More Loco

Muy caliente. Dig it.

Hara-Creepy

This is a performance by a 3D hologram in Japan. I only wish the Japanese spent their considerable imagination and technological know-how working on shit that could actually improve life beyond simply keeping club kids rolling. That being said, this digital chick is still more lifelike than Ke$ha.

The Green Mile

The glassy eyes of the nation were on California yesterday as Prop 19 (legalization of marijuana) was defeated by 52% of the electorate. Had it passed, it would have served as a barometer for other states to pass similar legislation. Despite marijuana being the number one cash crop in California- a state that is deeply in the red, financially- legalization opponents still adhere to archaic misinformation about the war on drugs, draping themselves in platitudes about a "public health issue". Numerous studies over the past two decades have revealed alcohol to be far more damaging to society than most other drugs combined, yet no one is even remotely suggesting that we return the nation to Boardwalk Empire status. God forbid there are any anti-pot advocates who get cancer, glaucoma, ALS, or a hundred other afflictions whose symptoms are easily ameliorated with marijuana. Seeking refuge in the financially crippling Big Pharma will surely make them feel much better.

Erection Day

Well, that was a fun week. As of yesterday, the military's archaic "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy was reinstated after a brief period of judicial sanity. The various judges hearing the cases on the basis of their constitutional merits evidently don't see eye to eye, so it goes back for another volley. And what luck! Just in time for politicians terrified of losing their seats to use it as another cultural wedge issue. Oh, I almost forgot: a leak from a new Pentagon study reveals that the troops really don't give a shit if someone's gay or not and top brass admits that the ban is bad for the esprit de corps. (That, and we're now behind Libya in letting gay soldiers openly serve.) I guess people running for office are too worried about taking "getting behind the troops" too literally. What a proud day to be an American.

Pride Of The Yank-ees

Middle Men is a new film about the guys who first made money off of boobies and snooch on the interwebs. Luke Wilson must have really wanted to get out of doing those AT&T endorsements.

Exploding Christmas

Happy Independence Day, everyone.

Oh, Man. I'm Screwed.

Guess I won't be getting any work done for the next five hours.

80's Drum Keyboard

Oil Of Oy Vey

It's time to stop referring to the greatest environmental disaster in history as a "spill". When I reach across the breakfast table and knock over my orange juice, that's a spill. Oops! To equate that with tens of thousands of barrels of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico per day is engaging in denial of the highest order. BP contends that their current solution (#459, I believe) has reduced it to a "relative trickle", but we also know they're really bad at math. However, the seductive language is far from accidental on the part of those who contend that this is a minor mishap; the cost of doing business. It creates a subliminal connotation that it's all gonna be just fine. It's not. Because, among all the sturm und drang on both sides of the political aisle, efforts to continually prop up big oil (clearly at any cost) is an effort in continued futility. There are three industries that employ most of the residents of the Gulf Coast region: tourism, oil, and fishing. After Obama's moratorium on drilling in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon debacle, jobs are being lost in all three. Plans to resume drilling in order to restore those jobs can be considered a pyrrhic victory, at best. It's also hard to recall a time in recent memory when the public reaction to corporate incompetence has been so tepid. We live in a nation where parents will pick up torches against Wendy's when their kid gets the wrong CD in their happy meal, yet the reaction to BP has strangely been along the lines of, "mistakes happen". I suppose even the dimmest among us realize that outrage over this disaster would force us to look ourselves in the mirror and willfully ignore a very basic truth: oil is simply not the future. Sadly, as long as it remains cheap, we will do nothing to face that fact. The cover of the latest issue of Newsweek says, "What The Spill Will Kill" above a picture of a sea turtle. Taken in the larger context, that turtle might as well be us.

Winter Of George

Seinfeld fans know that a sad piano is all that separates comedy from tragedy.

Pop Culture Morph

Get ready to trip.

A Fifth of May

Cinco de Mayo: Arizona-Style

Atom.com: Funny Videos | Short Films | Funny Animations

Deja View

This is badass. And you knew it had to happen sooner or later. Now, if it could just replicate natural light...

Booba Fete

You're welcome, nerds.
Hot Chicks With Stormtroopers.

Race To The Right

I have a fair number of friends with whom I disagree on social issues and matters of policy. My parents are post-9/11 Republicans, which has essentially removed any healthy discourse from the holidays. (None of us want Thanksgiving dinner marred by a shouting match and I love my parents). No one on either side of the aisle has cornered the market on truth and the public discourse has been ratcheted to a fever pitch by fringe elements that are heavy on heart, but light on head. Fittingly, the elephant in the room is still race, which plays a much bigger role in the proceedings than most people are comfortable admitting.

-You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.
-You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy.
-You didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.
-You didn't get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.
-You didn't get mad when we circumvented Congressional approval to invade a country that had not threatened us.
-You didn't get mad when we spent over 600 billion(and counting) on said war.
-You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq.
-You didn't get mad when you found out we were torturing people.
-You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.
-You didn't get mad when we didn't catch Bin Laden.
-You didn't get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.
-You didn't get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans, drown.
-You didn't get mad when we gave a 900 billion tax break to the rich.
-You didn't get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.
-You didn't get mad when the housing industry collapsed because Wall Street fought even the slightest oversight whatsoever.

