#81 - YouTube's All-Time Most Discussed Comedy Video
#52 - YouTube's All-Time Most Linked Comedy Video
#87 - YouTube's All-Time Most Viewed Comedy Video
"With a corporate office in New York City, Dunder-Mifflin
has branches in Buffalo, Stamford, Albany, Utica, Scranton, Akron, Camden,
Nashua and Yonkers..."
I always enjoy visiting NBC's web site for The
Office. It's got deleted scenes, original "webisodes", and fake
public service announcements - and even a fake web site for the paper
company where the show takes place.
Dunder-Mifflin Inc. (stock symbol DMI) is a mid-cap regional paper- and
office-supply distributor with an emphasis on servicing small-business
clients....
"When we said we wanted to combine the excitement of 'Snakes on a Plane'
with the intellectual stimulation of sudoku, everyone said we were crazy.
Well, who's
crazy now?"
Oh no, you didn't....
"We totally took regular sudoku puzzles, got rid of those
safe 3-by-3 squares, and replaced them with deadly snakes. There are over
1,500 snakes in this book, and Agent Flynn [Samuel L. Jackson] isn't here
to help you."
I saw it in the bookstore tonight.
Though, honestly, I was disappointed that the puzzles inside had actually
kept the 3-by-3 squares after all. There were two
fan-createdSudoko
puzzles on the Snakes on a Blog fan site that actually
twisted the 9 digits into snake-shaped
polygons.
Anton Gustavsson was a "conspicuously uncool" 19-year-old in Sweden. He
was a computer programmer with an ordinary voice who nonetheless recorded his impassioned
vocals for Iron Maiden songs over simple computer MIDI music files in
1999.
His honest energy endeared him to an online audience, and he became the
prime example of a "DIY celebrity", even distributing a CD on an
alternative label. (Click here to listen to Anton Maiden mp3s).
"I thought it was an off day," pitcher Dock Ellis wrote in his
autobiography.
So he'd dropped acid with his girlfriend in a Los Angeles hotel room.
Glancing at the newspaper, she then realized that he was scheduled
to play that day.
Six hours later, he was on the mound.
"I can only remember bits and pieces of the game..." he wrote in 1984.
But it's lovingly remembered in an article from GettingIt.com.
("I had a feeling of euphoria. I was zeroed in on the catcher's glove...
sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn't...")
When the game was over - he'd pitched a no-hitter.
A great moment in western civilization is preserved in this Amazon
DVD review.
It was a thing of beauty what happened back in 2003. People of all races,
nationalities, socioeconomic backgrounds, political affiliations,
religions, and any other differences you can think of that polarize us
finally agreed on one thing. We all took a stand against the syphilitic
evil of reality programming by laughing The Real Cancun out of the
theaters.
Of course, any uprising of this magnitude is bound to have
opposition. The bad guys aligned themselves with the thirty-three people
left, most of them in the 14-16 year old age bracket, who still watch
eMpTyV (and buy any products that eMpTyV hawks) and a bunch of horny frat
boys waiting for something to tide them over until the next Girls Gone
Wild DVD hit the shelves.
When the smoke cleared, the good guys
were
victorious for a change.
Now for network television.
WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER!!!
"4 of 6 people found this review helpful."
Reviewer: Habitual Linestepper "The Thompsonian Institute of Bad
Reviews"
"And let us not forget to toast
everyone who might have missed the boat.
And to everybody else who waits
till the next one sails in again..."
I thought that would be a beautiful epigram for a book about the dotcom
days in the 90s. But though the Devo song is called "That's Good,"
someone else has a different
opinion.
This is some of the laziest rhyming I've ever heard. These lyrics are
especially bad, because earlier in the song the lyics to this part of the
structure did indeed rhyme. ("Ain't it true, there's just no doubt /
There's some things that we can't do without...") That's not good at all!
It's just one of many examples submitted to a site listing
nearly 400 artists
who are guilty of badly-rhymed lyrics.
