I’m feeling sadness for Haiti (text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to American Red Cross relief for Haiti) . . . and also for the following two “trivial” events because they represent and reflect larger cultural issues for me: City Lights Records closing and Conan O’Brien’s last show.

Conan O’Brien

Last night most of America tuned in to watch Conan O’Brien’s last show on NBC. Conan’s grateful closing monologue and “Free Bird” finale was a perfect ending to “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.” He went off the air playing his guitar with a huge grin on his face. That guy’s a class act.

Too bad “The Tonight Show” is dead now. Feels like a nail in the coffin. Is anyone really going to watch Leno again? Really? When we have the Internet, Letterman and so many other TV channels?

I was inspired by this quote from Conan’s closing monologue:

“Please don’t be cynical. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”

Dear Internet, Conan is today’s everyman. “I’m With Coco,” yes. (I’m also a little sad that the world is losing Conan’s Super Mario Bros. set backdrop.)

Where will Conan end up? On a late-night talk show on another network this September? On the Internet? For Conan O’Brien’s core audience (age 18-34), “the time slot is being replaced by a URL.” Read more: “Bye, NBC. Hello, Internet?”

City Lights Records

The end is near. I haven’t lived in Pennsylvania for over eight years now, but this is still important to me. My favorite independent record store, City Lights Records (off Penn State campus), is closing after 25 years. It’s sad, but not unexpected. City Lights is (was) State College’s last record store. I spent countless hours there. The closing of the store is the closing of happy memories that I won’t ever be able to revisit physically.

Read local coverage in The Daily Collegian and The Penn Stater (with video).

This comment by a user named Chuck really resonates with me: “I have mixed feelings towards the digital revolution. And it’s obviously here to stay. But there will always be a soft spot in my heart for those stores that influenced my listening habits.”

Late night comedy

Similarly, I have a soft spot for those creative comedians who were funny enough and cared deeply enough to influence my own sense of humor. “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” was a staple of my television consumption during high school and college. Though, during college, my TV watching started to approach zero. I also enjoyed David Letterman on both NBC and CBS for years, throughout my childhood and adolescence.

Even though I didn’t watch much of “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien” until January of this year, I am eager to know where Conan will land next and will probably tune in (if only on Hulu or similar). It’s strange how all this controversy between millionaire entertainers and network executives created such a genuine outpouring of support from the American public (working class). Strange that it even caused me to watch a network television show for the first time in a long while, if only for two weeks. But, I have to say, it was really fun, enjoyable television.

Michael Ian Black argues that Conan O’Brien has inexplicably become a modern representation of Norma Rae—someone who stands up and does the right thing in the face of corporate injustice. I think most of America feels that way. An unlikely hero, sure.

Digital revolution

As for independent music stores, if Penn State University and State College, PA can’t even manage to support one small basement record store anymore, then I can no longer deny that the halcyon days of rifling through stacks of obscure CDs (and vinyl, for some) and discovering new music via artwork and physical forms have ended. Those days ended years ago, of course. Plastic discs are a dying medium.

I can’t remember the last time I actually bought a music CD. I always hated how much physical space my huge music collection took up. But I also have such fondness for these days gone by. Each collected disc was potentially precious and meaningful. Albums mattered. Today I have more MP3s than I know what to do with. It’s hard to give any artist or album the proper amount of attention . . . and the gigabytes of MP3s continue to grow. The solution is to keep buying bigger hard drives on which to store all of this music and figure it out later.

I guess right now I’m feeling a little nostalgic for the illusion of simpler times. (And I’m starting to veer off topic.) I’m thinking of days before presidential administrations agreed with the RIAA and openly supported “file sharing damages of up to $150,000 per track.” The time we live in is certainly a transitional period for all media industries and entertainment products. But so long as independent artists are able to survive this cultural turmoil and continue to inspire our lives, we’ll come out all right. I could ramble some more about these issues, but instead maybe I’ll give one of these MP3 albums a second or third listen.

See you in September, Coco.

We spent most of Saturday afternoon in Darkside Cinema at the da Vinci Film Festival encore.

I loved the feature documentary In Pursuit of Panama by first-time filmmakers and lifelong friends Garrett Martin and Ryan Swan. The film is Kerouac-like, both genuine and inspiring. It’s a truly funny, coming-of-age story about a seven-country road trip that starts in Corvallis, Oregon. I definitely recommend it, if you can find it. (Personal sidebar: The experience of watching it approximated the feel I wanted to create with my first novel . . . that I never actually finished.) See the trailer at their website.

