Nonpopulist's Browsings of the Day

Annie Wersching, now that is a rack on which I would like to put some spices. Am I doing this right? (In memory of 24 which is now in its last season)

I now write for The Gally Blog. I will try to keep up at least two posts a day here, but I am not making any promises. There will be another announcement concerning The Gally Blog and I in the coming weeks. There may even be an announcement to make concerning me writing for another site. I will let you know, mom. Here is my first post for The Gally Blog.

I am not necessarily a fan of MMA or UFC, but I am a fan of this post about the most recent UFC event as covered by noted internet personality Logic. [HammerFisted]

Some cool drawings of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg [Beatdom]

Sarah Palin is really getting a reaity show. I thought all of the talk about it was merely speculation. Surely she has some sort of political strategist to let her know this is a bad idea. Or maybe she is crazy like a fox. [WarmingGlow]

Venn Diagram that attempts to explain the difference between nerd, dork, and geek. I thought these were supposed to be funny. This one is like a real one you would learn about in a textbook [GreatWhiteSnark]

It does not matter how nice you are, if you hack the first and only presidential twitter account, the Secret Service will want a word with you. I don't think they will be very nice either. [CNN]

A hilarious literal pun picture.

[http://hilarion.tumblr.com/post/467664255]

John Feinstein is a Blowhard: Fact

Come read me burning a sportswriter. If there is one thing you can count on blowhards to do it is blow, hard. Sportswriters are often guilty of this, and John Feinstein is only the latest example of a sportswriter being caught in a bloviation. There is a bit of back story to get through before I can nail the gotcha bloggerism I have in store for Mr. Feinstein.
I enjoy sports talk radio. I used to even enjoy regular talk radio when I was a teenager. That was before I completely gave up on politics at 17. I am so jaded. As far as sports talk I have had passing phases between Colin Cowherd, Jim Rome, and more recently Dan Patrick. Patrick has a catch phrase, "passion bucket," that is a little cheesy and hokey, but also genuine and endearing. The phrase is used to mean how passionate someone is about life or a sporting event. It is a nice metaphor. Here it is used in a sentence: "Sean Payton's passion bucket was overflowing after the Saints' win in the Super Bowl because he knew how much the win meant to the city of New Orleans." Dan has been using this phrase for a while, I think even back to his old ESPN days, but now what he does with it is when he interviews a guest with which he has a good rapport he will goad them into using the phrase during an interview or on a broadcast. It's all in good fun.
Fast forward to Dan interviewing Cornell men's basketball coach, Steve Donahue, before their recent NCAA tournament game with Kentucky. Dan asked coach Donahue to work the phrase in which the coach delegated to one of his players, Ryan Wittman. When Wittman said "passion bucket" during a press conference he and his fellow teammates could barely contain their laughter because they were in on the joke, but serious sportswriter John Feinstein found nothing funny about their antics because he is a serious sportswriter who takes himself too seriously. Feinstein went on Tony Kornheiser's radio program and called the Cornell players racist for playing basketball or the NCAA racist for letting Cornell play in the tournament or you racist he knows how you lock your car doors when you see someone of a different ethnicity next to your car on a sidewalk. He was calling someone racist. That is all I know for sure. How he made that leap can not be fully explained, but one possible factor is Johnny had already made up his mind that Cornell is a school of racists and was looking for anything to back up his point. Passion bucket was just the sort of racial slur to set his sportswriter story sense tingling. Witness Feinstein's "column." What a tool. In Feinstein's interview on Kornheiser's show he bluntly called the Cornell player, Wittman, racist, but he veils that statement with his mind-numbingly boring column in the Washington Post. Here is Wimman's rebuttal/explanation of someone who has never met him calling him a racist from the Dan Patrick Show since Feinstein can not be bothered with doing research or follow-up since he is busying himself with writing for a dying medium and other up and coming bloviations of obliviousness he has burning on his mental hot plate.
/dismounts soap box
//wonders if anyone still uses the term soap box
///Feinstein, ya burnt, go write a column for some city's Times-Picayun or Press-Register
I did not use a picture of Feinstein because sportswriters' faces should really remain a mystery.

Dock Ellis Threw a No-Hitter on LSD

Some people do not know that former major league pitcher, Dock Ellis, once pitched a no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates while tripping on acid. I did. I knew that. The video below is Dock himself giving commentary accompanied with music and animation. It is art. Appreciate it.



What other positive things do you think people could accomplish on drugs?

