Will the sequel be Hannukah on Venus?

I love The Flaming Lips. Bonus to you and me, they're in a film called 'Christmas on Mars'.

Weird? You haven't heard their Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots then. Apparently, their Fight Test EP had a trailer of the movie. I'm so late to the game.

While the movie's in release in *select* theaters, a CD-DVD set including the movie and soundtrack is coming out in November.

These guys are by far one of the best things to ever come out of Ohio. Family and friends reading this, you know it's true.

Portywood? WTF?!

What in the...huh?

Why is Natalie Portman in a Bollywood video?

What would Darth say?
Noooooooo!

Best. End Credits. Song. Ever.

Waaaay better than the Griggs rap (Deep Hard) at the end of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Seriously.

Valve released The Orange Box last year to much enthusiasm...ok I was I excited. It was a bundled package of 5 games, one of which was a unique puzzle-shooter called Portal. The timeline looks to run parallel to the Half-Life universe. It takes place at the Aperture Science labs (a smaller competitor to the Black Mesa labs, which was the progenitor setting of the Half-Life series). In fact, later levels allow the player to look in abandoned conference rooms where slideshow presentations are still looping comparing Aperture grants to Black Mesa's. Pretty funny.

The game involves the player using brains to solve non-linear 'puzzles' by using a 'portal gun' which allows the player to manifest the equivalent of a wormhole (or tesseract, for all us Madeleine L'Engle fans) on a certain surface thus allowing the player to move through walls and other applicable surfaces.
The player is apparently held captive in Aperture Science by a bland computer, GLaDOS, who's later revealed to have a much larger (and sinister) role in the game. She's maniacal, twisted, conniving, and funny. If she wasn't trying to kill you, you'd want to hang out more.

"Good news. I figured out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was a morality core they installed after I flooded the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin to make me stop flooding the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin. So get comfortable, while I warm up the neurotoxin emitters."

I don't want to spoil it, but I will say that you kill your companion cube and the cake is a lie.

The end credits feature a song written by Jonathan Coulton. The song is called 'Still Alive', and is sung by Ellen McLain (check out her interview by IGN), who voices GLaDOS and other Half-Life 'overseer' type characters.

The latter part of the tune made me think of some folks who are 'doing science and still alive'...Benny, Brown, Dysard, and Shags...you know who you are.

Harder Better Faster Sleeper

I need sleep like Kenny Rogers needed Dolly Parton for 'Islands in the Stream'.

Like Burt Reynolds needed Lori Anderson.

Like Oates needed Hall.

Like Michael Jackson needed Bubbles.

Notice the 80s-enhanced comparisons? More on that later...

Sleep. UC Berkeley just finished a study on sleep deprivation. The data suggests that people who don't get enough sleep can suffer various degrees of emotional imbalance.

"It could even help explain road rage, said Matthew Walker, director of UC Berkeley's Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory and senior author of the study, which was coordinated with researchers from Harvard University.

"One of the functions of sleep is to reset and replenish the emotional integrity of our brain circuits so we can approach the day's emotional challenges in appropriate ways," Walker said. "If you don't get a good night's sleep, you'll be making irrational choices.

In the UC Berkeley study of 26 young adults, half of the subjects were kept awake for 35 hours straight and the other half were allowed a normal night's sleep in that same time period. Then all of the subjects were hooked up to an MRI and shown a series of images, some of them disturbing pictures of graphic violence or gory injuries. Researchers monitored what happened in their brains as each image was shown.

When shown the disturbing images, the sleep-deprived subjects had a significant jump in activity in the amygdala, the section of the brain that puts the body on alert to protect itself. At the same time, activity slowed down in the prefrontal cortex, which controls logical reasoning.

Subjects who had gotten a full night of sleep showed normal brain activity.

What this means for most people is that a sleepless night can cause them to overreact to emotional challenges that they would otherwise be able to tolerate with no trouble, Walker said."

This is sooo true for me. If I don't get enough sleep, I become a cranky, nasty, and volatile person. I'm a racecar running in the red, and all I'm saying is that it's not good to have a racecar in the red. I eat sleep. It's my dessert.

