The United States Senate has passed a bill that will deny suspected terrorists the right of habeas corpus (aka the right to seek release from unlawful imprisonment). Here's what comedian Jon Stewart has to say about all this, along with an educational (:p) look at the English justice system 900 years ago:
The October 2006 issue of Vanity Fair magazine comes with a fake cover flap for the neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard (courtesy of writer/designer Andrew Hearst). As you can see, it's the sort of thing that would boil the blood of your average right-wing hawk. I hope someone actually pulls off the prank at a newstand and then videos people's reactions! That would be classic.
(via BoingBoing)
The video for "Weird Al" Yankovich's new song, Don't Download This Song, is directed by none other than the phenomenal Bill Plympton!
The song, a parody of your typical inspirational ballad (with lyrics that lampoon the RIAA's attempts to deal with music piracy by suing the heck out of music downloaders), is pretty funny. The video, a cautionary tale of a boy who illegally downloads music and is subsequently chased down by the police as a hardcore felon, is truly hilarious. If you'd like to see more cartoons by Bill Plympton, check out this blog entry by Shawn, which lists all the Bill Plympton videos that he found on Youtube (including the Oscar-nominated short Guard Dog). Thanks, Shawn!
Well, it looks like "Weird Al" has recruited some truly awesome animators to work on the videos for his new album (for which Don't Download This Song is the lead single). John Kricfalusi, creator of the famed Ren & Stimpy cartoons, is working on one of them (along with the talented illustrator Katie Rice)! I can't wait to see it.
A 4-part series of ads for Smooth-E Babyface Foam is by far and away the most hilarious advertisement I've seen all year. Heck, it's funnier than most films released this year. It's just totally entertaining. There's a Youtube version here but I'd recommend you watch the high-res versions of the ads at the Cannes Lions website (here's the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 of the ad), where the ad won Gold in the Film category. Personally, I think it should've gotten the Grand Prix 'cos it's way cooler than the actual winner- a big budget CGI-fest made for Guiness. But that's neither here nor there. What's important is that you watch these ads, laugh merrily and then go out and buy some face wash so you can find true love. :P
The 6-episode BBC Comedy The IT Crowd- currently making the rounds on Bittorrent- is the funniest TV comedy I've seen since Spaced (the most excellent slacker comedy by the fine people who made Shaun of the Dead). I avidly watched the show til it's all-too-soon conclusion after reading Cory Doctorow's rave about it on BoingBoing. The show is about 2 hapless, socially dysfunctional computer geeks who work in the IT department of an unnamed corporation (and of course, they're housed in the building's basement) and their new female supervisor, who knows absolutely nothing about PCs. The genius of the show is in its razor-sharp writing, over-the-top characters and increasingly surreal plotlines. The 2nd episode, where this motley group has to hide an out-of-control fire from their very, very weird boss, is a highlight. The season ends on somewhat of a cliffhanger, so it's gratifying to know that there's a second season on it's way.
On another note, it's interesting how the Internet is increasingly making TV networks irrelevant. I haven't watched anything but the news on TV for the longest time now. If I need to watch a TV show, I just get off the Internet- more often than not, months before the show comes to Singapore.
Update: The Youtube video I originally embedded is "no longer available" so I replaced it with one that still is.
Oh this is fun! A live-action version of the Simpsons' famous opening sequence has been filmed in the UK- according to British tabloid The Sun, it'll air in the UK as a commercial for the show's 17th season (wow I didn't know the show'd hit 17 already!!!) on the channel Sky One. But hey, why wait when you can see it here now? Hehehe it's got a bit of a British flavour but it's very amusing. Now that the idea's out there, how long before people start making homebrew versions?
Update: NBC's at it again! They've forced Youtube to take down the video, but they have put it up on their own site. The video player STILL doesn't work in Firefox. Note to NBC: HIRE A BETTER WEB CODER!
The Lonely Island boys are at it again. After their phenomenal Lazy Sunday video (which, curiously enough, is no longer available on Youtube. Oh, apparently NBC forced the site to take it down. It's still availabe on NBC's website... except that the video player doesn't work in Firefox. Works on IE- for a change- but the video's really choppy. Oh heck. Just find the video on P2P. It's well worth it.) and their funny though not amazing Chuck Norris video (which I embedded in this earlier post), they've now recruited the gorgeous Natalie Portman to do a hilarious gangsta rap parody. First V for Vendetta, now this. That girl is busy cementing her status as the most awesome actress of her generation. Respect. Heh.
Update: Oh poo, they've taken down the video.
One of the coolest things about living on the 44th floor of a building in the middle of Singapore's business district is being able to observe the flow of human traffic on the streets down below. When I was 6 years old, I'd sit by my window after waking up in the morning and count the cars that drove along Robinson Road. Yeah, everything was exciting back then. On a weekday I'd count upwards of a 100 cars in 10 minutes, easy. On a weekend I'd be lucky to hit 50 on in half an hour.
