Charleston, Meet Aphex Twin

Jumping shamelessly on the Charleston bandwagon (theres like 30 videos now), I made a new version today that combines the dancing video with a part of the middle of Aphex Twin's 'Windowlicker.'
It doesn't sync all that well in the beginning, but as it goes it along it begins to match up more and more until the ending, which is almost absurdly bizarre in how well the two go together.

The Woman Who Loved Charles Bronson

With his baby-muppet face and weedy voice, one might not expect Charles Bronson to be much of a ladies man outside of film (and he's presumably only a ladies man in film because both parties are getting paid) but he ehow capture the heart of this bat-shit crazy woman, who left him nearly $300,000 WHEN SHE DIED.
From people.com (the one, and only time, I shall ever quote them. Notice I didn't even make a link)

Probate papers recently revealed that a Kentucky woman who died 15 months ago left her entire estate, worth some $240,000, to actor Charles Bronson, 77. A sister of the late Audrey Jean Knauer is now waging a legal battle to acquire the assets, saying Knauer was mentally unfit. Bronson, for his part, intends to donate the windfall to charity.

Who can resist this face?

Is the Charleston timeless?

This is a fucking awesome video somebody created setting footage of some guys doing the Charleston on a TV broadcast to Daft Punk.
They sync up surprisingly well- actually not all that surprising because 'Around the World' has about the most conventional beat you can find (not that its not awesome.)

The Man Whose Arm's Exploded

"After spending twenty minutes stabbing himself with the syringe, and ozzing out buckets of blood and pus..."

This could be one of the grosser things I've seen on the net that doesn't involve Russian prostitutes in a bath tub.
TLC did this report on Gregg Valentino, the man who decided normal steroids weren't enough and decided to inject himself with enough nasty shit to make his arms grow all elephant man and then explode.
Just the thought is enough to make me shudder.
Heres the vid from Youtube, kudos to the poster, andrefgb.

NFL all about Men on Men

I hate football.
So it was with much tedium that I sifted through today's 'Google Trends' and realized that every single fucking name was some footballer this and some defensive tackle that.
And then, because David Bowie is a man god, I saw the name Ziggy Hood and decided to click on it, hoping it was something cool.
The result...wasn't quite what I was looking for. It's more NFL march madness draft shit.

But this picture is priceless:

It's like Ziggy tackled this guy and fell on him, and then as they went to get up they looked into each others eyes and found eternity.

So sweet.

How Dare You!

I was reading Neil Armstrong's Wikipedia page for some crazy reason (I'm actually trying to find this short film I watched years ago where he plays himself as an old man, sinking into dementia and telling everyone "I went to the FUCKING MOON.")

Alas, It was not to be.
Instead, I found this totally bizarre tidbit:

In May 2005 Armstrong became involved in an unusual legal battle with his barber of 20 years, Marx Sizemore. After cutting Armstrong's hair, Sizemore sold some of it to a collector for $3,000 without Armstrong's knowledge or permission. Armstrong threatened legal action unless the barber returned the hair or donated the proceeds to a charity of Armstrong's choosing. Sizemore, unable to get the hair back, decided to donate the proceeds to the charity of Armstrong's choice.

Who does that?
What kind of person saves a famous mans hair to sell it later, what kind of person ACTUALLY BUYS IT, and what kind of person makes a huge fuss about it?

"I have, in this sealed bag, the slowly decomposing hair of a man who walked on the moon half a century ago! And I only paid the price of a used car!"

The best thing about this story? This incident happened in 2005. And here is a photo of what he looked like that year-
Would you pay $3,000 for a piece of that?

First Human Leaves Solar System

The gods of the internet led me to stumble upon this interesting article by the "Fortean Times : The World of Strange Paranoma," which claims that as you sit here and read this, the perfectly preserved body of a lost Russian cosmonaut is currently drifting outside our solar system.
According to the article, his name and story were all but hidden from the world by Russia, and if not for the diligence and obsession of two Italian brothers who were secretly spying on NASA and the Russia Space Program, would never have seen the light of day.
Suck on that, Yuri Gagarin.

Cop to Twitter "Lets bash some hippys"

The English Police force is just getting more and more fucking corrupt.
Apparently some idiot cop thought that posting "Can't wait to bash some long haired hippys (sic) up @ the G20" to his twitter was a good idea.
Coming days after the death of Ian Tomlinson at the hands of bobbies, this officer has now been warned.
The Police are supposed to be public defenders.
Read the article, get outraged.