I can go for a couple days with a subpar amount of sleep, but if I don't catch up on the third day, I will be evil incarnate. I will intentionally break unopened rose blooms in my neighbor's yard before I leave for work. I will push someone out of the BART train as the doors are closing so they have to wait for the next train. I will fart on other BART patrons and then walk around, further dispersing the stank. Industry insiders call this move 'crop-dusting'. Once I get to work, I will need to drink a carafe of coffee to be mildly abrasive. I'll sit down at my desk, and ignore emails. Instead, I'll register those colleagues for sweepstakes on sites that vomit spam uncontrollably. At lunch, I'll go outside and kick pigeons. Pray I am not in your midday meeting. I'll doodle to keep from launching spitballs on the whiteboard as you draw out some fantastic metadata management model in which global changes can be effected across hierarchies in multiple parent-children structures. Then I will go home, and be a pleasant person because I know that while I'm tired, at least I can be tired in shorts and a tank-top and play with my son and wash dishes used to serve my wife's savory and delicious meal before I lose consciousness at 8:30pm.

This being said, let's sleep on this: the 80s are back.

On my way to work this morning I listened to the new Kanye West album, Graduation Day, which bleeds Al Pacino-Scarface synth undertones. Then I go on the train, and saw this woman dress like Pat Benatar and sporting the Farrah Fawcett feather hair-do. It wasn't Oct 31. This wasn't a costume. She was going to work. She was making a fashion statement. She was telling everyone on that car that the 80s are back, and she was ready for them.

Maybe Kanye will do an 'Islands in the Stream' remix...meanwhile, check out 'Stronger' for more interpolation on 80s flavor (sampled Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk).

Keith Richards leaves defeated

Absolutely hilarious material from theonion.com. I hope she's able to pull out of her tailspin and moderate her drug use. Maybe then she can renew some performance dates. If she's able to make a comeback, it'd be a killing. Otherwise, the best she could hope for would be to crash out at Dave Chappelle's spot in South Africa, get straight and come back to do small venues.

Did you see the Rolling Stone interview? You should check out the paper version as the online is just an excerpt, but it definitely paints a gnarly state of affairs of substance abuse. Not that I'm one to follow the drama rags, but anytime I hear the word "speedball" I think first-class, one-way ticket to a dirt-nap.

iTunes secret assassinator for Outlook?

Word on the street is that the latest version of iTunes software is obliterating some Outlook recurring events. Not a big deal if you're using it at home to listen to the Sphincter Sister's podcast while you dial Mom and looking at the photos your cousin sent you from inside Space Mountain.

But if you're one of those people who have admin rights and can install the iTunes software on your work machine AND your work mail solution just happens to be riding on the Exchange/Outlook backbone, well then...for now you might want to consider disabling automatic updates of the iTunes software if the MS Outlook Calendar-iPhone synch is a concern for you.

The affected version of the software is version 7.3.2.6. If have already have this version installed and have not yet synched, you can also disable the Outlook add-in.

For Outlook 2003, follow these steps to disable third-party add-ins:

1. Open Outlook 2003
2. From the Tools menu, choose Options.
3. Click the Other tab.
4. Click the Advanced Options button.
5. Click the COM Add-Ins button.
6. In the add-ins "iTunes Outlook add-in" and "Outlook iTunes Sync add-in" please uncheck and disable this.
7. Deselect the checkbox for each third-party add-in in this list.
8. Click OK.

For Outlook 2007, follow these steps to disable third-party add-ins:

1. Open Outlook 2007
2. From the Tools menu, choose Trust Center.
3. Select Add-ins from the left column.
4. Look at the list of add-ins beneath "Active Application Add-Ins" iTunes/Outlook add-ins ("iTunes Outlook add-in" and "Outlook iTunes Sync add-in") select the iTunes add-in
5. In the Manage box, click COM Add-Ins, and then click Go.
6. In the COM Add-Ins dialog, deselect the checkbox for each iTunes add-in in this list.
7. Click OK.

Folks who were troubleshooting this couldn't find any other alternative order of operations or impact from other applications that would cause this problem, so tread lightly. This looks to be affecting Outlook Calendars on both PCs and Macs. More troubleshooting from Apple here. Although in this case installing the newest version of iTunes probably shouldn't be part of the solution. Steve Jobs wants to kill your Microsoft calendar...muah-ha-ha-hahahaha!!

Drunk on Amy Winehouse

She's cool. Her debut (Frank) is finally seeing light in the states...four years after its initial release in her native U.K. Her most recent album (Back to Black) has gone triple plat in her homeland...probably because the Brits jock American soul music so hard...but the appeal is clear: she sounds great and seems to embody that old school sass.

I won't reiterate all the descriptions about her smoky vocal style, which some say is reminiscent of Billy Holliday, or the beehive which smacks of The Ronettes, but I guess I just did. Regardless, some of the music, though it may sound like Motown or old school jazz, it's definitely a 21st century interpretation...let's just look at "Fuck Me Pumps", as an example. Don't be thrown by the title.

