It says “Twinkles Pony Star” on the sign-in sheet. Is that your legal name?

Miss, this is a pretty small office, but I was able to fit two chairs in here, so if you wouldn’t mind sitting in one and not dangling from the window ledge. The breeze is really nice, but, it’s just, we’re on the fourth floor and the wind keeps blowing the papers off my desk, so… thank you.

Do you have ID? I’ll just copy your name down from there. OK… Jennifer, ha, right, I figured “Twinkles” was a joke, but you don’t want to assume things. Yesterday I had a woman in here named Candance and I figured the second “n” was a typo but it WASN’T! A lot of this is pretty self-explanatory, we’ll get you out of here lickety-split.

Are you filing as married or single?… I’m not hitting on you, no, the government makes us ask that, it’s a big deal on these forms. So… single? No, I don’t think they care if it’s just “single” or “always single and completely available.” I’m just checking off the box here.

Let’s take a look at your finances. I see you have a folder there, do you have any W-2s? Thanks. You’re handing me The Joshua Tree and Zooropa? Oh… ha… DOUBLE U2, yeah, ha. I don’t think the IRS is going to accept this.

What I’m asking is, were you employed this year? I just need some documentation regarding how much income you may have earned.

I’m sorry, what? You sold cupcakes to kittens? That’s a pretty specific niche. Did the owners pay you? OK, so, instead of money, one of the kittens let you live in the family’s tree house out back? I’m going to list that as an “in-kind” donation. Is that it? Did you do any other work this year? That flowing skirt looks kind of expensive. I’ve never noticed a cashmere crop top sweater at Walmart. Do you want to declare any major gifts, or maybe gambling winnings?… So the clothes are hand me downs from your grandmother who raised you because your own parents were too busy and this interfered with your ability to trust and form normal attachments?

Yeah, I don’t think the government needs to know any of this. I’m just going to mark you down here as “self-employed.” The good news is, since you own your own business, we can take out some deductions for any expenses you might have encountered. Oh, are those receipts in your pocket—HEY WHAT THE HELL?! STOP THROWING ALL THAT GLITTER! MY OFFICE LOOKS LIKE A STRIP CLUB TERRORIST ACT!

I’m sorry, no, you’re right, I shouldn’t yell, you just surprised me. Don’t cry. I’m not angry. Do you need a tissue? Plese don’t hide under my sport coat.

Hey, look at me, you’re right, glitter DOES make this whole experience more magical. I’m just responsible for any non-standard cleaning in here. This whole job is just contract work through mid-April, you know? They’re really particular about the floors in this building, I just don’t know how this will vacuum. I mean, it’s GREAT—really, I love it. I hope it’s always there, it’ll be like I’m walking on tiny bits of gold that stick to everything and do NOT make me look like I molested an elementary school art class.

I’m going to go ahead and assume you didn’t bring any receipts.

OK, we’re almost done. I know you’re still upset, I really am sorry, please don’t leave. Oh, sure, dancing makes you feel better, that makes sense. Can I just ask you—wow that’s a lot of twirling!

I just have a few more questions. This is probably a dumb one, but do you have any major investments or own a home or—right, right, ownership is a silly idea, of course, “we all just have love.” I guess I can write that on here, but, you know, what number would I place as the relative value? Pretty deep, right?

See, I can be interesting too. One time I told my boss I had to pick up some antihistamines at the pharmacy but instead I snuck out to go get a latte on Starbucks “free coffee” day—I don’t even have allergies!

I think we’re all done here. Actually, I think I’m done here as well. Being a part-time contract accountant was never my dream. You helped me see that, Jennifer.

This might sound crazy, but with you beside me, eating food off strangers’ plates, wearing inappropriate outfits, and running away from responsibility, I feel like I could finally, truly be ME. I want to become a conceptual yodel artist, I always have. It’s been my secret dream. Help me make it come true! Let’s run away together, or at least for a few months until I realize that I like being on time for things and being an emotionally responsible person. Oh I’m just teasing, I’ll never realize that! Not before you leave me at least! Grab your Hello Kitty backpack, we’ll climb out the window, you can teach me how!

