Now I’ve never had a bar mitzvah, but I’ve been to a couple, and I don’t remember this particular part of the Torah:
For some reason this video makes me feel nervous. And for those of you who didn’t make it through the whole thing, I don’t blame you.
Somehow, website UGO.com, which describes itself as "the ultimate online entertainment playground for people with “Gamer DNA,” has lined up a huge roster of celebrities to answer this question: who would win in a fight between a minotaur with a trident and a centaur with a crossbow?
Not to mention the comments section from the metafilter post that I got this from has a good ongoing debate about the question…people quoting D&D rules, methods of re-loading crossbows, etc.
I was worried that the dolphin stuff below was a little too cute, so thank the internet gods I’ve been rescued by a truly brutal Ernie and Bert music video.
The song is called “A Divine Proclamation for Finishing the Present Existence” and it’s performed by the band Last Days of Humanity. I love how Ernie & Bert still retain their central muppet-ness despite the shift in tone…and the ending is great. Crank it up!
There’s a nice article in the WSJ about how there might be a part of the brain that triggers an opioid hit when we are given new information that we need to absorb and interpret. That in the past we would need to gather this type of information in order to survive, so we’ve evolved to feel good when we get it, much like eating lots of fats and carbs.
In today’s info-saturated world though (like our food-saturated world), we are able to get so much information that it’s a bit like the monkey pushing the pleasure-stimulating lever until it dies (although this oft-cited experiment might be fake?). This accounts for why it’s so fun to cruise the web for info, to read blogs, to forward links, to post to blogs.
From the article:
this is amazing to me:
"Meanwhile, more than nine million people still pay $10 to $25 for AOL’s dial-up service when faster broadband service is available in most parts of the country, often at comparable prices. Dial-up is a rapidly declining business, but it is not an insignificant one. After all, it accounted for most of AOL’s $5.2 billion in revenue last year."
it’s from an NYT article on slow tech adopters…
is that this happens at 7am instead of 6am.
several times during this video art piece by artist Paul Slocum I thought I was losing my mind. Enjoy "You’re Not My Father."
Tony Millionaire’s Maakies. I always see Tony Millionaire’s collections in the comic store, but I’ve never gotten one. But now that they’re showing up in cartoon form (on SNL and Adult Swim), I may have to take the plunge. I love TM’s description of the series:
"Maakies focuses on the darkly comic misadventures of Uncle Gabby (a drunken Irish monkey) and Drinky Crow (a crow who likes to drink), two antiheroes with a propensity for drunkenness, violence, suicide, and venereal disease."
Nice. Check his animations here, or check his site here. Full of good dark stuff. I love this one (thanks Bill D)…
Yesterday morning I was suddenly hit with the memory that I once wanted to do a doc (or series?) on culture jamming, the artform that has the artist using the culture as the medium for their art. It’s generally making some kind of comment on mass culture, often to do with consumerism, occasionally with art itself. Probably the best-known example (unless "Andre the Giant has a Posse OBEY" counts) is Banksy, whose stencil graffiti is mega-famous now, but I always liked his museum insertions better. Pictured above is a classic that he snuck into the British Museum in 2005; my favorite bit of the story is the fact that the British Museum:
"praised the way his rock was hung and the style of the sign, which was ‘very similar’ to their own design."
He’s also hit New York museums…
What else could count as culture jamming? Well, I think Improv Everywhere would definitely fit in, and I’d love to do a segment on The Amazing Hypnotist, though I guess these days they’re more well-known for the annual No-Pants Subway Ride or the Grand Central Station Freeze or Best Gig Ever, which showed up on the premiere of the tv version of This American Life.
I think Santarchy would fit in as well — without a culture for hundreds of Santas to play against, there wouldn’t be a Santarchy.
There must be more — if I could come up with a strong set of them, it could maybe make an entertaining, Erroll Morris-ish doc a la "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control". Plus it would have the overarching culture jamming theme over it.
So that popped back into my head yesterday — I think because I’m geeked to do more filming after The Snow of Truth — and then today I get this great link to a blog that someone has started within the comments section of a post on Gawker, which is itself a blog. Let me repeat that. Someone has started a blog in the comments section of another blog. Awesome. Does this count as culture jamming?
I was thinking of buying an iphone. My old(e) ipod mini just died of critical hard drive failure, and my phone is old(e). I still have a year to go on my Verizon contract, but then I came across this way to get out of your verizon contract if you do it before 3/2/08, so I figured, what the heck, I’ll get an iphone!