Former child star Barry Williams remembers this moment in his biography
I was a teenaged Greg.
(Chapter 17 - "One toke over the line.")
He'd been given a day off, when some friends of his older brother visited.
"I was introduced to a thin,
hand-rolled, yellow joint. 'Listen, man' said one of the buds, 'toke slow
-- this is some
real heavy shit.'"
"'Cooool,' I thought... Several drags later, the stuff had kicked in
hard."
Which is when the Brady Bunch's assistant director called him back to the
studio "to shoot the driveway scene"...
The makeup man helpfully handed him a bottle of visine - and then Barry
strutted onto the set,
"thinking to myself that my now-heightened sense of consciousness and
intensity might give me a chance to completely recreate my role..."
Williams high-fived
the
crew, "feeling very cool."
When they'd gathered on the set, Williams "saw it as
crying out for innovation and improvisation." His biography's confession
includes detailed memories of the minutes that followed.
"In my mind, I made up a history for the bike; why it needed air, what
happened to the tire, where I had
been riding it at the time. When rehearsal began, I proceeded to get
involved with the
spokes of the wheel, forming a relationship with each individual spoke,
and then trying to come
up with a more aerodynamic design for them."
"Instead of merely crossing over to the car and standing there as
expected,
I invented a new saunter..."
"Instead of just standing and listening to [Mr. and Mrs. Brady]
while they were talking, I opened the
car door and stood on its threshold to reach boat height and worked on
loosening the straps."
"I experimented with my speaking patterns and inflections, giving each
individual word
undue weight and significance:
YOU didn't SAY anything ABOUT getting a boat, Dad
You DIDn"T say ANYTHING about GETTING a boat, Dad.
YOU didn't SAY ANYTHING ABOUT getting a BOAT, DAD!
"In subsequent rehearsals I changed my lines altogether, or simply made up
new ones as we went along."
But when the filming actually started, Williams suddenly became paranoid.
"I was now
second- and third-guessing my
every move, my every word, my every action." And then - the cameras
rolled.
(Brady calliope music) Williams waves, trips over the bike pump. Mrs. Brady opens the
sliding
door.
Greg: Hi dad! Mr. Brady: Hi! Greg: (pause) Uh (laughs) you didn't say anything about getting a
boat!
Mr. Brady: ...I thought with a little work, we could fix it
up!
Greg: Far out!!
To this day you can still see Greg sleepily waving 'hi" to his dad in the
clip - and
then tripping over the bike pump. "I pretended not to notice my
stumble...I
continued on like nothing happened and hoped
somebody else would mess up."
How does Williams sum up the experience?
"Getting stoned instead left me...feeling as phony as the turf in the
Brady's backyard.
UPDATE:
How do you take a song about irrational, fatal desire, and change its lead
singer
from a 32-year-old male to a 13-year-old girl?
That was the task Devo faced when they handed off "Girl U Want" to
the all-kid band they'd assembled for Disney's
"Devo 2.0".
Though Disney's web site
shows Nicole Stoehr singing a neutered
version of "Girl U Want," the album has her singing "Boy U Want," a
song where nearly every lyric has been changed.
I wondered if it might empower a generation of girls,
with an animated male floating through the video as the object of
desire.
But in the
song's lyrics, it's still the woman who's driving the man
crazy.
You've got him thinking that he's out of his mind.
This kind of feeling isn't easy to find.
But then, look how strongly the song's writers (and re-writers) had felt
about
its original message. (Below is my original post about the song...)
*
*
*
Sunday night, somewhere in England, a mysterious post-industrial figure
types into Google U.K.
song meaning girl u want devo
Since I'm now the #2 match, I felt compelled to find the answer...
"It's about the essence of desire," says co-author Gerald Casale.
"...aching desire. She sings from somewhere you can't see,
like the famous myth of the sirens that used to lure the sailors to their
deaths by singing to
them in the night.