Today's a public holiday (Happy Chinese New Year, one and all! It's the year of the dawg!) so there's even less traffic in this area than usual. Chinese New Year is one of the few public holidays in Singapore when most (not all, but most) shops are gonna be closed so it's more or less a sit-at-home-and-relax kinda day for me. Well, actually, I'd go out and watch a movie with my sister normally, but she flew off to the UK early this morning- she's gonna be there for the next two and a half months for a training thing- so I took the opportunity to go through all the RSS feeds I subscribe to on my Rojo account.
I'm currently listening to Gackt's new single Redemption- it's the theme song for the FFVII spin-off game Dirge of Cerberus (both the song and the game came recommended by the mildly-infamous-on-the-Internet gonzo journalist Tim Rogers). The song's pretty damn good! I'm surprised. I really enjoyed his songs with his old band, Malice Mizer, but nothing the man's done in his solo career seemed very interesting. Gackt's last album Diabolos, in particular, was pretty awful. It's cool to see him finally on-form. I wonder if he can keep this momentum? Well, seeing as how the man is a 400+ year old vampire (I kid you not, go read his Wikipedia entry :p), time is on his side ey?
Speaking of music, I've been meaning to integrate my Last.fm account with my blog and it looks like there's finally a way to do that! Must be a new feature. Coolness. So I've added a Last.fm chart of my most-played artists of the week to my sidebar. As you can see, I've been listening to The Strokes a lot lately. I bought their new album First Impressions Of Earth last week. It's got some great tracks, like opener "You Only Live Once," "Heart in a Cage," "On The Other Side," "Killing Lies," and "Ize Of The World." Though I think their last album, "Room on Fire," was more consistent overall, I really like that the band experiments with their signature sound a bit here instead of just doing the same thing over and over (randomize songs from "Room on Fire" and their first album "Is This It" and you wouldn't be able to tell which song came from which album. They're that similar.).
Back to my Last.fm chart- if you click on it, you can go to my Last.fm page and see what songs I listen to the most every week and also what artists and songs I've played the most overall. Last.fm's nifty, but the charts aren't perfect- the site's software plugin only checks what I've been listening to on my iTunes, but not my iPod. And apparently it doesn't count repeated plays of the same song. Oh well.
I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds. So many, in fact, that it can take me more than an hour to go through them all once every 2 days. Well I haven't checked my Rojo for a week so I've ended up with a mountain of unread entries. But I read em all anyway because I never know what gems I'll find in there. 
Another thing I've noticed while reading all my feeds is that everybody's talking about Chuck Norris these days. I hadn't heard anything about the guy since Walker, Texas Ranger (reruns of which are actually showing on TV these days!) which I never really watched anyway. The only thing I knew about the man was that he fought with Bruce Lee, which is actually really cool. But late last year he exploded onto the Internet as a sort of thought-virus. As far as I know, it all started with this page of "facts" about the man, compiled from a thread on the Something Awful forums. Well, the guys who hang out on those forums are nothing if not bizarrely creative, which is why we get gems like "Chuck Norris does not hunt because the word hunting infers the probability of failure. Chuck Norris goes killing." Or "If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can't see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death." Or "The chief export of Chuck Norris is pain."
OK I'll stop now. After this one! "The original theme song to the Transformers was actually "Chuck Norris--more than meets the eye, Chuck Norris--robot in disguise," and starred Chuck Norris as a Texas Ranger who defended the earth from drug-dealing Decepticons and could turn into a pick-up. This was far too much awesome for a single show, however, so it was divided." Yep. I'm done with the quotes. But that's not all the Chuck Norris stuff I've seen online lately.
It seems Conan O'Brien's gone Chuck-crazy- he's been playing random clips of Walker: Texas Ranger on his show. But the culmination of all this Chuck-related madness (which includes people digging up old Chuck toys, comics , a cartoon series... What? Even Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't have a cartoon show and he was the toughest dude alive in the 80s! Not to mention the 2nd toughest robot, after Optimus Prime, of course.) has got to be this SNL skit about the young Chuck Norris:
It's actually pretty funny, though far inferior to the SNL Narnia rap skit which made the rounds on the Net last year. Both these skits, by the way, were made by these guys. Wow. Saturday Night Live's actually funny again. Anything's possible in TV Land I guess.
There's just one last marginally-related-to-Chuck thing I've got to write about: this video, titled The Ultimate Showdown, on the Flash portal Newgrounds.com. It's a surreal flash animation where Godzilla, Batman, a zombie Abraham Lincoln, Optimus Prime and several other characters/celebrities (including everybody's favourite Chuck Norris) fight to prove... err.. who's the baddest. Or something like that. Yeah, it makes no sense at all. But it's decently-animated (in a South Park sorta way) and all the carnage is set to a really catchy-song! Ok now I've gotta go away from my PC before my brain leaks out my head because of all this rampant weirdness.
British humour is pretty awesome. And so are pirates. So it comes as no surprise that this old BBC radio sketch titled Pirate Training Day from the BBC Million Pound Radio Show is incredibly hilarious. Listen to this and you'll be on the floor in stitches, rolling around while laughing like a maniac. Please don't listen to this at school or work. ;-)
In other related pirate news, Talk Like A Pirate Day is coming soon- September 19th! Arr!
(via Boing Boing)
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