Mock Draft: Albums that never get old!

After today's relatively disappointing Kissing Suzy Kolber commenter draft (Topic: Restaurants where you would like to eat your last meal), Scott (who posts under Hats for Bats on his group baseball blog) and I decided to start our own diversion:

Mock Draft: Albums that never, ever get old

Rules: Not a lot to explain here. One album per round. No repeats of artists.

Round 1

BiweeklyBrilliance: Who's up first?

HatsForBats: I'll give you first pick since I proposed the topic.

BwB: I would stick it to you and take The Verve: Urban Hymns, but I'm not that cruel. (Yes, he is--ed.)

H4B: I wondered if you would try that. I was going to take it with a lower pick since it's too obvious for me.

BwB: I figured. OK, I'll start with Ted Leo and the Pharmacists: "Hearts of Oak".

H4B: Good one. I'll go with Counting Crows: "Across a Wire Live in New York City".

BwB: Ooh, a fine choice. I could listen to the 10-minute version of "Round Here" forever.

H4B: I love both discs separately.

BwB: Related: you should pick up the live Wilco double album, "Kicking Television: Live in Chicago". It's like a greatest hits, but they added this wicked awesome 3rd guitar player (Nels Cline) who really adds some bite to a lot of tracks.

H4B: Nice. I'll check it out. You're still on the clock, by the way :-P

BwB: Sue me.

Round 2

BwB: AC[lightning bolt]DC: "Back in Black".

H4B: Good one. All right, I'm hitting you where you live: Smashing Pumpkins: "Siamese Dream".

BwB: Ass. But for the record I would have taken "Adore" before "Siamese Dream."

H4B: I knew you would. ... we know each other way too well in this regard.

Round 3

BwB: Led Zeppelin: Houses of the Holy.

H4B: Hmm. All right, I'll swing it back newer. Postal Service: "Give Up".

Round 4

BwB: Hmm, I'll go a little out there. Eminem: "Marshall Mathers LP".

H4B: Interesting choice.

BwB: It still amuses me to this day. I never expect it either.

H4B: Okay, I should have taken this one earlier. The Refreshments: "Fizzy Fuzzy Big and Buzzy".

Round 5

BwB: You're going to hate me: Jeff Buckley: "Grace".

H4B: Oh, that's so good, it should have been mine. ALl right, The Verve: Urban Hymns. I gotta protect now.

BwB: Yeah I knew Jeff Buckley would get you sweating.

H4B: Big oversight on my part.

Round 6

BwB: Nirvana: "MTV Unplugged in New York".

H4B: Radiohead: "The Bends".

BwB: Wow. Monster pick. Lot of upside potential. Big wingspan... etc.

H4B: I had to recover from Grace.

Round 7

BwB: Ozomatli: "Ozomatli".

H4B: Damn. OK, you hit me where I live now.

BwB: Know what? I stole album from you. Call the RIAA. (He did not steal. Please do not call the RIAA--ed.)

H4B: Miles Davis: "Kind of Blue".

BwB: Nice. By the way, I think my favorite part of "Kind of Blue" is how every single "best albums of all time" lists always places it at, like, #6.

H4B: "We need some jazz on there, but it doesn't need to be first."

BwB: There's always a pissing war between "Pet Sounds" and "Revolver" and "Sgt. Peppers" and "Blood on the Tracks"... but there's "Kind of Blue" at #6 every single time. I think that qualifies it for #1 ever.

H4B: By the way, I'll just say it: I was happy for that Thriller video this morning, because I had the Beatles in my head, and I didn't want them there. Stupid deli radio. "Let it Be." Ugh.

BwB: That's how I respond to "Are you a Beatles or a Stones guy" questions. I say I'm in MJ's court :-P (Hopefully not in his bed!--ed.)

Round 8

BwB: Oh, you're going to want to reach through the series of tubes and murder me: Over the Rhine: "Ohio".

H4B: Ahh! I knew it was out there.

BwB: I admit that's a mean-spirited pick. Thanks for turning me on to Over the Rhine, by the way.

H4B: Grrr, and you've already got Ted Leo off the board. Okay, fine, you wanna play that? Sufjan Stevens: "Illinois"

BwB: Oooooooooooooooooh! You MONSTER. It cuts like a knife!

H4B: You brought this upon yourself!

BwB: Damn you for taking away one of my favorite songs, "Casimir Pulaski Day."

H4B: Ditto, "Suitcase."

Round 9. Final round!

BwB: Drive-By Truckers: "Decoration Day"

H4B: Now you're just doing this out of spite. I commend that. My last pick: Arcade Fire: "Funeral"

BwB: I hadn't considered that. Nicely done.