"They'd go try to find these girls that didn't really exist, and the boat
would crash on the rocks and they'd die."
I was browsing my local bookstore when I spotted it.
"Snakes on a Plane" - the book.
"A snake jumped right out of this book like a spring-loaded projectile of
venom and bit me right on the nose!"
writes one
Amazon reviewer. "It's just THAT intense!" ("7
of 7
people found this review helpful...") ("Add to baby registry!")
UPDATE: The mysterious reader of the book
has
been identified! ("Since I didn’t want to ruin the ending, I’m only
going to read the first
chapter....")
His blog post included an excerpt from the opening of
the book - which
drew
the following reader responses.
"That first paragraph suffers from a severe lack of snakes."
"Also planes."
The film's merchandisers appear eager to capitalize on the movie's
internet buzz.
Also available:
Snakes
on a Plane: The Album, whose product description notes that the best
fan-produced songs are included on the enhanced portion of the CD.
Johnny Depp has played pirate Jack Sparrow in two Pirates of the
Caribbean movies - and said he modelled his character on
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.
It's been confirmed. The next movie in the series will include an
appearance by Keith
Richards himself.
In the third film ("At World's End"), the main characters "sail off the
edge of the
map, navigate
treachery and betrayal, and make
their final alliances for one last decisive battle," according to the
plot
summary at
IMDB.com.
"The Golden Age of Piracy is finally at its end. The East
India Trading
Company has amassed an enormous fleet with one purpose in mind: riding the
waters of all pirates... Our heroes must face
Lord Cutler Beckett, Davy Jones and Admiral James Norrington in a titanic
showdown that could eliminate the freedom-loving pirates from the seven
seas -- forever."
Rumor has it that Keith Richards will be playing: Jack Sparrow's father.
Roger Ebert's wife told
the Chicago Tribune: "[P]lease give the big guy the space and time needed to recover until he
is ready to use those thumbs again."
Today she added,
"Roger would also want you to go out to the movies. He gives you
permission
to see even those movies that don't have his personal 'Thumbs Up'."
Girl U Want
Uncontrollable Urge
Freedom of Choice
Whip It
Beautiful World
Big Mess
That's Good
Cyclops
Peek a Boo
UPDATE: I don't know why the kids were playing instruments in the
videos, since all they did on the CD was sing.
But
"Cyclops" is one of the first new Devo tracks in 20 years. And then
there's the Disney kids' version of Devo's 1982
classic "Peek A Boo." ("I know what you do, 'cause I do it
too.")
"The way that we weren't is what we'll become. So please pay
attention
while I show you some of what's about to happen."
UPDATE: An entry about Devo 2.0 on Wikipedia has apparently been
hacked
in retaliation. The phrase "vocals provided by children" has been
re-written so the page now describes a new Devo album with
"vocals provided by yeti children."
Actual changes in lyrics appear below.
Devo sang "It's a beautiful world for you... It's not for me."
Devo 2.0 sings: "It's a beautiful world for you...I guess me too!"
Devo sang "A dog who found two bones...he ran in circles, til he dropped
dead."
Devo 2.0 sang "A dog who found two bones..he ran in circles, til he
dropped down"
Devo sang: "I'm a man with a mission, a boy with a gun."
Devo 2.0 sings "I'm a girl with a mission...a girl having fun."
Devo sang: "Life's a bee without a buzz."
Devo 2.0 sings: "Life's a bee that doesn't buzz."
Devo sang: "It's got style, it's got class, so strong, I can't let it
pass."
Devo 2.0 sings: "Fogged in, after lunch, I get a snack attack, I need to
munch."
Devo sang: "Eliminate the ninnies and the twits."
Devo 2.0 sings: "Eliminate the time you waste in cliques."
Devo sang "Look at you with your mouth watering."
Devo 2.0 sings: "Look at you with your mouth muttering."
Devo sang: "You know you're headed for the pleasure burn."
Devo 2.0 sings "You know you're shaking and you're ready to learn."
