"If you want to make your own necropants (literally; nábrók) you have to get permission from a living man to use his skin after his death. After he has been buried you must dig up his body and flay the skin of the corpse in one piece from the waist down. As soon as you step into the pants they will stick to your own skin." [Strandagaldur via disinformation] 
    
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This LED baby costume is possibly the most amazing thing we've ever seen. It's terrifying... and yet completely adorable. Look how her little LED legs scamper!
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(Image: Fred Studart)
At Ask Reddit (my favorite subreddit) movienevermade asks:
If you wanted to write the beginning of a book that hooked you from the very start, what would be the first line?
There were several excellent responses, many of which inspired other redditors to begin writing immediately. Here's an opening line by WittyCommenterName:
I'm dead. Not that I want sympathy, I just don't want you to be surprised later.
Many contributors went along on horror themes. Here's one by run_dmt:
Everyone told me I couldn't kill him; I see now that all they really meant was "shouldn't".
There were science fiction ideas, such as this gem by GuaranteedWeirdo:
After eons spent watching humans, I already knew that the most exhilarating and terrifying moment of my tenure would be when one started watching back.
Kronzlar offered this glimpse from a terrifying future:
It's hard being the only person in the world that can't read thoughts.
Ruthi suggested the first line for a hard boiled noir story:
I had two shots in me; one bourbon, one lead.
You can read the entire thread here.
And my own sweet land of liberty? We Americans lead the world in Nobel laureates and getting killed by lawnmowers. Yeehaw!
USA! USA! USA!
Doghouse Diaries created this map showing what every country excels at. You can see a larger version here.
Do you need personal space? Head to Greenland. The most women per man? Estonia. Do you like velociraptor bones? Get thee to Mongolia.
I could go on, but I need to go mow the lawn. Here, hold my beer.
We get a lot of mail at NPR Music, and amid the new Pokemon 3DS games that have zombified our once-expressive children is a slew of smart questions about how music fits into our lives — and, this week, tips on how to name one's band.
Suraya Mohamed writes via intra-office email, about 20 feet away: "I'm in a band called Hey Arboré — a D.C.-based indie-rock group with girl-boy-girl harmonies, driving drums and sweet keys; we play bittersweet jangle pop for bipolar surfers. We have a new album coming out soon, but before we release it, we need to solve a big problem. We are all embarrassed whenever we have to say our band name out loud. We came up with it in a hurry and didn't really think it through, especially the part about including a letter with an accent mark, because no one can interpret the pronunciation when they see it in print. (Arboré is meant to be pronounced "ar-bor-AY.")
The band used to be called The Ardennes — a forest in France, and actually a good name — but after a couple of members left, we thought we had to change it. Can you help us find a new name? Every time we like a name, we Google it, and it appears to already be taken by another band. Seriously, every single one! We've been trying for more than a year. What is the etiquette here? Can we recycle a previously used name from a no-longer-active band? Or use band names from groups that have a limited web presence and don't play out much, or who are not famous at all, or who are far away from where we live?"
Hoobastank has sold more than 10 million albums. Does it really matter what you call your band?
A few quick thoughts, right off the top:
1) Don't use a band name that's already been taken. You'd be amazed at the lawsuits, threatened lawsuits, Internet trash talk and colossal inconveniences that have resulted from disputes over band names — especially once a band has taken off enough to become a juicy target for legal action. The last thing you want is to have to change your name, and lose all the momentum attached to it, in order to spare yourselves a lawsuit. You're far better off accepting that lineup changes happen — no joke, more than 100 different musicians have been members of Blood, Sweat & Tears — and opting to stick with The Ardennes.
2) Hey Arboré isn't an inherently bad name — there's a good new band called Diarrhea Planet, so the bar needn't be set all that high — but it does make me think of both Hey Marseilles and Arborea. (Hey Arboré does, I mean. Diarrhea Planet makes me think of diarrhea.) I'd come up with a new name for that reason, if nothing else.
3) You may not have a name for your band, but Bittersweet Pop for Bipolar Surfers should totally be the name of your album.
Okay, with that out of the way, what the heck do you call your band? As a guy who's breezed past literally tens of thousands of band names in the past few decades — and who's been involved in naming a number of projects, including this column — I can reassure you that a great band name is less important than you think it is. Honestly, I'm suspicious of names that are too clever (Jesus Chrysler Supercar, etc.), because they feel to me as if someone out there thought, "That's so good, I have to start a band so I can call it that" — creatively speaking, a less promising process than making music you love and then slapping a name on it as an afterthought.
