Listen, folk singers, female singer-songwriters, and other accoustic guitar wizards: it is NOT THAT FUNNY to cover rap songs! It has been done a zillion times and it wasn’t particularly amusing the first time! It is a racist joke! Oh, ha ha, you are a white woman who is singing words written by a black dude! LOLLERSKATES!

Just stop it.

For reference:
Whatever You Like

We must be eternally vigilant in our panic! Fortunately, there’s no shortage of reasons to do so:

The moon claimed victory during our first offensive, consuming the impact and mocking our puny rockets.  Behind the cloak of media secrecy, this may be the first volley in an interstellar war with terrorist-sympathizing aliens who’ve taken refuge on the moon.

But that’s not all! There are plenty of other threats to concern yourself with!

Nano-sized nuclear bombs!

Physicist with Al-Qaeda ties discovered to be working on the Large Hard-On Collider!

Common donkeys ignoring God’s law and posing as zebras!

The eternal threat of asteroid impact! Is 2068 the new 2012?

And last but not least, giant Polar Bears will disrupt international commerce, destroy the moon and flatten Anchorage!

On paper, I hate Chromeo. Smart-ass New Yorkers–one of them a French literature professor at Columbia–make soul-tinged ’80s synth-pop with tongue planted firmly in cheek. It’s a premise that appears to be focus-grouped to ensure ultimate American Apparel store soundtrack replayability, or conversely, to enrage me as much as is possible, on premise alone. Seriously–the shit reeks of entitlement.

In practice, it’s a totally joyous electro celebration of the many charms of Hall & Oates-esque blue-eyed soul. “Night by Night” is their newest single, and they’re staying the course with a limber dance jam that could have been shipped directly from 1983. Read rest of story…

I’ve been an absent, neglectful editor here. My abject apologies–don’t write us off yet ma, much more to come!

Say what you will about the ACORN scandal (mountain out of a molehill, but the people involved were total dumbasses, etc…), Ryan Grim of the HuffPost comes across a little whoopsies in the rush to turn the organization into defunded pariahs:

The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to “any organization” that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.

In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops.

Somewhere down the line, this may bite some privatization-mad warmonger in the ass, so at least some minor good may come from this grim circus.

It never ceases to amaze me that Twitter occupies such different niches in the US versus other parts of the world. In the US it is mostly for telling people what awesome bar you are at or OMG YOU GUYS I AM TOTES LISTENING TO A MASHUP OF KANYE AND TAYLOR LOLOLOLOOL. In China, Egypt, and Iraq, it’s a means of striking back against cruel or totalitarian governments, a way of spreading the word internationally about the happenings behind the walls built by insecure leaders.

The closest Americans get to this level of activism-via-Twitter is re-tweeting FREE THE HIKERS.

Only in the hellhouse mirror that is contemporary American politics could you find a black President being compared to Nazis or centrist, fiscally-conservative policies dubbed ‘socialism’.

Today Gawker posted photos of ArmorGroup employees engaging in degrading sexual hazing at their Kabul encampment. ArmorGroup is the security contractor protecting the State Department’s people in Afghanistan.

This is nowhere near as disturbing as the allegations against Blackwater, but it is still more evidence that perhaps privatizing national security is a shitty idea. It’s small comfort that there is a watchdog organization like the Project on Goverment Oversight blowing the whistle on deviant activities like this. Surely our own military could provide both security AND sex abuse at a lower cost?

I read Google Reader so you don’t have to: Disney buys scrappy multibillion-dollar upstart Marvel, black people sighted at a Grizzly Bear show, and Cheney continues his campaign to be the most despicable pile of human offal on the face of the planet.

Let me make a few things clear here: as a vegetarian, I don’t spend much time eating at KFC. Corporate overlords YUM! Foods have questionable practices. Regardless, even I can acknowledge that a floating KFC on Lake Michigan is several degrees of awesomeness:

This photo is also noticeable for the geriatric actor playing the Colonel, who looks like he’d rather be anywhere–playing bingo, cards, napping–than on the rough seas of Lake Michigan with a couple of fried-chicken “babes”.

BrandFreak

I’m sort of fascinated by the early days of Disneyland–as a reflection of the unsustainable pie-in-the-skies planning of Southern California in the ’50s, as well as Disney’s vision of a future that was never to be. Also, I just really liked going to Disneyland as a kid, to be completely honest. Anyway, this home movie of Disneyland in the early ’50s is an interesting glimpse into an era that seems so very long ago.

Home Movies At DisneyLand – 1956 from Jeff Altman on Vimeo.

via

Ryan Adams blogging about classic video games is shockingly much more tolerable than his music!

1. Artists have every right to charge money for their work, damnit.
2. Not every joke has to be in first person to work.
3. To paraphrase Snow Crash, sexist in the way of nerds who think they are too smart to be sexist.
4. The fact that I read it every goddamn Monday, Wednesday, and Friday even though it irritates the shit out of me.

For your derision or pleasure, depending on how you feel about copyright law and programming: xkcd

Too many annoyances for one morning! Allow me to attempt to quell the beasts with a handful of belated links:

Comedic drunken stereotype “the Russian people” are shocked by their own level of alcohol intake. According the NYT, hipsters have become chubby chasers, and Obama is to blame, or something like that. MSNBC has acquired Everyblock, a great service to find out about all the petty crime happening on your block and which restaurants are being shut down for rat infestations.