Check her out when she performed on Dave.

The Rolling Stone also did an interesting article on her.

Lala rocks the house...any house

Do you use Lala for your musical appropriations?

Well, they just launched a service that integrates your music library so that you can listen to it from any computer. Once you establish a profile with the service, the small app that installs searches for your music library, uploads it, processes and tags it as needed using Gracenote's catalog, and allows you to play your iTunes library (for example) from any computer that has internet access.

Sweet.

This means you don't have to carry your iPod or CDs to work to listen to your music, or if you DJ or stream music you don't need any special hardware or software (save for the small app) to access your music. It definitely puts the crosshairs on Sling technology, and makes the Lala CD trading experience that much richer.

The Police illustrate history repeating itself

So, I haven't been able to post in a while because of this stupid thing called work. Gosh, how I hate work. It gets in the way of the real moments of your life. Stupid money...making me work for you so I can live in house and pay taxes to support a government that at this point is pretty good, although I have serious qualms about its current leadership.

On my way to work, I was thinking of a Police song while listening to the news about the Senate approving the spending bill for the war in Iraq. Dubya has promised to veto it because he says it forces an arbitrary exit date and doesn't support the troops. Meanwhile, the 'war' against terrorism is completely free of any ambiguity and makes complete sense, and it seems that most people don't seem to care because we're more inspired by what happens on Lost or we're more enthusiastic about the competition in American Idol because Sanjaya was voted off.

However, I think we're going to shake off our indifferent malaise, and realize that supporting the troops means bringing them home within a prescribed date. We've got a big mess to help clean up, and I don't think the continuation of large-scale military actions abroad is the best way to help people understand that America is about democracy and freedom. We need smaller scale, black ops insertions where we would execute missions about which we'd feel ashamed to tell our children we had helped execute.

Anyways...the Police song. It's a good one. It smacks of the 80s sound, and even though it's a commentary on the war going on during the Reagan administration, it could just as easily be sung and felt in 2007.

The general scratches his belly and thinks
His pay is good but his officers stink
Guerrilla girl, hard and sweet
A military man would love
to meet

The president looks in the mirror and speaks
His shirts are clean but his country reeks
Unpaid bills
Afghanistan hills

Bombs away
But we're ok
...

The general only wants to teach France to dance
His army life doesn't give him any romance
Guerrilla girl, hard and sweet
A military man would love to meet

The general scratches his belly and thinks
His pay is good but his company stinks
Guerrilla girl, hard and sweet
A military man would love to meet

Bombs away
But were ok
Bombs away
We all obey
...

We need ol' Dubya to obey the American people. We don't support his war, and he needs to listen to the messages that Congress is sending.

You see, George, Congress is supposed to be representative of the people in the 50 states. They're supposed to go to bat for folks who don't have a Karl Rove or Dick Cheney in the back pocket, because Lord knows those guys are evil, but have proven to be very effective in maintaining an iron grip on the rudder while crushing any opposing viewpoint.

Hmm...'iron grip'...'crushing viewpoints'? Sounds like Soviet communism to me. Hey! Karl (Karl Marx? hmmm, I smell something deceptively communistic about this) and Dick, do you happen to be card carrying members of the Communist party? I know...I shouldn't say that...it's not fair to Communists. Sorry guys.

Hmm. It's almost like the current White House administration wants us to emulate the Chinese government...they're no longer really Communists. They're more like Socialists with well-funded banks with G-men patrolling the Internet to make sure that no one is blogging about how they'd like to have more news about the outside world. The message now is, 'we'll let you get rich, but leave the politics to us'.

I digress. What I mean to say is that a song from the 80s, is just as appropriate now as it was then. And, of course, songs from the 60s are still just as relevant now. And the songs, poems, and literature preceding the 60s are just as germane.

History is doomed to repeat itself, but in the meantime, the weapons get bigger and badder. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that we try something different this time around. If we've still a planet in 2008, let's wash the filth away and start clean...well, as clean as we can.

Rodrigo y Gabriela are awesome

Here they are doing a cover of Stairway to Heaven. You may now ignite your lighter and hold it up in the air.



I recommend the album. Rodrigo and Gabriela cite Metallica as one of their biggest influences, by the way. Check out their other videos on the internets.

And no, AG Alberto Gonzales does not listen to them.

Thanks to my buddy Juan for hooking me up.

