Pass the Mic

25th anniversary. For a lot of groups, this would mean redundancy. Or even reunion tour. But not my boys.

Way to go, guys! You're still relevant!

We all die

If we so desire, we may get our 15 minutes of notoriety, such as being presented in a pie to the king.

But it’s more likely that we’re not going to become famous.

Which turns out to be not so bad, after all. Just get over it and move along.
(via Murder Burger.)

“The artist has only to remain true to his vision”

The artist has only to remain true to his vision and it will possess his work in such a manner that it will resemble the work of no other - for no two dreams are alike, and those who reach the heights have all toiled up the steep mountains by a different route. To each has been revealed a different panorama.

What quote, other than this one by Albert Pinkham Ryder, could better describe R. Crumb, owner of his own panorama. And here it is, masterfully lettered at the bottom of yet another beautiful Crumb piece.

Look past the subject matter: the shading in this thing is sublime. And I’ve always thought Crumb’s lettering was as at least as beautiful as his illustrations.

Super Cub

A brief history of the Honda Cub, the most successful internal-combustion engine in history, with over 60 million sold in the past 50 years. It’s the vehicle that made Honda, as described in this Wired article, because it was cheap, simple and virtually indestructible. Is that not the holy trinity of virtually every field of human endeavor?

In the video, noted motorcycle enthusiast Charley Boorman attempts to kill a Cub, starting by replacing its oil with used french-fry grease.
(Sort of via Ffffound!)

Hotelicopter

If I’m reading the French right and Fubiz is to be believed, this is an actual “hotelicopter” that will commence flying in June. Crazy.
(UPDATE: Gizmodo has a few more details.)

ROLcats continues to amuse

(source.)

One take

God, as if I didn’t already love Metric enough, here’s an amazing video for their new single, Gimme Sympathy. Stick with it, or fast-forward right to the end, because the final few seconds are fucking beautiful. Either way, keep in mind that it's a continuous take. Nicely done, nicely done, nicely done.

Damn, I love art

The Physical Value of Sound by Yuri Suzuki.

Kitchenettes & Dr. Pepper

What a beautiful shot from FILE magazine, via Ffffound!

World’s Worst Game Show

I read an article recently that said comics were trying out their routines in Twitter, which makes no sense whatsoever.

“Hey, I just wrote the funniest joke of the decade. I think I’ll lob it out into the vast anonymous echo chamber!”

I follow quite a few comics on Twitter and I can tell you that most are not knocking us dead with killer one-liners, hour after hour. (That honor goes to Brawny-Shouldered Everymen of the Great Plains like @badbanana.)

They are, like the rest of us, filling their idle time with observations about life at the moment.

Having said that, and to make a long stupid story even longer and stupider, one of my favorite English comic chaps, criminally unknown on this side of the globe, Peter Serafinowicz — damn, I just spelled that correctly from memory. I’m not completely stupid yet — mentioned today on Twitter that he and his co-conspirator, Robert Popper, think this series is the funniest bit of television ever made.

I have to agree that it’s pretty insane.

Thanks, Ratzi

You’re quite a guy.

Tall tiny islands

I just love this picture by Alex Lukas (via Peter Nidzgorski). Lukas is amazing - check out his whole site.

My new hero

I’ve been seeing this guy on image sites recently, but only tonight discovered that Sebastien Tellier is not just a model in some crazy stylized photo shoot.

As Pieter comments, he totally looks and sounds like the stereotype of a louche French pop singer. Of course Serge Gainsbourg was the ne plus ultra of this genre. Can’t ever really top old Serge.

But I was amused by M. Tellier, who seems to have a phobia about being around women who wear pants. I’m going to form a support group.
(via today and tomorrow.)

Dead pixel in Google Earth

A burnt square the size of a dead pixel as seen in Google Earth from an altitude of one kilometer. Nice.
(Helmut Smits via today and tomorrow.)

Hambone and eephin’

This is the stuff of nightmares.
(via [ the sugar sheet ].)

So long, Sam the Record Man

topleftpixel has this amazing and sorrowful look at the remains of Sam the Record Man on Yonge Street in Toronto.

Back in the day, Sam the Record Man was known as the premier record store in Canada, and it eventually leveraged that name-brand into a chain across the country at just about the same time that downloading music for free off the Internet became massively popular.

And so it folded, an early victim of the new reality, although the flagship Yonge Street location struggled on heroically until 2007.