Seriously, think about the bands you love, and then think about how few of them have brilliant names. The Beatles? Just a dopey pun, really. The Band? Come on. You could just slap a "U.K." onto an existing name like The Charlatans U.K. did — one of my favorite band names of all time is Cher U.K., a joke I intend to steal for myself if I ever get Hoobastank U.K. off the ground — but I'd encourage you to find a strange series of words or an obscure pop-culture reference that just sounds right to you and your collaborators. Then you can be done with it already, stop feeling bogged down, and focus on making music strong enough to make any name stick.
(That said, readers: You know you've dreamed up a name you've always wanted to use in the event you start a band, so have at it in the comments.)
Got a music-related question you want answered? Leave it in the comments, drop us an email at allsongs@npr.org or tweet @allsongs.
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Or at least why he shouldn't team up with Badman, the imbecilic hero played with such gusto by Pete Holmes. Warner Bros., if you want to use this scene verbatim in the Batman/Superman movie, I'm totally cool with that.
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Every year, TV networks spend millions of dollars making pilots for shows that never see the light of day. Occasionally, those pilots surface online, and I stumbled upon a whole bunch of them recently that I had never seen on the internet before and embedded them below.
From the Bob Odenkirk-Janeane Garofalo HBO comedy Life on Mars to the US adaptation of The IT Crowd with Joel McHale, from Andy Kaufman's first sitcom role as a robot to a bunch of questionable TV adaptations of popular movies, it's a fascinating bunch of failed comedy pilots that have rarely (if ever) been seen by the general public. Enjoy!
The post The Rare TV Pilots Starring Bob Odenkirk, Patton Oswalt, and Andy Kaufman appeared first on The Awl.
Image: Universal Pictures via Collider
A boy and his sister discover a space alien and provide him refuge in their home closet. Their parents correctly identify it as a groundhog.
— Hard Sci-Fi Movies (@HardSciFiMovies) October 14, 2013
Ray Bradbury once famously said, "Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself ... Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about."
To which, Hard Sci-Fi Movies replies, "Not so fast, buster."
Hard Sci-Fi Movies is a novelty Twitter account, started by a metafilter user, that takes the Occam's Razor approach to science fiction. The result is pure brilliance. See if you can identify the science fiction movies and novels referenced in the tweets.
Image:
The Asylum
A tornado passes over a large group of sharks. They are unaffected.
— Hard Sci-Fi Movies (@HardSciFiMovies) October 8, 2013
Image: Warner Bros.
Remote imaging detects a black, perfectly rectangular monolith orbiting Jupiter. Further study identifies it as a broken pixel array.
— Hard Sci-Fi Movies (@HardSciFiMovies) October 14, 2013
Image: MGM Home Entertainment
After robots kill most of Earth's population, the Resistance sends a lone soldier back in time to prevent war. No-one knows if he succeeded.
— Hard Sci-Fi Movies (@HardSciFiMovies) October 10, 2013
Image: Warner Bros.
A powerful new AI has gone haywire. Its code and dataset are rolled back to an earlier version. The mission proceeds normally.
— Hard Sci-Fi Movies (@HardSciFiMovies) October 9, 2013
Image:
Universal Studios
A scientist purchases a DeLorean DMC-12. It fails to start.
— Hard Sci-Fi Movies (@HardSciFiMovies) October 9, 2013
Image: Sony Pictures Entertainment
A spider is irradiated by a particle accelerator at a science exhibit, and bites one of the students. The student is given a Band-Aid.
— Hard Sci-Fi Movies (@HardSciFiMovies) October 8, 2013
Image: Warner Bros.
While repairing the Hubble Telescope a small group of astronauts encounter a high-velocity cloud of debris. They die.
— Hard Sci-Fi Movies (@HardSciFiMovies) October 8, 2013
Image:
Warner Bros.
Gigantic beasts are attacking Earth's cities. Gigantic robots are designed to combat them. The design is rejected in favor of air strikes.
— Hard Sci-Fi Movies (@HardSciFiMovies) October 8, 2013
View more over at @HardSciFiMovies - via Metafilter, where you can find more user-submitted examples
There’s a famous Tumblr post where the Nightmare Before Christmas song “What’s This?” is given a slightly (well, more than slightly) more profanity-laden incarnation. I won’t repeat the title, because think of the children!, but I sure as shingles am going to post the video version that LordJazor created. Because it’s brilliant.
