Is the best way to describe mash-ups. The Best of Bootie 2006 is out and there’s some fun stuff.

There’s something genius about crossing 80’s hit “You spin me round” with Christina Aguilera.

Other favorites:
Go Home Productions – Don’t Hold Back, Sweet Jane (Chemical Brothers vs. Velvet Underground vs. U2 vs. Sugababes vs. MARRS)

DJ Jay-R – Sweet Sovereign (Lady Sovereign vs. Eurythmics vs. Shiny Grey)

ARRRR!!!!

Overheard in New York is one of the greatest community supplied blogs ever, if you’re in need of unintentional humor.

It also presents a fun opportunity to make use of Google Blogsearch for narrowing it down a bit.
Here’s all the posts about bimbettes and hipsters ( I can’t get enough of them). For extra points, you can subscribe to a feed of that deliciousness.

Additional coolness = Mihai’s mashup with Google Maps

This all makes me miss New York.

Okay, I don’t know if I necessarily want to wear these– but I think the following threadless tees are high-larious.

Hmm. I guess I love anthropomorphized food. Go figure.

Rayman Raving Rabbids is the funniest game I’ve played in a long time (since Psychonauts?) My favorite game so far is “Bunnies Have a Great Ear for Music”- where you find the bunny that is singing out of tune in a choir and slap him out of it. The shooter-on-rails games are also excellent.

Gabe from Penny Arcade posted some other great bunny situations here.
Some additional excellent bunny fan art.

Alright, after a very long period of downtime due to our computer going down at Caltech, the archive of Crippling Depression (our own breed of crappy comics about life at ‘Tech) is back online. This is thanks to Kevin’s dreamhost account.

Because it was written in godawful php3, I decided to port it over to Ruby on Rails. Fortuitously, the mysql schema was exactly the right format. A lot fewer lines of code now…and this time, I’m going to keep track of the damn static html, so the next move will be painless. As a bonus, I have it on good authority that we’re going to post a new comic soon (the first in over four years).

We should have done this in class. Found via video.stumbleupon.com

I watched Flags of our Fathers with the parents the other night. It was quite an impressive movie about the three surviving soldiers from the famous “raising the flag” photograph. It bothered me the entire time, but it turns out the annoying jackass soldier is the guy from Bring it On! — and that horrible Happy Endings movie (I’m not going to bother to link to those.)

I look forward to checking out the companion movie, Letters from Iwo Jima.

Most everyone I know is quick to jump on the “Let’s make fun of Ben because he likes zombies” bandwagon. Perhaps this is because they see the zombie genre as an excessively campy sub-genre of horror flicks. Well, personally, I hate campy horror movies but I have been powerfully drawn to the wave of zombie revivalism found in 28 Days Later, the new Dawn of the Dead and George Romero’s latest Land of the Dead.

Of the world-ending scenarios, the zombie-apocalypse is one that is terrifying, plausible but also somewhat survivable. The message of most of these tales is that if you’ve got your head on right, through ingenuity and pluck you may be able to stave off the zombies (albeit temporarily). This message does not usually apply to normal horror movies which are fairly arbitrary. Moreover, it seems to me that zombies – unlike Freddie Krueger, vampires, and that girl from the Ring – are not that far-fetched in a science-gone-amok sense.

So, I actually think zombie stories teach us great lessons on how to survive if presented with this plausible… nay! PROBABLE situation. (Much more probable than robot-apocalypse, in my opinion) Clearly, the author of World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Max Brooks, would agree, as his previous book was a basically a zombie HOWTO, The Zombie Survival Guide. World War Z, however, is a completely different beast.

Most zombie works occur over a relatively narrow window of time. World War Z stands out, due its vast scale. The story spans the entire globe and stretches for at least a decade. It is a meticulously researched, relentlessly anal work that is conveyed one vignette at a time slowly revealing how the story of how humanity screwed up, panicked, got pwned, and then finally got its shit together in the face of the undead menace. It’s clearly not a spoiler to say that humanity “wins”, since it is an “oral history” — and history is written by the victors… and zombies are illiterate anyways.

Still, I won’t reveal much as — there’s simply too much stuff in the book anyways. In any case, I’ll ramble about some of my favorite parts and call it a night.

As an industrialized, first-world nation, America had a lot of problems dealing with the undead. The defeat of the technologically sophisticated military at Yonkers is a great story. Adjusting to the post-apocalypse economy was also difficult. White-collar workers suddenly become horribly unskilled. This hits particularly close to home, as I spend a lot of time lamenting my utter lack of post-apocalypse skills. Perhaps, my heightened interest in zombie works is to compensate— at least I’ll know what to do, if not how to do it.

Some of the most fascinating stuff is how different countries reacted to the zombie threat. China, predictably, hid the menace under a layer of denial (much like their initial reaction to actual pandemics). Israel reacted quite decisively and admirably. England made use of its castles again. Additionally, there are some great “cameos” by real figures. It seems a thinly veiled version of Bill Maher and Anne Coulter get intimate. Most tantalizing, of course, there’s the implied President and the Vice-President of the United States (I won’t spoil it).

Ultimately, the book is rather optimistic about how humanity eventually triumphs. I wonder if Brooks isn’t overly idealistic about our capability to band together against a global, mutual threat especially after the de facto collapse of western civilization.

I’m kinda frightened by the news that the story has already been optioned for a movie by Brad Pitt’s production company. It seems like the story is just too large to be confined to a movie. I’d rather see this get made into a massively multiplayer online game.

In conclusion, EDUCATE YOURSELF ABOUT THE ZOMBIE MENACE.

Random fun facts:
The American military refers to the zombie menace casually as “Zack” (kinda like “Charlie” in Vietnam). The English call them “Zed Heads” — silly Brits!

Okay… to blog or not to blog?

Pros:

1. Become a contributing (non-leech) member of the blogosphere
2. Another outlet for staving off the boredom
3. A written record of my whims, musings, rantings

Cons:

1. Will start to use the phrase “read about it on my blog” (don’t know if I can say that with a straight face)
2. Don’t I type enough as it is?
3. A written record of my whims, musings, rantings

Seriously, though, I’m terrified of not having enough to really blog about. My first instinct is just to blog about the stuff I’ve recently read, watched, heard – either on “teh Internets” or on the TiVo, on the plane (the only time I really read books, in the theater, what have you. Basically, the stuff I normally spam to everyone via IM or talk incessantly about. Anyhow…let’s get started.