Food notes:
•The band Team Robespierre, earlier this year, recalled an article on “Cooking with Fugazi.”
•Conan O’Brien (sounding oddly like my friend Chuck Blake) announces his new show and how he was bribed with a pizza pie.
•Comic books are occasionally clever, and Marvel not long ago introduced the idea that the planet-eating monster Galactus has a [...]
Seeing the band Baghdaddios on Saturday night not only afforded me the opportunity to meet a conservative member of the band Beauty School Dropouts but led to the odd experience of me popping outside the club to retrieve Baghdaddios leader Ken Rowell so that he wouldn’t miss a song being dedicated to him by the [...]
I’ve long said that East Asians should be the most vocal opponents of affirmative action in America, given that their numbers on college campuses have been kept artificially low relative to their test scores by lefty proportional-to-the-population regulations. But there’s no reasoning with people attached to the symbolic anti-racism of such regs, regardless of [...]
•Normally, when you think of hive minds being invaded by brain-controlling, zombie-making parasites — and I know you do — you are thinking about a dark potential future (or at least Washington, DC — speaking of which, if you haven’t already watched this weekend’s Freedom Watch, airing again tonight at 7 and 11, note that [...]
Some people get accused of wanting to rule the world, and I was recently accused of subconsciously wanting to destroy it for liking things like this Road Warrior-esque Pink video for “Funhouse.” Did a male comics nerd have a hand in writing the chorus about “evil clowns,” I can’t help wondering? Dave Whitney notes [...]
I’m not sure how much of the comedy value here was intentional, but my former employers at the American Council on Science and Health have created probably the funniest thing the organization has done, by plugging a dialogue about the (harmless but nonetheless feared) chemical BPA into this personalizable cartoon of talking bears.
In other cartoonish [...]
All right, I’m back from visiting my ancestral homeland of New England, which I have to admit is perilously close (geographically and culturally) to Canada, with which I have a love-hate relationship. On the downside: the socialistic tendencies that the U.S. now threatens to imitate.
On the plus side, it’s the land that educated the Williamsburg-dwelling [...]
By now, everybody and his uncle have probably used this JibJab animation to put their faces into a short version of The Empire Strikes Back, but I dare say I make a natural Luke Skywalker in this version, with photos entered by co-worker Austin Petersen. Of course, I’m not saying it’s as funny as [...]
•Since the past two days’ entries mentioned time travel, the Victorian British, and imperialism, it might be a fitting time to note that I stumbled across this nineteen-minute sketch featuring Rowan Atkinson (among others) as a comedic version of Doctor Who. Not bad. (The Doctor’s British-eccentric combination of wanderlust, tolerance, and very-reluctant interventionism [...]
Jacob Levy notes J.E.H. Smith has attacked 80s music — or rather, has captured perfectly how a forty-year-old Gen Xer of a certain sort (e.g., me) feels about whether to stay hip or indulge in musical nostalgia…or both…or neither (I also really like the first comment below the article).
I will note that I am not [...]
I’m pleased to see that this clip of a pug dog who (ostensibly) sounds like he’s saying “Batman” (followed by ABC anchor-banter that reminds me oddly of some dates I’ve been on) has already gone viral…and been transformed (as my friend Paul Taylor points out) into this musically-enhanced version using the theme from the 1960s [...]
I see that a couple weeks ago I was evoked as an example of a libertarian with conservative cultural sympathies (due to my debate with Kerry Howley), in a Daily Caller column defending gay marriage. I don’t want to exaggerate my conservatism, since I also have my punk side (as the blog slogan suggests), but [...]
•I understand David Mamet’s play Race got some negative reviews, but I liked it — sort of a Twelve Angry Men with gruff racial arguments thrown in, with enough layers of un-p.c. expectations-thwarting and reverse-reverse-racism to keep things ambiguous. (And Eddie Izzard looks a bit like comic book industry legend Scott Nybakken, as a [...]
Comic book writer Harvey Pekar passed away this week, but while he lived, he wrote the graphic novel biography of my friend Michael Malice, a one-man walking anarchist revolution (and former Cato Institute intern). Malice recalls the experience in this article. I wish this were a typical comic book death and thus likely to be [...]
As the final World Cup match approaches, I can’t help thinking there is something familiar — and sinister — about the world delighting in combative arena-revels while thinking of a prophetic, tentacled beast with purported psychic powers.
And speaking of dread Cthulhu:
•This two-year-old story about a ban on photographs of H.P. Lovecraft’s grave was just brought [...]