Swine Flu : Epidemic of the Week

Condolences to anyone who gets killed, sick, or loses a loved one to Swine Flu, but has anybody else had enough of ratings-hungry media organizations coming out every few months with a new epidemic set to kill us all?
When I was in grade school, Killer Bee's were going to invade from South America or Africa and take over, trapping us in our homes and stinging us to death.
Then there was SAR's, which was far scarier for the way governments around the world reacted to it then it actually ended up being itself.
There are, of course, very real dangers of a disease outbreak, even in our own 'modern times's...though most people bizazzarely have never heard of the post WWI Inlfuenza pandemic.
But there is a fine line between actual danger and appropriate response, sensationalism and actual truth. I don't doubt someday we will face a real epidemic, but panic and fear sells newsprint, and judging by the fact that 'Swine Flu' has been googgled an ungodly amount of times today, I think we're in for a year or so of disease based terror.

Beware the Wrath of a Chinless Penguin!

I'm all for global warming (fighting it, not it happening) but I'm starting to despair a little because our cause seems to be again under attack by the sinister Lord Christopher Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley!
RUN IN FEAR!
Perhaps somebody should tell him being royalty hasn't been fashionable in the west since most of our kings and barons heads ended up on the pikes they used to beat our ancestors into submission for centuries.
What does he look like to you? A penguin? A chinless Robert Mitchum? Somebody who fiddles children on a carousel?

Foppish?

I was just looking at this google hot trends thing, and Foppish, is, at the time of this posting, the most searched word on google.
WTF?
Did I miss something?
I must have, I miss just about everything.
Here is what foppish is defined as by dictionary.com:

obsolete : foolish, silly2 a: characteristic of a fop foppish dressing gown> b: behaving or dressing in the manner of a fop

I particauly love when definitions use the word itself in the definition, as in above.
So what is a fop?

"Fop became a pejorative term for a foolish man over-concerned with his appearance and clothes in 17th century England." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fop)

Perhaps the best part of this little search thing was the discovery of THIS amazing tidbit at the bottom of the wiki page:

"FOP ROCK- A more recent and minor trend is "fop-rock," in which the performers don 18th century wigs, lace cravats, and similar costumes to perform, a minor movement that would appear to owe something to glam rock, visual kei, and the New Romantic movement.

Fop Rock: Fop out with your lace out.

Let the Right One In

If you've stumbled across this, chances are you know what this movie is and you just want to know if it's any good.
The answers pretty simple.
It Is.
One part coming-of-age story, one part shockingly brilliant horror flick, melded with excellent acting and the picaresque, effortlessly beautiful cinematography Sweden's best directors always seem to deliver, Let The Right One In is one of those movies fans of good cinema, trashy horror, and blood-soaked gore can all come together and enjoy.
One word though- whatever you do, do NOT watch the English-redub version. It is godawful. I can't believe it was even made, it wrecks the movie.
The voice actors are so, so, so, so, so bad, it turns it from art to unintentionally hilarious camp, but not the good kind.
You've been warned.
Especially cool scenes include, without giving away spoilers, the spontaneous combustion of a very sick woman, some violent goings on at a pool, and the young main characters fail to come to terms with his fathers new life.
The behind-the-scenes is also worth watching. You would never believe, before watching it, that most of the close-shot outdoor scenes were actually filmed on green screen, or how the final scene of violence was actually put together.

Best. Cyber. Sex. Ever.

Someone posted this ridiculously awesome link on reddit.
http://www.chrudat.com/the_best_cyber_sex.html
What this guy does apparently is go into cyber sex chat rooms, get the other people excited, and then slyly, shockingly, and hilariously subvert the conversation and see how long they stick around.
Some of them had me practically in tears.

Godfather II - An offer you should refuse.

This game is absolutely horrible.
It's not obvious for the first few hours or so, so in the beginning you're like "Oh shit, this will be awesome" but after the tenth time your car spits you out and vanishes, after you realize it has all the depth of a sidebar online flash shooter, after you realize that the entire open world environment is maybe the size of one of crackdown's islands, it hits you.
The following example perfectly illustrates why this game sucks: You have henchmen, who each perform specific tasks. Demo-men can blow up businesses (useless) or blow down doors. Engineers can cut fences, and open up some doors. Bruisers can batter down some doors. Safecrackers can open safes (meaningless because money does nothing) or, oddly enough, open some doors.
Yep, the doors in the world of Godfather II are strange things. Some are so beefy that only explosives can open them up, yet others will only open, and I mean ONLY, for some guy with big arms. These rules are as random, as arbitrary, and as implacable as Roman law.
Worse yet, some doors, which look exactly like others, can't be opened at all. Some times you'll have to get into a building by climbing the back fire escape. I'm not talking about crazy mob hangouts, I'm talking about Banks and Bars.
The actual gameplay itself goes along like this- there are businesses, and you need to take them over by killing a punch of people and threatening the owner until he/she caves. Initially fun, as you brutally smack them around and torture them and find their breaking point, when you realize this is about 95% of the game, it loses a lot of its appeal.
All in all, this game is hardly worth the words it took to write this review. And its a bit sad, because in the first few moments it seems to have such promise, upon which it does'nt even begin to deliver.