(via: Tumblr)
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Cultivating the ability to experience the “geeky rapture” of metaphorical thinking and pattern recognition.
As an appreciator of the art of visual storytelling by way of good information graphics — an art especially endangered in this golden age of bad infographics served as linkbait — I was thrilled and honored to be on the advisory “Brain Trust” for a project by Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist, New Yorker writer, and Scientific American neuroscience blog editor Gareth Cook, who has set out to highlight the very best infographics produced each year, online and off. (Disclaimer for the naturally cynical: No money changed hands.) The Best American Infographics 2013 (public library) is now out, featuring the finest examples from the past year — spanning everything from happiness to sports to space to gender politics, and including a contribution by friend-of-Brain Pickings Wendy MacNaughton — with an introduction by none other than David Byrne. Accompanying each image is an artist statement that explores the data, the choice of visual representation, and why it works.
Byrne, who knows a thing or two about creativity and has himself produced some delightfully existential infographics, writes:
The very best [infographics] engender and facilitate an insight by visual means — allow us to grasp some relationship quickly and easily that otherwise would take many pages and illustrations and tables to convey. Insight seems to happen most often when data sets are crossed in the design of the piece — when we can quickly see the effects on something over time, for example, or view how factors like income, race, geography, or diet might affect other data. When that happens, there’s an instant “Aha!”…
Byrne addresses the healthy skepticism many of us harbor towards the universal potency of infographics, reminding us that the medium is not the message — the message is the message:
A good infographic … is — again — elegant, efficient, and accurate. But do they matter? Are infographics just things to liven up a dull page of type or the front page of USA Today? Well, yes, they do matter. We know that charts and figures can be used to support almost any argument. . . . Bad infographics are deadly!
One would hope that we could educate ourselves to be able to spot the evil infographics that are being used to manipulate us, or that are being used to hide important patterns and information. Ideally, an educated consumer of infographics might develop some sort of infographic bullshit detector that would beep when told how the trickle-down economic effect justifies fracking, for example. It’s not easy, as one can be seduced relatively easily by colors, diagrams and funny writing.
And, indeed, at the heart of the aspiration to cultivate a kind of visual literacy so critical for modern communication. Here are a few favorite pieces from the book that embody that ideal of intelligent elegance and beautiful revelation of truth:
America's Most Popular Birthdays
The days of the year, ranked by the number of babies born on each day in the United States (Matt Stiles, NPR data journalist)
Byrne — who believes the best use of infographics allows us to “experience a kind of geeky rapture as our senses are amplified and expanded through charts and illustrations” — is especially fond of one sub-genre:
Flowcharts [are] a form of poetry. And poetry is its own reward.
Indeed, flowcharts have a singular way of living at the intersection of the pragmatic and the existential:
Email: Help for Addicts
A handy flowchart to help you decide if you should check your email. (Wendy MacNaughton, independent illustrator, for Forbes)
How to Be Happy
Just ask yourself one question. (Gustavo Vieira Dias, creative director of DDB Tribal Vienna)
Some are visually elaborate:
The Breaking Bad Body Count
All of the deaths in the first fifty-four episodes of AMC's ‘Breaking Bad,’ with each deceased character represented by a faux chemical formula indicating when he or she died, how they died, and who killed them. (John D. LaRue)
The Four Kinds of Dog
Analyzing the DNA of 85 dog breeds, scientists found that genetic similarities clustered them into four broad categories. The groupings reveal how breeders have recombined ancestral stock to create new breeds; a few still carry many wolflike genes. Researchers named the groups for a distinguishing trait in the breeds dominating the clusters, though not every dog necessarily shows that trait. The length of the colored bars in a breed’s genetic profile shows how much of the dog’s DNA falls into each category. (John Tomanio, senior graphics editor, National Geographic)
Others appear more visually abstract yet derive from precise and concrete data sets:
Paths through New York City
‘Flow map’ of travel in New York City derived from the locations of tweets tagged with the locations of their senders. The starting and ending points of each trip come from a pair of geotagged tweets by the same person, and the path in between is an estimate, routed along the densest corridor of other people's geotagged tweets. (Eric Fischer, artist in residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco)
Planets Everywhere
All of the planets discovered outside the Solar System. (Jan Willem Tulp, freelance information designer, for Scientific American)
Then there’s the mandatory love of pie charts and its derivatives:
Ten Artists, Ten Years
A revolution in color over ten extraordinary years in art history. Each pie chart represents an individual painting, with the five most prominent colors shown proportionally. (Arthur Buxton)
Seasonal Produce Calendars
The availability of produce in the northern hemisphere by month and season. (Russell van Kraayenburg)
The greatest power of infographics, however, lies in two things: Their ability to weave visual metaphors that enhance our understanding, something particularly potent given how essential metaphorical thinking is to the way we communicate and learn, and their role in igniting the very pattern recognition that fuels our creative comprehension. Byrne writes:
We have an inbuilt ability to manipulate visual metaphors in ways we cannot do with the things and concepts they stand for — to use them as malleable, conceptual Tetris blocks or modeling clay that we can more easily squeeze, stack, and reorder. And then — whammo! — a pattern emerges, and we’ve arrived someplace we would never have gotten by any other means.