More movies

Last weekend I also watched Timecrimes, which was very good and reminded me of Primer. I love the exploration of time-travel paradoxes. See other films I’ve rated and reviewed at Filmometer.com.

Here is some interesting news: “Neuromancer movie in the works (no, really this time!).” The attached director is Joseph Kahn. You may know him as the director of Britney Spears’ “Toxic” and “Stronger” music videos. As well as Destiny’s Child’s “Say My Name” . . . and a Blink-182 music video . . . and a horrible feature with Ice Cube called Torque . . . and . . . I am afraid. I really want Neuromancer to be awesome.

On that note: “After Watchmen, What’s ‘Unfilmable’? These Legendary Texts.”

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus received a standing ovation at Cannes Film Festival this May but has not yet been picked up for U.S. distribution. Read more: “Terry Gilliam’s Final Cut for Heath Ledger and Imaginarium.”

The Orwellian satire Visioneers starring Zach Galifianakis looks very interesting as well.

It’s refreshing that Michael Bay has progressed to this current point in his career, where he’s willing to be a parody of himself. He’s really become the ultimate artist the postindustrial world has been waiting for. See: Verizon Commercial – Michael Bay EXTENDED. Groan.

Browsing the Web from 10,000 feet

This is very cool: Pixamix. It’s an experiment that reduces any site to its core color mood (i.e., giant pixels of color).

Resignation

Vanity Fair edits Palin’s bizarre, incoherent resignation speech into publishable shape: “Palin’s Resignation: The Edited Version.” Wow.

Ice cream

Will they succeed in making ice cream fall from the sky like snow? Check it out: “The Cloud Project Would Theoretically Make Ice Cream Fall Like Snow.”

I am reminded of a few weeks ago when I ate Cold Stone ice cream that melted into JELL-O pudding (mentioned here and here on Twitter). That was fun.

First, I really liked the YouTube DTV logo from June 12, 2009. Goodbye, analog television.

Second, below is some old crap that might still be funny or interesting.

Music and movies

This is intriguing: “David Lynch Writes a Rock Album.” Also, the “Kids” music video by MGMT is pretty cool. A friend sent this to me via email: “Everyone is monsters. Except your mom. And MGMT. MGMT’s dog is OK too.”

Here’s a political mashup: JFK Auto-Tuned. And a funny Jurassic Park mashup: Hey!

Also found this older stuff: The Lonely Island Episode 1: White Power! and every clip of Zach Galifianakis from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! on Adult Swim.

Transformers 2 and Michael Bay

The photo at right is the only keyboard Michael Bay knows how to use: “MICHAEL BAY: THE BOOM GOES ON.”

Press Ctrl-Alt-BOOM to restart. Click BOOBS to continue.

I’ve made several Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen posts on Twitter in the past couple of days, such as these two about screenwriters Kurtzman and Orci and the soundtrack.

I love this review (includes spoilers): “Michael Bay Finally Made An Art Movie.” And how! I’m sure the new Transformers movie will explode many heads this weekend.

Food (sort of)

Eat Me Daily has a lot of disturbing food-related features, as does the This is why you’re fat. blog.

Here’s an Eat Me Daily example: Cheez-It Flavored Lip Balm. What? There’s so much fast-food wrongness here: Burger King’s Super Seven Incher Ad, The McDonald’s Mac Snack Wrap and The McGangBang. Ugh.

Animals

Cute Overload calls this guy the blorpiest: disapproving frog. Also see: Super Keyboard Cat Bros. (the 8-bit version).

Cats be getting stoned: How catnip gets cats high.

Office jargon, Ground Zero and Twitter

I feel like it’s time to revisit some entertaining office jargon/annoying buzzword sites: The Ridiculous Business Jargon Dictionary and Generation X Office Lingo.

The Ground Zero app is an interesting. Here’s a quote: “Have you ever wondered what would happen if a nuclear bomb goes off in your city? With Google’s Maps framework and a bit of JavaScript, you can see the outcome. And it does not look good.”

If you like texts from last night, you should also like the Twitter-based Favrd.

Iran election crisis

Here are two interesting articles from last week about the Iran election crisis/protests: “U.S. Government Asks Twitter to Stay Up for #IranElection Crisis” and “Cyberwar guide for Iran elections.”

Go, Twitter! Though, weird, right?

