For a feature package on the tabloidization of many broadsheet newspapers, Poynter Online runs an illustration showing what The New York Times might look like if it shifted to a tabloid format:

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categories: Art and Design, News and Politics

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First Shakespeare porn, now this (probably not work-safe):

Who knew that Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl were into hot incest action? Or that Elastigirl likes to engage in sticky, athletic sex with Syndrome, her nemesis?

And the Incredibles aren’t the only cartoon characters doing very naughty things behind the scenes: Futurama’s Leela loves getting it robot-style from Bender. Even the characters from The Family Guy are getting reamed in every hole. It’s all happening at the Drunk Toon Party:

Welcome to the Drunk Toon Party! Lots of famous cartoon characters, like world-known families, villains and super heroes, young chicks and guys craving for sex, - are all gathered here! This party brings you extreme hot party fucks, chick blowjobs and drunk lesbos…. Could you possibly imagine that toons could do things like that? Oh, yeah, you probably thought they were fast asleep in their beds. Not tonight. They’re getting really naughty at this incredible party! What’s more, they only got started! Other famous toon heroes promised to come over for some wild fun, too. You can’t miss it! Join us at the hottest party!

The weirdest thing about the site: It isn’t just a repository for lurid drawings by bored, undersexed, underemployed, easily amused illustrators. It’s a commercial operation apparently aimed at people who are actually turned on by this stuff. To access anything more than a handful of thumbnail galleries and promo pages, visitors must pay a hefty membership fee: $14.95 for three days, $34.95 for one month, or $54.95 for two months. Are there really enough deep-pocketed cartoon character fetishists in the world to sustain a pay site devoted to Wilma fucking Barney or Fred giving it to Daphne and Velma doggy-style? The site is probably just a vehicle for identity theft or credit card theft, but still.

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categories: Art and Design

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A treasure trove:

The Alan Lomax Database is a free service. This multimedia catalog of the audio and video recordings and photographs made by Alan Lomax from 1946 to 1994 is designed to be an inclusive record of Lomax’s recordings of music and the spoken word; it thus documents all recordings, including interrupted tracks and false starts. It can be searched by performer, song title, geography, culture, genre, subject, instrument, collection, session, and recording date. Users can print out single-page reports of their search results. Photographs taken by Lomax during the field trips are linked to the appropriate sessions and also available in a separate searchable catalog. Every audio recording in the catalog can be heard in samples of forty seconds (music, spoken word) to two minutes (radio shows, discussions, lectures). The first six collections to go on line are: Texas Gladden & Hobart Smith 1946; Calypso Concert 1946; Mississippi Prison Recordings 1947 and 1948; Big Bill Broonzy 1952; Southern Journey US 1959 and 1960; and Central Park Concert 1965. These will be followed by the remainder of Lomax’s fieldtrips, each to go on-line as they are completed. It will also ultimately include some of the older collections of audio recordings made by Lomax on behalf of the Library of Congress in the 1930’s and 1940’s.

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categories: Music and Audio

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Randomness:

• Google Sightseeing: “the best tourist spots in the world via Google Maps’ satellite imagery.”
• “Show that you support the ‘culture of life’ by buying and proudly displaying one of these patriotic unborn Americans.” [via the awesome Lindsay.]
• Unintentionally sexual comic book covers.
• In Salon, Michelle Goldberg has an excellent and sort of alarming interview with the graphic memoirist Marjane Satrapi, who lived through the Iranian revolution and its aftermath when she was a child growing up in that country. Says Satrapi: “If I have one message to give to the secular American people, it’s that the world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.”
• I am totally going to order all of these TV Carnage DVDs. I didn’t know about TV Carnage until I read Matt Haber’s article about it in Sunday’s New York Times. TV Carnage sounds very Media Shower-ish, so of course I will probably watch the DVDs over and over and over again…
• Late-’70s heartthrob Rex Smith is now a Realtor. His slogan: “Results That ‘Take Your Breath Away.’” I totally remember watching the 1979 TV movie Sooner or Later when it was originally broadcast.
• “In 1982, three kids from Mississippi set out to create a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark and ended up making history.” Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation was screened at the Brooklyn Underground Film Festival this weekend, and man, I wish I’d been able to see it.
• A complete bootleg of Radiohead’s show in Berlin, Germany, on September 11, 2001. Lots of other good music downloads on that site, too.
• In case you missed it, Matt Taibbi of The New York Press wrote a devastating review of Thomas Friedman’s new book, The World Is Flat. The book’s governing metaphor is hopelessly misguided, Taibbi writes: “The significance of Columbus’s discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the ‘flat world’ into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world.”

