Hollywood Is Inside My Brain

August 29, 2009

Sorry folks, I've got another video for you. This is a trailer for a movie called Hot Tub Time Machine. I can't decide if this is going to suck, or if it's going to be my favorite movie of the year (or maybe even decade). Regardless, I think I'll have to watch it.


Museum Of Animal Perspectives!!!!

August 28, 2009

File this under things I never knew I wanted, but now I can't get enough.


Here's a video from the scorpion cam:




And here's a video from the tarantula cam:




UPDATE: Try MAP's YouTube page instead of the Flickr one. Also, I've now changed the embedded vids to get them working again.


More dancing!

August 16, 2009

In my efforts to transform NOEXTEHO into dance video blog, I present...... this:


You're welcome.

In fact, most of this person's videos are entertaining. For instance, some bass-playing talent:


Youtube, I still love you.

August 09, 2009

Could this video possibly be as awesome as it's title ("Dutch Kids dancing to Hyper Bass!")?


Yes. Yes indeed.

(NOTE: Hyper Bass is now my second favorite musical genre name next to Speedranch. But Google just told me that Speedranch is an artist, not a genre (what?! I could have sworn...), so I guess that means Hyper Bass is my favorite genre name.)


Joe Meets Dubstep

OK, so I've actually known of it for quite a while. (Hell, it was my job at one point to know about it.) But sooooo much of it is sooooooo bland. And that's before you take into account all the lame shit that someone made just because they wanted to jump on the bandwagon. So, for the most part, I've avoided it, except for some random outlier sort-of-dubstep/sort-of-not stuff that's walked right in front of me.


But recently I've had a change of heart. And it's all because of one blog post on Salacious Sound: 3 Dubstep Tracks That Give Me Goosebumps. Not sure how I found it, but that title grabbed me... That's what I need: a small collection of some truly awesome tracks. And that is indeed what they are. If you're at all curious, GO THERE NOW and GET THOSE TRACKS.

That day, I read many other posts on Salacious Sounds, only to learn that it was not actually an "awesome dubstep" blog. Instead, it's a Toronto-centric blog about dance music. But there were a couple other posts with good dubstep-y tracks: Rusko Roots Reggae and Recommended by Jayho. If you're feeling this, then you need to go get those tracks, too.

(Pay attention to this Rusko guy, btw. I know he's already pretty big, but damn... his stuff is usually soooooo damn good.)

Anyways, I got so swept away with this sudden group of actually good dubstep tracks that I went and made a whole radio show (mp3 download on that page) based on them. I probably played everything I just linked to, and then a whole lot more Rusko. But, you see, I mixed them together, a little bit, at least. Like a real DJ. So perhaps you should forgo all the Salacious Sounds links and just check this one out, instead.

Finally, if you know of any other dubstep I should check out, let me know. I need more.


The Perils of Food Porn

August 08, 2009

I can not stop looking at TasteSpotting today. I took it out of my regular blog reading rotation for this very reason. But I've exhausted my regular reading, and (stupidly) decided to revisit TasteSpotting. (I blame Bitten's article yesterday in the NYT - which I read today. It reminded me that awesome foods can be slobbered over on the internet.) Now I have about 20 tabs open, each to a different desirable recipe. And I am sooooooo starving. All I have to look forward to right now is oatmeal. And bananas, too, I suppose.


TasteSpotting really is food porn, as folks call it, but it's sort of worse than 'regular' porn. 'Regular' porn doesn't make me go out and buy things. Food porn does. Either I'm going and buying the ingredients for a recipe (during a trip where I invariable end up buying another $20-$30 of food just because I'm in the mood), or I'm getting a quicker fix and dropping more money than I should on some pre-made gourmet-ish thing. Or sometimes I go nuts and drop $100 at Fairway and then eat that $100 worth of food in a shade under 48 hrs.

Or, perhaps even worse than that, I don't have any money to drop on anything. That's how I am today. My mind is racing, my stomach is pang-ing, and all I have to turn to is my oatmeal (and bananas).


Hot damn, it's a good YouTube day today!

August 07, 2009

Why oh why did I not see this video of Ice-T destroying a Mac laptop the instant it was posted online?!?!



It's been a while since I've posted a good WTF video, right?


After researching the Ig Nobel Prize, I found this:

the Wikipedia page for the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year


Being the nice guy that I am, I went and found some of the book covers for you.







Been a while since I've loved a music video

But apparently there's a music video for my favorite track off Alva Noto's Unitxt (a truly awesome album! listen to it loud! and make sure you've got bass...):



I Need More Linkblogs

August 04, 2009

As if I don't already read enough of the internet as it is, I want MORE.