Somebody Get This Man A Cheeseburger

The latest Youtube sensation involves a drunk man longing for a cheeseburger and the tangled web he weaves as he tries to fight a guy at a Whataburger in Texas with special guest appearance by noted white rapper Paul Wall (don't care) and other people I think have something to do with music about which I do not care. Have you ever been drunk to the point where you could not fight? I don't think I have except maybe that one night where I drank loads of Soju and beer as I shouted "No tomorrow!" with a bunch of Korean guys. I threw up kim chi 4 times the next morning. It turns out there was a tomorrow.
You have a chance to get in on the ground floor here, folks. The video was posted 3/25/2010. There is brief, non-sexual nudity of the 2nd worst kind, a guy's butt. Enjoy and be the first to share it with your friends. Tell them where you heard it first. Y'all come back now, ya hear? Ok, I'm going to stop now and show the video.

My favorite parts of the video are the guy in the brown shirt repeatedly asking the drunk guy who attacked him, "are you done" after he had the guy in the worst submission hold ever *looks to MMA aficionados for confirmation* and the guys of unknown ethnicity at the 3:00 mark who say, "Only in America." Only in America, indeed, my culturally diverse brethren. And then at the end we see Paul Wall put Michael Strahan on blast for being slow. Not a smart move, Gap Tooth will be looking for you in the screets! You won't be able to lay low at the scrip club or Scranton, PA. Wait, that one works without changing the... oh, nevermind. I ASKED FOR A CHEESEBURGER! I'LL WHOOP ALL Y'ALL! I WILL BEAT YOU ALL OVER THOSE FRENCH FRIES!

People Drank Fat Mike's Pee at SXSW... and They Cheered for It

Fat Mike as Cokie the Clown

Lost in the deluge of South by Southwest coverage was news of a performance by lead singer/ bass player/ co-founder of NOFX, Fat Mike, as an alter ego he created for their recent EP, Cokie the Clown. He dressed up in full clown costume, handed out a few shots of tequila to some fans up front, did a couple of shots himself, and did a few acoustic songs without the band present including The Decline (which I would have loved to hear.) One can not listen to much NOFX music and not wonder what sort of dark events shaped Fat Mike. Mike let some of those events find light during his performance at the Austin's SXSW festival including the story of him helping his mother die when she was terminally ill, stealing a record from his friend after he had committed suicide while the friend was still hanging there, and possibly the most disturbing story from this review from Pinpoint Music of the performance...

"The series of stories Cokie told started off with an account of how back in the mid -’80s Mike and Eric Melvin had witnessed a girl being forcefully carried down the stairs of a club on her way to being raped. As it goes, they both stood there watching slack jawed as she stared at them helplessly, then she grabbed onto both of them and yelled, “Help me!”. The men told Mike and Eric not to say a word. They did exactly that and went upstairs to watch the Vandals perform."

Wow. Wow. I could type wow about twenty more times. Not to mention at the end of his performance he let a video play that began just as he was offstage about to come on and perform which showed him peeing in the bottle of tequila from which he poured the shots he and the crowd drank at the beginning of his set. "That'll teach you posers to clamor to get up front", could be the message he was trying to send with that stunt. Some people have tried to post videos of the performance on Youtube, but they have all been taken down for copyright infringement claims by NOFX's label, Fat Wreck Chords, which is owned by Fat Mike. That is a rare move by Fat Wreck, but I can understand it considering the circumstances. I have been sitting on this story for three days trying to find a video, and then out of nowhere Fat Wreck's twitter feed posts a link to a story TMZ did on the event. TMZ even got a quote from Fat Mike. Say what you will about TMZ, but they get to the bottom of stories. They really give it their all. The quote from Mike was,

"I confirmed that urine was not classified as a biohazard waste and not subject to the risks of legal ramifications of blood, semen, or feces."

Here is the video from TMZ's website:

And now a favorite Youtube clip of NOFX---
Green Corn

The Nonpopulist's Browsings of the Day

The internet has been largely disappointing today. Nothing is really blowing by e-skirt up today. The trade rumors of Donovan McNabb to the Raiders or Rams? I am not buying that. People still whining about the change to the NFL playoff overtime rule? I am not really sweating that one either for two reasons. 1. I actually trust the owners to make a good decision this time and 2. We will cross the wired-with-explosives bridge of a playoff overtime quirk when we get there.
Here is some stuff I saw on the internet today:

An old picture of Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert. Whoa, hair. That must have been a hell of a rat's nest to deal with, Colbert. I actually watched The Colbert Report last night. It has been a while. Don't get me wrong, it's a funny show, but I just can't make it appointment television. You have to make cuts or you will spend your whole life in front of the TV. He is still doing awkward interviews at the end, and it was still funny. I was hoping to catch another piece in the "Better Know a District Series." Does he still do that? I was not surprised to find him making fun of Glenn Beck. Someone needs to run him into the ground. He is quite possibly the biggest tool walking planet earth. Rachel Maddow would be a close second. Smarmy much? Original picture at [YepYep]