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categories: Miscellany

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In June 2004, a woman named MiRi “Sonyk-Rok” Park won the 2004 U.S. Air Guitar Championship with a rendition of Eddie Van Halen’s riffing in “Hot for Teacher.” A week or two later, she performed her rendition on Late Night With Conan O’Brien. The Air Guitar U.S.A. website (which I discovered through a Flavorpill link to Aireoke) has video of Park’s Conan appearance, and it’s a travesty: Though the cascade of notes in the intro is one of the more famous examples of Eddie’s pioneering two-handed-tapping technique, and in fact is impossible to play any other way, Park keeps her right hand down at her right hip the whole time, as if she’s playing her invisible guitar the standard way. I suppose an air guitar performance is meant to be an interpretation, not a literal recreation of all the relevant techniques, but this is a disgrace!!! Are there no standards in the world of professional air guitar? Is there no honor? Would someone interpreting Murray Perahia at the Air Piano U.S.A. Championship get away with performing using feet on the keyboard instead of hands? I seriously doubt it!!!

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categories: Best Of, Music and Audio

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This short glossary of scriptwriter slang, from the blog of a longtime TV writer, outlines some behind-the-scenes terminology that scriptwriters use as shorthand for various situations and cliches:

“A Nokamura”: When a large number of jokes are all predicated on a single, earlier joke. This can entail great risk. Based on a Cheers episode. A day-player was named “Nokamura”. A vast chunk of the second act’s jokes were based on people mispronouncing, repeating, etc. the name “Nokamura.” But the problem was, on tape night — the first mention of “Nokamura” didn’t get a laugh. This meant the rest of the jokes wouldn’t work. The rest of the show was shanked. The worst thing about a Nokamura is that when the first joke fails, you as the writing staff know what’s coming. All you can do is watch in horror as your show unravels, the Nokamura too deeply entrenched to require anything but a complete between-tapings rewrite. (Note: We have recent e-mails suggesting the origin of this term was actually The Bob Newhart Show. We are investigating) […] “a Squiggy” or “the ‘hello’ gag”: From Laverne & Shirley. Can only be defined by example. Laverne (crossing to door): “What sort of degenerate freak would agree to that?” Squiggy (door opens): “He-looooo.” This is a variation of but distinct from … “the Gilligan cut”: When you cut directly from a character declaring there’s no way he’s going to do something, to him doing it, for comedic effect. Also called “the flip joke”, but I’ve heard this usage, and it’s more interesting nomenclature. Thanks to Jacob at Yankee Fog. (previously listed as “the red dress”, This name comes from the way it was always described to me: a burly guy saying”There’s no way I’m going to get into a red dress and pretend to be your wife”. SMASH CUT to … you get the idea.)

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categories: TV and Video

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Don’t fuck with this redneck: Your knife sucks. His does not, because it attaches to his belt buckle for easy access. The video demonstration is hilarious: “Whatever I’m doing with my hands, my knife’s going to do.” (I love the dog barking in the background, and the offscreen woman’s voice telling the dog to shut up.)

[Tip from my excellent pal Mary Schmidtberger, who is absolutely the coolest and funniest person ever.]

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categories: TV and Video

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Got back from L.A. on Sunday night. I’ll be posting a few things from the trip soon. In the meantime, here are a bunch of fabulous links you should follow:

• Some amazing stuff here: Unrealized architectural projects from Stalin’s Russia.
• Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has done something cool: He’s put the band’s new single online as individual tracks that can be opened in GarageBand, the entry-level Mac OS X music app. If you own GarageBand, you can tweak and remix the song.
• I’d rather listen to Roth-era Van Halen than, say, Franz Ferdinand or Television or even the Velvet Underground. With a few exceptions, most rock criticism makes me want to barf. So naturally I love The Online Home of The Rock Snob’s Dictionary. The title of yesterday’s post: “Rock Snobbish Things to Ask Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason When He Appears at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square, NYC, on Tues., April 19.”
• Mr. T loves his mommy—or at least he did back in the ’80s.
• Southern Dialect Quiz. I grew up in Southern Indiana with a New York-bred father and an Australian mother, so whatever accent I have is slightly inconsistent. I did grow up using “Coke” as a generic term for “soda” or “pop”: “Hey, do you want a Coke?” “Yeah, thanks, I’ll have a Sprite.” Etc.
• For a series appropriately called The Untitled Project, the photographer Matt Siber took photographs of urban environments and then digitally stripped out all traces of text from the billboards and other signage. For each photo, he created a separate text-only image featuring all of the stripped-out text. The two images are presented side by side. Siber’s site also has images from Floating Logos, another cool series of digitally altered photos. [From an excellent blog I just found out about: Josh Rubin: Cool Hunting (tagline: “Stuff From the Intersection of Design, Culture and Technology”).]

