One more than three, one less than five

If this doesn't give you even the slightest hint of a shit-eating grin, you're a heartless monster.

There, I said it.



Additional note: clearly, Feist is a highly advanced white woman.

Will heaven have room for all his stuff?

George Carlin, RIP. Goddamn that's a shame.

If you've been trying to surf blogs at the office and been thwarted by a ton of NSFW George Carlin videos, well, I don't care, I'm making it worse:



"Stuff" isn't necessarily the funniest Carlin skit, but I have a distinct memory of my little brother discovering George Carlin and, in his continuing efforts to spread joy for others, happily reading a transcript of this skit to the entire family.

Gotta love the universal appeal of a vulgar, cranky old man.

Have you noticed that their stuff is shit and your shit is stuff?

Classic. He'll be missed.

Weekend reading wrap-up

This is what happens when it rains all weekend.

The following things I read over the weekend gave me a serious case of the grins:

Diamonds on Demand: I've read several articles about this over the years, and I'm convinced lab-grown diamonds are just about the coolest thing ever.

Using very secretive methods (there are a few competing methods from a handful of manufacturers), these guys can make diamonds out of (half-) literally thin air. The basic processes have been around for 50-odd years, but now they can make flawless gems (not just industrial-grade!) of almost any cut, clarity, color, and carat in a matter of weeks instead of, ya know, billions of years.

And they can be BETTER than diamonds from the ground. They can make-to-order diamonds of any color, shape, thickness, electrical properties, composition... The Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Lab has already grown probably the world's hardest known substance in a type of lab-grown diamond that's harder than any known geothermal diamond. It broke the scale. The scale was made of diamonds.

That is just awesome.

How awesome?

With a cheap, ready supply of diamonds, engineers hope to make everything from higher-powered lasers to more durable power grids. They foresee razor-thin computers, wristwatch-size cellphones and digital recording devices that would let you hold thousands of movies in the palm of your hand. "People associate the word diamond with something singular, a stone or a gem," says Jim Davidson, an electrical engineering professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. "But the real utility is going to be the fact that you can deposit diamond as a layer, making possible mass production and having implications for every technology in electronics."

How about an iPod that can hold all the collective knowledge of the world? That awesome.

Unless you're De Beers. This is very bad news for De Beers, who have profited handsomly from (a) convincing the world that diamonds are rarer than they truly are; (b) lowering the supply of diamonds artificially by convincing everyone to keep their diamonds off the market -- they're "forever," haven't you heard?; (c) that whole blood diamond thing. They're fighting this lab diamond thing tooth and nail.

Money quote:

The problem for the producers is that even though diamonds are not all that rare, people believe they are, so their price is substantially inflated.

Once people realize that manufactured diamonds are indistinguishable from the real thing, he said, that could change.

So they dismissively call these lab-grown diamonds 'synthetic diamonds' in an effort to lower their status to that of, say, cubic zirconia or ice cubes. But there's nothing synthetic about these diamonds: they're compressed carbon with all the sparkle sparkle and hardness and all that. They're diamonds, no 'synthetic' about it.

My brother's girlfriend, bless her heart, has always said she'd be happy with a cubic zirconia. Why? They sparkle more than diamonds, they're clearer than all but the best diamonds, and you can get a Brobdingnagian rock for pennies on the diamond (sorry!). What's not to like?

We call her a "keeper."

Next up, I continue to love long-exposure light effects.


Sleeping Beauty - City lights / Music video from Benjamin Taft on Vimeo.

Next: How's The Weather? Here's a little waste of time: it pulls your location from your IP address (assuming you're not behind a firewall), automatically gives you the weather, and pulls a full-screen picture from Flickr based on some keywords in the forecast. There are worse ways to waste time online.

Next: THIS is Natalie Portman's boyfriend? She just shot up to the very top of my 'laminated 5' list for it-could-happen reasons alone.

Next: these guys performed in front of surveillance cameras, then used the British equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act to request the footage and make a video. That's just inspired:


Next: The Love Guru takes in a pathetic $14M. Waaah.

“The Love Guru” placed fourth at the weekend box office in a serious embarrassment for Mr. Myers, who had spent years perfecting his new screen character, a love counselor named Pitka, only to be rejected by the critics and audience alike.