But then talking to some people made me think maybe I shouldn’t. And I hate being an early adopter. And I don’t really NEED it, since I’ve got a decent phone, and I’m using my backup 256MB Creative mp3 player (from the days before ipods!!), so you know, I started thinking maybe I shouldn’t…
and then I came across this, and figured, well maybe I’ll just do this instead. This seals the deal.
It comes from this site, willitblend.com, which seems to be another thing that a whole huge part of the internet already knows about but which I never came across. It’s great watching him blend things. I especially enjoyed the glow sticks and Guitar Hero 3.Came across this really wild form of animating paper based on the stratacut technique…it seems like it’s been pioneered by Javan Ivey, and this clip is lifted from his website, pretty good stuff. Also he’s in Brooklyn, so there’s that too.
Check it out…strangely beautiful and affecting…
His website has a good timelapse film of him preparing the animation…18 hours to prepare, compressed into 30 seconds…
So after posting that bit about the CERN collider perhaps creating a black hole, I didn’t want to freak you out and let you know that when they start up that huge collider it might also create a rift in space-time and allow time travel to be possible. But hey, it might.
Instead I want to let you know (courtesy joshgranger.com science coorospondent Pat G) that some badass scientist named Scott Funkhouser (yes!) thinks he may have unearthed some kind of new cosmic constant, and it’s 10 to the 122. Nice. Good work, Funkhouser. It comes into play in trying to explain that "dark matter" we keep hearing about, and also:
"the ratio of the mass of the observable Universe to that of the smallest possible ‘quantum’ of mass is about 6×10122. And the number of ways in which the particles of the current Universe can be arranged throughout space (a measure of entropy) is 2.5×10122."
According to Funkhouser (preach it, Funkhouser!) “It is unlikely for chance alone to be responsible for generating so many pure numbers from just several fundamental parameters.” In other words, it looks like design! I love it when science gets out in the fringes…
Meanwhile, let’s take a moment to reminisce on another, more classic cosmic number:
Wizards, robots, math, science, hip-hop — I love this video! It’s by comedy/music duo Hard n Phirm.
They’re also known for their medley of Radiohead songs done in a bluegrass style. Of course they are. It’s called Rodeohead, check it out…according to wikipedia (can we ever believe them?!) Radiohead themselves approved the track…
[audio:Rodeohead.mp3]
I heard this great podcast this morning from WNYC public radio’s Radiolab, which seems to be a sort of hodge-podge, documentary-style radio show that airs intermittently. Their main page is here, and their blog post that I got this mp3 from is here. I’ve taken the mp3 and trimmed it down to just the content and end credit so it doesn’t have any of the radio show bits at the beginning…
It’s by Sherre DeLys, an Australian artist and sound designer, and it’s called "If". I found it weirdly compelling, very moving, sort of like a hypnotic lyrical story. Joshgranger.com is the perfect place for me to be able to post this kind of stuff, because this isn’t anything I’d put on a mix for anyone, and it’s too involved to be the kind of link I’d e-mail around…but it’s definitely a fascinating piece and worth hearing…
It’s about 7 minutes long, so if you want to listen to it later I’m adding a download link under the player…
[audio:IF.mp3]
A great drinking chat with Chris B about God, Zen and the universe reminded me of this cool animation from The Vancouver Film School. It’s basically two films telling the story of the origin of life, one from a creationist perspective, and one from an evolutionary perspective. The fun is that the (religious) creationist one tells it as though it’s pure science, while the (scientific) evolution one tells it like it’s a religious text.
Kind of tough to understand when written out, but easy once you see the films.
Then they take it to the next level by letting you watch both films at the same time, so you can hear the competing creation worldviews giving both sides simultaneously. Whew. I’d post it here, but I can’t match their shmancy simultaneous player. Good stuff, check it out!
Find it here.
Mmmmmm…SILFs.
It seems like I’m always coming across internet memes in postings where people are assuming that EVERYONE knows about it. Like "oh, well, it’s just another lolcatz" or "just a rip-off of All Your Base"…same thing happened when I read about lipdubs (someone in a post used the term "post-Lodwickian" referring to Jakob Lodwick, creator of lipdubs).
Lipdubs are when someone lipsyncs to a song, but splices in the actual song to the video…there are a million out there and most of them are lame (like the first one), but the first I saw (and arguably the most popular) was this one, which is great. It also features SILF:
video originally posted here.
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