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.

Afro Samurai

Those of you unfamiliar with the Afro Samurai franchise, prepare to have your minds blown. There is apparently a manga series in which a man with an improbably large afro moves at impossible speeds in order to kill robot clones of themselves. This already awesome concept got a whole lot awesomer in 2007, when Afro Samurai made the leap to the screen with one of the finest anime I've had the pleasure to watch. (Bebop still wins.) The five-episode miniseries featured music composed by The Wu-Tang Clan's RZA. Yes, the RZA. Even better, the man who lent his voice to the titular* character for the English dub (which is surprisingly good) was none other than Samuel L. Jackson, which just about makes this whole thing the third most awesome thing on Earth. Obviously, the number one spot is occupied by another television show (see above), but the second spot is reserved for the Afro Samurai full length affair released earlier this year, Afro Samurai: Resurrection. The film followed the events of the anime, but with a bigger budget, tighter animation and far more resurrection than you would expect, even for a movie with the word "resurrection" in the title. But I know how hard it is to understand a visual phenom through words alone. Allow me to play you out.

*Seriously. The main character's name is "Afro Samurai". It's unfortunate.

EDIT: I just found these links. They look pretty good. Also, I think you should all know that in my YouTube page's "Videos Currently Being Watched" box, I see not one, but TWO videos claiming to have captured the ghost of Michael Jackson.

World's Ugliest Dog

This year's Ugliest Dog competition is over, and a boxer named Pabst is the new champion. But there was some serious competition.

Pabst is the first one. And let's not forget my personal favorite, Squiggy:

Composed entirely while clearing my hard drive of unneeded pictures of ugly dogs.

Optical Illusion

This is perhaps the most visually impressive optical illusion I have ever seen.

While it may look like alternating spirals of blue and green, you're actually looking at a spiral of one color. Go ahead and take a closer look. I pulled it up in GIMP and everything. Same color. (via Discover Magazine.)

Rufus Harley

Earlier today, whilst whiling away the hours in the normal way - looking up jazz musicians and making fun of their names (dude's name is Bix) - I stumbled onto a lesser known artist who deserves some serious celebration. Rufus Harley is the world's only jazz bagpiper. No joke. While having a comparatively small catalogue of music, he has left an indelible mark on the city of Philadelphia, where he was celebrated as a cultural icon.

If you want more Rufus (and who wouldn't?) you can check out this review page. It has some radio.blog tracks on there.

Srebrenica

DISCLAIMER: Not the Bosniak massacre.

It is, however, something to completely destroy any semblance of sanity you thought you might've had. As far as I can tell, Nanny Lynn's animated work of unparalleled genius was discovered in a video reproduction store. Its target audience appears to be children, but no child with a shred of self-preservation would find this entertaining in any way:

So, what do you think?

P.S.: I first found this mentioned on a site that sells DVDs of what the trash cinema elite might call "badfilm". Srebrenica comes packaged with a similarly animated pornographic short called "Rumpenstein's Monster" and a collection of out-of-context freezeframe endings from CHiPs. I'd recommend pretty much anything there.

Joker Boner

No, seriously. I don't even want to explain. Just click here.

Between The Bars

This is Madeleine Peyroux, a gal I strongly suggest you check out. Elliott Smith fans should be happy with the cover.

Windosill

Last night, I played one of the best games I've played in several years. No, not the new Ghostbusters, although that does look awesome. The game I played was the product of indie Flash developer Vectorpark, who first piqued my interest with their release of Feed The Head. Go ahead, play it. It's one of the most surreal uses for the Flash engine I've ever seen. Besides, it's got barrel-of-monkeys levels of fun. But when I heard that Vectorpark was demanding MONEY for their new game Windosill, I was adamantly opposed. They were, however, allowing the first half of the game to be played for free. Thinking nothing of it, I decided to play the five free levels and leave it at that. About half an hour later, I was eagerly shelling out the three dollars necessary for the remainder of the game (yeah, I'm a cheapskate). It's that good.

Windosill is a masterpiece of design. The cool blues and whites that define the first levels are a common theme through the entirety of the game, and the seamless animations serve to keep the player engaged right up until the end (breathtaking). You know I don't advocate the purchase of anything, so when I say that this game is worth far more than the three bucks it costs, trust me. In the unlikely case that you don't, just try out the free levels here.