Complement The Best American Infographics 2013 with Nathan Yau’s indispensable guide to telling stories with data and Taschen’s scrumptious showcase of the best information graphics from around the world.
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I’m deeply honored that Morrissey spoke out on behalf of This Charming Charlie, although not surprised. Morrissey is not a stranger to fair use, and it was my extreme respect for his appropriation of words and images that led to this project in the first place. I’m glad he is able to see the humor in all of this, even if lawyers could not. Hopefully, this example will set a precedent for copyright laws in the future, and encourage others to express themselves and enrich our culture through free speech, parody and social critique.
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It was David Willis, so far as I know, who first postulated that if slapstick comedy becomes more funny as the intelligence of its victim rises, then Batman is the greatest straight man in the world, capable of making anything funny. That’s probably why the Joker likes him so much. That’s probably also why Sarah Johnson‘s Ordinary Batman Adventures series is so popular, so check it out when you’re done looking at this small sample here.
(via BuzzFeed.)
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Making his way through the boroughs of New York, the infamous but mysterious interventionist Banksy is broadcasting new stencils, installations and mixed media work all month as a street-artist-in-residence in America’s largest city.
In Midtown Manhattan, his figures, phrases, plays on words and signage can be found defacing (or at least: refacing) concrete walls and garage doors in Banksy’s typical self-referential style. From there, he has moved onto Williamsburg and otherBrooklyn neighborhoods, and no one knows quite where he will pop up next.
As he often does in new destinations, Banksy is actively toying with New York City culture and tropes, from its stylized graffiti fonts to its world-famous Broadway shows (his contribution to existing tags above: “The Musical” stenciled alongside each).
Branching out from two-dimensional pieces, here is “a New York delivery truck converted into a mobile garden (includes rainbow, waterfall and butterflies).” This piece in particular is also actually moving around the city: “The truck will visit a different location every evening from dusk,” starting in an East Village location.
Perhaps best of all, this time Banksy also provides wonderful faux-vintage commentary on this series (titled: Better In Than Out) in the form of audio tour files you can click to play on Banksy’s website - or by calling a special toll-free number found spray-painted next to a number of these pieces: 1-800-656-4271. Of course, as always and almost as quickly as they appear, many of his works are being erased or defaced by city workers or other street artists - it goes with the territory.
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When Neil deGrasse Tyson‘s sequel to Carl Sagan‘s Cosmos airs next year I think there’s a good chance he’ll become even more popular than he is now, and that thought makes me happy. Not only is Tyson an accomplished astrophysicist, he’s one of the best science communicators in the world and, frankly, I feel actual joy when somebody like this becomes a celebrity. The more platforms he has to start conversation about science, the better.
This man’s opinions on Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity were always going to be interesting. I’ve been waiting for them, in fact and I was happy to see Tyson take to Twitter to discuss the film this evening.
Here are his points about the film, mostly in the form of rhetorical questioning.