OK folks, let's hear what yours would be in the comments.

What if my buddy David ended up in a Chilean prison?

Here's an idea for what you can do if you end up owning a Chilean prison: reenact "Thriller"--with full choreography and a guy in drag, natch--with 1500 prisoners:



Hat tip to Scott, who sent it along with this note, referring to a mutual friend that memorized the Thriller dance:

Seriously, in my head, the backstory is that there was a mix-up at Chilean customs, and David ended up in prison. and a week later, this.

Sorry, sad emo kid: blood is not blue. Your veins are not blue.

Mythbusting time! Colour Lovers settles the "veins are blue" mystery.

Would you believe the answer is pretty similar to why the sky is blue? It's the light, stupid:

Why Are My Blood Veins Blue?


Well, they’re not. They’re a dirty red. Of course, the darker blood won’t be as dark outside of the body because it will oxidize when hitting air, but it still contains waste from cells. Seeing a vein as blue through the skin is because of the layer just below the epidermis and dermis, the two outer layers of skin. Because our skin’s “job” is to protect our bodies from the sun, this provides an interference for how light penetrates the skin by allowing only lower frequency light through, and color is light bounced off of an object, after all. The wavelengths that do make it through to the veins are high-energy blue.

What about the "it's just blue until it hits the air and absorbs oxygen" idea?

Even some of my science teachers have previously said that blood from veins is blue before it hits air… where instantly it’s changed to bright red.

Seen under vacuum conditions, this has been disproved.

Wait, who's cutting people open in vacuums?

This makes the English Major in me happy: Spelling and Grammar trip up phishers

Think spelling and grammar don't matter? Try taking this quiz about Phishing schemes. The Amazon.com one was hardest for me.

I got 10/10. Beat that! Oh, right. You can't.

The most important part of the quiz is they tell you how to identify fake websites out to get your information. While the secret to some of them is the fake URL, for most of the sites the giveaways are that gawdawful Nigerian grammar, phrasing, and inconsistencies.



End lesson: If you're writing emails or websites, quadruple check that your writing sounds like a human being and you're doing stuff consistently. If not, you might have dipped instantly from 'trustworthy' to 'potentially trying to rip me off.'

[via Lifehacker]

Yahoo! Most Viewed photos provides penetrating insight into the American psyche

Check out the "Most Viewed" photos today on Yahoo! Most Popular:



Yup. Lindsay Lohan x8, subtly overtly sexual yoga, and the planet Mercury a galactically fat man.

Bravo, America. I haven't questioned your taste this much since Wild Hogs hit #1 at the box office. Bravo.

Slate was really on top of their game today

Wow, Slate was really kicking ass on the Alps today.

First, they unearthed the fax that Chimpy McFlightsuit used to cede power to Cheneytron while he was in surgery. Yes, a fax. The same official, super secure document transmission method I use to order Chipotle burritos. You'd think he'd at least call!

If you're interested in some Harry Potter discussion, they have a nice series of letters about their predictions and feelings after it's over. Spoilers, obviously. Will Leitch, busybody editor of Deadspin gets in on the action.

Finally, they had not one but two killer slideshows. First up are examples of the video game clichés that let us instantly pick up new games, like medpacks and The Konami Code.

I guess Medpacks are preferable to eating cute fairies (picture link goes nowhere):



Second up is an exploration of the 12 major types of advertisements. They've put together some pretty good examples, and Seth Stevenson totally digs up one of my favorite ads ever, Nike's "Awake:"



Man, now I'm pumped. Might as well clear out some of my other Slate links here:

Did you catch their Action Movie one-liner contest? I would say my favorite was "Myspace friend add … denied!" but screw Myspace! "Dénouement-ized, man-kisser!" takes the cake. One blogger really took it to another level though with "Spoiler Alert! You die." and "You’re Tony Soprano and I’m an artsy fade to black." or "Subway: Eat death."

They launched a new video service, SlateV, with some very excellent video versions of their articles. Frankly, they're the best I've ever seen for internet videos. They certainly know when to let ridiculous material speak for itself. It also has a blog that tracks 'net videos that nicely complements the AV Club's "Videocracy" column as places to find fun videos without getting your fingers dirty by actually going to YouTube, land of daxflames and lonelygirls. Yeck.

Last but not least, a classic article by Hua Hsu about inexplicable hit "My Humps:"

Irony and camp have recast taste as an ethical shell game and we feel no guilt celebrating things that are, in the parlance of VH1, Awesomely Bad. But are there still songs that qualify as "bad"? Consider the Los Angeles hip-hop quartet the Black Eyed Peas. Their current single, "My Humps," is one of the most popular hit singles in history. It is also proof that a song can be so bad as to veer toward evil.