My Bloody Valetine in 3D

If you've come for the band you're in the wrong place.
This movie is only worth watching for the 3D effects, which have gone from the gimmicky joke of yesteryear to a really cool feature.
The movie itself is mostly bad and predictable, though it never takes itself too seriously and horror fans can have a lot of fun spotting the occasional in-joke.
The makers have gone way over the top in terms of gratuitous gore and sadistic violence- which is totally awesome. If you didn't agree, you wouldn't be here.
There's jiggling 3D breasts, hanging spinal cords, popping eyeballs and pick-axe punctured lungs that come screaming and flying and hurting towards you. Without the 3D, this movie would have utterly nothing to commend it- but with it, its fucking awesome.
That said, since its out of theatre's...don't expect to catch it in 3D anytime soon.

The Worst Music Video of All Time.

For sure.
Sometimes you type something into Google and get exactly what you were looking for, and sometimes you have trouble believing that it really is one of the worlds most successful search engines. And sometimes, rarely, you accidently stumble upon things like this:

Props go to Obscure437, its poster. This has got to be one of the most heart-wrenchingly bad things of all time.

Franz Ferdidand Live

The Franz Ferdinand I saw take the stage at the Moore on Easter Monday was a very different band from the one I saw some five odd years ago.
Though their sound has not changed since they put out their first disco-laced single, a half decade of hard touring has turned them from a disappointing, awkward mess into the band their relentlessly fun and swaggering music promises.
Franz Ferdinand melds the best excesses of '80s pop with the '70s funk guitar work that made ‘angular’ the most ridiculously overused word in music journalism for years after their debut.
Live, they blasted effortlessly and tirelessly through songs they had all but murdered so many years ago, and though the Moore is probably the absolute worst place for dancing people were doing their best for the two or so hours Franz Ferdinand played.
Wedged between two seats and broken cushion that kept hitting me in the back of the legs, I can only imagine what sort of ridiculous figure I cut.
There were two big surprises of the night: the bizarrely hipster-less, somewhat geriatric crowd, and the bands foray into more creative music territory, stretching some of their songs to double their length and devolving into what passes for feedback loops and freaked out guitar solos for a dance band.
Franz Ferdinand doesn't yet have the ability to pull off the colossal emotional breakdowns of Wilco or the effortlessly loose-limbed devolutions of Broken Social Scene, but their attempts were interesting in their own right.
Regardless, the show was great and catching them live now is entirely recommendable. Even if the hipster kids seem to have abandoned them, those interested in concepts like ‘fun,’ ‘dancing’ and darkly ambiguous dance music with cunning wordplay could do little better.

This is a video from that night, of the song 'Ulysses'. Kudo's to the poster- this is one of the only decent videos from that night. I was about three feet behind them- I remember watching them film this.

Porno Pirates

Somalian pirates are not the only pirates making a big controversy this year.
A so-called hardcore porn by the name of "Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge" has become a catalyst for heated debate, from the storied halls of government to the dirty, sticky floors of a college theater.
The film, a multiple award winning triple-X porn that owes more then a passing resemblance to "Pirates of the Caribbean," has been shown at schools around the country and was to be played at the University of Maryland's Student Union Theatre before the Maryland Legislature got wind of the idea and promptly shot it down.
The student union was planning to show the film in the same theater that, just years before, they'd screened the legendary “Deep Throat.” Planned Parenthood members were set to talk before the screening to educate the audience on safe-sex practices, as the actors in the film tend to do their swash buckling sans buckle.
When the Maryland General Assembly heard of what was going down, they came out swinging.
"Pornography is not fun. It's poison," said Sen. Andrew Harris, a republican who led the attack, in an article from the Washington Post.
“If guys want to view triple-X movies with their buddies, that’s fine, but it doesn’t belong on a college campus in a state-funded building,” Sen. Nancy Jacobs. a fellow republican senator, said later in the same Washington Post article.

Harris and company pushed an amendment that would cut off state funding for any university screening porn, in the University of Maryland’s case, upwards of $400 million dollars.

Unsurprisingly, the school buckled, but the real issue is only now coming to a head.
Everywhere bloggers, activists and news reporters from all walks of life are weighing in on whether the government should ever have a say in what goes on in college campuses, whether the first amendment protects porn, whether the film is obscenity and just who gets to define what obscenity is.
According to Adam Kissel, a director of the Individual Rights Defense Program at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education who was interviewed by the Baltimore Sun,“[the legislature was] far out of line...I think because of the autonomy that a public university ought to have versus the legislature, the president should not have canceled the film.”
Students at UMD have been staging token protests, showing clips from the film in an ‘education’ seminar on free speech and slamming their administrations urge to bend over backward before the legislature at the slightest show of dominance.
It’s still unclear exactly what the fallout of all this will be, with nothing except gallons of free publicity for the porn flick in question being the likely answer.