The film #Gravity should be renamed "Zero Gravity"
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
The film #Gravity should be renamed "Angular Momentum"
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
The film #Gravity depicts a scenario of catastrophic satellite destruction that can actually happen.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
Mysteries of #Gravity: Why Bullock, a medical Doctor, is servicing the Hubble Space Telescope.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
Mysteries of #Gravity: How Hubble (350mi up) ISS (230mi up) & a Chinese Space Station are all in sight lines of one another.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
Mysteries of #Gravity: When Clooney releases Bullock's tether, he drifts away. In zero-G a single tug brings them together.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
Mysteries of #Gravity: Why anyone is impressed with a zero-G film 45 years after being impressed with "2001:A Space Odyssey"
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
Mysteries of #Gravity: Why Bullock's hair, in otherwise convincing zero-G scenes, did not float freely on her head.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
Mysteries of #Gravity: Why Bullock's hair, in otherwise convincing zero-G scenes, did not float freely on her head.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
Mysteries of #Gravity: Astronaut Clooney informs medical doctor Bullock what happens medically during oxygen depravation.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
Mysteries of #Gravity: Nearly all satellites orbit Earth west to east yet all satellite debris portrayed orbited east to west
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
Mysteries of #Gravity: Satellite communications were disrupted at 230 mi up, but communications satellites orbit 100x higher.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
Mysteries of #Gravity: Why we enjoy a SciFi film set in make-believe space more than we enjoy actual people set in real space
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 6, 2013
Those are his published thoughts until now. That last one seems like a perfect cue for the trailer to his new Cosmos, a show that promises to be as utterly captivating as great drama without inventing a single character or suspenseful situation to put them in.
Click here to view the embedded video.
I look forward to being able to discuss Gravity more. The film is out in the US now and will reach the UK on November 8th. Seems like cinema doesn’t move at the speed of light after all.
Neil deGrasse Tyson Treats Twitter To His Insights Into Gravity
I'm the guest of honor this weekend at Fencon in Dallas, which is just getting started. One of the exhibitors is Cthulhu Wars, the Lovecraftian boardgame that raised over $1.4M on Kickstarter (they were looking for $40K). They've brought along the prototype for the game, and the tokens are amazing. They were kind enough to let me photograph them, and I've uploaded the hi-rezes to my Flickr; there's a gallery of some of the best after the jump.
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This incredibly dense couch gag sequence for The Simpsons was directed by Guillermo Del Toro. He’s stuffed it like one of those puzzle pictures where you’re trying to find movie names or tube stations or something.
Amongst the references are nods to Del Toro’s own films but, really, the breadth of horror and monster material given a wink here is staggering. There’s even some great Simpsons in jokes too.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Yep, that just had to be Bart’s blackboard line.
Now, I’m honestly going to go back and watch that again. And then a third time with some pausing thrown in.
Here’s a general trailer for this Sunday’s Hallowe’en-ready Animation Domination block.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Watch: Guillermo Del Toro’s Segment Of The Simpsons For Their New Treehouse Of Horror
Of all the awesome things in the world that I didn't realize existed until this very moment, this disco ball pizza oven has to be one of the best. Oh, and it spins, too!
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I said I wouldn’t do it.
In 2011, when a government shutdown loomed, I made with the wacky Twitter yuk-yuks.
I figured that was it. It was, after all, just one joke — a weirdly specific one, granted, with its “(Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome +Lovecraft + Whatever Meager Scraps of 11th Grade Civics Class I Could Scrape from my Hippocampus) = KOMEDY JOKE” structure — but still, it was just the one joke, over and over.
That’s more or less what I told people who asked if I’d dust it off last December, when a federal budget shortfall or whatever threatened. There just wasn’t any juice left in it.
But then last week, another government shutdown threatened. And I found myself in a dayjob SEO meeting, a thing that leaches light and hope and joy from the world. In desperation, I got on my old dead horse and beat it so hard it turned to glue.
But I did want to challenge myself. I also wanted to cop to the fact that I was shamelessly milking the original. So I decided to make the #duringthegovernmentshutdown hashtag even stupidly longer, and test drove a few options in my head:
#duringthegovernmentshutdown2thelegendofcurlysgold
#duringthegovernmentshutdown2thesecretoftheooze
#duringthegovernmentshutdown2havananights
#duringthegovernmentshutdown2theirfirstassignment
(No, I did NOT consider #duringthegovernmentshutdown2electricboogaloo, thank you VERY much, Mr. Hacky McHackery of Hacktown, Hacksylvania.)
Settled on #duringthegovernment2piginthecity. Because it was the shortest. And because Babe 2 is hell of a lot of fun.
I’d effectively chopped my available space for japery down to 90 or so characters. It was not easy. The tone of the dumb thing depends in part on archaic words and syntax, which are not ideally suited to Twitter. Over and over again, I had to completely rephrase the joke, or lose it entirely. In more than a few cases, I made compromises that still rankle.