Today I realized something... I no longer follow many linkblogs. (By 'linkblog' I mean a blog that pretty much just posts links.) Part of this is because I'm picky. I never really want just a straight link blog that's like LINK, LINK, LINK. I like ones that give about a sentence of context per link.

I used to read Metafilter several years ago (before they re-opened new user accounts), but it always had a bit too many posts per day for me. I would fall behind. And then they opened up new user accounts and all of a sudden the quality fell... so many mindless posts about a "cool" flash game... or a "cool" youtube video. NOT WHAT I WANTED, MeFi. Perhaps it was only a temporary slide, but I didn't stick around to find out, and haven't been able to go back.

I forget what other ones I used to read, but I stopped reading them all for one of two reasons:
  1. There were too many posts per day.
  2. The format changed from 'linkblog' to 'blog.'

Recently, though, I've discovered two nearly perfect linkblogs (for me, at least): Christian Neukirchen's Trivium and the O'Reilly Radar's Four short links. ("Four short links" is just an occasional feature on the O'Reilly Radar, but that's fine for me, since the rest of the Radar is pretty good too.) And to a lesser extent, I'm sort of getting into Grace Smith's roundups (also just an occasional feature), but this might just be because I have yet to find a truly good web design blog.

Now these are good, but not enough! I need more! So, if you're reading this, I suspect you share (or at least know of) my sensibilities. So if you know of any good linkblogs for me, please please please let me know!

(Oh, and I should mention that I am not looking for digg or reddit.)


Oh La Vache!

August 03, 2009

I just noticed a short article on the NYT website about cows. Specifically, about how cows kill about 20 people a year in the U.S. That's about as interesting as that article gets. But it got me thinking about how amusing it is to view cows as dangerous. Sure, you've got the running of the bulls... and bull riding at the rodeo. But that's about it for real danger. Everything else is just sort of like accidental danger.


But my mind is sometimes pretty awesome with making tangent connections. For some reason, this brought to mind a story I read many years ago (possibly about 10 years ago). It was originally posted by a guy named Scott on the Ghost Discuss mailing list (ghost-discuss@aurora.cdb.com) but I found it linked to from somewhere else. It's a bit of a long read (for this blog) but I think it's pretty awesome, so I'm including it below. (And, inexplicably it still freaks me out a bit.)

Once again I am posting something that I've thought about posting ever since I first joined this list. I think you will all realize very quickly why I haven't posted it before this. To this day, even I'm not completely sure what is was that I saw. I know what it looked like, but I've found that it's better, for me at least, not to believe that it really was what it looked like.

This happened years ago. I really don't remember how old I was at the time, but I don't think I was more that about nine years old. That would put the time of this somewhere during the summer of 1984. My Grandparents ( My Mom's parents ) lived out in the country about fifteen minutes drive from home. I was spending the weekend with my Grandparents. The story that follows occoured on the Friday night of that weekend.

It was after dark. I was on the couch, turned around and sitting on my knees, looking out a large picture window. I was waiting on Grandpa to get home from work. Grandma and I were the only two people in the there at the time. As I waited, a dense for began to form. The fog began to grow thicker as time passed. Grandma was getting a bit worried. Grandpa was late getting home and she was afraid he'd have an accident due to low visability brought on by the fog.

Several more minutes passed. I was still kneeling on the couch, watching out the window for Grandpa. Then I saw what looked like two lights coming up the road toward the house. At first, I thought it the lights were from the headlights on Grandpa's car. Then I realized that the lights were not the right color. One light seemed to be a lemon yellow, while the other appeared pink. I watched, curious, as the lights moved closer. Then I yelled for Grandma to come to the window and look at them.

Grandma was busy preparing supper and didn't want to leave the kitchen. I took another look at the lights, which were still moving closer, and then went to the kitchen to try to convince Grandma to come and see them. At this point, the lights were still not much more than fuzzy colored blobs due to the thick fog.

I left the window and ran into the kitchen. I told Grandma that there was a pair of lights approaching the house. She said something along the lines of, "Good. He's finally home." I told her that the lights didn't look like they were from a car. I told her about the odd coloration. Finally, Grandma agreed to go take a look for herself.

Running, I got to the window before Grandma did. I resumed my former kneeling possition on the couch before really looking out the window. The light were still there, closer than before. They were just starting to take on a more deffinate shape, like something was imergeing from the fog.

Grandma leaned forward for a closer look at the solidifying shapes. I turned to her, asking what the lights were. She didn't know and was begining to act a bit scared by the sight. I turned back to the window.