At least "My Humps" gave us this, which almost makes up for "You Oughta Know:"

Harry Potter and Poetry

So I've finished Harry Potter. My only comment that I'll share on a blog right now is... has JK Rowling always used so many ellipses? I counted like 20 on one page. Use a period, lady!

Now for something completely different: Famous Poems as Limericks! Here's my favorite:

There was a man who, at low tide
Would walk with the Lord by his side
Jesus said "Now look back;
You'll see one set of tracks.
That's when you got a piggy-back ride."

And you thought there wasn't a way to make "Footprints In The Sand" any more ridiculous, did you?

"The Raven" as a limerick is quite good as well.

[Via BoingBoing]

I deal with the soul-crushing disappointment of cheese every day

[Left-Handed Toons (by right-handed people)] via The Consumerist

Processing priority Potter pilfering, post-haste!

Disclaimer: Stealing is bad.

But maybe you'd be interested in seeing photos of every page of the last Harry Potter book. It's not as great as you think: it's very difficult to read since it's at a pretty fair distance. But it looks legit and it's apparently all there.

If you use BitTorrent, you could know who lives and who dies right now. Just sayin.' [Tip and Photo via Boing Boing]

PS: No, I haven't read it. Yet.

PPS: While you're waiting, here's a profane wish list of things that the final book should answer (via Cracked).

PPPS: Anyone seen the fifth movie yet? I thought it had a lot of nice moments but still wasn't as good as the third and fourth ones. Still way better than the unremittingly painful first two. I'm 25 years old, by the way.

CRIPPLE FIGHT!

OK, so I'm cheaping out again, but here's a side-by-side comparison of the divine cripple fight scene from South Park and the scene that inspired it frame-by-frame from the movie "They Live:" (umm, probably not safe for work if you couldn't gather from the words "South Park")



The original is almost as funny as the South Park version, outlandishly enough. [via Cracked]

The music is "Souvenirs" by Architecture in Helsinki if you were wondering

While I don't usually like to cheap out by just posting YouTube videos, this one is just so charming that I couldn't help myself. What's it advertising? Who cares! Pretty lights!

Maybe they should use a Mac...

Airport Security ftw!, originally uploaded by sirbrett84.

I've written about airport security before, but this takes the cake. If you want to hack into an airport's computer system, they're kind enough to advertise that it'd be pretty easy.

UPDATE: And, since I'm kind of a photoshop expert, allow me to go for the easy joke:

So long, morning

Ever played some video games? Check out this Commenter Draft on Kissing Suzy Kolber.

The question: which video game would you play against alien invaders for the fate of the world? This is one of the few places on the internet where you need to follow the comments.

This cost me my entire morning. I got into the commenting, but good buddy Hats for Bats really stole the show.

I ended up taking:

1. Legend of Zelda
2. Resident Evil
3. Upside-down spelling words on a calculator. That's a game, right? 1134. 58008. Tee hee.
4. Ducktales on NES

And that's when I called it a day.

But Hats for Bats... wow:

1. Major League Baseball 1991 for Game Gear
2. Super Mario 3 ("Finally living out my 'the Wizard' fantasy")
3. Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge
4. Turbo TextTwist (java game)
5. Drug War on a TI-83
6. Erotic Photo Hunt

At which point commenter John S pointed us to the Tetris theme music. When Hats wanted to run that over the office intercom, John S said,

If you could, it would be kind of like Andy Dufrense in Shawshank.

"It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free. "

And that, my friends, is how to win a comment thread.

Link roundup: holiday weekend edition

Time for another round of link vomiting, wherein I try to make sense of a big pile of stuff that I want to share with yinz. Here we goooooooooooooo...

Last time I left you with my new favorite blog, Passive Agressive Notes. Well they have a nice rundown of a household post-it war that escalates nicely.

Speaking of escalating nicely, you might get a kick out of this short take on invasive advertising, particularly the kind that's popping up all over video games.

Video games can make stuff funnier! You might have seen the clip of a breakdancer kicking a baby. Well, it's funnier when you add in sound effects from Street Fighter II. Is it wrong that I love watching children get injured? Is it even more wrong that I created a 'kidsgettinghurt' folder on my del.icio.us account, a decision that implies I intend to find more movies of injury to children?

Speaking of kids, if you think kids these days just don't play outside enough, you may be right, as that article highlights how the distance parents let their kids wander has shrunk from miles to backyards.

That's such a drastic loss that I almost wish there was an easy tool to make ridiculous unit conversions. Oh, wait, there is. It can tell you that I weigh roughly .15 whale testicles and I am .222 (repeating, of course) Oscar Mayer Weinermobiles tall.