From the “didn’t we already know this from some similar study a decade ago” files: the life-affirming chemical cocaine was found on 90% of cash in Washington DC. Another study that tells us what we already know: 40% of all Twitter tweets on the Twitter are “pointless babble”. From personal observation, I’ll add that another 40% are social media “experts” cheerleading about said social media in an effort to legitimize what are essentially over-hyped virtual toys.

And in closing, the only worthwhile thing I’ve found on this infernal Internet in the past few days: a photo gallery of Saddam Hussein’s palaces, now fallen to ruin.

Scottish rock musicians seem to be all the rage in my music collection all the time. Here are a few for your consideration:

• Malcolm Middleton is your man if you want sad-happy wit. “You’re gonna break my heart I know it. But if you don’t, you’re gonna break my run of unhappiness and destroy my career.” If you like that, start with Into the Woods.



• We Were Promised Jetpacks has such an awesome name that I had to buy their album. Luckily, These Four Walls is very good. Highlights include “Conductor” and “It’s Thunder and Lightning.”
• Frightened Rabbit starts The Midnight Organ Fight with a song that refers to lepers. I think this is a play on the Latin lepus for rabbits. Well, whatever. If you like Arcade Fire but are really tired of playing their one good album over and over, you will probably want to welcome FR into your life.

Because we here at 12 pt. plan are religious about the internet, here is a Saturday Sabbath link dump.

• 20^th Century left behind:Ron Rosenbaum insists that if Jon Stewart is going to persist with the Yiddish humor, he go back to being the Jew that he is: Jon Leibowitz.  The man has a point:
  

  I want you to change your name. Back to Leibowitz. Stewart is just so 20^th-century, a relic of that dark age when Jews in show biz changed their names because they feared “real Americans” wouldn’t accept the originals.

  But, I hope that my last name isn’t what makes me (or Jon) a Yid.

• No hydrogen left behind: Space Telescopes Find Trigger-Happy Star Formation. Never forget Spitzer still exists, even if it is less cool than Herschel.
• No X-ray left behind: Chandra is in on stellar Russian roulette.
• No pay cheque left behind: Whole Foods sucks.
• No killer left behind: Fantastic news for everyone who wants to die in an unjust war. Soon openly gay americans will be shooting at you too.
• All love left behind: Just a reminder that gays still can’t marry in 42 states or jointly adopt children in over 25. Huffington Post is not reporting that Congress is acting swiftly to repeal DOMA. Obama’s DoJ carries on the Bush tradition of defending it.

Happy Saturday!

I know, I know, I said I was busy and I am, but Youtube keeps calling. Here’s a 3-D rendering of the Hubble taking pictures of some Deep Space Shit.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D
via

Your editor is far too hungry, caffeine-deprived and busy to create compelling original content to stuff into your voracious maws at this particular time. So here are some VERY IMPORTANT pieces of bear news via The Awl:

Further Reading:

Bear goes for a dip in San Dimas swimming pool
Super-bears break into cars and homes (this would work much better with the COPS theme playing over it. Get to it, Youtube nerds!)

I find it frankly shocking that Valleywag isn’t familiar with the Bloggess. Given that I found out about Madame Bloggess via a friend who has exactly two blogs bookmarked (the former, and cakewrecks) it seems surprising that a site that follows every infinitesimal movement of Mark Zuckerberg would be so late to the crazy, Texan, pill popping party.

Sir Elton John is joining Alice in Chains to record “Candle in the Wind Pt. 22″, in tribute to the band’s deceased lead singer Layne Staley. John’s collection of maudlin tributes to the notably dead will likely be repackaged as a “Trapped In The Closet”-esque multipart music video, hopefully featuring Staley’s character portrayed by a midget and John narrating in a fine tailored suit while smoking a stogie. Vulture offers up a list of less-than-notable supergroups, though I have to argue with the inclusion of the Gravediggaz–Prince Paul! The RZA! (Also: Six Feet Under is a classic.)

This was inevitable: Copyblogger, my favorite search-engine-optimized guide to writing for web bots unable to parse writing with any nuance or complexity, suggest that scribes take a note from The Ramones. “Keep it five words or less and dunderheaded” is a pretty apt description of most web content.

From the Science Proves What We Already Know files: art is an evolutionary adaptation to facilitate sex! Well not totally. “But Miller admits sex alone may not explain the evolution of art. ‘It might have originated for some other function, and acquired the sexual display function later,’ he says. So what other purpose might art serve?” Another evolutionary purpose? How about to provide aging rich men a way to try to re-assert their sense of self-importance in the face of cosmic insignificance?

A few short bits: say hello to your new mechanized overlords–NASA deploys spiderbots to Mt. St Helens! Apple and record labels are–shockingly–having disputes about what instantly-irrelevant format will be used to deliver iTunes-age Enhaced CD’s. 55-years-ago today, Communism was outlawed in the United States by Congress. Oh yeah! If Steven Hawking has been born into the UK’s system of socialized medicine, he would have never lived to be a very-important progenitor of theories that stoner college students pretend to understand during spirited 3am debates on the couch. Oh whoops! He’s lived in the UK his entire life.