Thanks to X-Ray
specs for the last one. They add that "The sooner my daughter can be
through being cool and snap the trap of going with the flow, the
better."
Many more lyric changes were added for an alternate version, Boy U
Want
An entirely new set of lyrics was created for
Jerkin'
Back and Forth
John Grisham only wrote
one
story that became a movie without first being
published as a book.
A hot lawyer (Kenneth Branagh) squares off against a mentally disturbed
backwoods Southerner (Robert
Duvall) in the 1998 film The Gingerbread
Man.
But the great film-maker Robert Altman was chosen to direct, adding his
own distinctive
visual touches — chaotic atmosphere, bad weather, unexpected cruelty,
and
full-frontal nudity.
Amazon's review applauds
the intrigue in "the combination of Grisham's mainstream mystery and the
offbeat style of [the] maverick
director...The Gingerbread Man demonstrates [Altman's] skill in
bringing
a
fresh, characteristically
offbeat approach to conventional material..."
Both Altman and Grisham have given thought to the lawyer's character,
though
for Altman his complaint
is simply
that "the minute he gets outside his own element, he's dog meat." The
thriller
leads the
attorney into increasingly dangerous situations.
Now here's where it gets weird. The Internet Movie Database gives a
traditional summary for
the movie's gnarly plot. ("Lawyer Rick Magruder has a one-night-stand
affair with caterer Mallory Doss...")
But for the movie's poster, they display this.
"To my knowledge," I emailed the web site, "Robert Altman did not direct
Adventures of the Wishing Chair,
and John Grisham did not write its screenplay."
Again, to summarize:
In the movie:
Not in the movie:
I wonder which child in the armchair was the lawyer's one-night stand?
"But wait. Maybe we don't want to hear Paul Newman's voice coming
out of a car."
Yeah, the movie didn't really work for me either. But I applaud the
film-makers' obvious love for Route 66.
Even in the closing credits,
Pixar included a list of Route 66 businesses that had inspired them. And
Salon's reviewer
also points out that the voice of the small-town sheriff in Radiator
Springs was provided by the author of a book about Route 66.
The closing credits also included Pixar's traditional list of "production
babies".
I finally watched the last episode of "That 70s Show." TV.com reports
some interesting trivia about the closing credits.
"The gang is in the Vista Cruiser, singing along with 'Hello
It's Me' by Todd Rundgren; they're coming home from the Todd
Rundgren concert... that they went to in the
pilot."
The episode takes place, of course, on the last night of the 70s -
December 31, 1979. Which creates an opportunity for even more trivia...
"The outfit that Kitty wears in
the New Year's Eve party scene (red
blouse, flowered skirt)...is the same outfit she wears when she
is first seen in the party scene in That '70s Pilot."
But you know who really got sentimental? The show's actors.
Laura
Pepron, who played Donna, tells
E that the first time the cast read the
last episode, "We were all just crying... I'm probably going to watch it
just by myself,
not in front of a lot of
people because it's really special, and I'm probably going to be crying
like a little baby."
And the actor who played Hyde added that while they were working on the
last episode, "There were people losing it."
And -- one more time -- Eric told Donna he was sorry...
Four years before his death,
69-year-old Louis Rukeyser found a nasty
network surprise. Maryland Public Television tried to oust the
commentator from
the position he'd held 32 years. (AOL Time-Warner had offered them more
money to
re-brand the show as product placement for Fortune magazine.)
Not missing a beat, the shrewd, unflappable host used his weekly monologue (mp3) to
urge viewers to follow him to a different network. "It turns out that the
woods are
full of smart television executives," he chuckled.
His debut on CNBC drew the largest audience in CNBC history.
Within four weeks, 61% of PBS stations across America had chosen to
re-broadcast it.
The old PBS show (without Rukeyser) lost half its audience almost
immediately.
