The Slap Chop
(The 35 sec mark is when it gets really good!)

And not to be missed: the remix version. laughed until I cried:

Remixed Nuts

On Tuesday Will told us that he wanted John McCain to win the election. We asked him why that was (”did someone at school tell you that?”). He replied, “I like his hair.”

He was devastated on Wednesday to hear his favorite head of hair had not won over more voters. We tried explaining that there are other factors that people consider when casting their ballot (some people anyway…).

Speaking of casting ballots, the Libertarian ticket, headlined by Georgia’s own Bob Barr, appeared on the ballot in Georgia on Tuesday, but neither the Green Party nor independent tickets appeared there. It struck me as a little odd considering the Green Party’s candidate was Georgia’s own Cynthia McKinney. Apparently the Green Party primary was a landslide with Ralph Nader (famous – or perhaps infamous – for being the Green Party’s candidate in 2000 among other things) placing a distant second. The results of their presidential convention can be seen here. I’ve never heard of any of the possible candidates in the list other than Ms. McKinney and Mr. Nader.

As I mentioned above, Mr. Nader, running as an independent this year, was missing from the ballot. A friend and coworker informed me that Nader was an “official write-in” in Georgia. I’m still not sure what the heck that means. What distinguishes an “official” write-in candidate from an unofficial one? My coworker and I mused about this: do they discard write-in votes that aren’t cast for “official” write-in candidates? Hopefully (dare I say “probably”) not. I couldn’t find any online source that described an “official” write-in in Georgia nor could I find any online source that confirmed Nader’s status as “official write-in”. The closest thing I found was this. Read a certain way, it could seem to imply that Georgia voters can write in Nader’s name but not necessarily anyone else’s.

The Taste of Taste

Lately, Will has come to really enjoy a couple of TV commercials. One is a Campbell’s soup commercial.

Man Eating Soup: What is that taste?

Man in Chef Hat: Taste.

Man Eating Soup: Hmmmm. I like the taste of taste.

Man in Chef Hat: It’s very tasty.

It is a surreal and mildly amusing commercial. Every time it comes on, Will can be heard repeating “I like the taste of taste” afterwards.

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet found the commercial online. The closest thing I can find on YouTube also features the Man in Chef Hat and is titled “Mike Huckabee Soup Chef” due to the character’s resemblance to the former Republican presidential candidate. You can see it here.

His other favorite commercial features a talking baby espousing the wonders of E*TRADE. If you haven’t seen it, take a look here. His favorite part is the hurling at the end.

Today he and Malin engaged in a rather disgusting conversation. He saw the other talking baby E*TRADE commercial (featuring creepy clown instead of spit up), but he thought it was the other one. Mystified at the absence of puke after the commercial ended, I explained to him that there are two different but similar commercials. Somehow the conversation turned to Will’s baby brother (not due until April) and how Will will get more than his share of spit up after he arrives.

Will then joked, “I’m going to eat the puke.” At mom’s horrified expression and dad’s abrupt and incessant giggling, Will continued, “I’m going to swallow it! Ewww!”

During this rather repulsive interchange I could only laugh to myself thinking “at least he got the Humphries sense of humor!”

This anecdote won’t likely surprise my sister or brother-in-law in LA who got earfuls from Will about the “puke robot” when we were there last month.

Era of Change?

And to think, we have another one on the way. How will we handle two insane, hyper boys, running around, pretending to be Darth Maul, talking about retching automata?

We do have a few ideas of where we’ll be next year. It’s a cozy place in which we’ve become quite comfortable thanks to our precious little monstrosity of a mini-man :)

Come and join us sometime, won’t you?

• The Best of Murray Hewitt

When we were in LA on vacation the other week, my sister brought up the same TV show. Unfortunately, her DVDs of season one were on loan to a friend, so I didn’t get a chance to see the show. But she showed me another YouTube video that was a sequence from the show:

• Foux Du Fafa

I’ve since bought their self-titled album (or rather I’ve bought the MP3s that constitute that album). Malin and I even heard this song in background music of a recent episode of Chuck. Were it not for our introduction to this tune in LA, we would have never recognized it or noticed it.

