Fuck everybody, I love Erykah Badu. I've always loved her, always will, and have got her every album as soon as they come out since Baduizm (that means 11 straight years of love). Her new video is full of references to some other great albums and is interrupted by an excerpt of a video by her new super group side project Edith Funker (which includes Wendy & Lisa (of Prince's band The Revolution), ?uestlove, and DJ JazzyJeff among others). Where's the love?
References:
In other news, my new all-time favorite subway conductor is whoever it is on the F who sounds like Q-Tip...
Theme Music: King Horror - Loch Ness Monster [download]
I got back from Key West a while back and think I got skin cancer as a result (no joke!). Mostly all I did was read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, swim, eat and drink too much.
I read that the dead outnumber the living in Key West due to the large cemetery in the center of it. There's a tomb rumored to house a vampire and one man's inscription reads "I told you I was sick." Which is not nearly as funny as this.
I also caught this on video, an osprey eating a fish...brain first! I shoot what National Geographic is afraid to:
Oh, and I saw this:
Dilettante cryptozoologists would probably presume it to be a variant on the Loch Ness monster or Champ but it's clearly related to the Mokèlé-mbèmbé. Please ignore the asshole blocking the shot...
Me and Sachar went and saw this year's Oscar animated shorts at IFC and it was maybe the best idea ever (with getting stoned [which we neglected to do] coming in short second). Thanks to the unending beauty of the internet you can watch some highlights (wink!) here: Madame Tutli [Part 2]
I've been privately sending this to people for a while but it's time the world knew how amazing The System are (no further comment or explanation necessary):
I'm sorry, I can't help it! The clothes! The shoes! The attitude! The special effects! The signature dance moves! Bow down before greatness...
TV-Links is back up after having been taken down by the coppers! Back in the day it had pretty much every show or movie you ever wanted to watch ready to stream at a moments notice. When videos were removed or broken someone would inevitably upload a new version within a few days. It looks like they're still slowly rebuilding the wealth of links they had before but already it's shaping up to be great:
[Theme Music: The Beatles - Child of Nature (written and recorded by John while in India, later reworked and rerecorded as Jealous Guy)]
I was recently given the most amazing gift I could possibly imagine, a DVD of the 1942 live action version of the Jungle Book. I know I'm normally given to overstatement but this really really was my favorite movie of all time (that is, until I saw Short Circuit and Explorers). Rewatching it for the first time since the 80s made me just a little bit delirious. Knowing what was going to happen next without remembering having seen it before made me feel as if someone had somehow recorded a childhood dream I had and played it back to me, dredging up memories so old I didn't know I had them (I had a similar experience eating the dirt flavored Bernie Bott Jelly Belly beans that immediately took me back to being four years old and sitting in the rotting leaves and dirt under my porch). This was the movie that both led me to decide that the Black Panther was my favorite animal of all time and perfectly illustrated how I saw myself when I was running around all day playing in the woods, a child of nature, friends with all the animals and deeply pessimistic about the human world. Of course at the time I thought it was performed by real Indians (not by what appears to be a bunch of Guidos in brown face) in overgrown lost cities deep in the heart of the Indian jungle (instead of a Los Angeles sound stage). Friends would invite me to watch the cartoon version and if I only had the vocabulary at the time I would have said "What the fuck is this shit? Why would anyone settle for singing cartoons when they could have real panthers, wolves, monkeys, bears, tigers and elephants with a little kid running around with them?" I was going to post a little YouTube clip of it but then discovered that it's entered the public domain so you can now watch the entire thing (check it out at the 14:10 mark to see a toddler strolling around a den full of wolves!):
Apparently most feral children have been raised by dogs or wolves (here's a list). One feels inclined to develop romantic ideas about the purity of kids raised without human contact but it reality it doesn't seem to work out that way:
Friday nights around 2 AM Trash bar has free karaoke. A while back it unfortunately became super popular and thus no fun but that has apparently faded and it's back to being the same half empty room with $6 beer and whiskey specials and moments of pure joy. I never want to go without Steve again:
The brief pause in singing around the 1:10 mark is because John from Massachusetts pointed out a stray quarter on the stage so Steve from Massachusetts (being a fellow member of that frugal New England race) of course had to stop to pick it up.
I've been searching for this great article I read about the impracticality of every conceived form of inter-system space travel but can't for the life of me find it. I can only remember a few of the criticized scenarios off-hand. One of the ideas for traveling between planets are these things called generation ships that would be massive ships (possibly created from a hollowed out asteroid) capable of supporting the multiple generations worth of humans needed to survive the passage. Many sci-fi writers have already pointed out that even if the life support systems of these ships didn't break down, within a few (genetically limited) generations it is likely that people would begin to forget where they came from, where they were going and what their purpose was. The cruelest/funniest idea was that should one of these generation ships (or a ship carrying people in induced comas or what have you) finally arrive at its destination it is very likely that humans would have in the meantime invented exponentially faster forms of space travel, passing these older ships in transit to settle these other planets ahead of them so that the original space travelers, instead of stumbling out onto a lifeless planet would be greeted by just another earth outpost station or even city!
So instead of finding this essay I stumbled upon these great renderings of how Mars, Venus and the Moon would look if we terraformed them:
