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Ooh, so much. Alright, well here's a ton of stuff I couldn't flesh out into full posts:

My new favorite jazzman, Lee Morgan, comes highly recommended from this Russian forum, complete with Rapidshare links. Seriously. Just get The Sidewinder (each word is a link) and listen to the title track. If that doesn't convince you, just listen to the rest of the album. Now do you see the might of the trumpet?

TRANSLATION PARTY! Yeah! Do not ask questions, just click this.

A little site appropriately entitled HasTheLargeHadronColliderDestroyedTheEarthYet.com. You should probably check. I'll wait.

A fairly comprehensive Pixies anthology of albums. Listen to them all. If you're kinda like "maybe, I guess," then do me a favor and just listen to Surfer Rosa. It doesn't have the best Pixies songs, but it's the most consistently enjoyable album.

That is all.

Art On Acid

While testing the effects of LSD in the 1950s, the US government ended up dosing a man before giving him a box full of pencils and crayons, instructing him to sketch the medical officer in the room with him. Observe and enjoy.

20 minutes after first dose: An attending doctor observes - Patient chooses to start drawing with charcoal. The subject of the experiment reports - "Condition normal... no effect from the drug yet." ____________________________________________________________________
85 minutes after first dose: The patient seems euphoric. "I can see you clearly, so clearly. This... you... it's all ... I'm having a little trouble controlling this pencil. It seems to want to keep going." ____________________________________________________________________
2 hours and thirty minutes after first dose: Patient appears very focus on the business of drawing. "Outlines seem normal, but very vivid - everything is changing colour. My hand must follow the bold sweep of the lines. I feel as if my consciousness is situated in the part of my body that's now active - my hand, my elbow... my tongue." ____________________________________________________________________
2 hours and thirty-two minutes after first dose: Patient seems gripped by his pad of paper. "I'm trying another drawing. The outlines of the model are normal, but now those of my drawing are not. The outline of my hand is going weird too. It's not a very good drawing is it? I give up - I'll try again..." ____________________________________________________________________
2 hours and thirty-five minutes after first dose: Patient follows quickly with another drawing. "I'll do a drawing in one flourish... without stopping... one line, no break!" Upon completing the drawing the patient starts laughing, then becomes startled by something on the floor. ____________________________________________________________________
2 hours and forty-five minutes after first dose: Patient tries to climb into activity box (with the crayons and pencils), and is generally agitated - responds slowly to the suggestion he might like to draw some more. He has become largely non-verbal. "I am... everything is... changed... they're calling... your face... interwoven... who is..." Patient mumbles inaudibly to a tune (sounds like "Thanks For The Memory"). He changes medium to Tempera. ____________________________________________________________________
4 hours and twenty-five minutes after first dose: Patient retreated to the bunk, spending approximately 2 hours lying, waving his hands in the air. His return to the activity box is sudden and deliberate, changing media to pen and water colour. "This will be the best drawing, Like the first one, only better. If I'm not careful I'll lose control of my movements, but I won't, because I know. I know" - (this saying is then repeated many times). Patient makes the last half-a-dozen strokes of the drawing while running back and forth across the room. ____________________________________________________________________
5 hours and forty-five minutes after first dose: Patient continues to move about the room, intersecting the space in complex variations. It's an hour and a half before he settles down to draw again - he appears over the effects of the drug. "I can feel my knees again, I think it's starting to wear off. This is a pretty good drawing - this pencil is mighty hard to hold" - (he is holding a crayon). ____________________________________________________________________
8 hours after first dose: Patient sits on bunk bed. He reports the intoxication has worn off except for the occasional distorting of our faces. We ask for a final drawing which he performs with little enthusiasm. "I have nothing to say about this last drawing, it is bad and uninteresting, I want to go home now."

Source. Directed by the wonderful Drawing On Drugs, a blog with user-submitted pictures drawn under the influence.

