Important Stuff.
Today is National Chocolate Chip Day, a thing that exists because this is America and if someone says something is special enough to get it’s own day then well fuck you for trying to keep it from having said day. Who exactly did the chocolate chip people lobby to have a day? I don’t know, apparently it is not even legitimate enough to warrant placement on the Wikipedia entry for May 15th.
These days things become national “holidays” simply by getting some corporate backed momentum and trending on Google and Twitter. It is the sort of change that our parents justifiably shake their collective heads at. Who the fuck are chocolate chips to get a day? There are political dissidents and national heroes who have never been honored in such a way. Perhaps the chocolate chip people would like to buy some good will and might consider giving their day to Rosa Parks or Lydia Chapin Taft in the name of the advancement of our culture.
More likely they will ride the extra web traffic to the bank. People will eat chocolate chip cookies or ice cream and everyone will be none the wiser for it. America!
I don’t care if Shirley Manson is 45 years old. She’s amazing. And hot. And still writes great music. It’s been 7 years since Bleed Like Me and I can’t help but squeal that Garbage’s new album, Not Your Kind of People drops today. From first listen I can tell you that the singles are good but do not do the album justice. If anything, they are there to boost hype by bringing a mix of their classic 90s music sound and modern producing spectacle.
The absolute must have tracks from this album are “Control,” “I Hate Love” and “Sugar.” However, the interesting thing about Garbage’s new album, and this could be interpreted as a great thing or not so great thing depending on your personal views, is that it sounds like it never left the late ’90s. Unlike Bleed Like Me, which dared something a bit more striking and modern for the ’00s, Not Your Kind of People returns to form. That being said, if you’re a fan you’ll love it and if you’re not there’s a chance you may become one. Is it their strongest effort? No, Version 2.0 may still be their crowning jewel, but it’s good to see the band pick up where they left off no holds bar. They know the music business well enough to get radio play.
Sometimes, a video comes to light on the internet that makes you smile so hard you think your mouth is going to fall off. That’s what the video of the acapella group Y Chromotones, from Berklee College of Music made me do, at the same time asking “who the hell thinks of these things?” Apparently, these guys do. They got together to put together a harmonic medley of pop songs, from Toxic by Britney Spears to Bananaphone, all with the Bop It commercial song as the underlying melody. It makes sense that a group from Berklee College would be able to come up with something like this. You have to be pretty damn talented to even get in.
So sit back and enjoy hearing a bunch of songs from the past few years mashed together in an epic medley that will blow your mind. Ridonkulous is the only word that can properly describe it.
At least Lady Gaga had the balls to say she doesn’t speak German, but she can if you like. So we can let it slide that “Scheibe” isn’t perfect German. But the women can speak French fluently and she sounds damn authentic when she sings in Spanish on “Americano.” However, I can’t say the same for Beyonce. Occasionally you have the pop artist doing a song or two in Spanish to gain some attention from the Latino crowd. Other times you have American pop artists who actually speak Spanish fluently and decide to do the cross-over album, like Christina Aguilera. And you had the reverse with Selena back in the ’90s.
According to the Wikipedia page about Beyonce’s Spanish album, “When re-recording songs for Irreemplazable, Knowles’ vocal coach provided the Spanish lyrics phonetically, and each line was recorded up to four times for the EP. It also described the album as a mix of English, Spanish, and Spanglish. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Spanglish not an official language? It’s just a way of blending the two because the speaker cannot fluently speak the opposite language.
Call me crazy, but if Beyonce cannot speak Spanish, she shouldn’t try an entire remaster. Master the language first sweetie and try again. You’re already a multimillionaire and you’re married to Jay-Z. Why don’t you go breast feed the kid for awhile instead.
Is the GIF the greatest invention known to man? Probably not. Is the GIF superior to the photograph in every possible way? Of course it is!
Sure photography has had it’s day and indeed it is still an integral part of GIF production making it important but in the future all of the great photography will be done in GIF form. Gone are the days of simply having a photo of Grandma, now we can have a moving photo of Grandma sneezing to remember her by.
Each day you log onto the internet you should thank your lucky stars for the GIF technology that allows us to feel this wide range of emotions. We need these GIFs more than they need us. Do not think for a second they don’t know it.GIFs are the thing that keep the internet worth returning to again and again. Kittens licking things, people falling, clips from Samuel L. Jackson’s films, this is what the web is all about. Sure the internet has shared information and it is a place where people can meet and socialize but without GIFs what would we socialize about? You’re right, basically nothing.
It seems that although the Philosoraptor meme has been around since before 2008 it has struck extreme popularity in this last year and it continues to rise. For some reason people cannot get enough of smart animal memes, let alone an animal that is not only extinct but could tear you to shreds without a second’s thought.. or has it been thinking for all these years. The Philosoraptor is surely a quizzical internet meme.