He spend YEARS perfecting the character? I doubt that. "Horny guru mugs for camera" takes years? I just did it in 5 words.

Next: Ex-Girlfriend Don't Want To Talk To You No More, New European Boyfriend Reports: The Onion is brilliant, as always. Their writing proves, as always, that humor is in the details:

Although no answers have been provided to your flabbergasted stutterings following the announcement, 17 hours of careful overanalysis did uncover several new, emasculating details from within the one-and-a-half-minute conversation. It is now believed that the olive-skinned baron and multiple- vineyard owner who relayed the message is currently living with and possibly married to the woman you once tried to impress by wearing a belt.

You have also been able to deduce, without the aid of visual confirmation, that Norsten's new European boyfriend was dressed in flowing white linen pants and rustic kidskin loafers, and is, at this very moment, slowly consuming a perfectly ripened orange.

Lil' Wayne is number 1! Hell and yes. The new album is great, but my favorite Lil Wayne song is this one from Tha Carter II, as performed on Leno


Watch More Videos       Uploaded by www.bebo.com/GeorgeSamia

Next: The Call of Booty: How about some sonnets and haikus in text message format? You're welcome.

Next: The olympics are going to be difficult to watch now. I picked up Mario Kart for a little bit this weekend and was quickly reminded why I quit playing single player in the first place: that damn Blue Shell. What's the point of winning if the AI is going to smack me with a blue shell every 30 seconds? Screw that.

Also, Four Brothers was on USA, so I got my weekly regiment of Mark Wahlberg revenge movies, this time with a side of Dre from Outkast. Sweet. Like every Mark Wahlberg movie, well, it's better than it deserves to be.

The bravest movie review I've ever seen

I enjoy watching movies quite a bit, so, of course, I spend a good deal of time reading movie reviews. Through the powers of the series of tubes I can read hundreds of movie critics from all over the country, but over the years I've narrowed down my "must read" reviews to four sources. All of them present reviews that are mostly free of promotional material filler and almost all of them eschew numbers or star rankings. Read the damn prose review! Numbers are not opinions!

First up is Pajiba: Their tagline is "Snarky reviews for bitchy people." Accordingly, it's perfect for bitchy ol' me. I've been following them for years now, and their ever-growing roster of writers deliver some of the sharpest, funniest, and downright subversive critical reviews of movies, television, and (lately) books out there. All of their writers are extremely capable, but definitely read anything by webmaster Dustin Rowles and lead film critic Daniel Carlson. Rowles' contributes to the arts of hyperbole and snarkiness, whether skewering 27 Dresses or singing the praises of underrated films like Final Destination or Mission Impossible 3. Carlson is generally more thoughtful and does a good job of describing how it can feel to get swept up in a film, even if it ends up somewhat disappointing. See his reviews of Serenity, Spiderman 3, and No Country For Old Men to see what I'm talking about. I agree with Pajiba almost without fail. Call it ninety-eight percent.

Next up is Roger Ebert. Do I have to defend this? Although he's not as tack-sharp as he used to be, he's still quite prickly and comes armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of film culture and history. For the educational opportunities alone, each of his reviews (and his weekly Answer Man columns) are essential reads. I find myself agreeing with Ebert about eighty percent of the time.

For a quick hit, there's always the AV Club. The reviews are short and clever. I also agree with them maybe eighty percent.

Then, there's Stephanie Zacharek over at Salon. I find that I agree with her less often than the others here. Maybe 3 times out of 5, or 3 out of 4. That's splitting hairs. What makes her an essential read every week is how she approaches reviews from angles I never would have expected. In her review of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban she's bold enough to claim it's among the greatest fantasy films of all time; I'm with her there, especially the way she describes the poetry of the film. While other reviewers talked about how faithful it was to the book or whether kids would like it, Zacharek is on a totally different level of appreciation. She always approaches films with refreshingly open eyes.

And the review she posted today might just make her the most essential film critic out there. What review, you ask?

You Don't Mess With the Zohan

You read that right.

Go. Read. I'll still be here.

[taps foot]

I KNOW, RIGHT? How delightfully insane!