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categories: Miscellany

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An enterprising person on livejournal.com discovered that Google’s amazing new satellite mapping technology would allow him to access aerial photos of Area 51, the secretive government facility in Arizona that plays a major role in U.F.O. conspiracy theories:

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categories: Science and Technology

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I’m in L.A. for vacation this week, so posting will probably be a bit light until about April 18.

I tend not to get too excited by celebrity sightings, because I’m, y’know, cool and stuff, but last night I had a good one: I was sitting at the counter at Fred 62, a cool diner in Los Feliz, and a few seats away from me were two of the young actresses from Arrested Development: Alia Shawkat, who plays Maeby Fünke, and Mae Whitman, who plays Ann, George Michael Bluth’s girlfriend. Arrested Development is so much better than almost anything on television these days, so I’m still a little giddy about this sighting. I love that show.

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categories: Miscellany

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The song is awful. The singer is awful. The production is awful. The video itself is packed with just about every music video cliche in the book. Utterly, sphincter-puckeringly bad.

[via Verbose Coma.]

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categories: Music and Audio

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I really don’t know what to make of this. It’s a site devoted to user-submitted haircut stories. There seems to be a mild fetish aspect to most of the stories, but hardly any of them are overtly sexual. All I can say is: People are weird. Here’s an excerpt:

Curt picked up a comb and tried combing my hair. “Damn! What did you do to it? It is a tangled mess.” I told Curt I hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary. I asked Curt, “Can’t you do something so these darn curls won’t be bothering me?” Curt smiled and said, “I can take care of the curls so they won’t be a problem for over a month or more if that is what you want.” Now that sounded good to me. I immediately thought of some kind of hair straightener/conditioner that would be applied and have nice straight hair. I couldn’t wait. I didn’t see that Gary was sitting over in the waiting area motioning to Curt. Later I was to find out that Gary was rubbing his chin and motioning to Curt. After Curt was able to untangle the curls so he could get a comb through, the clippers came to life. I figured he was going to shorten my sideburns since they were so long that they had begun to curl as well. I was shocked when I felt the clippers moving across the top of my head. I jerked away and said, “Curt! What do you think you are doing?” Curt dropped a big pile of curls onto the cape and said, “I am freeing you of these curls. As I said, they won’t bother you for a month or more….trust me.” I jumped out of the chair and walked to the mirror so I could get a close look. I almost fainted when I saw that Curt had taken his 00000 blade and made a nice, smooth, wide path across the top of my head. I looked at him and he was grinning! I said, “Curt! I could kill you for that. What has gotten into you? What is my boss going to say? Honestly! You have gone too far!” Gary and Curt both said, “Wait until it is finished - it is going to look great.”

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categories: Miscellany

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Lots of very cool Flash stuff at levitated.net.

Gabocorp, which I first saw in early 1998, still does some really elegant Flash designs. But Gabo, the young visionary behind it, never seems to have much new stuff on his site. The simple navigation design up there now, after the intro, is super cool.

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categories: Art and Design

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Audiopad is “a composition and performance instrument for electronic music which tracks the positions of objects on a tabletop surface and converts their motion into music”:

One can pull sounds from a giant set of samples, juxtapose archived recordings against warm synthetic melodies, cut between drum loops to create new beats, and apply digital processing all at the same time on the same table. Audiopad not only allows for spontaneous reinterpretation of musical compositions, but also creates a visual and tactile dialogue between itself, the performer, and the audience.

Check out the demonstration and explanation in the three-minute video demo. Amazingly cool.

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categories: Music and Audio

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Blacking out teeth on a photograph or poster is probably the simplest possible form of social or political commentary. Even a three-year-old child probably has the motor skills necessary to do it. It requires no real creativity, and it’s done so often that it’s a cliche. And yet, remarkably, it is almost always funny. I took this picture of a subway ad a couple of days ago:

A few scribbles with a magic marker is all it takes to transform a powerful or attractive person (or a not-so-attractive person) into a slack-jawed yokel. In those few tiny marks, I see the human spirit struggling to overcome the darker aspects of modern capitalism. Er, maybe just in a tiny tiny way, but still.

Somewhere, at some exact moment in the past, some bored or outraged citizen became the first person ever to pull out a writing utensil and black out some teeth on a drawing or photograph or poster. Who was that person? Was he or she American? Is this a quintessentially American joke, given this country’s unprecedented obsession with dentistry? Do people do this in Britain, where bad teeth have generally not been an indicator of low social status? Has anyone ever written about this or studied it?