Emails From Crazy People

First of all, read this entire blog: Stranger Than Eviction. It's only three pages long, and it's totally worth it. It chronicles the back-and-forth between a man and his criminally insane landlord (very reminiscent of the now-famous exchanges of this spectacular man). I was directed to Gabe Dunn's tragic exploits by a comparatively new website, Emails From Crazy People. It's pretty much exactly what you'd expect.

The Westphall Hypothesis

Beginning its six season run in 1982, St. Elsewhere garnered little critical acclaim and virtually no viewer response as a sleepy medical drama set in a dilapidated teaching hospital in Boston. In all respects, it would have been an easily forgettable hour-drama if not for the series finale, which has become the stuff of nerdy legend. In the final episode, a main character's autistic son, Tommy Westphall, is shown staring at a snow globe with a tiny version of the teaching hospital inside. Given that the final moments of the show are completely at odds with the rest of the show's 100+ episode run, it is generally assumed that all events depicted in the show were a figment of Tommy's imagination.

In our crazy modern times, such a gimmick seems interesting, but not too outlandish. I mean, just watch more than three consecutive episodes of LOST to get what I'm talking about. But the story gets better. Some bright spark assumed that if St. Elsewhere was just the figment of a character's mind, then every crossover episode it ever had must have also occurred inside little Tommy's head. The main lynchpin of this theory rests with Homicide: Life On The Street, a crime drama produced by Tom Fontana (St. Elsewhere's creator). In more than one instance, doctors from Elsewhere appear on the show, presumably making the entire Homicide run similarly a product of Tommy's psyche. One of Homicide's main characters was a cop by the name of John Munch. Yeah. This guy:

For those not in the know, John Munch later appeared as a main character in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Since L&O:SVU belongs to the same universe as all of the Law & Order universes, Tommy is also responsible for one of television's longest running franchises. It doesn't stop there, either. Munch appeared in an X-Files episode, an episode of The Wire, and in an episode of The Beat (also the series finale of Arrested Development. Shit yeah). Also, let us not forget his brief stint on Sesame Street.

If your mind isn't fully and thoroughly blown yet, let me just cut to the chase. Through an extremely tenuous and unlikely series of connections, over two hundred and eighty television shows currently compose what has come to be known as the Tommyverse. Or I might have just made that name up right now. Either way, think of it. A lot of minor shows, but a vast majority of stuff you've probably seen. Stuff like Cheers; Alf; M*A*S*H; Las Vegas; Heroes; I Love Lucy; The Office (both versions); Crossing Jordan; Buffy The Vampire Slayer (therefore Angel) and Firefly; Doctor Who (all incarnations); Friends; Seinfeld; The Brady Bunch; Home Improvement; Matlock; The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air; Boy Meets World; Gilligan's Island; King Of Queens; Malcolm In The Middle; Alias; Knight Rider; Touched By An Angel; the entire Star Trek universe; the entire Crime Scene Investigation universe; and Moesha. In the unlikely event that you still care, just check out the full map below (click to enlarge), courtesy of this site. Tommy bless you, good sir.

If you want a key to the whole thing, you'll find it here. There's something else that gets me though. As a Buffy fan, I was instantly reminded of the season six episode "Normal Again", in which it is suggested that the entire Buffy universe may be the hallucination of a troubled teenage girl (who can't really kill vampires and prevent multiple apocalypses). What could this possibly mean? Are insane Buffy and little Tommy Westphall the only "real" characters on TV? I'd say: "Sure, why not."

Bizarre Dinosaurs And Flight Hazards

Let's be brief.

In the December of 2007, John Updike (who I guess is qualified to speak as a paleontologist) published an article through National Geographic entitled "Extreme Dinosaurs". Does that not pique your curiosity? Extreme Dinosaurs? Sign me up for that, please. But seriously, these real dinosaurs pose some serious questions. Like, for instance, why the hell this would be an evolutionary boon in any way:

Other than just looking cool, obviously. I think they're for courtship rituals. These dudes just turned into peacocks. Also seriously cool is the Styracosaurus. It's the one that looks like a 'roided-up triceratops. Check out the photo gallery for all of them.