Since I don’t yet have the DVDs (though I put them on my Amazon.com wishlist), I’ve been substituting the real thing with YouTube videos – of which there are many.

The honors for most demented Flight of the Conchordes video goes to Albi The Racist Dragon.

I would say that pretty much every musical number they’ve done on the show is genius. To save you the effort of a YouTube search, you can just click the following links. The best ones (in my opinion) are at the top, but don’t dismiss the others in the list. They are all very funny:

• Mutha Uckers
• Rhymenocerous vs. Hiphopopotamus
• Ladies of the World
• The Humans Are Dead
• If You’re Into It
• Mermaids
• Frodo, Don’t Wear The Ring
• Prince of Parties
• Leggie Blonde
• Cheer Up, Murray
• Business Time
• She’s So Hot – Boomking
• Bret, You’ve Got It Going On
• You’re So Beautiful
• I’m Not Crying
• Think About It
• Inner City Pressure
• Bowie’s In Space
• A Kiss is Not a Contract
• Sellotape – Pencils in the Wind

Their most recent comic, from yesterday, is cute, too. And it’s also centered around a food item that, like bacon, can be ordered from Waffle House:

A coworker and friend also forwarded me an e-mail about the most e-mailed photos, and one of them centered around our favorite food – combined with a close runner-up: the donut.

I had seen these cardiac thrombosis cakes before on a television show: Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations. In one episode of the show, Tony Bourdain visited the Pacific Northwest and makes a stop at Voodoo Doughnut, the purveyor of these fine, freaky, triple-bypass inducing, delicacies.

I’ve decided to delay that in favor of posting about my favorite animal: the pig! More specifically, pork, since the pig is my favorite-tasting animal. I went to lunch at a barbecue restaurant the other day with a co-worker, Paul (and of course had the pulled pork because it comes from the best-tasting animal ever!). Somehow we got to joking and talking about bacon. We then exchanged amusing cartoons, all related to the subject.

Paul e-mailed to me the bacon flowchart:

My favorite part is where it says “Withholding bacon from a dog is inhumane.”

He saw this image on this site. This site’s author is not the original artist/author that created the flowchart, but he posts a lot about bacon (some are very, very funny; others are very, very disturbing; many are both).

I then sent Paul a couple of gems from a really demented cartoon website named The Perry Bible Fellowship. The cartoons are always deranged and widely varying in subject matter. Two of their cartoons were about the delectable backside of a hog:

Maybe the next post here will be about something somewhat serious. Stay tuned…

After watching, I noticed some links to episodes of Chad Vader – Day Shift Manager. I saw these some time ago, but when I first watched them there were only two of them. Now the entire first season is finished: eight episodes in all. The story centers on Darth Vader’s lesser-known brother, Chad, and his tribulations as a manager at a grocery store. It’s quite amusing and worth wasting time with:

• Episode #1
• Episode #2
• Episode #3
• Episode #4
• Episode #5
• Episode #6
• Episode #7
• Episode #8

Recently, I recall someone telling me about a commercial wherein a gorilla plays drums to the beat of In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins. I can’t remember who it was that was telling me about this, but I just recently saw it firsthand. My brother, in fact, sent me an e-mail with this link.

We’ll start off with an amazing guitarist that I remember seeing on YouTube several months ago: Andy McKee. When I first heard of him, his record label – CandyRat – had taped recording sessions with lots of their artists and posted all of the videos to YouTube. This guy was definitely the most impressive. Below are links to four of his tunes that happen to be my favorites:

• Drifting
• Africa (written by Steve Lukather’s band, Toto)
• Art of Motion
• The Friend I Never Met

His style is very similar to Michael Hedges. If you’re not familiar with Michael Hedges, then you can see him play here.