When asked if there was room on TV for both shows, the Wall Street
commentator joked:
I've always liked drinking Black and Tans - and apparently Ben and Jerry's
does too. They created a
new ice cream flavor with "blended real cream stout" ice cream - and a
swirl of chocolate. And
they named the flavor "Black and Tan."
This got them in trouble.
Tonight Reuters ran a story from Dublin reminding
us that
the "Black and Tan" was a notorious British paramilitary unit from the
1920s, adding that the name "still arouses strong feelings in Ireland."
Wikipedia describes
the group's violent history and
the origins of their name.
"Any reference on our part to the British Army unit was absolutely
unintentional and no ill-will was ever intended," said a Ben & Jerry's
spokesman.
"Ben & Jerry's was built on the philosophies of peace and love," he added.
One of its
ingredients is "carrageenan." What's that? According to this web page, it's "a
colloidal extract from carrageen seaweed and other red
algae."
As I've travelled through life, I've never found myself pausing to ask:
How does "Urban Dictionary" define this phrase?
I'm actually not even sure what "Urban Dictionary" is, but they're one of
Google's top matches for the phrase "Snakes on a Plane."
It was kind of interesting watching
them going through the motions of a
definition.
A simple existential observation that has the same meaning as "Whaddya
gonna do?"
There's about four more examples on that page...
I've got my own definition. I play Quake III a lot, and am always
switching
in new goofy names for my avatar. ("You were fragged by...Gilligan!"
"You
were fragged by....a pwetty widdle girl.") Lately it's been "Snakes on a
Plane."
And I have this fantasy that somehow through the games I've played, my
lousy
Quake-playing strategies will become immortalized.
"So our avatars
were
spawning in the red cathedral area, and suddenly there's all these
grenades
raining down from the high window. Some lamer was continuously firing
grenade after grenade in the hopes that one would randomly hit us.
"So the floor of the cathedral is covered with grenades. Everywhere you
step - boom! There's something bad there! It's, like, I dunno, what
would
you call that?"
A 2004 article in the San Francisco Chronicle notes
that
FDA and medical researchers agree trans fats are "the most dangerous fat
in the human diet."
At the time the Girl Scouts' spokeswoman acknowledged the need for
healthier
alternatives in their cookies, then claimed that "We're fast-tracking that
ourselves."
It's two years later, and there's still 2 grams of dangerous trans fats in
my Do-si-Dos. The Girl Scouts are trying to kill us!!!
"By next year's drive, all Girl Scout
cookies will be
free of the fat that scientists now tell us is more harmful to our hearts
than saturated fat...."
The Scouts have [already] taken the villainous
substance out of three of their most popular cookies: Thin Mints, Caramel
deLites and Peanut Butter Patties.
MICHELLE NORRIS: I'm looking into your future. You've got two
films that are coming out soon
that both involve snakes. What's up with the snakes?
SAMUEL L. JACKSON: Well, actually, only one involves snakes.
Black Snake Mountain is a blues song by
Blind Lemon Jefferson that happens to be the title of this particular
film.
Snakes on a Plane is...pretty much what it sounds like.
I want to do films sometimes that
excited me when I was a kid. And I always liked horror and adventure
movies.
And when I opened the cover on that particular script, and it said "Snakes
on a Plane,"
I was immediately kind of viscerally struck with a "Oh yeah."
It turned out to be exactly what I thought. You know, somebody turns
loose a big crate-load of
poisonous snakes on an airplane, and we kind of fight the snakes 'til we
get to our
destination.
And it's just one of those popcorn kind of moments
where – you know, you go into a movie, you don't have to think
about what's
happening, you know what's
going to happen. You know? There's gonna be snakes loose on this plane,
some
people are gonna get bitten, and there's gonna be some victims, and
you hope you're a survivor. You know.
You just want to have that
experience
and excite people who are sitting there watching it.
So people who have a fear of flying and people who have a fear of snakes,
you know, are
gonna have like a double whammy going with that.
During World War II, the Steelers experienced player shortages.