In other news, I found a site that sells umbrella-concealed swords. Yeah. For real. That is all.

WE'RE BAAACK (Also, Some Internet Weirdness)

Hello, all. I know it's been a while, but rest assured with the knowledge that I couldn't have updated even if I'd wanted to. But all that's in the past now, and I'll get back to a semi-daily regimen once more.

Allow me to ease back into this with an easy (lazy) post: PicIsUnrelated.com. Just what it sounds like. Beautiful fodder for the insane and the bored:

My personal favorite would be a tie between Taxi Bear and a rather fly-looking Sith lord. Pink Vader is hard to beat. See you tomorrow, y'all.

Cake Wrecks

Proving once again that the concept of a "trickster god" is not entirely without merit, the internet has managed to find enough pictures of poorly-decorated cakes to warrant an entire website. Cake Wrecks is your one-stop shop for pictures like this:

Happy Anniversity indeed. Or maybe something a little more... intentional?

Anyone who knows me well enough knows that this would be the ULTIMATE birthday cake. Just saying is all.

Text says: "We Love Freymoto Put Heart In Place Of 'Love'". Freymoto is an amalgamation of he unlucky couple-to-be's last names, by the way. Probably the most confusing thing about this is the fact that several people are presumably involved in the creation of a custom cake, and not one of them looked at this and thought anything was amiss.

I like thinking that this cake was intentional; it would have been the greatest birthday party ever. I also like to see Holly make some bold choices where most 12-year-old girls would have opted for something else on their cake (Horses? MySpace? I have no clue).

Kutiman

First things first. If any of you see someone wearing this Sargon Ivy cap, I am telling you that it's alright to hit them as hard as you can. Here's a photo of it.

Just to be clear, that's an ivy cap with an embroidered dagger on it. The dagger is intricate and fancy, and lies broken amongst the lilies. It is meant as a tribute to Sargon, a Mesopotamian king who seems kind of sick and twisted and cruel. I mean, this is a guy who "marched to Kazallu and turned Kazallu into a ruin heap, so that there was not even a perch for a bird left." I get angry at places with stupid gimmicky town names as well, but I don't flip out and torch the place. And if I did, I wouldn't want to be memorialized on a hat whose target demographic would be purchasing them for "irony".

ANYWAY! Kutiman is a DJ, musician, producer, composer, animator, and, what the hell, artist. He's been the recipient of some fairly high praise of late, with the release of "ThruYou", an album composed entirely of remixed YouTube videos. This has garnered some minor nerdy applause, but has also revealed this Israeli musician's oeuvre to US audiences.

That's the first track off of the album, "The Mother Of All Funk Chords". If you liked it (you should have), you can watch the rest on the album's website here. Enjoy.

BeatleJazz

Being such a huge fan of both the Beatles and the entire genre of jazz, I'm actually a little shocked that I'd not heard of these guys before. BeatleJazz is a band that I have been blissfully unaware of, as they scooped up some major awards and appeared on several "Top Ten Albums Of The Year" lists. Seriously?! Usually, I'm fairly hip in the ways of music, and yet they appeared at first glance to be newcomers. But they've been around for about a decade now. Am I that pathetically oblivious, or does nobody else know these guys?

Irrespective, I found all four of their albums. I love them all, but the newer two are one that have (apparently) received huge praise. These ones were released after BeatleJazz's first two albums, "A Bite Of The Apple" and "Another Bite Of The Apple". I mention them together because they were conceptually on the same level. They were released a year apart, and are often mentioned together. By the way, you'll need a RAR expander for those files. If you don't know what that is, then GOOGLE IS YOUR FRIEND. Remember that, kiddies. Google is your friend. The password is "mbmc", if that's not immediately obvious (it took me two days to crack that nut. No joke). I can't really recommend any particular songs, because I listened to these albums all in a row without checking the track names. I would, however, point you towards "I Am The Walrus". Some excellent piano work on that part that goes, "Selmolina Pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower." Awesome.

