Saturday, January 22, 2011

Anti-winter attack ad

In the spirit of political campaign attack ads, summer has launched a campaign against winter. It's pretty convincing, I mean how could anyone vote for winter after seeing this?

I'm not SURE that winter is a socialist muslin terrorist, but I'm not sure that it isn't either.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Marc Maron, WTF: the podcast of podcasts


One of the best podcasts out there is WTF, a show about comedians and comedy hosted by Marc Maron. Actually the show is about Marc Maron and his issues, and either you enjoy his neurotic, angry, jealous, addictive, antic, bitter, probing, obsessive, self-loathing persona and love the podcast, or else it totally isn't for you.

The New York Times did a piece on WTF, and Maron will be on Conan next week. WTF just made headlines as director Kevin Smith went off on Bruce Willis on his recent appearance. The podcast is becoming popular and influential, so as Maron starts becoming more famous after decades in the alternative comedy business, people are wondering: will this success ruin Marc Maron? Answer: no, because he's already ruined. At least that's how his comedy persona would respond.

A good description from the NYT piece: "Mr. Maron, a stand-up comic by trade, has cast himself as an unlikely celebrity interviewer — one who is angry, probing, neurotic and a vulnerable recovering addict. And somehow he’s able to elicit from his guests, mostly other comedians like Sarah Silverman and Ben Stiller, the same level of vulnerability."

WTF is available for free on iTunes, and averages about 230,000 downloads a week, meaning that Maron is regularly reaching a lot of people with the conversations he records in his garage-- far more than an alternative comedian could regularly reach.

The must-hear WTF episodes are the ones where Carlos Mencia talks about dealing with the accusations that he is an a-hole who steals material from other comedians, which is the third rail of comedy that must never be touched. Most other comedians hate Mencia, but Maron gives him a fair chance to be himself, and just observes and gently prods as Mencia spins out his own unique version of reality. Must listening.

Twitter Warning

The Surgeon General's warning on Twitter:

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

The Year in Pitchfork album reviews


Here are the albums that Pitchfork reviewed in 2010, organized by their ratings.

Apparently three were 6 perfect albums in 2010, which seems like a lot to me, but what do I know, I am not a pitchfork. Since there were six perfect albums but only only one horrible album last year, it must have been an awesome year in music.

Unemployed crank gets hired to apply for jobs he'll never get



Unemployed crank Steve Madonna got a bit of internet fame (which is obviously the BEST fame) last year when his profane rant on an employment application got passed around the web. So the brilliant someecards.com site has now hired him to do a regular feature where he rants on job applications. Thanks Steve Madonna (or whatever your real name is) for doing it so we don't have to.

Whisky in cans!


Whisky comes in cans now! So no reason not to carry it with you to the beach or on a boat or in your coat pocket everywhere you go every day! Now when you fall to the ground in a drunken stupor, you won't shatter your whisky bottle and cut yourself to ribbons.

What a marvelous age we live in!

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Worst job interview questions


"If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender, how would you get out?"
“Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 how weird you are.”
“An apple costs 20 cents, an orange costs 40 cents, and a grapefruit costs 60 cents, how much is a pear?”

Questions like these are how corporate America selects the best and the brightest. No wonder everyone who has a job is so smart, efficient and successful!

Here is a list of the Top 25 Weirdest Job Interview questions.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Detroit or Chernobyl?


The Guardian has a great photo series on Detroit and its former grandeur, now ruined.

See the photos here.

Photographer Yves Marchand explains: "It seems like Detroit has just been left to die," says Marchand, "Many times we would enter huge art deco buildings with once-beautiful chandeliers, ornate columns and extraordinary frescoes, and everything was crumbling and covered in dust, and the sense that you had entered a lost world was almost overwhelming. In a very real way, Detroit is a lost world – or at least a lost city where the magnificence of its past is everywhere evident."

When did the nuclear bomb go off in Detroit? As Moe the bartender says in the Simpsons, "they're living in Mad Max times up there."



From the article: "This sense of loss is what Marchand and Meffre have captured in image after image, whether of vast downtown vistas where every tower block is boarded-up or ravaged interior landscapes where the baroque stonework, often made from marble imported from Europe, is slowly crumbling and collapsing. The pair have photographed once-grand hotels that were built in a carefree mix of gothic, art deco, Moorish and medieval styles, as well as countless baroque theatres, movie houses and ballrooms – the Vanity, where big band giants such as Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey played in the 1930s; the Eastown theatre, where pioneering hard rock groups like Iggy and the Stooges and the MC5 held court in the 1960s."


"The abandoned factories, the eerily vacant schools, the rotting houses, and gutted skyscrapers that Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre chronicle are the artefacts of Detroit's astonishing rise as a global capital of capitalism and its even more extraordinary descent into ruin, a place where the boundaries between the American dream and the American nightmare, between prosperity and poverty, between the permanent and the ephemeral are powerfully and painfully visible. No place epitomises the creative and destructive forces of modernity more than Detroit, past and present."

Henry Horenstein Honkytonk



Check out Henry Horenstein's cool photos of country music legends.