Here are the bands I saw at Sasquatch! on Saturday, May 23: Blind Pilot, Doves, M. Ward, DeVotchKa, Animal Collective, The Decemberists, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Crystal Castles. I also caught the last couple of songs from the sets by both James Pants and Kings of Leon. I made the tough decision to see Doves over Passion Pit (who played at the same time) on the strength of their amazing 2000 album Lost Souls. The sheer volume of the Animal Collective and Crystal Castles sets made my ears bleed. The Decemberists and Yeah Yeah Yeahs were probably my favorites, though DeVotchKa was great as well. I tweeted periodically throughout the festival. Watch Sasquatch! 2009 videos on YouTube.

I have to say that Shara Worden’s performance with The Decemberists stole the show. It was the highlight of Sasquatch! for me. Here are some clips of Shara Worden with The Decemberists: performing “The Wanting Comes In Waves” on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” on 5/14; singing the “The Queen’s Rebuke” on 5/19; performing at a Missoula, MT concert on 5/24 and singing “The Queen’s Rebuke” again. The Decemberists (featuring Shara Worden and Becky Stark) also covered Heart’s “Crazy on You” live on 5/26. You can stream (and download) The Decemberists’ latest album The Hazards of Love at decemberistsshop.com. Here is Shara Worden performing solo (as My Brightest Diamond): “Golden Star” and “Something Of An End.”

After the Sasquatch! Music Festival, we headed to Seattle and walked around the Northwest Folklife Festival at the Seattle Center on Sunday, which was also pretty fun.

More music

This is too bad: “Legal Dispute Results in Music-less Danger Mouse Project.” Or not. The blank CD-R thing is funny, in a way. Also see: “Danger Mouse’s Next Album Will Be A Blank CD-R.” Anyway, you can hear the entire album now at NPR.

Want to help save a music/film/culture magazine? Here you go: The Campaign to Save Paste. Donate and get over 70 rare and exclusive MP3s as a thank you, from The Decemberists, Neko Case, She & Him, Of Montreal and many more.

Somehow I got sucked into the Beatbox Battle Online World Championship on YouTube. There was a competition to win a wild card into the event. Here are the top six entries: Julia Dales, Primitiv, D-9, Lytos, The Beatbox Hitman and Daichi. Julia Dales, a 17-year-old blonde Canadian, won.

Logos, brands and photography

This is an interesting list of how some popular logos have evolved: “Evolution of 30 Popular Logos.” Also see changing PlayStation logos: “The Making Of: PlayStation.” This site is really good: Brand New: Opinions on Corporate and Brand Identity Work.

This article is worth a look: “10 News photos that took retouching too far.”

I really like this Flickr photo set: AT-ATs: not just for xmas.

I just helped launch the Where’s Benny? Photo Contest for Oregon State University Summer Session. You can enter via Flickr and Facebook.

A bit of randomness

This is an amazing video of a Malay Eagle Owl named Kitty. Cute, creepy little Furby guy.

Ever heard of a winged cat? Here you go: “Cat in China grows a pair of wings.” You may also be interested in the world’s smallest cat.

President Obama’s ASU commencement speech a couple of week ago was pretty compelling and inspiring. Watch part 1, part 2 and part 3 at YouTube.

I’ll leave you with this: “GeekDad Parents, Kids and the Stuff We Obsess About
Swine Flu Twitterpocalypse: Acting Out King’s The Stand 140 Characters at a Time.”

I’ve spent a lot of my free time gardening lately. I guess it’s mostly garden preparation (read: shovel rage and weeder fury) at this point. Maybe next weekend I will plant some everbearing strawberries, probably Hecker (read about strawberry varieties). (I also plan to reference Oregon State’s Landscape Plants: Images, Identification, and Information to finish figuring out what’s growing in my backyard.) You can follow me on Twitter for more details about my gardening progress and other random thoughts.

Animation and entertainment

First, here’s an Easter leftover: “Swedish parishioners unveil Lego statue of Jesus.” The colored Lego blocks were placed on the inside so people could only see the white form of Jesus. Hmm.

“A Wolf Loves Pork” is an awesome stop-motion animation short by Takeuchi Taijin: “Wolf Chasing A Pig Stop-Motion Animation Using A Series Photographs.”

Hadn’t really thought about this before: Watch This: Disney Re-Uses Their Animation. Makes sense.

I like this parody of the Where the Wild Things Are trailer: Spike Jonze’s Everyone Poops.

Ah yes, Michael Bay, Joel Schumacher and Roland Emmerich all get mentioned: “Michael Bay Signs $50M Deal To Fuck Up ‘ThunderCats’.” The Onion wins again!

Science, business and economics

Whoa: “Weird Science takes on economics and the sex trade.” Learn about “the downsides of career advancement, the dynamics of shopping carts, a product that will feature in your future spam, and trading sex using meat as a currency.”