Oh, but yes, you do need to sign here first. The IRS is pretty strict about that sort of thing.

by Alex Balk

I missed last night's "Game of Thrones" so don't spoil it for me! But whatever happened, this Sigur Rós song sounds amazing. Elf incest could never have a more appropriately ominous soundtrack. [Via]

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Well, another Game of Thrones episode set the internet on fire. "The Lion and the Rose" featured a very different wedding and a very different shocker from last time , but the reactions were no less passionate, as these amazing tweets prove. SPOILERS AHEAD, obviously.

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This is news worth working on a weekend for. Firaxis have announced Civilization: Beyond Earth, a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri. There’s an announcement trailer below, which doesn’t show any of the game but does set the scene. (The scene is of me, rubbing my thighs at all the spaceships). Also, it’s due out this “Fall/Autumn” which i) is not far away at all and ii) it’s nice that they wrote both Fall and Autumn because it makes me feel included as a non-American.

… [visit site to read more]

by Alex Balk

When I am in one of my more positive frames of mind I like to tell myself to focus on how remarkable it is that Eels have actually been able to be as big as they are rather than wondering what it says about the world that they aren't bigger. Either way, I am glad they're still at it. Sometimes just sticking around is a victory. Enjoy. [Via]

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[Marathon Diary]

Okay, so maybe this ended up being less of a Marathon Diary than a 5K Diary, but we all have to start somewhere. And even if Orphan Black's ten episodes weren't exactly a test of endurance, you know that bends-like feeling when your binge-watch catches up with real time? I'm soaking in it just as hard.

On the other hand, I'm also congratulating myself for having paused at what was clearly the season's turning point, where Sarah's MO began to shift from conning and fooling people to beginning to let them in. Her come-to-Jesus confrontation with Paul obviously didn't go the way she planned, but it worked out for the best. After Paul forced Sarah to confess that she isn't really Beth, and Sarah in turn got Paul to confess that he wasn't really Beth's boyfriend, Sarah found herself with a valuable ally. And then confidante. And then real boyfriend of her own.

After that worked out so well in her favor, it's not entirely surprising that she started sharing more with others. Mrs. S. was soon brought into the inner circle, and Sarah was clearly about to spill everything to Detective Art in that interrogation room until the lawyer showed up. I was suspecting during the first half of the season that this might end up being Sarah's coming-of-age story, but I didn't expect it to happen so quickly. Sarah's multiple crises are beginning to bring out the best in her, and not just her best hustling skills like we saw early on. Our little guttersnipe/fuck-up is growing up, and fast.

Also growing quickly? The cast. It's nice to see Sarah's fellow clones developing compelling arcs of their own, complete with supporting characters. I was getting frustrated with Cosima being confined to a Skype window and relegated to the thankless role of Science Officer, and clearly so was she. Good thing, too. Her relationship with Delphine may have been ill-advised (and literally advised-against, by Sarah), but it led to what may well be the head of the whole conspiracy, which we'll come back to in a minute. Also, there's an interesting conversation to be had about the fact that the clones have different sexual orientations. Something tells me "Born This Way" isn't on many of Cosima's playlists.

And whoa, check out Alison. Obviously she was wound way too tight for way too long, and girlfriend is coming uncoiled. She's taken over from Sarah in the field of impulsive, rash, and mostly irreversible decisions. First she decided husband Donnie was her watcher and started playing Jack Bauer with him when she was supposed to be playing Martha Stewart for the neighborhood potluck (not that it wasn't a lot of fun to see Sarah try return a favor by impersonating Alison). Then Alison decided it was her best friend Aynsley, whose husband she soon revenge-screwed in public before later standing by and watching Aynsley perish in a freak garbage-disposal accident. Not that Aynsley wasn't a dick, but Alison's face is going to be pretty red when she learns, like we already have, that Donnie is her monitor after all. Between her recent unpredictability, her increasingly frequent stress-benders, and her burgeoning friendship with Felix, Alison may be the most entertaining clone to watch. Loose cannons generally are.

