Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Weird…weird…very weird….

:: I saw this linked on a lot of highly-trafficked blogs, so my linking it probably won’t make much difference at all, but here’s the theme from Shaft, played by…the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.

(Thanks to the movie In the Line of Fire, the Clint Eastwood thriller, I’ll never misspell “ukulele” again. Believe it or not, the spelling of “ukulele” actually plays into a significant plot-point in that movie.)

:: Bacon zombie. (via)

:: OK, I’ve committed the act of fanfic in the past, but not in a long time, and…well, here’s some Star Trek fanfic. I clicked on a single story and read about five paragraphs in; in that space one character sat on a whoopee cushion and the author used it’s as a possessive. Then I was done.

That’s about all for this week.

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Not a whole lot going on weird this week. I’m losing my touch….

:: Letterman’s Top Ten George W. Bush Moments:

Number Four is my favorite. Remember, the guys at Powerline still think this guy is Teh Genius.

:: The Periodic Table of Awesome. Sure, I could quibble a bit, but since they replaced “Bob Saget” the other day with “Samuel L. Jackson” (whose element symbol is, of course, Mf), I’m happy. (Bob Saget? Awesome? Come on now!)

I don’t remember where I saw this linked, because I forgot to bookmark it and only found it again by Googling.

That’s all, I guess.

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Weirdness on Da Web!

:: I kind of wish I liked the sound of handbell choirs more than I do (generally, my attention flags after just a couple of minutes of handbells), because to watch a good handbell choir is always fascinating. It looks easy enough — it’s just a bunch of people ringing bells — but they have to ring the right bells at the right time, so if their timing is off, the entire tune will falter. This gets more impressive the more complicated the music is. In college we had a handbell choir that did religious music exclusively, but I generally find handbells more fun to hear if they’re doing something offbeat, such as…the Main Theme to the Pirates of the Caribbean movies!

:: For baseball fans, it’s always worth remembering what an entertaining jerk Rickey Henderson was:

In the early 1980s, the Oakland A’s accounting department was freaking out. The books were off $1 million. After an investigation, it was determined Rickey was the reason why. The GM asked him about a $1 million bonus he had received and Rickey said instead of cashing it, he framed it and hung it on a wall at his house.

Actually, messing with the heads of accountants is always good fun, so I can’t hold this one against Rickey. And I always found something admirable about the fact that Henderson wanted to play so badly that toward the end he was playing semi-pro ball. After all, to paraphrase Annie Savoy, you gotta respect a ballplayer just tryin’ to finish out the season.

:: OK, time for a little Star Trek bitching. At the risk of sounding like a deranged fan, this interview with one of the producers of the new movie — via AICN — presents what has got to be the laziest excuse for the movie cheerfully ignoring established canon that could possibly be cooked up. I would actually respect them more if they just said “We wanna start over with the same characters and do our own thing and screw your canon, so how do ya like that”, but instead we get a whole bunch of goofy babble about how quantum physics establishes that there are infinite possible timelines, so they’re just in a brand new timeline! Oh, come on. This is just dumb. Maybe we should use quantum physics to generate a timeline where we could finally see if an Imperial Star Destroyer could take out the Enterprise.

More next week.

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Only one item this week. I saw more weird stuff than this, but this one stands alone. In fact, it just might give me cause to stop running this feature. I was literally rendered speechless by this. I know, other cultures and all that, but…huh?!

What am I talking about? Well, via PZ Myers, I’ve now learned that in Catalonia, an old Christmas tradition involves statuettes of famous people defecating. You get one of these statues and you hide it in your neighbor’s Nativity scene for them to find, because it symbolizes fertilization and prosperity for the coming year.

I can’t decide what I think about this. I’m leaning toward thinking it’s possibly the funniest tradition I’ve ever heard of. The sheer irreverence of it, and apparently they’ve been doing this for two hundred plus years. Wow.

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Not a whole lot, since I wasn’t doing much websurfing, but:

:: Oh, come on. Here’s a simple test to see if the person you’re dealing with is an idiot: if they use the words “Muslim” or “Socialist” to describe Barack Obama, they’re an idiot.