I made it to Sam’s exactly once, when I was 18. It seemed like a pilgrimage to a bright neon shrine. Then we went to the Horseshoe Tavern! Woo!
(also by topleftpixel, who is so great and please don’t sue me.)

Mental As Anything

I have to admit that I missed out on Mental As Anything when they appeared in 1981 - I remember the name, which I thought was cool, but I never heard the band.

Which is perhaps just as well, because the music in no way agrees with the sort of antic craziness the name implies. It’s more like something from one of the Finn family projects. Y’know, Neil and Tim, those Split Enz/Crowded House guys. (Now one of them has a son in the music biz! It’s getting out of hand.)
(Undiscovered Twitter gold @indefensible is remembering great Australian bands of the ’80s. And there were a lot.)

Seven

Holy crap, how is it that I suddenly have a seven-year-old son? Does this mean that I have to grow up?

Damn snooty French squirrels

I’m sorry to laugh at this terribly broad caricature of French culture, but I did. However, I can’t see how this will get the nut company more sales. It’s more likely that people will associate the brand with elitism and will think of it in terms of high prices and ostentatiousness.

But it made me laugh.

Ostentatioucity! is my new word that I just made up.
(via AdFreak.)

Hood, Riding, Red, Little.

I love this kind of animation even when it’s merely okay, so I was in heaven watching this slightly retro-futuristic design take on the Little Red Riding Hood story. (That was a stupid way to describe it, but I’m at a loss for anything profound to say at the moment.) As they always say, this is a thing you will like, provided you like this sort of thing.
(via brandflakesforbreakfast.)

London bomb scare over Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch

I didn’t write anything about it when this happened, because I thought all the big blogs would be all over it. But apparently not. Seems a Spamalot souvenir was convincing enough to evacuate several businesses last week. And give me a reason to post the classic scene. Oh, Internet, how I love you.
(via TMN.)

The evolution of the bat

You don’t have to be a fan to appreciate this wonderful animation of the history of the Batman logo. One great design just flows into the next, and who knew there could be so many variations on such a specific logo? It’s brilliant.

(The YouTube screen-grab is awful; it does no justice to the actual video.)
(via Coudal.)

Mifune in stripes

(via Akira Kurosawa.)

Dream, baby, dream

I didn’t really appreciate Suicide back in the early days of punk, but now I know how much they influenced every electronic band that came after them. This is a great (in retrospect) early song.

(via this isn’t happiness.)

Walk a Tightrope

Wow, I was looking at this amazing Flickr set, wondering which of these incredibly cool movie posters I wanted to blurt about, when I saw this one. Check out the rest, but this is the best.
(via Coudal.)

Scratchin’ your own back

This one is for my five-year-old, who has figured out that getting your back scratched is the purest form of bliss.
(via Neatorama.)

Saturn moons in transit

Allow me to indulge my inner astronomy geek. Those little moon shadows on the big planet are so incredible.
(via APOD.)

Dammit George, you picked up while I was doing the Internet!

This is brilliant: “24” as it would have been, if made in 1994. Funny and thought-provoking. (That’s my current cliché, it would seem.)
(via Peter Serafinowicz.)

Who killed Bambi?

I was searching for Edward Tudor-Pole in his defining moment as a theatre usher vacuuming the lobby in The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle (terrible movie!) and I found this excerpt from The Filth and the Fury (great movie!) where John is narrating how Malcolm never gave them any money, over images of Paul Cook getting car-jacked and buggered by new-wavey types, one of whom looks a hell of a lot like Sting. (Going to check that now… dang, IMDb doesn’t say.)

Turbo Teen!

I was wondering why I had never heard of Turbo Teen before, but I see it aired during the mid-80's, when I had more pressing interests than Saturday-morning television.

Still, I like the concept: Boy driving sports car in a storm veers off the road and into the path of a secret government experiment, where boy and car are merged into an extremely unlikely crime-fighting figure. Man, Knight Rider’s got nothing on that!
(via Super Punch.)

Color-coordinated parking will fix this mess

Here’s a nifty little art project, in which drivers are assigned to various parking lots according to the color of their car. I imagine it would be quite appealing visually, and I’m surprised so few people grumbled about it. Perhaps some folks found themselves a lot closer to their destination than they normally would have been, simply because they drove a yellow VW Beetle with bitchin’ mags.