Allow me to summarize every other Zohan review you're going to read this weekend:

Idiots and frat boys like Adam Sandler. Adam Sandler seems nice enough, but, god, what a stupid premise for a movie. Rob Schneider is in it. Insert deserved snarky comment about how Rob Schneider owes his career to Adam Sandler. Talk about toilet humor. Talk about how thoroughly stupid this movie is. Maybe I cracked a grin, once, but no belly laughs. 1.5 stars.

There. I saved you the time of reading most reviews. I have another post in me about how most reviews seem to come off an interchangable Model-T assembly line, but that can wait. Back to Zacharek and Zohan.

Zacharek has the stones to... well, just look. Sit down. This goes places:

"You Don't Mess With the Zohan" -- in which Adam Sandler plays an Israeli counterterrorist commando whose big dream is to become a hairdresser -- is the movie "Munich" should have been. At the very least, it's got to be the first picture to use smelly-feet jokes as a means of parsing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

...

... there's nothing more offensive in "Zohan" than the sequence in "Munich" in which Eric Bana -- as a Mossad agent who's trying to escape the violence of his past -- makes love to his wife, as flashbacks of the murders of the Israeli Olympic team in 1972 in Munich run through his head. "Munich" was a fictionalized story set against a real-life backdrop of tragedy: Bana plays an agent assigned to avenge the kidnapping and murder of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September. In "Munich" -- its first half, at least -- Steven Spielberg attempts to wrestle with some morally ambiguous issues, particularly the question of whether violence is ever morally justified, or necessary. But Spielberg tiptoes up to the complexity of those issues only to pull back from the edge. And his conclusion -- "Violence begets violence" -- isn't particularly enlightening or deep.

"Don't Mess With the Zohan" is the braver movie, for the way Sandler uses throwaway humor in the service of a strong point of view. "Zohan" never even addresses the viability of violence as a solution. It posits, from the start, that the only way to solve this seemingly unsolvable conflict is by forging human connections. You can tsk-tsk Sandler's penchant for dumb, crass humor all you want, but there's some meaning behind his madness. Is there nothing more human, more humbling, than the idea of smelly feet?

Hole. E. Shit.

That, my friends, is what happens when you go into a movie with no preconceptions. That's bold, clever, and I can almost guarantee you you're not going to see any other review of Zohan quite like that.

So am I going to see Zohan? Not likely. I mean, Sandler comedies lost me after the dreck of Little Nicky. But I won't dismiss it immediately, which is what my gut reaction would have been.

So, mission accomplished, Miss Zacharek. I now think you're the single boldest mainstream film critic in America, and easily one of the most essential.

Am I crazy? Am I missing some essential critical voice? Who do you read? Let me know in the comments!

Update 6/6: A.O. Scott of the New York Times went there too in his surprisingly positive review. I may have jumped the gun on this one.

I might have a music addiction

Winwood!

So, you don't have to pay for music anymore.

OK, that's not news. Stay with me.

For a long time I had been relying on this Google search algorithm to find free music online. Replace "Judas Priest" (...shut up) in the quotes at the end with whatever band you're looking for and let Google do the heavy lifting for you.

Lately, though, that's gone to crap. Nothing but links to long-dead FTP sites and spam.

Then, today, I found Elbo.ws. It aggregates MP3 blogs, a class of blog that I understood to exist but, clearly, vastly underestimated. MP3 bloggers are, on the aggregate, crazy willing to save me some money.



Seriously. Give their blog search a try. Search for your favorite band or song on there. You can refine by album, artist, or song on the results screen to clear out some of the unrelated crap.

I'll wait. ...

...

I KNOW, RIGHT?! How hadn't I heard about this site before?

I seriously just "saved", what?, $50 bucks or so by scanning my long-neglected iTunes shopping cart, searching on Elbo.ws for those same tracks, and relying on the kindness of strangers to get the MP3s that I otherwise would have paid a buck for.

Pretty much any major single from the past 60 years? It's out there for the taking. Especially if your tastes run indie.

This isn't going to save you if you're an album lover. But if you need to hear Steve Winwood's "Valerie" right this second? You're set.