But Alison is the Maginot Line compared to Helena. We've learned a lot more about the Angry Angel's backstory, including that despite being so far outside the clone-spiracy that she's been working against it, she is actually Sarah's twin. There was an uneasy truce between the two for a while, but given Helena's penchant for moves like taking Kira for walks that end in the latter getting flattened by a car, and later kidnapping and killing the woman purported to be their surrogate birth mother, that truce was obviously doomed. But is Helena? Sure, Sarah shot her and left her for dead after that last stunt, and I haven't seen Helena in the promos for next season, but I won't be convinced she's out of the picture until I see a body and a sequenced genome. I kind of hope I'm wrong, though; the dentist's drill that features prominently in the musical score every time Helena writhes onto the screen is something I could live without indefinitely.

One frequent problem with conspiracy-based shows (yes, I'm looking at you, The X-Files, and all of your goddamn clones) is the glacial pace at which we generally learn who and what is behind it all. Not so here. It's entirely possible we've already met the big bad, who was probably birthing clone babies at around the time his portrayer was playing Max Headroom. Matt Frewer's Dr. Aldous Leekie is an evil genius whom one might almost forget is evil. Cadaverous but charismatic, he talks charmingly about wanting to work with Sarah and her "sisters" now that they're "self-aware," and even offers them a generous contract to join the fold. But then you remember that he had one of his own employees killed (not that Olivier would have necessarily wanted to go on after Helena cropped his tail), and you find out that he coded copyright language into the clones' DNA, and he hasn't even withdrawn the monitors like he said he would. Contract or no, it's not clear what leverage he holds given that his whole experiment is illegal, but he's got at least two of clones in his back pocket already: Rachel Duncan, his right-hand clone apparently bred for the purpose; and Alison, who got one last impulsive, rash, and probably irreversible decision in under the wire when she signed that damn contract.

Oh, and it looks like he's maybe got one other thing. All season, Sarah's primary motivation has been her daughter Kira. Alas, most of her efforts to keep Kira out of all this have proved futile. At the same time, we've gotten some clues about Kira's possible significance to the project, like how she's the only natural offspring of any of the clones, and her Slayer-like ability to survive a shoving match with a moving automobile. As desperate as Sarah is to protect her, Leekie would be almost equally desperate to nab Kira if he knew of her existence. So of course the season ends with Sarah showing up at the house to find Kira missing. Worst-case scenario, essentially.

And now, after being able to blithely burn through one episode after another, I'm stuck waiting more than a week to find out what happens next. Not just with Sarah and Kira, but with Alison, with Cosima and Delphine, with Art and his investigation now that he's figured out who Sarah is, with Dr. Leekie and his Dyad Institute, with Felix and whoever his favorite clone is any given week, even with Rachel and her businessbitch haircut that I don't buy for one second. Those of you who've made it almost a year, I salute you. If you all can wait that long, I suppose I can wait this long, yeah?

It's going to be the week between each episode from now on that's going to be the real killer.

Episodes watched: 10
Episodes Remaining: 0
Days Remaining: 8

Orphan No More appeared first on Previously.TV

Cloud To Butt is a Google Chrome web browser extension originally created by technology enthusiast Steven Frank that replaces instances of the phrase “the cloud” with “my butt” for comedic value. Cloud To Butt Plus, which is a fork of the original GitHub project, replaces “cloud” with “butt” in certain appropriate contexts in addition to the regular “the cloud” and “my butt” swaps.

image via Alex Pretzlav

via Ross Doran

Remember that time HBO put out an official Game of Thrones rap album, only it wasn’t as good as it could have been because there weren’t enough nerdy book references?

Duo The Sons of Mim put out a parody album that puts HBO’s efforts to shame. Coincidentally, it’s called Shame of Tones, and I swear to you, it is not an April Fools’ joke. “Total Eclipse Of House Stark” is actually a song you can listen to in real life. Above is the music video for the Tyrion-themed “Lannista’s Paradise,” which, fair warning, does feature some offensive language. Behind the cut I’ve included the track list for the entire album, which can be downloaded on The Sons of Mims’ Tumblr.