I just recently ran across another cool artist, thanks to a long time friend of mine, Keith Groover (Keith and I were next door neighbors for several years in Taylors, SC). One of his websites had a link to an awesome video by Kaki King. She is an amazing guitarist whose technical style shares a few things in common with Andy McKee. Below is a link to that video followed by a couple of other videos of hers:

• Playing with Pink Noise
• Gay Sons of Lesbian Mothers
• Yellowcake

While we are on the topic of awesome guitarists, how could we possibly forget the un-freakin’-believable Stanley Jordan. The links below are videos of live performances by this phenomenal virtuoso (after seeing him play, you can easily forgive his cheesy choice of costume):

• Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven
• The Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby

How about something completely different? Like some Wierd Al? Some skateboarding? YouTube has it all!

Here is a neat tune from a European pop group named Bloc Party. And here is an even cooler video for it, created using an addictive Flash application named Line Rider. And while we are talking about Line Rider, who can forget this one? (featuring a song named Tank! by Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts – also featured during the opening sequence for the animé show Cowboy Bebop).

Finally, I will share another facet of YouTube’s greatness: the availability of bizarre Japanese television programming.

Treadmill Madness:

Our big US television networks need to seriously consider hiring the guys that come up with this stuff – pure genius! (and way better than Deal or No Deal).

Ski Jumping Tires

See it for yourself. If it gets a little slow, stick with it – you owe it to yourself:

Japanese Tetris

I’m not really sure why they call it “Tetris” since it has nothing to do with the objective of that game. But there is no mistaking it – this game show rocks.

On a completely unrelated topic: I finally got my convertible fixed. It had problems in the differential and was making horrible, loud, grinding and whining noises. I took it in months ago to hear the bad news that it was a bad pinion bearing – which is much more expensive to fix than a wheel bearing. I had toyed with the idea of fixing it myself. But, without a lift, adequate experience, or even all of the necessary tools, I quickly abandoned that idea. According to the mechanic, after he took the differential cover off and inspected it, the pinion was bad.

So instead of just ordering a stock pinion, I had him install a slightly bigger one – and a matching ring gear, too, of course. So the rear end ratio is now 4.10:1 (factory ratio is 3.42:1). It definitely goes a little zippier now, and it was only marginally more expensive than the work that had to be done.

I’m pretty irritated at the mechanic, however, because the speedometer is off. I asked the guy before he ordered the new gears if it would cost me more to get the speedometer fixed. I was not that interested in dumping money into this car and was only considering the new gears because it wasn’t much extra considering they were already having to rebuild the differential. He insisted that the speedometer would be fine because it measured speed at the wheels. Well, he was wrong. It measures speed at the output shaft of the transmission – which is now about 20% faster compared to the speed of the wheels thanks to the new gear. So when their shop opens again (Thursday, after Independence Day) I’ll call him and fuss at him for telling me wrong. If they have the equipment to hook up to the car’s on-board computer, they should be able to fix the problem pretty easily – and they better be willing to do it for free considering it’s their fault I’m in this fiasco (I wouldn’t have ordered the new gears if I knew it would cost even more coin to set everything right).

On the bright side, the Camaro is now mostly drivable again. The roaring bearings are gone. The rear end does whine a little bit, particularly at highway speed, but it isn’t a problem. In fact, it is normal for 4.10s to whine a little. I’ll put some gear oil additive back there to see if that suppresses it somewhat. But it is, thankfully, much, much better now that the pinion and bearing have been replaced.

I say that it’s only “mostly” drivable because it is riding on a donut right now (i.e. temporary spare tire). I have to either find a way to patch the tire or find a used tire to replace it. Like I said, I’m not interested in investing a lot into this car right now. So, despite the fact that it could really use a full set of new tires, I’m going for the cheaper, near-term solution. I’ll probably order new tires for it in the fall – and maybe new wheels, too (if I can find ones I want for a reasonable price).