalaxies, which over the course of time will yield very massive old galaxies such as we see in the local universe," says Dan Smith, a postdoctoral researcher at Liverpool John Moores University in England. Smith, who was not involved in the study, calls the detection of such an early Lyman-alpha blob "a very exciting result."
But as of now, it is not known what Lyman-alpha blobs are or what causes them to glow. Resolving the proposed explanations for these early objects could shed light on how galaxies such as the Milky Way take shape. Some theories hold that Lyman-alpha blobs are formed by inflows of cold streams of gas, a mechanism that Smith points out has recently been suggested by some researchers as the dominant mode of galaxy growth. Other explanations posit that the blobs' gas emits radiation due to heating by an active galactic nucleus harboring a churning object such as a supermassive black hole or by an accelerated phase of star formation known as a starburst.
They named it after an ancient Japanese queen, who also was rumored to be part- black hole. Ooooh I'm nasty!
(via SciAm)
High School, Revisted
Let's have a momentary reminiscence. Remember a long, long time ago, when you were just a baby hipster in a baby nation*? And you loved that one movie, the movie that everyone else was like, "weee-eeird," but you were all, "naw dog, this is tight in ways you can't even underSTAND"? And you spent maybe a month humming "Head Over Heels" to yourself whenever you walked into the halls of your high school, contemplating such deep thoughts as, "Every living thing on this earth dies alone?" Yeah, so do I. We took Donnie Darko SERIOUS.
I have recently become reacquainted with Richard Kelly's first film, happening upon a copy which I received, appropriately enough, for my sixteenth birthday (or something). Revisiting this artifact of my weird adolescent development was accompanied by a strange sentiment, some peculiar cross between wistfulness for Jordans past and dread of the same.
I needn't have feared. The movie has become something totally different than it once was. To watch Donnie Darko during the melodramatic, self-serious period of early- to middle- highschool is to project a similar sort of sincerity onto the movie. Lines like, "I guess some people are just born with tragedy in their blood" are met with tender sympathy, and speak to the tortured, misunderstood teenage soul.
It is a surprise-delight, then, that these lines become hilarious when seen through more adult eyes. If you are willing to entertain an alternative reading in which the film satirizes all characters as viciously, albeit less obviously, as it does Beth Grant's charmingly desperate suburban stage mom Kitty Farmer ("Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion!"), you suddenly begin to find hilarity in nearly every scene in the movie. Case in point: do you remember the scene with Drew Barrymore's character Karen, just after she gets fired and is sitting in her empty classroom with Donnie, with the phrase "cellar door" written on the chalkboard behind her? As she gets up to leave, Donnie asks her the meaning of what she's written and, while removing with great care her reading glasses which are tethered around her neck, she replies in a sort of annoyed, non-ironic sincerity, "This famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language, of all the endless combiantions of words in all of history, that 'cellar door' is the most beautiful." As she casts one last, mournful look at Donnie, the two American flags jutting proudly out of the box in her arms bump against the door frame and she falters, stumbling gracelessly offscreen. The utter vapidity, the incredible absurdity of the claim she repeats is further ridiculed by the physical comedy. It is fucking hilarious. If you resist this joke, it's only because you don't know how to laugh at yourself. And if you think that they're really serious, take a look at this, dummy.
Further, it is impossible to resist this little exchange when Karen is getting fired:
-"I don't have time to get into a debate about this, Karen. I believe I have made myself clear."
-"You call this clarity? I don't think you have a clue what it's like to communicate with these kids. We are losing them to apathy, to this prescribed nonsense. They are slipping away."
-"I AM SORRY THAT YOU HAVE FAILED. Now if you'll excuse me, I have another appointment. You can finish out the week."
-"FUUUUUUUUUCK!"
Nearly every character is given some such funny moment. Eddie Darko's comes when he's watching a Dukakis-Bush debate on the TV, slouched low in his chair, sloppily eating some snack, covered in crumbs. Bush says something dumb about the Iran-Contra Scandal, and Eddie mumbles cantankerously, "You tellem, George." I've already mentioned one of Gretchen's, and though it's a bit cynical, I'm inclined to laugh at Rose Darko's answer to Donnie's "How's it feel to have a wacko for a son": "Oh, Donnie. It feels wonderful," pfft! Wanna see the funny? The clip below contains some great moments. Skip in to 3:45, and try to tell me I'm wrong.
*"baby nation" intellectual property of Yasmina Bersbach
I have recently become reacquainted with Richard Kelly's first film, happening upon a copy which I received, appropriately enough, for my sixteenth birthday (or something). Revisiting this artifact of my weird adolescent development was accompanied by a strange sentiment, some peculiar cross between wistfulness for Jordans past and dread of the same.
I needn't have feared. The movie has become something totally different than it once was. To watch Donnie Darko during the melodramatic, self-serious period of early- to middle- highschool is to project a similar sort of sincerity onto the movie. Lines like, "I guess some people are just born with tragedy in their blood" are met with tender sympathy, and speak to the tortured, misunderstood teenage soul.
It is a surprise-delight, then, that these lines become hilarious when seen through more adult eyes. If you are willing to entertain an alternative reading in which the film satirizes all characters as viciously, albeit less obviously, as it does Beth Grant's charmingly desperate suburban stage mom Kitty Farmer ("Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion!"), you suddenly begin to find hilarity in nearly every scene in the movie. Case in point: do you remember the scene with Drew Barrymore's character Karen, just after she gets fired and is sitting in her empty classroom with Donnie, with the phrase "cellar door" written on the chalkboard behind her? As she gets up to leave, Donnie asks her the meaning of what she's written and, while removing with great care her reading glasses which are tethered around her neck, she replies in a sort of annoyed, non-ironic sincerity, "This famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language, of all the endless combiantions of words in all of history, that 'cellar door' is the most beautiful." As she casts one last, mournful look at Donnie, the two American flags jutting proudly out of the box in her arms bump against the door frame and she falters, stumbling gracelessly offscreen. The utter vapidity, the incredible absurdity of the claim she repeats is further ridiculed by the physical comedy. It is fucking hilarious. If you resist this joke, it's only because you don't know how to laugh at yourself. And if you think that they're really serious, take a look at this, dummy.
Further, it is impossible to resist this little exchange when Karen is getting fired:
-"I don't have time to get into a debate about this, Karen. I believe I have made myself clear."
-"You call this clarity? I don't think you have a clue what it's like to communicate with these kids. We are losing them to apathy, to this prescribed nonsense. They are slipping away."
-"I AM SORRY THAT YOU HAVE FAILED. Now if you'll excuse me, I have another appointment. You can finish out the week."
-"FUUUUUUUUUCK!"
Nearly every character is given some such funny moment. Eddie Darko's comes when he's watching a Dukakis-Bush debate on the TV, slouched low in his chair, sloppily eating some snack, covered in crumbs. Bush says something dumb about the Iran-Contra Scandal, and Eddie mumbles cantankerously, "You tellem, George." I've already mentioned one of Gretchen's, and though it's a bit cynical, I'm inclined to laugh at Rose Darko's answer to Donnie's "How's it feel to have a wacko for a son": "Oh, Donnie. It feels wonderful," pfft! Wanna see the funny? The clip below contains some great moments. Skip in to 3:45, and try to tell me I'm wrong.
*"baby nation" intellectual property of Yasmina Bersbach
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