Here are two Gizmodo features: “This Is How the Sky Would Look if Both Your Eyes Functioned as Telescopes” and “London Bar Pumps Gin and Tonic Into The Air: Please Breathe Responsibly.”

That’s quite the collection of brands on this list: “The world’s 10 most powerful brands.” Here’s another interesting list of brands: “Twelve Major Brands That Will Disappear.” Recession depression!

Technology, legal and politics

Network neutrality? It’s Comcastic! Here’s a comparison to the UK: “Pick your poison: bandwidth caps or throttling?”

The court decided to make an example of The Pirate Bay founders: “Pirate Bay founders jailed, ordered to pay $3.6m in fines.” I mean, they didn’t call it The Pirate Bay for nothing.

Vaguely animal-related

Have you heard the Animal Collective’s “Zero” remix? Interesting what they’ve done to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song.

This is amusing: Fuck You, Penguin. It’s a blog about cute animals, kind of.

I liked this article on the evolution of visual perception: “Color Vision: How Our Eyes Reflect Primate Evolution.”

In April of 2009, Boaz is setting out on an Un-Road Trip. He’s criss-crossing the United States using every mode of transportation except for car. This may include a horse or dog sled, thus this link totally fits within my animal theme. So there.

It’s interesting how Obama ultimately got to keep his CrackBerry, I mean BlackBerry, in the White House . . . and how when the Obama administration arrived the White House was setup for email (and the modern world, in general) like it’s 1992: “E-Mail Outage Forces White House to Operate the Oldfangled Way.”

New network neutrality tools have arrived to help keep ISPs honest, thanks to Google. See these two articles: “Google lets users search for Internet blockers” and “Is Your ISP Throttling Your Internet Connection?” Can ISPs be stopped from filtering and throttling Internet access? Maybe with Google fighting broadband providers (somewhat indirectly) via Measurementlab.net. Wait, which side do we want to win? All our data are belong to Google, once again. It’s Comcastic!

I’ve been learning more about resveratrol (the red wine chemical, found in red grapes and peanuts), the French paradox, sirtuins (enzymes involved in the aging process) and Sirtris Pharmaceuticals. You know . . . good fats and bad fats, low-quality and high-quality foods, heart disease, dairy and meat, cancer prevention, the magic elixir of eternal life . . . blah blah blah.

About halfway through the Australian Open tournament I was thinking how cool it is that the top seven-ish men have become so competitive (see men’s draw). I was thinking that it’s no longer just Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. Though I guess it still kind of is. However, Nadal’s semifinal match with Fernando Verdasco was amazing. I wonder if Nadal will have the energy to defeat Federer this weekend, following his five-hour, five-set win over Verdasco. In the past, Nadal has won two-thirds of his meetings with Federer.


I don’t really care who wins this year’s Super Bowl, or even care that much about the commercials (except for the 3D ads). I thought it would’ve been interesting if the Arizona Cardinals had been forced to defeat every other NFL bird mascot on their way to the Super Bowl championship: Seattle Seahawks (Week 17), Atlanta Falcons (Wild Card game), Philadelphia Eagles (NFC championship) and Baltimore Ravens (Super Bowl). But that can’t happen now because the Baltimore Ravens lost the Pittsburgh in the AFC championship. Oh wait, Bill Simmons already wrote about this on January 16:

The Alfred Hitchcock Angle for “Creepiest Angle Involving Birds”
So you have the Cardinals beating the Seahawks in Week 17, then the Falcons in Round 1, and now, potentially, the Eagles in the NFC title game. Meanwhile, if the Ravens topple the Steelers, then the Cardinals could potentially beat every other NFL team with a bird nickname during their improbable five-game winning streak to capture the Super Bowl, and if that’s not enough, birds took down Thursday’s U.S. Airways flight heading from New York to Charlotte … the city that’s home to the team Arizona beat five days ago in Round 2.

Tired of the stock market? In this delicious economy, there’s this: “9 Things You Should Do Instead of Buying Stocks” (from Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert).

I can has Engrish? Check out these lists: “100 Most Often Mispronounced Words and Phrases in English” and “100 Most Often Misspelled Words and Phrases in English.” So many pet peeves, so little time. Do not misunderestimate us!

I found the x-axis and data labels of this car-themed GraphJam chart really funny.

I’ve been waiting for weeks to upgrade spiral::notepad to WordPress 2.7.1, but its release is still delayed. Entire WordPress development community otherwise occupied? Perhaps distracted by lolcats? See the WordPress Roadmap for projected release dates for next versions.