Their next effort, "With A Little Help From Our Friends", was a big leap in excellence, as you can tell from the sheer number of bytes it's going to take up on your hard drive. Check it:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Shazam. Three parts. That means it's three times as good. And then, you have their newest release, "All You Need". This just has two parts, but it doesn't get the above fanfare because I haven't finished downloading it yet. Enjoy.

UPDATE: Okay, I'm not the only one not in the know, because Wikipedia doesn't have a page on them, and Wikipedia has a page on EVERYTHING.

The Beatles Backwards

To blatantly plagiarize from the site I found it on, "one intrepid fan dares to rank the original songs of The Beatles and give his reasons why in a worst-to-first countdown." All of the original 185 (give or take) Beatles songs are ranked and have had a helpful little paragraph written about them. It's worth checking out for any Beatles fan (or if you're not, which mean you're just not a Beatles fan yet). I'm afraid I must respectfully disagree with the low rankings of "Good Day Sunshine", "You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)", and "Her Majesty" (although he has a good reason). "Cry Baby Cry", "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "I'm Only Sleeping" deserved higher rankings, while "Helter Skelter", "Taxman" and "Within You Without You" probably didn't deserve the higher ranking they got (I'm just sayin' is all). On the other hand, I agree with all of the top twenty songs (though I don't know if I would have chosen that order). I'm also glad to see "Dear Prudence", "For No One" and a personal favorite, "Yes It Is" (comparative footnotes in The Beatles' catalogue) given such high praise. Check it out here.

Worst Album Covers

After a recent Cracked article, I decided to do some independent research and find some of the worst album covers I could. Luckily, the work was already done for me. FidTheKid over at RateYourMusic.com has a handy little collection of album covers that either try a little too hard, breach the understood limits of taste, or are just horrible in every conceivable way. Like, for example; I find the below to just be... bad. Just really, really bad.

And these next ones are confusing, but just ridiculous enough to work.

And these are just hilarious.

Irrational Fears

Okay, so I'd advise taking a look at TheOnlyThingToFearIsFearItself.Blogspot.com. It's an online compendium of YOUR irrational fears. You just send off a quick email and hey-hey, it's on the site. And the great thing is, it's been online all of a single day. So get cracking. You can get in on the ground floor of this new opportunity.

For those of you who enjoy reading about others' irrational fears a bit more, you could always try the site Unusual Phobias, which has a rather impressive listing. My favorite is probably the fear of being shot by a spider.

Al Leong

So I was watching Lethal Weapon, a movie that taught us, among other things, that you could shoot a car until it caught fire (if Gary Busey is driving, it just keeps going), white sneakers are a bold and dashing fashion accessory, and that you can just shake off a shotgun wound in seconds if you're wearing a vest. On the other end of the spectrum, it gave us such lines as "You're one psycho son of a bitch, but you're good," and the always appropriate "I'm too old for this shit". Anyway, I'm watching it and I see this fellow (the movie also teaches us that ethnic slurs are okay if the guy is evil).

I knew that I had seen him before, so I look him up. A cursory glance at his IMDb page reveals that he has been in dozens of films in the past thirty years. He's just one of those guys. However, there is a much deeper significance to his career. He's not just one of those guys, he's one of those guys that people (for some reason or another) just fall in love with. Hence the phenomenon of AlLeong.com. Seems to be a straightforward, if extensive, fansite. But no; there's a fanfic page and everything. I refuse to read it on principle, but you can be my guest and have at it. Enjoy people's weird fascinations.

P.S.: Fans of other guys known as "that guy" may enjoy Cracked's "20 Best 'That Guy's", featuring the likes of William Fichtner, Stephen Toblowsky, John Heard and my personal favorite, James Cromwell.

Above: James Cromwell, who you've seen in pretty much everything.

Liquid Sculpture

Alright, so I found this delightful little place where this one guy, Martin Waugh, takes photos of something that you probably see couple times a day and never take note of, though the magic of high-speed photography. Enjoy.