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Keitel Records
You think you’re done with “Call Me Maybe”? You cringe when your car radio lands on it for even a moment? You swear that no cover, mashup, or parody could ever get you to listen to that song again?
I’m here to sympathize but also to tell you that you must hear it one more time, at least if you haven’t yet seen the Night of Too Many Stars duet between Harvey Keitel and Carly Rae Jepsen. Keitel pulls a William Shatner by doing his part as a spoken-word performance exactly as you’d imagine Harvey Keitel would.
Night of Too Many Stars is the biennial variety-show founded by Robert Smigel and hosted by Jon Stewart to benefit autism programs. This year’s edition aired last Sunday on Comedy Central as a live telethon with clips from a show held the previous Sunday at New York City’s Beacon Theatre. Other standout moments included Katy Perry singing “Firework” with 11-year-old Jodi DiPiazza and Louis CK auctioning off a holiday-card photo with Al Pacino.
[Update: My links have unfortunately all gone bad, although if you find and enjoy the material elsewhere online you can hopefully likewise find a way to donate.]
Related: Gift Rap • Muppet Monday • Crazy Talk
The Garlicks Is Cookin’
Lea Hernandez has less than 48 hours to go in the campaign to raise money for her project The Garlicks on Indiegogo.
Images © 2012 and characters TM Lea Hernandez.
So yeah, I’m putting up this post kind-of late, but that’s no reflection on my enthusiasm; I also figured, maybe wrongly, that promoting the project towards the end rather than towards the beginning might be better. Anyway...
The Garlicks is the tale of young Pandora Garlick and her family. Pan’s mom is a human who runs a butcher shop. Pan’s dad is a vampire barista. Pan’s baby sister, Ham, turns into a fishbat — that’s right: a fishbat — while Pan can’t turn into anything at all. But she can and does make comics inspired by her crazy life.
Joker Lice
Along with my verification-word definitions — like yesterday’s — I’ve made a small running thing out of sharing weird search terms that Blogger’s Stats info says lead people here.
My first such post was in January; the second one, in April, was titled after one of those oddball terms, as is this one. To cut to the chase: I can’t find a record of joker lice being a thing, in Gotham City or anywhere else.
A dozen more strange — or in a couple of cases, strangely mundane — search terms, some of which totally befuddle me not only inherently but in how they led people here:
15-year-old with a fencing sword
action figure rod stewart
business team with laptops in the white cubes
The Meaning of It All
I’ll have legally been 42 for 24 hours at the stroke of midnight. Regular visitors here
will recognize this post’s title as referring not just to my age, per an earlier post today, but fitting the pattern of my occasional volleys of word-verification definitions (collected and explained for the uninitiated at that link). I’ve taken to publishing these when I expect the blog to lie fallow for a spell, as well as simply when the mood strikes, but while I can see some things getting in the way of new posts over the next couple of weeks I confess that I’m not yet sure to which scenario this entry applies.
• androjor — [an dro jor] n. Robot duplicate of Superman’s Kryptonian father.
• bucritas — [buh kree tahss] pl. n. A Mexican dish made from pirate meat.
• cobside — [kob syd] adj. Near an ear of corn.
• dingdoc — [ding dok] n. Popular subgenre in Australian cinema of nature films featuring wild dogs.
• entheist (1) — [en thee ist] n. One who worships the 14th letter of the English alphabet.
42 Is Me
When the dad of a dear friend gave me a copy of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in 5th grade — for me, obviously, not for him — I’m sure I didn’t think of the cosmically resonant number of 42 in terms of the age I’d be over three decades hence.
And yet here we are. I don’t know if reaching, in human years, the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything will impact my existence in any positive way but it’d sure be nice.
Power to the People
I’m afraid that I don’t have much nice to say about...
The episode was a letdown, overall — just sort-of meh, really, as opposed to spectacularly bad in ways that prompt their own kind of commentary. I can’t recall when (if ever) Fringe left me feeling that way before. Has it frustrated me? Yes. Has
it grossed me out? For sure. Has it turned in a lackluster installment that felt like the script needed, minimum, one more pass? Dunno ’bout that.
Which is a particular shame given how, per my choice of Beatles title for this post, “The Recordist” kicks off what appears to be the impetus for at least a good early-to-middle chunk of this final, 13-episode season.
41 Favorites: #7-9
For my 40th birthday, I jotted down a list of some of my favorite things to prompt a series of occasional posts. My aim was to periodically knock out brief entries that cover a variety of subjects, as I’d been retreating from new content due to frustration with the constant gremlins.
That was two years ago. I had to switch the title from 40 Favorites to 41 Favorites in 2011 and I’ve only added three installments since then — including this one. Sunday,
I’ll need to renumber the series again.
Anyhoo; I’d prefer to talk about...
7. coffee
Oh, I loves me the coffee.
To many folks it’s merely a delivery system for a vital dose of caffeine, and I’m not above using it that way myself. While caffeine is a vasoconstrictor that’s often helpful in alleviating migraines, however, I’m among the minority for whom it’s a soporific rather than a stimulant; I could very well get a brief jolt from it neurologically, were you to look at a brain scan, but I’ll begin to get sleepy from a cup of strong coffee in short order. (I’ve gone off of caffeine entirely in the name of eliminating potential rebound or caffeine-withdrawal headaches from the picture, twice, and the tradeoff was not worth it. Migraines still abound. It’s way better to have caffeine in the arsenal even though going too long without caffeine after regular caffeine intake will probably trigger a headache.)
Mother
I was a little concerned about using up “Mother” this soon, as we’ll doubtless get another episode about the Olivia & Etta dynamic before Fringe is over; there are now fewer than a dozen episodes left, however, and I’ve learned not to be too precious
about such things.
Here, partly in honor of Walter’s addled state but largely because it’s all I’m able to put together, are some disjointed musings on...
No Swedish or Portuguese, I promise.