Men have weiners, and any man in the audience can probably appreciate Big Daddy Drew's Father's Day plans. Yeah, this is late, but the cologne that smells like gunpowder kills me every time. Badass.

Speaking of badass, the new Die Hard movie is pretty good. But I don't think it'll be as good as Ben Stiller's classic parody of the franchise. Remember when he was funny? Before he did crappy cartoons?

Speaking of cartoons, go see Ratatouille now. I can't say enough nice things about it. I would rate it as just as good as Incredibles but not quite as good as Finding Nemo or Monsters, Inc., one of my favorite movies ever, as I've illustrated with this graph:



That looks harsh, until you realize it's out of scale compared to all other children's movies:



While I'm at it, Slate also had a nice slideshow about the excellence that is Brad Bird. It takes a special director to make soup preparation utterly thrilling -- by a rat, no less! If I had my way, Remy the Rat would take Mickey's place as the icon of Disney. Though I don't think that would work out. Walt Disney was a sexist asshole. But we already knew that. Remy the Rat is too nice to be such a dick.

Speaking of things that can carry disease, you all should also go see Sicko. It's easily Moore's best since Roger & Me and he blessedly stays the hell out of the way, letting other people who have been screwed by the insurance industry do the talking. It's brilliant, tragic, hilarious, and infuriating, and you can watch it (the whole thing!) for free (legally, even!) right here. So you have no excuse. Only people who hate Michael Moore on principle can hate this movie. While his proposed solution is far from perfect and doesn't hit on everything, goddamn is the movie powerful.

Speaking of powerful, if you're a GMail convert (If you aren't on Gmail and want an invite, leave a comment and I'll fix you up), you can consolidate all your disparate emails into Gmail (including having Gmail send outgoing replies "from" the address that received it) to have all your email in one place. This is especially handy if you have to use a bunch of different addresses and mail clients for pleasure, school, and work emails and want them all in one place. Saucy.

Speaking of saucy, I want an iPhone really bad... as soon as it holds as much music as full-size iPods and isn't on the tin-cans-and-string cellular network. Those commercials lie!, but I admit they make me chuckle (and the girls in those spots are pretty hawt ... man I'm pathetic).

Speaking of pathetic, have you ever stumbled on a car taking up more than their fair share of the parking lot? Well, Youparklikeanasshole is the most fun way to rat them out. It even has notices you can print out and leave on offending cars. Probably don't want to do it if the driver can see you. Caveat emptor.

Speaking of cars, this blog post runs down some incredible car commercials, including the infamous Honda "Cog" spot, the grocery parking lot defense, and this incredible Honda spot that I hadn't seen before.

Still on cars, Consumerist posted a very thorough essay that explains why gas is so expensive. Summary: it's not the gas station's fault; it's every other step in the process that is actively out to screw you. Maybe it's time to go back to walking or public transport.

Speaking of traveling, if you're heading home for the holiday, you might want to look into this tutorial and this one about how to get your parents' computer free of ad-, mal-, and spy-ware. If your parents are like mine, their compys will need it. Badly. Stop using Internet Explorer for heaven's sake!

If you must drive on your trip back home, you should fire up some Pearl Jam on the iPod and try to figure out the lyrics to "Yellow Ledbetter".

You should also pack some maps, and you can find a ton of insane ones on this blog. Be sure you have a lot of time to waste, since there's tons of cool stuff on there, including a clever visual of online communities and a very compelling reason to study the cartography of Hannover.

While we're talking about graphical abstractions and wastes of time, you can lose hours in the "Stick Figures in Peril" photostream. Lots of funny ones, although I have yet to see the infamous "Beware Flying Bats and Balls" sign that has a stick figure getting whacked with a baseball... but this one is close. (It might have been caused by Jedi Baseball.)

Speaking of safety, if you're listing something to sell on Craigslist and don't want to put your phone number on the greater Intertubes, use this service to create a free forwarding number to keep your real number private. I also found a nifty way to keep your laptop private with a relatively inconspicuous FedEx envelope.

While you're on Craigslist, if you need to airbrush your picture for your personal ad (and you have Photoshop, natch), this tutorial can show you how in a ridiculous amount of detail. This should also show you how to never trust any picture you find online ever. You might find yourself with someone like this toothless harpy and end up on FOX reality television programming.

Speaking of things the cat wouldn't drag in -- I know... I'm reaching -- well, I don't want to spoil it, so just watch the video. If you get anything from this post, make it this:



And while we're on the joys of youth, remember as a parting word of advice that if you must show a "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner at a school function, the Supreme Court says you're better off with something like this.