Losing definite articles, for example: “The Were-Hares take Warren Buffet’s corpse …”, is, I avow, an objectively and implicitly funnier phrasing than “Were-hares take Warren Buffet’s corpse….” Can’t tell you why. Just is.
I started it up again on Thursday the 26th, thinking the shutdown would be averted and I could stop when a compromise was reached in a day or two, as in 2011.
But the bastards blew it up. So I kept going.
I resolved to stop once the actual shutdown occurred at 12:01 a.m. on October 1st. Because once basic, vital services stop reaching the people that need them, the whole notion of shutdown gets a lot less funny.
ANY REGRETS?
I should have started later. Really thought they’d compromise, and I wouldn’t have to keep it going for FIVE DAMN DAYS.
ANY SURPRISES?
Easily the most RT’d/Fav’d one was the zombie/Bikeshare one, followed by the cupcake one. I came VERY close to deleted each one before Tweeting it, figuring they were both tired references (zombies? cupcakes? still?).
SO, THIS IS ALL JUST RIPPING OFF WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE, RIGHT?
Lookit: I love Welcome to Night Vale. I have proselytized for Welcome to Night Vale. The writing on that show is crystalline, perfect. But, you know, they didn’t patent the Lovecraft joke. Nor did I, back in 2011. So back off, sonny. Next question.
ANY YOU’RE PARTICULARLY PROUD OF?
"Proud" is the wrong word to use when the subject is dumb Twitter jokes. But the Tarot one, I sort of like. Air & Space. Merpeople. Patrick Leahy. The cabs vs. Uber one is funny to me, and me only, and allowed me to make a Mister T reference, because as seen above, I got my finger on the pulse of the today’s hip, happening youth.
ANY YOU’D TAKE BACK?
I didn’t love going back to the White House organic garden twice. I really did try not to cover the exact same ground as before. For example, I consciously avoided use of the word “fleshpit,” though I love it a lot and it’s ideally suited to this endeavor, because I’d used it back in 2011.
ANYWAY.
Here they are, after the jump, in their dumb entirety: five days’ worth of my sweaty attempts at mirth, in the order I Tweeted them. If you followed my feed during all this, thank you. You are good people. If you unfollowed, know that I get it. And that you can come back now, because normal service (fish puns and dad jokes and shameless promotion of my book, SUPERMAN: THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY, which I wrote, which is a book you should totally buy) has returned.
John Boehner smears the offal of a she-goat across the Great Seal. The air sours. It begins anew.
The President addresses a worried nation but in his eyestalks we see only his stark & vivid terror.
A rude tower of bones & skin shudders into existence on 14th St. & begins selling gourmet burgers.
ALERT: The Blue Point oysters at Hank’s are, in fact, fetal shoggoths. Still a good deal, though.
As foretold, a DC DMV employee rouses herself from her 15-year slumber in the break room.
On Theodore Roosevelt Island, a statue of the 26th president hectors tourists about their weight.
The hot dry wind in the boughs of the Tidal Basin’s cherry trees hisses “Kiiiiilll meeeeee.”
Shadow-demons roost in the scaffolds of the Washington Monument. A gibbous moon rises. Bloodsong.
Ted Cruz stands sweating before a great desk. The chair revolves. “Well done,” whispers Asmodeus.
Bo’s missing. “This isn’t blood!” FLOTUS insists. “I was chopping beets! From my organic garden!”
Sotomayor field strips her AR-15 nightly. She won’t go down over a jammed firing pin. Like Scalia.
"The Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Oversight is dead," he whispered. "I am Lord Fang now."
Lo, a Great Reckoning shall descend & all will finally reckon that red pandas are just dumb foxes.
The undead are great in number, & they do not sleep. But the Bikeshare barricade holds. For now.
A cold sound, a voiceless dread, an invocation to despair. Ladies & Gentlemen, the Capitol Steps!
The shade of Mark Russell roams the Mall. To hear his song (“The Shutdown Shuffle!”) is to perish.
Harry Reid sneers, rubs his mohwawk. “The price … is unchanged,” he says. “Ass, gas or grass.”
They say Valerie Jarrett can cure the radiation sickness — if you feed her your eternal soul.
Many sought refuge leagues away in the vile, cursèd place Men name Reston Town Center; we speak not of it.
Corpse-lights caper in the carrels of the Library of Congress; a portrait of Jefferson weeps.
Hilary Clinton slathers ordure on the punji sticks. “Now we watch,” she thinks. “And we wait.”