The strange lights were almost to the house by that point. (**Thinking back now, I realize just how bright they must have been to have been visable at the first.** ) Then the lights finally took on a more tangable shape. (**This is the part that REALLY makes me doubt what we THOUGHT we saw**) What we saw looked to be two cows, both bulls, dancing along the road on their hind legs. (**No, this is NOT a joke.**) One was glowing yellow, the other was glowing pink. Each of the "bulls" had a front leg, "arm" draped over the shoulder of the other. They were heading toward the driveway.

At this point, Grandma fainted. I only remember giving her a quick look as she collapsed beside me on the couch, then I resumed staring in disbelief and shock at the sight outside.

The "bulls" danced along until they got to the driveway, turned as if to make their way up it to the house. Then both just faded away.

After some time (**I'm not sure how long exactally, but I don't think it was more than a minute or so**) I turned away from the window to Grandma. She was still unconcious. I had no idea how to revive her. I remember shaking her, as if trying to wake a sleeping person, and talking to her. I do not recall what I said. After a few moments, she began to stir. As Grandma woke up, she turned quickly back to the window. I told her that whatever we had seen was gone. I asked her what HAD we seen.

Grandma sat me down on the couch and told me that I was NOT to breath a word of what had happened to Grandpa when he got home. I asked why. Grandma wouldn't give me an answer. She just kept telling me to keep quiet about it.

A few minutes later, we heard a car door slam outside. Grandpa was home. Again, Grandma warned me not to say a word to Grandpa about what had happened.

Naturally, the moment Grandpa entered the house, I ran straight to him and told him everything that had happened.

Grandpa spared only a second to ask Grandma if she were okay. The moment she said "Yes" Grandpa retieved his shotgun and went outside. Grandma began to scold me, very loudly, for disobeying her orders.

Several minutes later, Grandpa came back in. He had found nothing.

To this day, neither of them will discuss what happened that evening.

If that had been the end of the matter, I would have convinced myself years and years ago that both Grandma and I had simply been hallucinating. In fact, not too long after the incident, I had convinced myself of that.

Several years after seeing the "bulls" at my Grandparents' house, a friend of mine who I grew up with came to me one day with a story. I'll call this girl "A". (**Both she and I were about twelve when she told me this**)

When I lived in Ohio this girl's Grandparents lived directly behind us. "A" lived mostly with her Grandparents during the summer months. Only a one lane alley seperated our two yards. Across this girl's Grandparents' yard was the railroad bed I've posted about a few times in the past. On the other side of the railroad bed was a small farm. (**We lived at the very edge of town**)

"A" came to me one day saying that she had seen something very strange the previous night. I asked her what she'd seen. "A" made a long speach about how I'd think she was crazy if she told me. I pointed out that she'd already brought up the subject, obviously, she wanted to tell me. "A" agreed.

She said that late the night before she had been unable to sleep and had been looking out of her bedroom window. It began to get foggy. In the fog, "A" claimed to have seen two glowing lights moving across the pasture back at the farm. One light was yellow, the other pink.

(**Please keep in mind that I had NOT told anyone about what Grandma and I had seen at this point.**)

"A" said that, as the lights got closer to the railroad bed, they began to take on solid shapes. At that point, I was starting to get cold chills. "A" said that she must have been seeing things and that she wouldn't waste time telling me the rest of her story. I insisted that she did. After a few minutes "A" said, almost in tears, that the lights took on the shapes of cows. Bulls. Each bull had a front leg draped over the shoulders of the other. Both appeared to be dancing along on their hind legs. They were moving toward the railraod bed. Toward "A" 's Grandparents' house.

"A" said that at that point she had turned away from her window and hid under the blankets until morning.

After "A" told me her story, I told her mine own, very similar one. As far as I know, "A" never saw the "bulls" again after that night. I've never seem them again, myself.

If not for "A" 's story, I would long since come to believe that what Grandma and I had seen was a hallucination brought on by the dense fog and car headlights or something like that. "A" 's story makes me think again. I don't know WHAT we saw, but I do know that we saw SOMETHING.

Anyone have any ideas?


Why I Am Still Awake Right Now

August 02, 2009

I can not stop listening to several things:


#1:

Françoise Hardy - On dit de lui

# 2 & 3:
The chilling songs Fearns Foundry - Now I Taste The Tears and The Poppy Family - Shadows On My Wall, both available for download at The Devil's Music.

#4:
Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra - I've Been Down So Long (It Looks Like Up To Me)

Despite what #2, 3, and 4 might seem to imply, I'm in a good mood. I swear. (Mostly because of finding #1.) BUT I'll be in a better mood if some kind soul passes me an mp3 of that Françoise Hardy song...

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