Red Wedding
Lannista’s Paradise
Arya Gonna Make Them Pay
Even Flowdor
Another Dick on the Wall
Dr****s in Essos
Total Eclipse of House Stark

It’s impossible for me to pick a favorite. The Dany-themed “Dr****s in Essos,” a parody of “N****s in Paris,” is splendid, but the lyrics of Pearl Jam parody “Even Flowdor” are inspired. And “Red Wedding.” “Red Wedding.”

Again: Not an April Fools’ joke. You will not download these songs and find that they are all “Never Gonna Give You Up,” I swear to R’hllor. Listen to them now.

(via Geekosystem)

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Most first world thing ever said?

Like the site? You’ll love the book (probably).

Starpocalypse will be at the Big Easy film festival! If you're in New Orleans and wanna see our dirty jokes on a big screen late at night, this is the place.

by Alex Balk

"Three-quarters of a century ago, Swedish authorities tried to put a stop to the pernicious encroachment of international pop music, and instead they accidentally built a hothouse where it flourished."

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From the time they take their first steps to the time you send them off on the preschool bus, your life with a toddler is a trip through the looking glass. And just like Alice, you will be confused and confounded by something new every day. If you’ve never been totally in charge of a 2-year-old demon spawn from the pits of hell, you might find this amusing, if a bit incredible. If you’ve actually raised a child through the toddler phase, you will laugh uncontrollably at how spot-on this list really is.

2. THEIR RULES ARE LABYRINTHINE AND INEXPLICABLE

Watching a toddler is like watching an alien creature build some kind of extraterrestrial machine. It’s like watching ritually-peculiar Druid magic, or the interpretive dance of a sentient spam-bot. Our boy-human will put on an Indiana Jones hat and start calling himself “Nemo.” He’ll hand you things and then demand you hold them and if you try to give them back you’ve broken some ancient changeling contract. He’ll require a very particular truck and if you hand him one that is 95% the same truck, he’ll actually hate you — like, maybe literally hate you — for at least two minutes. (Then he’ll forget.) He’ll place things around the room or perform a sequence of events that, for all you know, is meant to unlock some kind of apocalypse. It’s methodical and maddening, like a bird building a nest out of watch parts. Other times? He’s not like that at all.

3. THE WOLVERINE TORNADO

Take a bunch of wolverines. Throw them into a roaring F5 tornado. That’s a toddler. It’ll tear through your home, shrieking and whirling about, scooping things up and depositing them elsewhere. It’ll lose things. It’ll destroy other things. It’ll change direction in the hair’s breadth of a moment — “I’m doing this no now I’m doing this other thing wait what’s that over there.”

Chuck Wendig’s observations as a father include a part about toddlers being “proto-teenagers.” As the parent of several teenagers, I look forward to his analogies when his child reaches that stage of life. And I will laugh then, too. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Flickr user Janet McKnight)

Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Travis Gettys reports that creationist Danny Falkner appeared Thursday on "The Janet Mefford Show" to complain that the Fox television series and its host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, had marginalized those with dissenting views on accepted scientific truths. "I don't recall seeing any interviews with people – that may yet come – but it's based upon the narration from the host and then various types of little video clips of various things, cartoons and things like that," said Falkner of Answers In Genesis who also complained that Tyson showed life arose from simple organic compounds without mentioning that some believe that's not possible. "I was struck in the first episode where he talked about science and how, you know, all ideas are discussed, you know, everything is up for discussion – it's all on the table – and I thought to myself, 'No, consideration of special creation is definitely not open for discussion, it would seem." To be fair, there aren't a ton of shows on TV specifically about creationism says William Hamby. "However, there are entire networks devoted to Christianity, and legions of preachers with all the airtime they need to denounce evolution. Oh, and there was that major movie from a few years back. And there's a giant tax-payer subsidized theme park in Kentucky. And the movie about Noah. And entire catalogs of creationist movies and textbooks you can own for the low low price of $13.92.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Martin Freeman. In FX’s Fargo miniseries. Minnesota accent. Golly gee, I have been waiting for this trailer for months.

