Recursive mems

(original image found on 1984web, modified by me.)

Another zoo keeper moment

I haven't heard this band in forever. Viva Youtube!







This is why Youtube was created.

If I ran the Zoo

And by zoo, I mean radio station, I would play shit like this.


Via Boingboing, where the incomparable Mark Frauenfelder posted this.

Pure Pop Fun

I've been into Guided By Voices recently, which is odd. Enjoy.

Latin Funtimez Megapost

So, friends, I love me some Latin. And hate it. Which goes with the "odi et amo" theme we're encountering in class with Catullus. Enjoy these magical bits of Romanish fun I've found or been sent.

From Latinology on youtube, via my LAT 104 class.

I defy you not to have this stuck in your head all day.

Also from youtube,

More Star Wars/Latin fun

Carl Orff's setting of Miser Catulle. Don't say I never did anything educational for you.



From a Latin Humor page I found:
A Howl of Protest
Latin is a dead, dead language
As dead as dead can be.
It killed off all the Romans
And now it's killing me.

Dead are all who wrote it;
Dead are all who spoke it;
Dead are all who learned it;
Blessed death! They earned

RSfelibus!

I want to live in the future

Especially if the future is so elegant. I love things that make me think I could one day own a space station.

Fuck me running, that was epic.

Oceans/Cursive at Canopy Club today.

Oceans, as always, was epic. They played a new song, which was epic as well as knew. Seriously. We're talking like the Illiad of Instrumental Rock here. They play the "building up until you don't think they can do it any more, and then building more" game as well as anyone. It looks like all hell is breaking loose on stage, and then you notice that everything is, in fact, fitting together perfectly. In addition to being a band that gets better every time I see them, they're all also sweet dudes. A+.

Cursive, was also pretty good. It was a way early show, and then spent a good chunk of it trying out stuff from the new album (Verdict: probably going to better than Happy Hollow, although milder [not necessarily in a bad way] than earlier albums). The stuff from Happy Hollow aged better than I expected, which sounds like damning with faint praise, but isn't. The new drummer also rocked pretty hard, and they played "Sink to the Beat." All in all, a good way to spend a Monday night.

Westerns that Rule

One of the few things my dad and I bond over is the superiority of the western genre. There's nothing not to love about them; we watch them weekly. Unlike other lists, this is in approximate rank order. I'd like to share my favorites.

1. High Noon. I've talked about this movie before. It's one of the best movies produced in America in the past hundred years, which is a little ironic, as it was produced by an Austrian Jew. It's got that great them that Americans love to think it theirs and their's alone - a Man alone, against the world. It's got just the right pacing to tell its story.
2. Open Range. One of my favorite recent Westerns. The story of Kevin Costner's character's transformation from a heartless Confederate raider to a brave defender of a small cattle town is amazing, but what makes this movie worth it is that last gunfight, which takes up the last fifth of the movie. It's totally worth it.
3. The Magnificent Seven. Yes, it was a remake of the Seven Samurai. Yes. The original was better. But fuck all that that - it was a sweet movie in its own right. The classic (and underrated) Pixar movie A Bug's Life was based on it. It is one of the archetypal movies of them American screen.
4. True Grit. The classic John Wayne western. Yes. the Searchers was good, but this movie defines badass. You don't fuck with this.
5. Serenity. Yes, it's by the dude who did Buffy. Yes. there are spaceships. It's still A western, and it's still badass. It's the bridge betweem sci-fi and western.

Cough.

I did this.

Things I love to hate.

This is, of course, by no means an exhaustive list:

1. My Super Sweet 16
2. Mallard Fillmore*
3. the DI comments threads
4. The GD: Primaries forum of Democratic Underground
5. VH1. Everything about it.
6. Libertarians.

*My favorite example of this is when Jon Stewart had the parody cartoon about how unfunny the strip is, Bruce Tinsley spent a week making unfunny cartoons about this slight featuring a charmingly anti-semitic caricature of Jon Steward. If they gave a Pulitzer for Excellence in Missing the Point, he'd wear the certificate as a hat.

Oh, DI comments threads

So, the comments thread on Paul Cruse's piece on affirmative action turned into the predictable cesspit. I'm not going to quote much here, it's about what you'd expect - although I did like the guy who showed a great amount of class, tact, and good breeding in changing "Paul Cruse III" to "Paul Cruse XXX," apparently implying that he's either too hot for TV, or three times as radical as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.

So, just as I was despairing about my school, I came across this shining gem. I will post it in its entirety.

Harvard Student

posted 1/18/08 @ 8:59 PM CST

Let's be honest here, the University of Illinois is not a very prestigious university. Very prestigious universities don't have community college transfer students and they don't have students who come to the university to party and drink all day. The only thing prestigious about the University of Illinois is the engineering school.

Dis. And the reply?

Gerrit

posted 1/21/08 @ 10:19 AM CST

Harvard is totally queer.

That's what I'm talking about! Don't let them talk down to you! Prove them right!

I'm mean, granted, I love to sling calumny on a privileged, East Coast bastard as much as anyone, but really? You couldn't point out the elitist stick up Harvard Student's ass, his blatant classism, or complete lack of knowledge about the achievements of the school outside of engineering? The fact that while Harvard was producing the chinless wonders running the country today, U of I was producing agronomists to feed the developing world, economists to make the money flow, journalists to write about it, and just to top it all off, invented the web browser.

But please, go with the gay joke. I mean, if too many people know how awesome we really are, they'll all want to come here.