:: Heckuva job, Bushie. God, these people need to go.

:: In a truly weird item: Matthew Yglesias, whom I believe to have grown up in NYC, is a native New Yorker who actually admits that NYC pizza isn’t the only kind of acceptable pizza in the world. But then, Matt is a pretty sensible fellow and not given to rabid lunacy.

OK, that’s all.

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Here we go:

:: What management idiot thought this up?! And to not even spell “tries” right?!

:: Not a web find, but something I saw on the way home from grocery shopping last weekend and I got a picture with the phone:

It’s kind of hard to make out because it was raining, but it’s one of those street corners that is covered with signs because a business down the road is having some kind of massive blow-out sale of the type associated with going-out-of-business. However, in this case — it’s a furniture store — the signs don’t say “Closing” or “Going out of business”, but rather, “Remerchandising Relinquishment”. And I have to note: I have absolutely no idea what this means. None. Is that a new way of saying “Going out of business”, or does it mean something else? What the heck is “Remerchandising Relinquishment”?

And while I’m on the subject, does anyone besides me ever wonder about the people whose job it apparently is to stand at street corners holding placards for stores having their liquidation sales? Are these actually employees of those businesses, or is there some firm that actually contracts out their employees to hold these placards up at street corners, or are they poor people being paid under the table, as it were, to do what must be a freakishly boring job that requires standing in one place, doing nothing, in potentially ugly weather (like a cold November rain)?

:: I’ve been long trying to decide what contemporary gizmo it is that forms the justification for our species’s existence in the first place — i.e., what we were created to invent. I’ve now decided that it is USB. I want each and every item in this wonderful post.

:: Hey, wanna know what life was like for political prisoners in the Soviet Union? Latvia’s got you covered! (via)

Enough for this week. More next!

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

And we’re back with the Burst of Weirdness! Yay!!!

:: No Smoking in the Skull Cave has a post up called How to Hatch a Dinosaur: A Batman Episode in 18 Screen Caps. It’s funny in that kitsch way, of course, but the very first one makes me think of if this year’s Republican ticket had actually run in 1968….

:: I’ve had this bookmarked for a while, so here it is: Star Wars rubber ducks. I can’t endorse this; Darth Vader shouldn’t squeak when you squeeze him.

:: I plugged “Cthulhu” into Google’s Blog Search, and after a couple of clicks I found Cthulhu Family Circus. I’m so glad it’s Jeffy in that strip!

And we’re back. Huzzah!!!

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

[Broken link fixed]

Oddities for a hot Sunday afternoon (Lord, I hate July; I don’t know how you people south of the 42nd parallel do it):

:: The onward march of technology has had a lot of impact on architecture and the way our cities and towns look; one of the more notable effects is the erection of broadcast towers everywhere. The effect is especially pronounced in “old world” European cities like Prague; check out this TV tower there, rising above the staid old buildings.

But that tower’s not even the weird part, oh no. Scroll down for a closer look at the things attached to that tower….

(via)

:: The wonderful world of Russian advertising through the years.

:: Not weirdness per se, but wow, the teaser poster for the new Star Trek reboot movie is awful. Seriously, that is one bad poster, and not “bad” as in “good”. How many people, other than hard-core geeks, even recognize the StarFleet insignia anymore? About the only real iconic thing from Trek anymore is the Enterprise herself, and apparently that’s being kept under wraps. I remain, as ever, unenthusiastic about this whole project, and this poster does nothing to get the blood pumping.

All for this week….

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

I wasn’t online much this week, so I didn’t see a whole lot of weirdness. But:

:: Someone made a trombone out of glass. It’s a really cool video to watch, but the background music is lousy. (via)

:: I suppose that in the current housing market, actually putting effort into selling the house is probably useless, huh? Hence a blog of nothing but bad photos from real estate listings. Wow. (also via)

:: I was looking for weirdness at Warren Ellis’s site, and while it isn’t weird, I sure do like this picture.

OK, that’s all.

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