You finally got mad when the government decided that Americans deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick.

Palin Rider

It must suck when you have to "energize your base" with someone you've already publicly derided. Leave John McCain some dignity, for god's sake. His time in Vietnam must have been less torture than this. (I am digging her "Harley chick" getup, though.)

Down Time

We'll always fear what we don't understand and there is too much of both in present-day America. Looking ahead to the future of employment, conservative columnist/ TV pundit Reihan Salam has a fantastic piece in this month's Time magazine that manages to be oddly comforting in its vision of a wholly rebooted workplace, despite being burdened with so much uncertainty.

Zed's Dead, Baby

June 23rd. That's my birthday. For the record. In case you wanted to get me something.

Ubermensch

The fact that Christian conservatives statistically favor the theory of intelligent design over evolution is freshly ironic, since a new study suggests that conservatism is the more evolutionarily traditional path. Reaching the conclusion that intelligence is higher in people who exhibit tendencies that are "novel" with respect to evolution, liberals, atheists, night-owls, and monogamous men all hit the top of the IQ chart. The study will no doubt be derided by some as "ivory tower elitism", as it clearly has flaws. Show me a liberal dude who parties all night and rejects the concept of an afterlife, and I doubt I'll be looking at a one-woman man.

White Power

Congress is on its third day of recess because of blizzard conditions in DC, delaying work on a federal "jobs" bill. (Let's hope that legislation doesn't involve any snowplow unions.) For anyone who still believes in the patriotic fortitude of our elected officials, keep dreaming. If our nation can't even handle a naturally-occurring weather phenomenon, it doesn't give me much hope for the bigger stuff. Sadly, the irony of the mid-atlantic being buried under feet of snow, while the Winter Olympics in Vancouver remain bone-dry is lost on the climate-change deniers. More shocking is when the residents of these states remain shocked at the crippling power of winter. It happens every year, people. How can 25% of the snow plows in the DC/Baltimore area be broken when we all own calendars that are pretty good indicators of when we'll need to gas them up? If Phoenix got a foot of snow, I could understand everyone keeping one eye peeled for a litany of biblical plagues. Sure, this winter is a bit of an anomaly but otherwise, there aren't a lot of surprises if you live east of the Mississippi. It's gonna get deep.

Aural Fixation

Hurtling through time and space with a handful of songs that you must find and download, if only to make your tastes seem more impressively broad.

Steely Dan, Glamour Profession
Bruce Cockburn, Lovers In A Dangerous Time
Roxy Music, More Than This
Thievery Corporation, The Glass Bead Game
Brian Eno & Harold Budd, Late October
Gojira, Ocean Planet
Failure, Pillowhead
Daysleepers, Release The Kraken

Double-C 4

Religious fundamentalism is like a late-night infomercial: appealing to people who are groggy with lack of sleep, angry at the state of their life, and convinced that some useless gadget will make it better. In the case of Al-Qaida,it seems that gadget might be boobs. Recent intelligence chatter gathered by the United States and Britain's MI-5 indicates that Al-Qaida is certain to launch another attack on US soil in 2010; more specifically, that radical Muslim doctors trained in the UK have returned to their respective countries to fit teen female suicide bombers with explosive breast implants. In what counts for suffrage in the Middle East, it seems detonating yourself into oblivion is no longer a man's game. Given the inveterate horndogs that men are, it may prove to be terrorism's master stroke to turn our own vices against us. (I doubt American men would notice a sudden influx of Pakistani hookers.) Of all the weird things women scream during sex, "death to the infidels" probably isn't even in the top ten. In the interest of gender equality, similar surgery has been performed on male suicide bombers. In their cases, the explosives are most frequently inserted into the buttocks. With all due respect to Taco Bell, if your last living act is blowing your ass out, you've earned your share of virgins.

Player Haiti

The devastation in Haiti presents us with a wide spectrum of interesting choices and opinions- none of which are wrong, but none of which are altogether right, either. The fact that the poorest nation in the western hemisphere is finally getting the attention it desperately needs means that the earthquakes that demolished its major cities were a blessing in disguise. While reconstruction efforts will probably remain largely cosmetic, they will still provide marked improvements to that country. Some Americans are outraged that taxpayer funds desperately needed here at home are being sent overseas for humanitarian efforts, though it seems too casual of a response to be anything other than selfishness passing as patriotism; I doubt those same people are continuously petitioning for some of our nation's largesse to still be sent to New Orleans. The flipside of the altruism coin are those who have taken Haiti as a cause celebre, despite ignoring the fact that the country has personified abject poverty for over a half century and may only be slightly better off when the cable news cameras leave. When the President is sending email to the middle class asking them to donate their money towards his efforts to deliver them from their own unemployment, it becomes clear that no individual or institution can provide simple answers on how to prepare for disaster.

Sigh

Even at 4 degress, I miss it. Props to my peeps braving the winds.

Breaking The Chains (Of Obscurity)

My new favorite commercial. Man, was I into these guys in high school. If George Lynch was still with them, he could just crush the chicken with his bare hands. Or an undeniably aggressive arpeggio.