The lusty war chants of undersecretaries split the night, ever closer. We are lost. Avenge us.
The flesh-peddlers who have seized the Office of Management & Budget are a fell & fearsome lot.
The ritual is complete. The braziers’ flames burn onyx-black. G. Gordon Liddy arises. “I THIRST.”
We huddle as the dawn’s first tendrils reach the Capitol dome no hold up those are tentacles run
The morning air is crisp, like the bones of a Senate Page in the teeth of a fire-drake. RIP Tad.
”In the cloak room at the DC courthouse, great Shaneequa lies dreaming.”
To stand in the footprints at the passport office is to become a meal for their trapdoor spider.
In an empty, ruined CrossFIt, Josh Rogin does burpees while whisper-chanting “Eat FIST, funnyman.”
A scream of outrage dies on Grover Norquist’s lips as the walkers redistribute his organs.
Flies grow fat & torpid on the ichor that seeps from our wounds; Jim Vance eats his own goattee.
Any who visit the Children’s Museum’s Please Touch exhibit emerge shaken, marked by a dread sigil.
Scrawled across a cardboard box in an alley off H Street: THIS WAY 2 CHEF GEOFF’S PEMMICAN BAR
"This town," mutters Liebovitch the Terrible, waving a 3rd camp follower into his bearskin tent.
Nate Silver raises his Rod of Lordly Might & casts the lich Zogby into a Margin of Error.
Suspended in a pool of mucilage far below the Old Post Office, the Old Postmaster waits and plots.
The Air & Space Museum vanishes, leaving only air, & space, & chittering. Always, the chittering.
A cold wind. In the dark, a thin voice: “Who dares summon poor, damnèd Atwater from his torment?”
Women flock to an ultra-chic Georgetown salon to get the bulge-eyed, slit-necked “Innsmouth Look.”
The Beast-That-Was-Joe-Biden slips without a ripple below the inky surface of the Reflecting Pool.
No one now lives who remembers her as she was. Now she is only Malia Soul-Reaper, Warrior-Queen.
A cloud shaped like Rand Paul. A scent, high in the nose, of the sea. The sky rains cephalopods.
The Deathless Ones paw at the chain-link fence around Georgetown Cupcake. They hunger. They wait.
The grimy urchins of St. Albans’ Lower School pelt the unwary with clots of feculent dirt.
Nader soars into the gloaming astride his cockatrice; the wind carries peals of girlish laughter.
"Change here for the Red, Blue, & Worrisomely-Infected-Lymph Line trains on the lower level."
Thunder at sunset. A green & sickly light flutters in the tower of Smithsonian Castle. A lone rat.
Where NoMa once stood, now lies only a vast & noxious sinkhole. So, not much different, really.
The Smithsonian looter dons Fonzie’s leather jacket & is suffused with a dark, eldritch power over jukeboxes.
In the charred ruins of the Kennedy Center, Shear Madness! plays nightly with a matinee Wednesdays.
The kaiju crushes the SEC under a scaly claw; its cry is a song from beyond space, a song of loss.
Entering the nightclub, Patrick Leahy extends the spines of his neck-frill in courtship display.
High inside the National Cathedral something gnaws & snarls & drops gobbets of flesh on the nave floor.
The entrails say nothing. David Brooks slips a pigeon gizzard into his mouth & sucks thoughtfully.
The Morlocks hunt in packs but never venture into Georgetown by night. So they’re gay, probably.
The Tower. The Hanged Man. The Heirophant. Nude Steny Hoyer Riding What Is That, An Ibex? An Ibex.
The Easter Egg Roll carries on without eggs. We use bezoars instead. Same weight. Just stickier.
Once, the House of Representatives. Now, the Charnel House of Disarticulated Skeletal Remains.
The World Bank announces that all international development loans will now be made in human teeth.
In the center of a Meridian Hill drum circle, a man-sized lump of squamous flesh wheezes & froths.
"It jussst feelsssss good not to have to hide anymore," hisses Chief Justice Roberts, a Lizard Man.
DC Cab’s champion is a re-animated Mr. T. Über’s is a Town Car Transformer. The pitiable fools.
I regret my tactical decision to make Key Bridge Boathouse our last stand against the Merpeople.
Death’s stallion champs impatiently at a bit crafted from the tanned, leathery skin of Karl Rove.
Yog-Sothoth makes the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows, offering only farts & ululations.