Also, check out the guy at 3:30 who basically says that if we can’t learn to park our cars in color-coordinated harmony, then universal health care and women’s equality are beyond our reach. Dare to dream, brother.
(via Urban Prankster.)

High hopes for this one

“Pawnee is not a tourist Mecca, but this fact has made it a somewhat desirable location for those looking to get away from the crowds.”

Twitter is the new journalism. Yikes.

Here’s a site that can collate TwitPics by #hashtags. Is that a new thing, or is it something that is finally about to break out? (Or am I about 6 months behind the curve?) Because it’s a great idea. Here’s a small sampling of the Twitterverse’s view of the most recent space shuttle launch.
(via things; TwitPic above by @fmckinnon.)

Not The Residents

If you go searching for The Residents on YouTube, you will find yourself tangled up with this other, identically-named Dutch band from 1965.

Which might seem at first like an honest Internet mix-up, but now I’m starting to wonder if the Dutch band isn’t some insanely brilliant Residents project? Because it looks like it might bear a resemblance to a performance piece by that seminal art-rock collective.

THE RESIDENTS:
The Hague - The Netherlands
Indorock band ex Crazy Rockers / Black Dynamites
live 1966 Scheveningen Palais de Danse
When My Dreamboat
line up:
lead guitar - Max Tahalele †
2nd lead guitar - Woutje Jansen †
rhythm guitar - Woody Brunings
bass guitar - Pim Veeren
drums - Henny Heutink †
recorded 11-8-1966 by Sam Patty

Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo

Back in the early ’80s, when I was buying (and loving) the first couple of Oingo Boingo albums, I had no idea that they were already just the husk of an earlier collective known as the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, who incorporated far more than just music into their performances.

Given that they were based in L.A., it stands to reason that they would have found their way to venues such as the Gong Show.
(Thanks to Neatorama for reminding me that 1984 was so long ago. Man.)

In which George Clooney does a pretty good Andy Rooney impersonation

There’s something really down home about George Clooney. It may be the biggest act in the world, but he really creates the impression that he would be a fun guy to hang with.

Here he is in Chad, on his way to something Darfur-related, and he’s amusedly showing off his hotel room, which is hardly fit for anybody, let alone a big-shot Hollywood millionaire, when he suddenly busts out a brief Andy Rooney riff. Funny stuff.
(via NPR’s Monkey See.)

Good-night, sweet Post-Intelligencer

Tomorrow is the last day for a print version of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Here’s an inside account of putting the last issue to bed.
(Picture via Gawker.)

Jesus appearance 2008 roundup

It seems Jesus was pretty busy making appearances in ’08. Luckily, the Virgin Mary was on hand for back-up.

Thank you, Jesus!
(Bargain Bin of Oblivion, via the entire damn Internet.)

Murder is funny when it’s committed by Andy Richter

And when it’s fictional, of course. Some of the people who read AdFreak disagree. They are perhaps missing the point that the ad is a spoof by Upright Citizens’ Brigade.

Worm vs. Meatball

There’s a nice little piece in last week’s NYT’s T Magazine about the conflict at NASA over the use of its two logos, the Meatball and the Worm. Well, not much of a conflict, really, but a slim hook on which T can hang a compare-and-contrast.

As for me, I’m a fan of the Worm. That was the logo of my teenage sci-fi reading years.

Satisfaction

I had a hankering to look for The Residents on YouTube and dang me if they didn’t have a fair number of good quality clips up there. Good news for fans of the band, though I imagine there are many more who hate them.

The Residents were always fairly cutting edge technologically and culturally. Hell, they put out a computer game before most people even had computers! (And I can only imagine how twisted that computer game must have been.)

And if you ask me, their version of “Satisfaction” is way better than Devo’s.

Beautiful stacks of paper

These paper installations by Christell Bonnet are sublime. At first I was going to comment about the appalling waste of paper, but then I decided that if one tree has to die to create something this beautiful, it’s just one damn tree, after all. In the meantime, the rest of us should stop printing out every e-mail we receive, or so I’m told.
(via Coudal.)

Your moment of boring

Here’s something from Japan which appears to depict… who the heck knows, but it’s strangely compelling and towards the end may feature the least-sexy sex scene ever. Totally SFW.
(via Ow! My Sweet Eyes!)