The best place to work isn't Halliburton, but Google isn't bad

According to an online poll taken at the consumerist site, Cheney's baby, Halliburton, actually came in a close second. The winning WORST COMPANY in 2007 was the RIAA. What does the consumerist send the winner? A golden dog turd, of course.
This comes as a bit of a coinky-dink given my post from yesterday. I'm assuming that people are pissed at the constant bombardment of the RIAA on people for downloading music, and attempting to blame them for losing money, when really they should be realizing that they're just pumping out crap, which will earn them just that.

On the flip side, it sounds like Google is the best place to work.

What are some of the perks?

At Google you can do your laundry; drop off your dry cleaning; get an oil change, then have your car washed; work out in the gym; attend subsidized exercise classes; get a massage; study Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish, and French; and ask a personal concierge to arrange dinner reservations. Naturally you can get haircuts onsite. Want to buy a hybrid car? The company will give you $5,000 toward that environmentally friendly end. Care to refer a friend to work at Google? Google would like that too, and it'll give you a $2,000 reward. Just have a new baby? Congratulations! Your employer will reimburse you for up to $500 in takeout food to ease your first four weeks at home. Looking to make new friends? Attend a weekly TGIF party, where there's usually a band playing. Five onsite doctors are available to give you a checkup, free of charge.

It's interesting to note that work environments like this are usually not advertising the work-life balance because when all these amenities become woven into the tapestry of your life, your time at work is your life. Why would you leave? Go home to your wife? Sheesh...she's already hanging out in the parent lounge adjacent to the day-care center. Must be nice when your stock is worth $483 a share. Google is definitely not getting any golden turds.

Needless to say, I'm reminded of a theme present in Margaret Atwood's book, Oryx and Crake, where supercompanies begin to take the place of regional governments, and the sole purpose of existence is to remain affiliated with a firm that can not only employ you, but offer a modicum of safety. Compound the fact that the government seems to be able to provide funding ($624,000,000,000) for a defense budget while cutting education dollars, maybe it won't be long before we see Google start its own K-16 program for employee children, where they work on all things Google from life to death behind a safe partition of glass and mortar.

CD sales suck, and it's not your fault

It's not your fault, Will.

Highlights (from WSJ.com):

"One week, "American Idol" runner-up Chris Daughtry's rock band sold just 65,000 copies of its chart-topping album; another week, the "Dreamgirls" movie soundtrack sold a mere 60,000. As recently as 2005, there were many weeks when such tallies wouldn't have been enough to crack the top 30 sellers. In prior years, it wasn't uncommon for a No. 1 record to sell 500,000 or 600,000 copies a week."

"The music industry has been banking on the rise of digital music to compensate for inevitable drops in sales of CDs. Apple's 2003 launch of its iTunes Store was greeted as a new day in music retailing, one that would allow fans to conveniently and quickly snap up large amounts of music from limitless virtual shelves."

"It hasn't worked out that way -- at least so far. Digital sales of individual songs this year have risen 54% from a year earlier to 173.4 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan. But that's nowhere near enough to offset the 20% decline from a year ago in CD sales to 81.5 million units. Overall, sales of all music -- digital and physical -- are down 10% this year. And even including sales of ringtones, subscription services and other "ancillary" goods, sales are still down 9%, according to one estimate; some recording executives have privately questioned that figure, which was included in a recent report by Pali Research."

"Meanwhile, one billion songs a month are traded on illegal file-sharing networks, according to BigChampagne LLC."

Let's not blame this all on Best Buy and illegal downloads. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the majority of music that gets cranked out suffers from being soulless, contrived, and manufactured. Am I old and crotchety for saying that DJ Unk doesn't inspire me to walk it out?

Is Al Gore the new Bill Graham?

He used to be called the "dull" one. Now he's nominated for an Oscar for his documentary, at which nay-sayers (read: people who still think the Earth is flat) scoffed at his "facts" and "scientific evidence". He's also recently announced the July-launching campaign: Save Our Selves — The Campaign for a Climate in Crisis. The concert is set up like Live Aid, and according to the AP, is being euphemistically referred to as "Earth Aid". It's got a stellar list of performers...although so far I haven't seen the Dixie Chicks listed, which would be cool given their take on Dubya.

Yes, this is the same Al Gore who was the U.S. VP for 8 years. Not "Bore", as we used to call him. This guy's got stupid crazy charisma now because it seems like he's really finally doing what he cares about, and couldn't do before as a candidate for the White House. Why? Because he would've scared off the conservative vote with his ridiculous and Satanic comments about this great God-fearing nation of carbon emitters. "HE WANTED TO TAKE AWAY MY GOD-GIVEN SUV (read: 2007 Earth Destroyer)! HE'S A COMMIE PINKO TERRORIST!", they'd say. Then they'd burn their daughters at the stake for doing calculus and smack their wives around, "cuz, they were gittin' uppity".