(via: Pajiba)

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Body mutilation can be rewarding.

by Alex Balk

This was not what I was expecting, but I like it. A lot. [Via]

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We've seen birthday cakes shaped like all sorts of science fiction icons, including star destroyers . But it takes a special kind of geek to want a birthday cake fashioned after the "Split-Face" from John Carpenter's The Thing.

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It's so easy to find things wrong with 1994's Street Fighter movie, I thought that Chris Plante's epic feature about the flick wouldn't have any surprises. But it's wonderfully well-written, and packed with all sorts of morbid detail. Moroever, I feel like I understand something important about the mad thinking behind that whole early wave of Hollywood game-films, right down to the overpolished "blue steel" aesthetic they had.

Van Damme is shooting guns, causing all sorts of mayhem, and he shouts to Chun-Li and Balrog: "Go, go, I'll catch you later." Here's what Van Damme said the first time: "Go, go, I'll catch you later — cut, cut, cut!"

It's unusual for an actor to call cut; that's the director's role, but Van Damme was sure he'd said "ladder" instead of "later" and he demanded they do it over. [Director Steven E.] De Souza, stunned, noted the crew would need to rematch the bullet holes, rerig the actors who fell from catwalks back on their wires, clean off the costume and replace the blood packs. But Van Damme ordered another take. While the crew reset everything, Van Damme listened to the audio and realized he'd had it right. De Souza — vindicated, albeit after losing time and resources — decided to shoot the scene again for backup. Van Damme got in position. De Souza called action.

"Go, go," shouted Van Damme, "I'll catch you ladder!"

So much went wrong that it's a credit to De Souza that he managed to make it to the end. Even so, the palpable disinterest in the source material starts at the very beginning. Days into filming, the director and his stars stand around and realize that no-one on set, least of all themselves, know how to pronounce the name "Ryu."

Nine Inch Nails - "The Hand That Feeds" (With Teeth, 2005)



The 2000s were an awful time to be alive. Sure, things started out so promising, but a funny thing happened on the way to the millennium - America was attacked and we were sucked into a maelstrom of paranoia, repression, and warfare that has yet to abate thirteen years on, and which only exacerbated already negative economic trends that eventually blossomed into the ongoing rolling economic crises experienced across the globe since 2008.

As someone who experienced all this bullshit firsthand, I can attest to the fact that the decade's musicians did a surpassingly piss-poor job of responding to said bullshit. Protest music has always had an iffy reputation. Looking back at the great era of sixties protest songs, how many of them hold up as anything other than didactic bromides designed to advertise the ethical superiority of the singer? With the best of intentions musicians who try to make some kind of political "statement" often find themselves sinking into a deep quicksand of self-righteous, condescending superiority, or worse, simply replacing vague platitudes for meaningful engagement. (See: Exhibit One.) The best political music is usually angry, less focused on establishing the artist's perspicacity than in communicating the strident urgency of the moment - think punk in the late 1970s, hip-hop in the late 1980s, or, hell, even Rage Against the Machine on occasion in the 1990s. I'm sure anyone reading this can remember any number of political songs from the last decade, but how many of them were actually any good? Think hard before you answer.

No one expected that the decade's best protest anthem would come from Trent Reznor. I say "best" with no fear of contradiction, not simply because the competition is so piss-poor, but because it's a damn fine song. And what's more, after 1999's The Fragile it would have been impossible to predict that Reznor could have come back as strong and as assured as he did in 2005. To be more precise: it would not have surprised most people at all if Reznor had died in the aftermath of The Fragile, and the odds of his rebounding from that album and tour not simply alive, but healthy, fit, and focused were downright troubling.