They
twice
merged with other NFL franchises in order to field a team.
During the 1943
season, they merged with the Philadelphia Eagles forming the "Phil-Pitt
Eagles" and were known as the "Steagles". This team went 5-4-1.
In
1944
they merged with the Chicago Cardinals and were known as "Card-Pitt" and
informally known as the "Car-Pitts" or "Carpets".
I decided to look up this year's Super Bowl teams on Wikipedia. I also
learned that the 1938 Steelers had a player named Byron White, who later
left professional football and became a
Supreme Court Justice.
In 1979, the Seahawks set the NFL record for the lowest total offense in
one game (minus 7 yards) in a 24-0 loss to the Los Angeles Rams at the
Kingdome.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show - filmed 30 years ago - starred
Barry Bostwick as the nerdy "Brad Majors." Bostwick was 29.
30 years later Bostwick (now 59), played a serial killer in an episode of
the CBS TV show
Cold Case.
The detectives trace his character's history to 1977, when he may have
murdered a Philadelphia doorman...
As a troubled Mormon teenager, he'd searched for a woman as pure as
Mary Magdalene.
And eventually a female co-worker agreed to take him to a movie.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Besides footage of the traumatic date at the movie,
the episode included several songs from the film in its flashbacks.
Rocky Horror fans would recognize "Superheroes," "I'm Going Home," "Hot
Patootie,"
"Over at the Frankenstein Place", and - inevitably - "Eddie".
In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer gives out his email address
(chunkylover53@aol.com).
Curious web surfers emailed him - and they got some funny responses.
Dear Nerd,
I didn't even know the internet was on computers these days, let alone
some kind of electric mail dealie. Please send all future letters (and
beer) to:
642 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield USA then a zip code.
Praise Jebus!
What's going on? I was trying to bid on a Weird Al Yankovic t-shirt on
Ebay, and now everyone in the world is sending me electric letters like
crazy!
I'm so confused. Confused and tired.
Homer Simpson, local man
P.S. If you know Weird Al, tell him to send me a t-shirt.
The holiday was invented
in 1966 by Dan O'Keefe - whose son Daniel became
a writer for the TV show Seinfeld. In 1997 he wrote
the episode where George's father insists on celebrating Festivus
rather than the more burdensome Christmas.
Wikipedia reports that the
writer's father discovered
the holiday in a book of obscure European
celebrations. (He later wrote a book about "the social theory of magic"
as a ritual with real social significance.) He was also inspired by
Samuel Beckett's play "Crapp's Last
Tape," in which an elderly man makes a tape recording of
his grievances throughout his life.
So next year when December 23 rolls around, be sure to shout out: Happy
Festivus!
It's even better than Chrismukkah. (As seen on The O.C.)
I was listening to mp3s of the Avenue Q
soundtrack -
and didn't realize they were in random order.
I'd been applauding the musical for its brashness in opening with the
number "You Can Be
as Loud as the Hell You Want (when you're Making Love)."
But I was
surprised when it ended with Kate Monster dumping Princeton. She sings
"There's a fine,
fine line between a fairy tale and a lie...I don't have the time to waste on
you anymore...."
In a final nod to reality, this version of the
musical
closes with the gang consoling a heartbroken Princeton that at least
"There
Is A Life Outside Your Apartment." The number ends when he
picks up "Lucy the Slut" and takes her back to his apartment.
Fun-fact: one of the performers in the show also actually worked
with the Muppets
This scene should be awarded with the prize for the most silly character
death ever produced on TV....She
flies off the roof... I can't believe
what I saw.
Last week the writers of Las Vegas
killed off the character of Monica, the
hated new owner of James Caan's
casino. She was wearing a wing-like cape which caught an unfortunate
breeze on the casino's roof.
In this week's episode: they dump her ashes in a toilet.
Although I have this theory that Monica faked her death. (Leaving
the
casino
to a charity before Ed could re-claim it.)
