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Via Reddit

The Monster Engine

The Monster Engine is a website/book showcasing an artist who has taken children's surreal and fantastical drawings and turned them into realistic artistic pieces. Very interesting. Also a fun reminder that children's imaginations are quite wild.

A couple of my favorite examples:

France: Ta Gueule!

Via WSJ: Mon Dieu! Will Newfound Popularity Spoil the Dainty Macaron? Macarons New Popularity Worries Fans.

Apparently in France, people can now buy macarons at places like Starbucks and McDonalds ("McCafe"). This is pissing the French off.

"Macarons are not meant to be mainstream," sniffs Laetitia Brock, a native of Paris who has been blogging about French culture from Washington for the past six years.[...] "I saw them at the McCafé on the Champs-Élysées—just down the street from Ladurée! What is the world coming to?!?" commented Allison Lightwine, using the screen name La Mom.

Okay. This sort of thing might be why people make fun of (and in some cases, strongly dislike) the French. I mean, Jesus Christ, we can't have common folk eating macarons with their lattes at Starbucks! These things are too good for those types of people! Casse-toi!

France, I EAT YOUR MACARONS!

What will Barbie be next?

Great Music Videos or Grestest Music Videos?

Jesus god in heaven. And there's more.

Light bladder leakage is no laughing matter.

Ask Whoppi Goldberg.

(There are about seven more of these, all ridiculous.)

(This doesn't mean I'm making fun of a problem that a great number of people have, and that is no laughing matter. I'm making fun of Whoppi Goldberg.)

(Via NyMag)

Law degree for sale, $59,250

(Via AboveTheLaw.com)



After several years of practicing law I have come to the conclusion that my law degree is useless and I don't want to be a lawyer anymore...This priceless collectible will permit you to be surrounded by hobby-less assholes whose entire life is dictated by billing by the hour and being anal dickheads...

Hilarious. Supposedly this is actually real.

The Holy See's approved rock albums

Someone sent this to me: The Vatican has released a list of their top 10 rock albums of all time. L’ Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's official newspaper, listed their choices for the best ten. "Revolver" and "Dark Side of the Moon" appear on the list, of which I approve. Oasis' "What's the Story (Morning Glory)" is a bit hinky to me. Also, "Thriller" made the list, which I guess makes sense given the Church's stance on pedophilia. (Yeah, obvious bad joke.) They did call the list "semiserious," which I suppose explains how Santana's "Supernatural" and Crosby's "If I Could Only Remember My Name" ended up on there. Fleetwood Mac's "Rumors" and Donald Fagen's "Nightfly" are choices I really like as well.

Figuref*cking

This screenshot of a video popped up as a Google ad this morning. Maybe I have a dirty mind but the picture gave me pause. And then made me chuckle. I played it for about three seconds and saw that it was just figure skating from the Olympics (three seconds being about 2.5 seconds too long for me).

Hug-E-Gram

This is apparently a real thing. So basically, once your girl gets tired of flowers, send a Hug-E-Gram (as if flowers is the only thing you could send anyway). A pair of Mickey Mouse-esque arms that you strap around your waist and I guess they inflate and tighten and you close your eyes and pretend you haven't just in desperation strapped on fake arms and that they are your real lover's arms. Who for some reason is not able to give you a real hug, as in a long-distance relationship. Next in line maybe is a Foreplay-E-Gram and then just a sex doll.

VD

In my email this morning I had an email telling me "Someone sent you a VD card!" This frightened me for a moment.

Da Crabs ASSASSIN

HIV Prevention Mobsters. "HIV...it's time to take control of this gangsta!"



I don't think there's anything I can say to add to this really. It's sad and funny that someone thought kids/thug-wannabes who might not respond to normal urges in wanting to find out if they might have an STD might respond if it was made to seem "gangsta." The names of the people on the billboard are hilarious. I'd have loved to be in the meeting where this idea was hatched. And these people's huge faces on display with titles like "da Chlamydia CRUSHER" displayed...why would they agree to that?