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categories: Art and Design

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Here’s an amusing relic from my magazine collection. What the hell is Colin Powell doing in there? Why is he slumming at the cyber party?

Virtual City existed for maybe three or four issues in 1995 and 1996. It had some sort of relationship to Newsweek; I think Newsweek was an advisor and investor. I wrote a bunch of site summaries for an issue or two, back when I was first starting to freelance for magazines.

Despite the incredibly embarrassing cover of the premiere issue, above, and despite the stench emanating from columns written by the short-fingered vulgarian Jason McCabe Calacanis, Virtual City could actually have been much worse. Less forgiving people would have no trouble finding snark fodder within its pages. But from where I sit, it’s clear that Virtual City was put together by editorial and design pros who knew how to create a magazine for a specific niche audience, even if what they created didn’t end up working, and even if the whole thing seems kind of amusing 10 years later.

From its emphasis on reviews and culture-oriented service pieces down to its use of Bureau Grotesque for most of its display type, Virtual City was blatantly modeled on Entertainment Weekly. It was obviously conceived to be the E.W. of the, um, “cyber” world. (Now there’s a word we don’t hear very often these days, thank god.) The magazine’s boosterish tone is a quaint reminder of what things were like back then, almost a decade ago, a mere year or two after the web became the Next Big Thing. Other contributors to the premiere issue: Ben Stein, Nikki Finke, Douglas Rushkoff, Scott Rosenberg. Here’s an excerpt from the editors’ letter, which is signed by Jonathan Sacks, the publisher and editorial director, and Lewis D’Vorkin, the editor-in-chief:

Consider this: On an average day almost anywhere in the world, you can connect by computer to the greatest minds in science, world-class comedians or experts on medieval art. You can phone home from 32,000 feet above Yosemite or from your tractor in the middle of 100 acres of Iowa corn. You can hang out online with Michael Jackson or Michael Milken. You can find a crowd of people who, like you, collect 18th-century thumbtacks. You can make out. Technology is redefining how you make friends, how you communicate, what you know and who you are. It’s the foundation of the Virtual City. With a computer hooked to a telephone line you can move right in. The Virtual City is a distinctly human place, rich with culture, with opportunity, with things to do and people to see. It’s as glamorous as the Miracle Mile and as perilous as a deserted alley, teeming with winners and losers, lovers and haters, geniuses and fools. Take the right turn and you find the Louvre. Take the wrong turn and you land in a place where thugs steal your credit cards. It’s the place where Rush Limbaugh found a wife and Tom Clancy lost one.

Toward the end, the editors’ letter also contains this hilarious sentence, which I assure you is not taken out of context:

This premiere issue of Virtual City is the work of a team of magazine editors, writers and business people.

Really? A team of editors, writers, and business people? You don’t say!

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categories: Magazines

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Apropos of pretty much nothing: I was 10 or 11 years old during the 1979-1980 Iranian hostage crisis. I distinctly remember some kids at my elementary school doing an anti-Ayatollah singalong a few times at recess and on the bus. It was set to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands”:

If you hate the Ayatollah clap your hands
If you hate the Ayatollah clap your hands
If you hate the Ayatollah and you think he’s assa-hole-ah
If you hate the Ayatollah clap your hands

Does anyone else remember this? Was it just a Southern Indiana thing? A Google search pulls up nothing.

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categories: News and Politics

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Last year The Onion’s culture section had this to say about Big Top, my pal Rob Harrell’s nationally syndicated comic strip: “Rob Harrell possesses a classicist’s sense of comic timing … using panel space as well as any comics-page humorist since, yes, Berkeley Breathed.” Andrews McMeel, the publisher of all the Doonesbury collections, just put out the first-ever collection of Big Top strips. My copy arrived from Amazon this week:

I wrote about Rob a few months ago in one of my first posts. We’ve known each other since middle school, when he was a Bloom County fanatic who amused himself by sketching pneumatic babes and other things in his notebook when he was bored in class. You can read Rob’s daily Big Top strips at ucomics.com.

Also received from Amazon this week: a copy of Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames—The d’Antin Manuscript. I’ve owned a xerox of this clever and hilarious book for about 20 years, but I’ve never owned a copy of the actual book. Oddly, my new copy has the appearance of a cheap bootleg: Both the cover and the pages inside were obviously reproduced from a mediocre photocopy of an earlier edition, not from the original plates. Given that the publisher is Penguin, this is kind of surprising. But I’ll be glad to replace my own tattered photocopy with something I can actually file away on a bookshelf.

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categories: Books

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