This is funny. Allegedly before a group of NFL draft prospects was about to take the Wonderlic assessment, Tim Tebow asked that they all bow their heads and say a prayer. Someone allegedly said, "Shut the F$%* up." Classic. [The Gally Blog]

The Warming Glow was pulling its internet weight today with a strong post featuring an amazing animated gif of Allison Brie. Jeff and Abed's face say it all. It simply must be viewed. [Warming Glow]

Google and Youtube experienced a brief outage this morning. When reached for comment, Google was quick to say that the issue was technical in nature, not tampering or cracking. Anything but that. China? What reason would China have to crack our web servers? That's preposterous! The timing seems a little fishy. [CNN]

'Flu Shot Girl' Does the Dubstep

We are living in the golden age of the internet, people, and I am about to prove it to you. Years down the road when our children have to use biometrics to be verified before they can post a comment on a website and videos can not be embedded without expressed written consent we will be able to say, "I remember the good ol' days, sonny." We will say a lot of things, though, and they won't make sense. So our kids will send us to nursing homes, but they will probably be better than nursing homes are now, I hope.
Many of you in internet land may remember the aspiring cheerleader whose life was tragically shattered by a simple flu vaccine. Many people called it a hoax. I have to admit I was skeptical. But she's getting better, so it is not too soon to do a hilarious remix with the original news report is it? Hell no, says Youtube user R0kkyu's video "WOBBLEGIRL - This is how you dance to dubstep." What is dubstep you may ask? I asked that as well. Urban Dictionary was surprisingly vague so I had to go to Wikipedia which defines dubstep as "a genre of electronic dance music that has its roots in London's early 2000s UK garage scene." Either way this girl is now an expert at it. My favorite parts of the video are at 0:25-0:33 and 1:02-1:18. Those breakdowns are nasty. You can not touch this girl on the dubstep. She is killing it. This is a classic lemons to lemonade situation. She is like the kid in Rookie of the Year when he breaks his arm, but that makes him able to throw a nasty fastball that no one can touch and he leads the Cubs to a pennant. Dream on, losers. I have watched this video roughly 15 times and I am still loving it. So wrong/so right.



Below I have the original news report and an update from the cheerleader herself, Desiree Jennings, in which she says she is getting better. So see, it all worked out in the end. Just like in Rookie of the Year.
 

Nonpopulist's Browsings of the Day

The above picture is a logo alphabet. I knew eighteen out of twenty-five. It looks like they combined "W" and "V."

A newish meme, "Release the Kraken," is making the rounds on the 'tubes. To be honest, this one is underwhelming, probably because it is trying to follow Epic Beard Man. Release the kraken is still funny, though. [Urlesque]

Alternet has compiled a list of ten overreactions to the health care bill passing. A list of under reactions has yet to be compiled that I have found. It's funny how people are now all over Rush Limbaugh, ribbing him that he should be packing his bags for Costa Rica afer he said he would move there if the health care reform bill passed. It's just the latest case of 'gotcha internetism.' (like gotcha journalism) It's kind of silly to hold him to his rhetorical boasts. It's like when I was in high school, and we were playing this really crappy team of inbred rednecks in basketball. In the locker room before the game I said if we were lost to this team I would castrate myself. Well, you can see where this is going... We lost to the team of inbred rednecks in spectacular fashion and afterward everyone was trying to make a joke of me cutting my balls off, and the coach was even laughing about it. Hey guys, you missed the point. We just lost to a really bad team that we should have beaten. We were a very bad team- true story. [Alternet]

Remember that show The Unit? Yeh, me neither. I think it had the first president from 24 in it. Anyway, David Mamet created it and this memo to the writers of his creation is fairly awesome. In it he gives some valuable writing advice including, "DO *NOT* WRITE A CROCK OF SHIT. WRITE A RIPPING THREE, FOUR, SEVEN MINUTE SCENE WHICH MOVES THE STORY ALONG, AND YOU CAN, VERY SOON, BUY A HOUSE IN BEL AIR *AND* HIRE SOMEONE TO LIVE THERE FOR YOU."
Duly noted, Mamet. I first saw this here at The Cajun Boy blog who got it from a tumblr called "Diablo Cody is not even her real name." [Diablo Cody is not even her real name]

James Cameron calling Glenn Beck an asshole? That is like Ulysses S. Grant calling Bill Clinton corrupt. Let's just agree that they are both tools. [The Hollywood Reporter]

The Indian Military takes terrorism seriously. Have you ever had jalapeno juice on your fingers and wiped your eyes? It SUCKS. [Gamma Squad]

The Double McGangBang Is an Epic Win

No, it's not a Ronald McDonald and Grimace sex tape link. It is an epic combination of items on McDonald's dollar menu that will take days, possibly weeks, off of your life. The Double McGangBang is a McDonald's McChicken Sandwich inside of a double cheeseburger. I was so fascinated when I first heard about it via this link from Gunaxin (although I think they got it from somewhere else but I'm not laboring through the internet link trail since I feel arteries hardening at this point) that I had to try it for myself. I, of course, have photo documentation.