No news from Gonzaga since the Lamiae, howling for child-flesh, overran the campus. Hope fades.
The steps of the Capitol South escalator have grown a coarse black fur and flinch at your touch.
The blood-rains are unsightly, yes, but the real problem will come later, when the Potomac clots.
The Awakening statue frees itself from the loamy soil to crush & maim. Gawk not at its huge dong.
Turn off the lights in a DEA Office men’s room. Say “Hank Schrader” 3 times into the mirror. Die.
Capital Weather calls for blood rain followed by black bile snow, yellow bile virga, & phlegm freezing drizzle.
Were-hares take Warren Buffet’s corpse into their burrows, where his name & his fate become one.
Elder Ones nest in the bowels of the Old Executive Office Building, which we now call the EOOEOB.
The Lincoln Memorial’s statue strides up to the NAS Einstein statue. They totally start doin’ it.
It was a squeaker, but Bob Mould has officially defeated Ian MacKaye for Witchfinder General.
Before the Cenobites took over every ANC, participatory government was less about the flensing.
The quote on MLK’s statue is wrong. I mean “Ahnahl nathrak/Uuthvas bethohd/Dochiel dyenveh” WTF?
"I know that blade!" gasps Darrell Issa. "It was carved from a Shai-Hulud’s tooth! I am undone!"
Now that Toecutter, Bubba Zanetti & Johnny the Boy drive Priuses their havoc’s quite eco-friendly.
In filthy rags, Jay Carney rides atop a vast squirming tide of vermin, screaming “I am Ratmaster!”
Sobbing, Matthew Lesko strips to the waist & slices yet another dollar sign into his downy thigh.
Pierre L’enfant, in skunk form, is cursed to chase a cat through the very Avenues he designed.
Inside the Rayburn Building lies the Nelson-Reilly Vault, where is kept the fabled Cravat of Doom.
Newt Gingrich’s secret mutant twin, Skink Gingrich, suns himself on the Mall, chewing a beetle.
Death panels. Also death paneling, famine baseboards, war wainscoting & a floral conquest border.
Pleasures strange, dark & orgiastic await in Mitch “Dr. Flesh” McConnell’s Nudey Den of Sauciness.
The Aquarium below the Commerce Building gets somehow even lousier.
It’s basically the LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD video, with slaughter. And EVEN MORE shoulder-dancing.
Foggy Bottom has fallen to the IMF Board of Governors, mounted on their terrible mecha-saurs.
The troll guarding P Street Bridge can only be bribed with the suckling goat from Komi.
Manticores descend on the S Street Dog Park. We repel the 1st wave with our rolled-up yoga mats.
The dog park is a killing field, and the manticores have fled with 4 Jakes, 2 Maxes and a Buster.
The FOX NEWS bureau crumbles to dust, exposing the Dread Temple of Skorm below. As suspected.
The warlord Er’c Kan-Tor tears into the haunch of a wood elf. It tastes of starlight & innocence.
Nothing now separates Carl Levin’s body from the demon’s urgent, pounding music; he IS The Dance.
Krampuses stream into the German Embassy carrying wriggling burlap gunny sacks stuffed with tots.
The doorframes of Embassy Row are smeared with faun’s blood in a desperate bid for diplomatic immunity.
The Smithsonian Folklife Festival is now just 6 women in dirndl dresses hurling eels at one other.
The Night Hags caper on the moon-dappled White House lawn, trampling FLOTUS’ prize Swiss chard.
John Adams’ spirit paces Ford’s Theater catwalks nervously prepping “Piddle, Twiddle,” his solo.
A 2-headed panda is born, auguring dire … Wait, my bad. It’s two pandas, snuggling. Aw. Pandas.
Turns out John McCain’s conspiratorial wink is, in fact, the flutter of his nictitating membrane.
The kobolds have formed a SuperPAC to campaign for a ballot initiative in re: child-gnawing.
Bestride his quetzalcoatl, David Plotz surveys the carnage. “This is great for DC!” he shouts.
Arlington Cemetery gives up its dead. We hear. I mean it’s way out in Arlington, so who the hell knows.
That otherworldly odor in Kramerbooks? In the cellar, they make cheese from the milk of Triffids.
"Play with us, Danny," say Malia & Sasha. "For ever. And ever. And ever." Dan Snyder screams.
The shutdown starts; #duringthegovernmentshutdown2piginthecity ends. Thanks for your tolerance. Now huddle & cling, everyone. Huddle & cling.