Don't misunderstand me: The Fragile is still my favorite Nine Inch Nails album, hands down. The Downward Spiral has never been my favorite, and while Pretty Hate Machine is preternaturally strong, I was late to the party and my memories of that album are mostly second-hand. But The Fragile - I bought that album the day it was released and listened to the whole thing - both discs - probably a dozen times the first week I had it. I even remember making a special detour on a road trip just to buy the advance single for "The Day The World Went Away" the day of its release - only to be, er, a bit confused. (The song was a terrible first single, it didn't make a lick of sense until the album dropped, and the B-side "Starfuckers, Inc." is one of the most embarassing songs in the Nine Inch Nails catalog - and this from the guy who once wrote, "The devil wants to fuck me in the back of his car.") But as much as I still love The Fragile, I also recognize that its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: it is one of the most solipsistic, ego-driven, navel-gazing documents ever recorded. It makes The Wall look like the Polyphonic Spree. If you can't buy into the fact . . . enjoy the fact that the record is a supreme monument to destructive self-absorption, you're going to find it insufferable. But if you can dig it, it's in a class by itself in terms of its full-throated commitment to the sensations of (arrested) adolescent egotism and self-loathing - and deep down isn't that what rock is all about, really?

It's easier to imagine Reznor being found dead in a hotel with six different kinds of narcotics in his system sometime around 2002 than it is to envision what actually happened, which is that he had a really rough patch after The Fragile but cleaned up, became a gym rat, got some serious focus and decided to go on a prolific streak that culminated in his winning a fucking Academy Award and marrying (!!!) his girlfriend and starting a new band with her. He has two children. What the fuck.

So it's not just that Reznor's mid-decade comeback was improbable - the success of "The Hand That Feeds" flew in the face of a much of the band's history. It's not as if Reznor had never been political before. I've always thought "Head Like A Hole" made a nice bookend with "The Hand That Feeds," and the surface similarities between the two tracks certainly create a nice symmetry underscoring the idea that With Teeth represented a rebirth for Reznor in many respects. But previous to this track his politics had been largely inchoate, vaguely defined, unfocused. There are political allusions in "Marsh of the Pigs" and a few other tracks, but Reznor as a political being was mostly a force of pure id, lashing out at faceless figures whose only purpose appears to be that of limiting the expression of free will - that is, a teenager lashing out against the omnipotent authority of "The Man." The interesting thing about "The Hand That Feeds," at least for me, is the way it immediately alerts the listener to the fact that Reznor is no longer interested in just talking about himself ad nauseam, but is genuinely trying to engage with a larger world outside the confines of his own head.

This is quite a clever track. Whereas many Bush-era political songs focused on either the man himself or vague homilies about the wages of war, Reznor did something a lot more difficult: he addressed not simply the politicians who lied their way into office and into two wars, but the political system that put them there and kept them there without levying any consequences for their malevolence. The lyrics in the first verse could be addressing Bush himself, or they could just as easily be aimed at the rank & file Republican voters who (sort of) swept him into office twice, or it could even be aimed more broadly at the larger plurality of Americans of any party who were fooled into following lockstep behind the military-patriotic-national-security complex that enacted a silent coup in the months following September 11th:

You're keeping in step
In the line.
Got your chin held high and you feel just fine
Cause you do
What you're told
But inside your heart it is black and it's hollow and it's cold.

Just who is Reznor talking two? He's not laying the blame at the feet of any one actor, any single person or group who deserves the credit for the debacle of the Bush years. In the chorus, he asks the listener,

Just how deep do you believe?
Will you bite the hand that feeds?
Will you chew until it bleeds?
Can you get up off your knees?
Are you brave enough to see?
Do you want to change it?

He's talking here about the ways in which faith can be used as a tool by unscrupulous operators to manipulate the masses (an easy enough theme of the period), but also the ways in which faith becomes a most convenient pretext for self-delusion. It's common knowledge that Bush's most fervent base was the evangelical right, a highly motivated interest group who the Bush team was happy to placate with nine years' worth of subtle and not-so-subtle dog whistles in the direction of exceedingly conservative social policy. But it's also true that any examination of the record will show that for all the bluster of the right during the Bush years, Bush himself really was not the fire-breathing culture-warrior his most rabid followers believed him to be. Sure, he surrounded himself with people who could talk the talk, but when push came to shove Bush himself really was hesitant put his weight behind intervening in too many divisive social policy issues. (Do you remember his comical Solomonian pre-9/11 compromise on stem cell research regulations?) Sure, he put two conservative (although not as conservative as he probably believed at the time) judges on the Supreme Court and stacked the federal bench, but even there it's easy to overestimate the effect of his appointments in the context of a historical moment that was on the verge of a hard leftward shift, at least in terms of social (if sadly not foreign, economic, or military) policy.