The question no one asked: what did I download tonight? Be happy to tell you! It starts with a sampling from some upcoming and recent releases and then gets, um, less reputable... then swings back to this blog post with half of the Big Lebowski soundtrack. Shouldn't be hard to track down the MP3s yourself, but have some music videos while you're here. The Cloud Cult and Wisely ones (with Pam from The Office) are especially cool.

• Cloud Cult - "Everybody Here is a Cloud"



• My Morning Jacket - "Evil Urges"


• Fleet Foxes - "White Winter Hymnal"



• Fleet Foxes - "Ragged Wood"


• Fleet Foxes - "Mykonos"


• House of Pain - "Jump Around"



• Mungo Jerry - "In The Summertime"


• Hanson - "Mmm bop"


• Loverboy - "Working for the Weekend"


• Nena - "99 Luftballons"


• Marc Cohn - "Walking in Memphis"



• Wisely - "Through Any Window"



• The Stranglers - "Golden Brown"


• Deee-lite - "Groove Is In The Heart"



• Donna Lews - "I Love You Always Forever"


• Sonic Your - "Superstar" (Yes, the one from Juno)


• Carpenters - "(They Long To Be) Close To You"


• Peter Bjorn & John - "Young Folks"



• Steve Winwood - "Valerie"



• Mark Ronson f/ Amy Winehouse - "Valerie"


• ? and the Mysterians - "96 Tears"


• The Crests - "16 Candles"


• The Commodores - "Three Times A Lady"


• Paul Simon - "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover"


• David Bowie - "TVC 15"


• Dusty Springfield - "I Only Want To Be With You"


• Harry Nilsson - "Everybody's Talkin"


• Elvis Costello - "My Mood Swings"


• The Gipsy Kings - "Hotel California"


• Kenny Rogers & The First Edition - "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)"


• Bob Dylan - "The Man in Me"

The lesson, as always: I'm hopeless. The Fleet Foxes and My Morning Jacket albums coming out in June sound like they're going to be really awesome.

And can I say a hearty "SCREW YOU!" to people that disable embedding of their videos on YouTube? What the hell is the point if I can't embed the damn music video?? How am I supposed to share Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up"?? Yes, that's the first time anyone's warned you about being Rickroll'd. You're welcome.

Oh yeah! Tang!

Until yesterday I would have told you that the best Kool-Aid Man joke would be this classic from the pilot episode of Family Guy:



Until today, when I found out that Robot Chicken trumped it:

Friday morning time waster - Be Kind Rewind trailer

There's a new trailer out for the next Michel Gondry movie called Be Kind Rewind. Gondry was the man behind--yeah, I'll say it--the best movie of this decade, so I was already nigh giddy as the trailer was loading. My school-girl giddiness was fast replaced by pure joy as the trailer served up a steaming ladle of ohmygodawesome:



You saw that right. Jack Black and Mos Def recreating famous movies with a camcorder. I saw Ghostbusters, Rocky, Driving Miss Daisy, RoboCop, Rush Hour 2, 2001, and Boyz in the Hood. It's turning Rushmore's 'films-remade-as-plays' aesthetic up to 11 for the YouTube age. I'm pumped. You should be too.

Oh, and here's a link to some higher-def versions if you care about that kind of thing.

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?

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]

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!

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.

How Delta should deal with the coming PR crisis of someone videotaping their 7-hour delayed flight

Watch this entertaining video (courtesy The Consumerist) about a man that was smart enough to videotape being stuck on the runway for almost 7 hours in a plane:



I now present 1-act play that I call...

Delta Crisis Response Squad

[Scene: Delta CEO's office]

DELTA CEO: "I feel like going for a plane ride today." [Picks up phone.] "Yes, I'd like 2 tickets... one for me and one for that suspicious-looking guy that works in IT... yeah, yeah, the one with the beard and the crazy eyes. ... tell him it's a business lunch."

[Scene: Airplane interior. Delta CEO and Suspicious IT Employee are sitting next to one another in coach]

CEO: "Thanks for joining me on this not-at-all-strange midair business lunch."

SITE: "Oh, no problem. It's nice to get out sometimes. And with the CEO, no less!"

CEO: "Of course. Would you mind taking a picture of me?"

SITE: "Sure thing, boss!"

[CEO hands camera to employee]

CEO: "HELP! This suspicious-looking man with a beard and crazy eyes is trying to learn the secrets of air travel! Homeland Security! Batman! George W. Bush! Any properly diligent citizen! Stop him!"