And the thing that is especially haunting about this meme is that I have come across enough questions to keep me awake at night. I never thought I’d lose sleep over velociraptors again once I got over the trauma of seeing Jurassic Park as a baby. I was so, SO wrong.
I guess only the internet could birth something so quirky, and hopefully Steven Spielberg won’t take any cues from this internet meme for the next Jurassic Park sequel because Indiana Jones was traumatic enough to last me a lifetime of grievances.
Here’s a question for the ages, “If Indiana Jones 4 was so bad, why does Spielberg think Jurassic Park 4 will be good?” Now that’s a question a Philosoraptor would really want to ask just for the sake of maintaining the reputation of his intelligence.
Remember Little Foot from “The Land Before Time”? Remember his cute little teeth eating those cute little leaves with his cute little friends? Well, apparently these seemingly innocuous little dinosaurs packed a major wallop where it really counted. In a new study produced in the May 8th issue of Current Biology, scientists Dave Wilkinson and Graeme Ruxton (John Moores University and University of St. Andrews respectively) take a look at the methane production of sauropod dinosaurs.
Sauropods are the long necked enormous dinosaurs like Brachiosaurus (previously known as the Brontosaurus) and the Camarasaurus. The study was brought about by these two scholars sitting around thinking about dinosaur ecology, leading, as any conversation of sauropod ecology would, to dinosaur methane emissions aka. Dino Farts.
“If modern cows produce enough methane gas to be of interest to climate scientists,” says Wilkinson, “what about sauropods?” What about them indeed! Apparently the numbers were startling. “Our calculations suggest that these dinosaurs could have produced more methan than all modern sources-both natural and man-made- put together.”
Just to give you a taste of how potent dinosaur flatulence really was we have a comparison for you. Modern animals like cows, goats, and others produce methane emissions of about 50 – 100 tons (Tg) per year. Sauropods produced a calculated estimate of 520 million Tg per year. That’s is more enough to have had an enormous impact on the Mesozoic climate.
It makes you wonder how bad Jurassic Park must have smelled.
If you thought your grandma wasn’t interested in watching sex tapes or keeping up with the latest celebrity gossip, think again. Your grandma is retired, she has nothing better to do than watch all those mindless television shows on during the day. So here we have three grandmothers discussing the Kim Kardashian sex tape. One of them has already seen it and wants to show the other two. Now there’s a good chance this “reaction” video is most likely scripted, but whoever wrote it, kudos to you.
What makes the video so hilarious is that it seems so authentic. Their speech is exactly how I picture my own grandma if she were to watch it. Actually, she would probably say it’s disgusting and wouldn’t want to see it at all. But it’s what I imagine every other grandmother is like. Naturally the women are a little frisky and enjoy watching this black stallion she’s banging. According to them, his tongue is as long as his…Yeah I’ll stop there. Hey, old people like to get it on too, they just don’t talk about it and they usually need a long nap afterward. Enjoy this funny video –real or fake it’s still good.
I am not quite sure when it happened or really why it happened but at some point any television show worth its weight in salt was suddenly getting dozens if not hundreds of online “recaps.” Some of these recaps take a funny spin around the exploits of HBO’s Girls or the latest American Idol finalists. Others take obsessively focused nuanced looks into the inner workings of television shows as diverse as Mad Men, How I Met Your Mother and Game of Thrones.
Each week there is a wide array of recaps each hundreds of words in length and really it is sort of hard to understand exactly why. Each person has seen the same show and to assume that you or I has any more authority on what a particular program is doing than anyone else watching it is sort of absurd and yet these recaps must be generating traffic as they tend to appear on a wide variety of major websites from New York Magazine to The Onion AV Club to the Huffington Post.
Since this website is all about fun ways to waste time I thought I would point to this weird heavily refracted world of television criticism. It will help you waste meaningless hours on the internet forever and ever.
Okay, so this video is fairly old but I doubt as many people have seen it as should have seen it when it was first released. Calvin Harris is a British DJ and he’s been releasing awesome dance tracks for a good amount of time– several years in fact. However you probably know him as that featured artist on Rihanna’s “We Found Love” that you never hear speak. That’s because he’s a DJ– he spins tracks now and rarely uses his own vocals for his music anymore. His older stuff was just as catchy, albeit had a more vintage 70s and 80s disco sound to it.
What I now present to you is a human synthesizer. Basically Calvin Harris sampled the parts from his song “Ready for the Weekend” and assigned them to each of the lovely ladies featured in the video below. Using paint that conducts electric currents (no not the electrocuting kind) he is able to initiate the sounds by high-fiving these girls. Pretty cool, huh?This is what he dubs the human synthesizer, or humanthesizer for short.
If you want, take a look-see at the video and behold the wonder of music made by people in their underwear… get your mind out of the gutter. Enjoy this pop culture tidbit. Om nom nom.