This is very similar, incidentally, to the ways in which Obama's most fervent supporters believe, deeply and truly, that he is a fire-breathing crusader for social justice, just beneath the milquetoast trappings of a compromise-hungry adherent to Clinton's disastrous "Third Way" DLC-approved conservative Democratic ideology. The one truly revolutionary facet of his presidency - the color of his skin - has proven capable of obscuring every other obvious sign that he is not and has never been the true-blue leftie agitator in whom his fans desperately wanted to believe. How deep do you believe? Are you brave enough to see just how badly our guy failed to live up to our make-believe expectations?

The next verse draws the song more tightly into focus as an Iraq and Afghanistan-era protest song:

What if this whole crusade's
A charade?
And behind it all there's a price to be paid
For the blood
On which we dine
Justified in the name of the holy and the divine.

Two disastrous wars in two far-off Muslim countries - often referred too either accusingly or triumphantly as "a crusade" - were conceptualized by their detractors as wars of blood for oil (oil which has, of course, failed to ever arrive). But instead of simply casting blame on the usual suspects, Reznor is careful to lay the blame precisely where it belongs: "we," those of us (all of us) who profit either enthusiastically or tacitly from the flexing of American military might and coercive foreign policy across the planet. We're all culpable here.

Complicity is key. It's not enough simply to be opposed to bad policy and unjust wars, how money of us actually manage to get up off our knees and do something about it? It's a simple observation but no less powerful for its familiarity. It's not just the Republican functionaries or "values voters" or Reagan Democrats with "black and hollow" hearts, or the moneyed interests who keep the whole machine running smoothly for their own benefit and no-one else's, and it's certainly not just the specter of Mr. George W. Bush himself - it's the whole damned system that allows the situation to fester indefinitely: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

Musically, "The Hand That Feeds" is a textbook example of how a comeback single needs to sound. It's muscular and confident, every bit the attention-grabbing earworm that "The Day The World Went Away" was not. The album from which the song was plucked was similarly strong (and strangely slept-on in the years since), positively concise by Reznor's self-indulgent standards, filled with punchy hits and uncharacteristic straightforward hard-rock riffs. In scope and accessibility, With Teeth is the anti-Fragile, all killer no filler. It also marks a slight return to Reznor's dance-y origins, after having spent years distancing his subsequent material from the industrial dance sound of Pretty Hate Machine. "The Hand That Feeds" rumbles and it crunches, but most importantly it runs with sufficient momentum to knock down a tree. It's just a great song.

Just look at it. (Sugary sweet J-pop goes death metal) (via Mefi)

The Ladybird Book line still exists, but in the traditional sense, the name refers to a line of British children’s books that were published from the 1940s through 1970s. The had a standardized format including a listing of key vocabulary words on each page.

Miriam Elia, a writer and artist, has released the book We Go to the Gallery. It's a satire on modern art that in the form of a fake Ladybird book:

“I thought it would be humorous to see Mummy, Peter and Jane going to a really nihilistic modern art exhibition”, she says. Among the works confronted by the trio on their cultural outing are pastiches of Emin, Creed and Koons, through which they learn about sex, death, nothingness “and all of the debilitating, middle-class self-hatred contained in the artworks.”

You can see more a few more pages at The Independent.

-via American Digest

http://www.pattonoswalt.com/index.cfm?page=spew&id=170

Alex told us about how useful it would be to name a child "Gotham" so that dad will get up and attend to him when he hears "Gotham needs you." I can’t say with any certainty whether that was the inspiration for today’s comic from Lunarbaboon, but his take on the idea is quite clever.

firehose shared this story from Garrett Guillotte.

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romanvs:

love it

This has got to be the best lede of all time. And a great article, too. Caitlin Flanagan, writing about fraternities, law, liabilities, and corruption in the Atlantic magazine:

One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.

"The Dark Power of Fraternities" [The Atlantic]