Yes, I got a Sparks for lunch. Don't judge me! My initial thoughts are, "Whoa, this is huge. I'm going to have to squish it down to get it in my mouth (That's what she said.) Ah, damnit, there is mayonnaise on the chicken sandwich. I hate mayonnaise, or as I like to call it 'abortion juice,' so much that I forget some people actually like it and restaurants actually put it on sandwiches (not that McDonald's is a restaurant.) Anyway, the taste bouquet is masking the mayo taste well, but after the first two bites I am starting to feel full. I purposely have not eaten anything today and only had coffee and water to drink. This is not feeling good. On alternating bites I am liking the taste and then feeling disgusted with myself. Photo update:

At this point I am glad I did not get any fries, but I am definitely not going to eat the two apple pies I got just because they give you two for one dollar. I am done with the Sparks Red and I have a lump in my stomach. This must be the price all investigative journalists pay to get to the heart of the story. This story is going straight to my heart and hardening on the way. I feel gross. I regret NOTHING!

Hey, Want a Top Ten List That Will Make You Throw Up?

Well, I have just the thing for you. It's the list of the ten songs most downloaded on ITunes (courtesy of the AOL Radio Blog.) Here is the list with my uninformed comments in italics.
10. Ke$ha- "Tik Tok" Who is this? She has a symbol in her name? Ooohhh, she's like a modern day e e cummings. Wait, this isn't good.
9. Leona Lewis- "Bleeding Love" Is this Lennox Lewis' daughter? When are we getting to The Beatles?
8. Taylor Swift- "Love Story" She's pretty. #8 all-time? Are teenage girls the only ones using ITunes?
7. Flo Rida- "Get Low" Sounds like a bangin' club hit. Wait, what does that mean?
6. Lady Gaga- "Just Dance" The lady that dresses weird. That's what you are. Nothing more. WHERE IS MY ZEPPELIN?
5. Coldplay- "Vida la Vida" I guess this is an ok song, but not worthy of top five all-time download.
4. Jason Mraz- "I'm Yours" Um, bro, could you be any more chill, bro?Go suck a FarmAid cock.
3. Black Eyed Peas- "Boom Boom Pow" I'm beginning to think I will not be finding any Steve Miller Band on this list.
2. Lady Gaga- "Poker Face" The song may be catchy, but I just don't look at her and say, "Her career has staying power." It's more like, "Future number on a crappy VH1 Saturday afternoon countdown something or other."
1. Black Eyed Peas- "I Gotta Feeling" I absolutely hate this song. I never thought I would say this, but hurry up and release some posthumous Michael Jackson songs so this crap sandwich can be unseated.

That was brutal. Hopefully with time this list will balance out to include some decent music. Or maybe this is decent music and I'm old. Nope, the first one.
*Spits tobacco juice and asks you to leave lawn*

Nonpopulist's Browsings of the Day

 Tina Fey, why do you continue to confuse my boner?

Have you sadly come to the realization that you will never visit Paris? Let your self-pity marinate by viewing an interactive map of the sites around the town you will never visit. [Paris 26 Gigapixels]

A tumblr devoted to Mystery Science Theater 3000 haikus, that is at least a weekly click. [http://mst3khaiku.tumblr.com/]

A Steven Seagal emotion chart.

Couchsurfing! If I was still a college student or single I would be all over this. Now I will settle with being all over a porn based on this. [Couchsurfing]

An intrepid look at the Neon Deion Sanders in his post- playing days pursuit. I am glad for the update, but I am not sure what to make of him after reading this article. Make my mind up for me, sportswriter! [ESPN]

Shia "Rough" Lebeouf (I think I got that from FilmDrunk) gives a little bit more information about that wreck where he lost fingers that have been replaced by hip bone pieces. That's rough, Lebeouf. [Technorati]

More information on Conan's upcoming nationwide tour. [LA Times]

The government is watching you on the Facebook. O noes! They can't see me looking at only pictures of girls in bathing suits, can they? [Readwriteweb]

So, 24, you recycled the girl double agent storyline on the Dana Walsh character? I didn't like her character at all anyway and now you've made me hate her. Jerks.