[A puff of smoke appears. Dick Cheney emerges from the blackness]

CHENEY: "We have underestimated terror. Clearly it wishes to expose the foibles of modern air travel through the black magic of 'film' and 'moving pictures.' I banish thee to Gitmo, Guillermo del Terror!"

[Lightning flies from his fingers and strikes Employee, who disappears.]

CHENEY: "Furthermore I ban all cameras, camcorders, and camera phones from planes! Or else terror will win!"

CEO: "Hooray!"

CHENEY: "May I have some of those peanuts?"

CEO: "No, they weren't budgeted for this flight."

CHENEY: "Awww..."

[Fin!]

Robot Chicken and Star Wars: joygasm!

Update! There's a better version of this available direct from Adult Swim. It's in 4 parts but it has nifty little pop-up video elements (look for the TV icon in the lower right corner). Courtesy of Pajiba.

If, like me, you've ever thought, "I love all those Star Wars parodies on Robot Chicken, but I hate having to track them all down individually on YouTube. Also, I wish there were more."

Well, look what I found:



You're welcome. The "Empire on Ice" musical at the 3:00 minutes left mark is not to be missed.

My half-completed to-do lists

Here's another pile of links and recommendations presented in the form of works-in-progress.

I make a lot of lists...

Reading List
1. The Sandman by Neil Gaiman
2. Bone: One Volume Edition by Jeff Smith
3. Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
4. The World is Flat by Tom Friedman
5. The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
6. The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Normand

Video Games to Beat (as represented by links to video game comics and YouTube videos)
1. Metal Gear Solid 3
2. God of War 2
3. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
4. Guitar Hero 2 (on Expert) (If you've every played the game, you really need to witness the utter insanity of that video)
5. Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (yes, still...)

Music To Enjoy
1. Wilco - "Sky Blue Sky" (People hold fierce Wilco positions, so the comments get a little crazy by hipster rock standards. Just skip to the wonderful comment titled "Better than Revolver and Dark Side of the Moon")
2. Ted Leo & The Pharmacists - "Living with the Living"
3. Penguin Café Orchestra - "Preludes, Airs, and Yodels"

Action Movies I know were or will be retarded but enjoy anyway
1. XXX
2. Crank
3. The Protector (Argue with me that this 4-minute uncut battle isn't one of the coolest ever)
4. Unleashed
5. Live Free or Die Hard

Childhood Heroes To Mourn
1. Mr. Rogers (If you read any one link, read that one.)
2. Captain Kangaroo
3. Mr. Wizard
4. Optimus Prime
5. Darkwing Duck

Excessive Home Office Equipment to Purchase
1. 20" Widescreen LCD Monitor
2. Ridiculous ergonomic keyboard
3. Ridiculous ergonomic mouse
4. 30" Apple Cinema Display
5. Two of #4
6. A personal tank (Ok, for this one you must read the first few user reviews.)

Events to Witness
1. Pretty White Girl dies under tragically ridiculous circumstances. EVERYBODY PANIC! BAN EVERYTHING!
2. Someone recreates the LOTR Battle of Helm's Deep with candy
3. Olympic Committee unveils logo that looks like Lisa Simpson blowing a slot machine. . .
4. . . . that gives people seizures

5. Paris Hilton realizes her lack of worth
6. A baby buffalo survives an attack by a pack of lions. . . and an alligator.
7. The greatest day of a courtroom reporter's life
8. Ragnarok

Jobs To Have
1. "Can You Hear Me Now" guy a.k.a. Network Technician
2. Drone a.k.a. Corporate Insurance Underwriter
3. Hater of all humanity a.k.a. Waiter
4. Staffwriter a.k.a. very bad journalist
5. Asshole a.k.a. Web Designer
6. Hero a.k.a. The Daily Show or The Onion Writer
7. Hero a.k.a. X-Man

Very funny, Google Maps

So I was messing around with Google Maps the other day, when I found out that it now does driving directions in Europe.

But does it do driving directions to Europe?

Here's a map from Pittsburgh to Paris:



Hmm, interesting. What's that big line in the middle?



Har har. Very funny, Google.