Welcome to my world, four eyes

It’s kind of a pleasant surprise to realize that this is the first of our children who needs corrective lenses, given the vision problems on both sides of our family (particularly mine).

Today we picked out the frames in a hilarious session at LensCrafters. He was fairly drawn to models like the leopard-print cat’s-eyes.

These are the frames we settled on. I was hoping for even more severe horn-rims, but this was the best they had along those lines. Except for the $300 Dolce & Gabbana kids’ frames. Which is kind of an astonishing price, because these are glasses that will be lost, broken or grown-out-of in a ridiculously short period of time.

C’est difficile de te quitter.

@DixonTam called me out on Mitsou tonight and I thought I already had her on my blog, but I didn’t. Have to find that file. In the interim, I give you “Bye Bye, Mon Cowboy”.
Mitsou! hubba-hubba! back in the day.

I don’t care

It’s an awful song, in my opinion, but my oh my, the visuals in this 1952 number starring Mitzi Gaynor are delightful. Plus there is the rich irony of a woman parading around in an outfit that looks like a semi-exploded chicken and singing that she doesn’t care what people think about her.

Mitzi Gaynor was kind of ubiquitous in Vancouver when I was young. Having just now read her Wikipedia entry, I can tell you she used Vancouver’s legendary Cave nightclub to try out her latest Vegas revues, and all of the attendant showbizzery was breathlessly reported in the local newspapers.
(via Dinosaurs and Robots.)

Your partner for indigenous air systems

This is why we have the Internet: here’s a Bollywood-style promotional video for an Israeli company that’s pitching anti-aircraft missiles to the Indian military. Apparently, good old-fashioned under-the-table cash bribes aren’t enough anymore.

This is just wrong on so many levels that I can only look on in awe. Having said that, don’t miss the flower-bedecked missiles that show up now and again.

Dinga dinga dee!
(via Danger Room.)

Tracking Paris? Isn’t it in France?

An Internet meter, plain and simple, of the current relative search engine (and other media) popularity of Paris Hilton versus Paris, France.

What a great idea, from Paris-based artist Tim Schwartz, but when I tuned in I realized it was just a concept, which was sort of disappointing. I guess I was expecting to see an actual Flash site, with real-time results. That wouldn’t be too hard to do, would it?

In any event, cool idea and cool pictures. His entire site looks inviting.
(via things.)

Who needs Kraftwerk?

Sure, Florian’s left the band, but as long as we’ve got Tim & Eric, we’ve got a safer, more North American group to relate to, and Minivan Highway clocks in about 20 minutes shorter than Autobahn.

(Actually, not knowing anything about Tim & Eric, I don’t know if this is them doing a parody, or actual found footage. I suspect the former.)
(via Merlin Mann.)

Portrait of an Unknown Document

Sorry, I haven’t been feeling too bloggy lately. I find that weekends are increasingly devoted to real family life (especially as summer spring approaches), and that weekday evenings are devoted to television. Oh wait, I’ll probably post five items tomorrow…
(pic via today and tomorrow.)

Racy

I don’t watch Gossip Girl, so maybe this poster is a parody, but I kind of have the feeling that it isn’t. My understanding is that the show is targeted at teens, so doesn’t this seem a bit racy? Or am I just an old stick-in-the-mud?
(via Ffffound!)

More, more, we need more

Actually, I’ve been trying to upload this for so long tonight that I can’t remember why I even wanted to do so in the first place. It is rather beautiful, you have to admit.
(via this isn’t happiness.)

Olivier dark, Monroe light

(via ICPWAGTBAWLODC.)

Amazing New Yorker cover

From what I can tell, this wasn’t actually a submission to the most recent New Yorker Eustace Tilley competition, but if this site is any indication, he should be getting a lot more covers. Or are all of these by different artists? I can’t tell from the site…
(via your monkey called.)

More found art (not by me)

Every single one of these crazed street posters placed around an Australian (I think) city is a glittering gem of surreality.
(via @benthemorrison.)

Thanks for reminding me that I’m old

(via.)

One green bottle

A beer bottle, about to smash, flashes back on its life. I don’t think the concept is much better or worse than most commercials, but I think the cinematography is gorgeous. It’s a one-minute epic.
(via AdFreak.)

Never wash it again

Clever commercial for Hockey Canada. I actually had to watch it twice, because I didn’t notice the dirty hand on the first viewing, so they got their money’s worth with me.
(via CDR.)