Sarah Palin, Super Genius

Like I needed more reasons to not trust Sarah Palin to run a PTA meeting, let alone anything approaching a political position, now we have more antics in her attempts to answer questions. Last year, she was flummoxed by "gotcha!" questions like "What do you read?" - and really, lots of people don't read, but could at least just name a random magazine/newspaper/book; even Bush was able to do that - this time she read answers she had written on her hand. At a "tea party" meeting, in which "tea baggers" (I never get tired of saying that) are of course going to be lobbing softballs at her.



This is pretty awesome when you're in middle school. I used to write answers on my hand, after I perfected a way to write really small and write in a sort of abbreviated code. I also used to write answers on my pencil (some teachers were dumb enough to give us reviews that were exactly the same as the test, so I could just write "a, b, b, c, d, a, etc."). In 7th grade I wrote answers on a piece of paper that I put in my mouth - something I learned from Spies Like Us - but I swallowed it a couple of minutes into the test.



Part of me hopes Palin runs in 2012 - this seems to be what a lot of people are thinking will happen - because she's quite entertaining. However, she could win. Seems a long shot maybe, but this country embraces batshit people. Also, Democrats fuck things up at every opportunity.

Why we don't understand Gallagher

I never thought I'd spend a half hour of my life reading an interview with Gallagher, but I have. And it is quite funny. Who knew that the guy who makes asinine observational jokes (the kind that make Jerry Seinfeld's observational humor seem absolutely profound) and then smashes fruit is such a social commentator. I mean, when he makes the point - and makes it and makes it - that the reason he doesn't get love and admiration is because Americans just champion mediocrity, and that's why people just don't really "get" his humor, well, he's obviously right. Prop comics like Gallagher and Carrot Top rise above mediocrity but go unloved because we are just too mediocre and bland to get these profound purveyors of high comedy and performance. (To be fair, he does make, buried in the ranting, a few points which I think are good and that I agree with.)

This interview made my day (though my God that's a sad statement, isn't it). The guy is like the Harlan Ellison of gimmicky fuck fruit smashing prop comedy.

Hey you kids...

I've noticed a troubling trend in my life lately. Whenever I'm listening to some new band/artist, or (rarely) watching something new with some actor/actress or interview subject and I think enough to do a Wikipedia check to see perhaps what else they've been in or what other albums they've released, and then I see what year they were born in and it is later than my year of birth...my heart sinks. Looking up some musician earlier I saw they were born in 1985. 1985?!?!? Am I too old to like them then? This must be a symptom of being ten months away from turning thirty. Even worse would be seeing some cute musician or something and then seeing that she was born in like 1988...being not only a bit younger than me but yet not actually technically "too" young. It used to be people 8 and 10 years younger than me were, like, way young. What the hell?!?!?

One(Last)Stop-Shop

I work next to a crematorium, and ever so often out the office window I see black smoke. I know this to mean that someone is being cremated. Nothing like a reminder of mortality while I'm at work playing online poker bored out of my mind (I am currently looking for another job). But when it is at last my time to go, my family can take comfort in planning my final resting arrangements - Wal-Mart now sells caskets. In a new section on their website called, appropriately, "Funeral" (it is, oddly, a subsection under the heading "For The Home").

If your hands were metal that would mean something

This is really great. A minimal design project of TV show prints that I guess is distilling an idea of each of these shows into a most minimal design. I don't like just about any of these shows (and I can't figure out what a few of them even mean as a result) but the design project is awesome. The ones for MacGiver and Monk I'm especially fond of.

Not Jesus, Hey Zeus

For a while now I've decried the decaying power of television and movies, and one of my very top 2009 priorities was to watch less of that glowing box in my living room and to limit myself to seeing only as many movies in the theater as I can count on one hand, and really, I have been far happier, more alert and much more productive than ever since I made that resolution. I'll go on all day (ask my girlfriend) about how television and, increasingly these days, movies do more harm than anything else, and I do actually wholeheartedly believe that. But I'll tell you something:

One of my students doing a project in my lab today needed to know real quick who the 21st president was. And I immediately told him: Chester A. Arthur. And I knew that piece of trivia because I learned it from Die Hard 3.

Glenn Sings "Nerd Rock"

Glenn demonstrates nerd rock for me. This is an angle that we should've pursued back then, really.

You're in a chair...in the sky