More than 100 performers are scheduled to appear at the July concerts, including Melissa Etheridge (whose song in "An Inconvenient Truth" is nominated for an Oscar as well), the Foo Fighters, Lenny Kravitz, Sheryl Crow, John Mayer, Duran Duran, Korn, Pharrell, the Black Eyed Peas, Akon, Enrique Iglesias, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw.

Can't you just see Akon smackin' that a-- for global warming awareness?

Relatedly, and I'll be the first to admit I don't have any data on this, so I'm going straight from the gut on this one (did you know there are more nerve endings in your gut than in your head? Look it up, people), I'm postulating that American children's medical needs are the root cause of the failure of the auto industry. Just allow me some room to drift here...it's all tied up in a neat little package for you:

• Cause A: Kids need good medical attention to become happy healthy members of society;
• Cause B: Medical insurance is expensive to pay for out of one's pocket, and employment that provides subsidized healthcare benefits is the ideal solution;
• Factor A: American car manufacturers produce gas-guzzling vehicles that are of shoddy construction and which pollute the environment and keep us fixed on the sweet tit of foreign oil;
• Primary Effect: Kids get sick from breathing in the crap (this is a scientific term) in the air;
• Secondary Effect: Parents go to work to provide for their families/children illnesses brought on by said crap;
• Tertiary Effect (as related by Factor A): American car manufacturers try to cut costs by reducing healthcare benefits for workers or closing plants altogether (here's where carbon emission pollution and healthcare costs implode upon each other);
• Quaternary Effect: Parents lose their jobs and lose healthcare benefits, thus reducing their socio-economic viability in this country, thus reducing the amount of quality medical care their children can receive;
• Quinary Effect: Children of these parents turn into adults and require even more medical coverage in order to combat health problems that could've been addressed during common preventative doctor visits, of which costs would've been subsidized by the auto maker.

I'm still working on the details, but this is the general gist: get rid of American children and replace them with robots powered by Dick Cheney's evil, soul-sucking smile.

Note that this cause-effect model is intertwined with the issue of carbon emission pollution of which the primary effect is global warming, which effects polar ice caps, which...eh...you get the picture.

Super Bowl XLI Commercial Winners

Some watch for the game, some watch for the commericals. Airtime for ads runs at about $2.5MM for 30 seconds.

Which were some of the best 30 seconds during the game that didn't involve the Colts tramping over the Bears?

1. K-Fed's Nationwide rap - probably would've been funnier had we not see or heard all that crap about the fast food workers getting pissed off at the guy.


2. Robert Goulet and nuts - comedy. Robert Goulet always delivers.


3. Ax-hitcher - beer commerials seem to always reign supreme on Super Bowl. This year's was no different.


If you missed Prince's half-time show, then you'll just have to got rent "Purple Rain".

And one of my personal historical favorites...I want to claw my way up to middle management (so I can be in charge of TPS reports...)

iPhone...or iRipyouagoodone

Let's face it...Apple puts out hot sexy gear that makes you quiver with desire. They made UNIX hot with OS X. They have groovy PC-Mac commercials where the Apple guy is the quintessential "every-guy" (no doubt a character amalgamated from careful market analysis, surveying of Apple store patrons, and executing multiple focus groups) with whom all Apple fans can identify.

Or not.

The newest, and hottest thing to come from Apple was announced at this year's CES in Vegas: the iPhone. You may have seen the new device. It's hot. It's sexy. Did I say that already? Yes I did. Other not so sexy facts: while the two iPhone models will retail at $499 and $599 for the 4 and 8 GB versions, their actual costs of production will amount to no more than $245.83 and $280.83, respectively.

The markup on each model, which falls just under 50%, is one of the most aggressive in recent consumer electronic history. A 2-year service contract with Cingular will also be required for the purchase. Unlike most service plans, the agreement obviously does not subsidize the hardware cost.

You can check out the itemized breakdown here.

This just in: consumers have enabled Apple's raping of their collective wallet! Yay! I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I will not be an early adopter of this product. I'll let it go through a couple iterations and feature enhancements and price drops before I make a commitment here. Apple is still hot and sexy, but I just can't afford a Gisele-type device. I need more of a Tina Fey model.