ROLcats

I wasn’t going to write anything about ROLcats because it will probably be this huge thing on the web by tomorrow, but I really love the caption on this one:
Lie back and think of summers in Kiev, o cloudless sky.
Our edifices are firm but gentle lovers!
You shall not want for steel…

I know nothing at all about Cyrillic and I can tell you that this translation is a crock. But it’s still a whole bunch of fun.
(via Francesco.)

Spare a thought for the poor blind cavefish Steve Guttenberg

All: Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do! We do!

Karl: Who leaves Atlantis off the maps?
Lenny: Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
Alien: We do! We do!

All: Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
We do! We do!

Skinner: Who robs cavefish of their sight?
Homer: Who rigs every Oscar night?
All: We do! We do!
(via Eye on Springfield; lyrics from this awesome Simpsons lyrics archive.)

Quest for G

Okay, I just watched all 9:24 of this, so I’m going to exercise my right to comment. Apparently, this campaign is generating a lot of hate because it dares to channel Monty Python & the Holy Grail. However, I like it for doing exactly that. Sure, it’s not as funny as the original, but there’s very little that possibly could be. And I give them full marks for trying.

Title: Lost in the Options

From my Internet chum The Subtle Rudder, who writes so beautifully, comes this video from Reggie Watts. Maybe I’m late to the game, and most of you already know about him, but this is new and impressive for me.

A pimple on the map

I’m not sure which is more delightful: the discovery of this odd little bit of Ireland that protrudes into Northern Ireland, or the fact that its discoverer, the fellow who runs Strange Maps, can’t find out why it protrudes. (It’s driving him nuts.)

Marco Polo Motel, Seattle, Washington

What a beautiful image tonight on If Charlie Parker… I actually stayed at this hotel when I was a kid. I don’t remember much about the hotel, but I do remember the name.

Polaroid Hockney

Wow, I’ve never seen this before. It’s very much of its time (which is to say 1982, brrrrr), wouldn’t you agree?

And I don’t think we need to name-check which band got the inspiration for that album cover, do we?

“More Paintings About Young Men and Swimming Pools.”
(via Ffffound!)

Score! Apu and Krusty join the team

I’ve been remarkably lucky in my ongoing purchase of Kidrobot Simpsons minifigs. I figured I’d have at least one spare Homer by now. But, no!

Apu and Krusty join Homer, Marge, Barney and Comic Book Guy (whose actual name I recently learned. Do you know it?).

I’m a little bit bummed because Krusty was missing whatever little prop he was supposed to come with. Anybody know what it is?

Auto Polo

When men were manly and seatbelts were for wusses.
(via Shorpy.)

Scraped and repainted wall

Perfect.
(via Ffffound!)

Earthgrazer

Here’s a meteor the size of a small truck ripping through the upper atmosphere. (Click to embiggen.)

What is that streaking across the sky? A bright earthgrazing meteor. In 1972, an unusually bright meteor from space was witnessed bouncing off Earth's atmosphere, much like a skipping stone can bounce off of a calm lake. The impressive event lasted several seconds, was visible in daylight, and reportedly visible all the way from Utah, USA to Alberta, Canada. Pictured above, the fireball was photographed streaking above Teton mountains behind Jackson Lake, Wyoming, USA. The Great Daylight Fireball of 1972 was possibly the size of a small truck, and would likely have created an impressive airburst were it to have struck Earth more directly. Earthgrazing meteors are rare but are more commonly seen when the radiant of a meteor shower is just rising or setting.

I like how they say the meteor was “from space,” like it could have been from somewhere else. And I also think it would have created something worse than an “impressive airburst” if it had hit the Earth “more directly.” Yikes.

(Thanks for the nightmares, APOD.)

The $100,000 bicycle

Covered in gold plate and 600 Swarovski crystals, this may be one of the most bloatedly ostentatious things ever made. However, it’s meant as an art piece, not an actual product, so that’s cool, I guess. But it still strikes me as a little overmuch in these Tough Economic Times™.
(via Booooooom.)

You can’t stop progress

That’s right, you negative Normans! We are going to mail bees to each other! There’s nothing you can do to stop us!
(via Modern Mechanix.)

Snowplow locomotive

One of these was parked in the railyard under my office window last week. Even at the height of winter, there’s little call for one in Vancouver. Which is kind of a shame, because in action, they’re pretty amazing.
(via D&R.)