P.S.: The first few levels are pretty easy, but that doesn't mean you should just run through them. Take the time to play around with everything you can see. (For instance, try knocking over some of those letters in level two. If nothing seems immediately awesome, wait around.)

Gene Simmons' NPR Interview

If you ever had any reason to think that the frontman of KISS wasn't a complete ass, allow me to change your mind. Download the MP3 of his interview here. Trust me on this, you'll want to listen to it. It's almost as good as the infamous Billy Bob Thornton interview for Q Radio:

If you cringe at episodes of The Office, watch that. He puts Michael Scott to shame.

Pictures For Sad Children

Ladies and gentlemen: a new webcomic, quite possibly the most existential one yet. Pictures For Sad Children, regularly updated by John Campbell, is a disquieting look into the unblinking eye of ennui, as told through the perspectives of a heartbreakingly bleak cast of characters, including Paul Who Is A Ghost and Sara, a depressed woman suffering from an unnamed mental condition, possibly schizophrenia. It's a comic! HAHAHAHA!

That pretty much sums it up. Enjoy.

P.S.: The Sherlock Holmes trailer is... *sigh*... ballin'. Check it out.

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.

A Wolf Loves Pork

Is it wrong that I only notice how wasteful this is?

RiffTrax

Among the detritus of late-night basic cable dreck during the Nineties, one might have stumbled across a great little program entitled "Mystery Science Theatre 3000". MST3K was a show in which a man, accompanied by his two robot friends, is periodically subjected to terrible B-movies. His torturers are incompetently evil doctors (or mothers of said doctors, in later seasons) whose motives in this endeavor are mysterious. Do they think the movies will drive this man insane? Who knows? Regardless of how A-W-E-S-O-M-E that premise sounds on it's own, any sane viewer will realize that the flimsy premise is covering for a show that allows audiences to enjoy terrible B-movies from throughout history, accompanied by the three wisecracking protagonists, who lambast the film from their seats. I mentioned them before, you know. The link includes a full episode, so if my description doesn't suffice, you can watch "Space Mutiny" to get the idea.

Anyway, that show ended over ten years ago. Fortunately for us, the genius minds behind the show continued to do what they do best. They started RiffTrax, where they sell feature-length DVD commentaries that sync up to movies people already own. The Dark Knight, The Happening, Pirates Of The Caribbean, I Am Legend, Transformers, and dozens more. It actually doesn't matter if the movie is good or bad, it just gets better when these guys get a hold of it.

Disney Animators: Lazy

This speaks for itself.

Sleepwalking

YES.

Crispin Glover Is God

There are many ways one might describe Crispin Glover. Some would describe him as "Who?" or perhaps "That dude in Willard? I didn't see it, but he's a weird guy, so... it was probably weird." And then there's the tiniest fraction of you who are like, "Hell yeah, Crispin Glover." I am now one of the latter. And you can too. Just enjoy this:

In the event that you did NOT like the above, then I advise you leave this establishment. Because this... this is AWESOME.

The song is "Rubin & Ed," and was, of course, written and performed by Crispin himself.

Iron Man vs. Bruce Lee

Exactly what it sounds like. Easily the most impressive non-studio stop-motion animation I've ever seen (if that makes sense).

Saddest Thing

There have been many suggestions as to what may constitute the saddest thing. As an exercise, I asked many of my friends, and a young woman as kind-hearted as any I've met suggested that the saddest thing was a three-year-old girl with no arms, falling off a swing on a lonely hilltop. Needless to say, the game ended shortly thereafter. Clearly there was no topping her response; there was also the frightening quickness and clarity with which the answer came to her mind.

On a whim, I wondered what the internet had to say on the subject, and with the help of my friend Google, I found The Saddest Thing, an online user-generated pit of despair. Check out the Saddest Of Them All. These are the ones that were voted saddest, and they are SAD, people. Fun stuff. These are found among the much more numerous sad-but-still-sorta-funny things, like this story, or this picture:*

The brutally honest webcomic Achewood has an excellent (read: heart-shattering) suggestion to add at this point:
(click to enlarge)

I, sadly, do not have a definitive answer to offer you. Perhaps one day I'll stumble upon something so sad I instantly fall into a coma from how bummed out I'll be, and then I'll know. Until then, dear readers, I remind you that you're free to comment below with your contribution to this ongoing dialogue. I would also implore you to consider this video in your own deliberations.

*I know EXACTLY where he got that photo. This spectacular website has been a favorite of mine for a while now.

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).