Sean Daily is an English major from New Jersey now living in Las Vegas, the Other City of Lights. "I consider 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' to be comfort reading, I like the al pastor tacos at Tacos Mexico and I count among my literary influences the Chainsaw from 'Doom'. 'RRRRRR! You don't like that, do you, Mr. Undead Marine! RRRRRR!'"
Shanoah Alkire is our Discordian at large. "Born in Santa Cruz, I grew up in Grass Valley and the Bay Area, and now lurk in Las Vegas. My literary influences include Ray Bradbury,
Lewis Carroll, and Douglas Adams. I also program as a hobby,
and currently maintain the Gtk port of Angband. You can find
a rather old bio of me here."
I read today that people are finally celebrating the new year in public in Baghdad for the first time since the United Stated invaded Iraq. Think about that: people are finally able to do what people in Times Square took for granted. No matter what you think of the war, this is a good sign.
There are places in the world where a new beginning means more than it does in other places: places with war, with poverty, with opression. People take their revelry today mixed with just a little desperation, both here and abroad.
With that sentiment, One Neat Thing a Day gives you your final neat thing of 2007: people greeting the new year…
… in Baghdad:
… in the Philippines:
… in Moscow:
… in Kurdistan:
… in Afghanistan:
… in Johannesburg:
… in Brazil:
… and a good one to end this post with, in India:
Happy New Year to you and to everyone. Let’s hope it’s a better one.
It’s funny what you run across on the Web. Someon made the perfectly reasonable observation one day that some cats have a cute little mustache that makes them look like Hitler.
The result of this observation? Cats That Look Like Hitler, an entire site dedicated to, well, stuff like this:
Lest we forget, before ‘007 becomes ‘008 (who I believe was stabbed to death by a knife-wielding clown in the opening scenes of Octopussy), your last cognitive dissonance of the year comes from that always-rockin’ cartoonist Tom Tommorow.
What is pen spinning, gentle reader? Why, it’s flipping a pen around in your fingers… except that, when you get really good, you can do it to deathcore music and make pen spinning music videos (PSMVs, I guess). It’s fidgeting raised to a high art.
In a One Neat Thing a Day three-fer, here’s a video clip from AP that clued me into this.
Here’s American artist Tim Ferriss’ take on pen spinning. Ferriss (Bueller?… Bueller?…) was educated in Japan and traveled around the world, so when he says that pen spinning’s pretty popular in the Orient, I believe him. He offers a quick tutorial on five different pen spinning tricks.
Your final neat thing is a Yahoo! Video channel with four! four PSMVs! ah ha ha ha ha! I like the last one the best… but only because I’m a hëddbangör, I guess.
If the Camp Delta prison at Guantamo Bay has been able to convict only one guy on terrorism charges, out of its 300 or so prisoners, in its six years of existence (and was only able to sentence this republic-threatening terrorist to nine months in jail) (and only started his trial after the Australian Prime Minister got involved)…
Believe it or not, I found today’s What the FUCK after looking at the Related Videos from yesterday’s What the FUCK. I’m not exactly sure how a celebration of Hello Kitty and a celebration of a game where you can decapitate your opponent with a rising uppercut are related…
Actually, now that I think about it, it’s a perfect match.
When watching this movie, I felt my ancestors from the Greatest Generation reach out to me through the dim mists of years and decades gone by and, somehow, touch my heart.
Then they grabbed me by my scruff of the neck, shook me like I was a three day-old puppy and said, “Wake up, asshole! We fought this fascist shit in World War II, and now you’re letting it happen all over again! Wake up and DO SOMETHING!”
You will also get this feeling when watching this move: 1946’s Despotism, from Encyclopedia Britannica Films. Trust who just got finished fighting despotism for four bloody years – longer, in the case of Europe and Asia – to tell you what it is and how to spot it.
And how does America rate on this movie’s four-scale despotism metric? I’ve made up my mind. But you make up your own.
So I’m running this Oriental Adventures D&D campaign and I have the bright idea to bring in Sanrio as minions of the Princes of Hell. Sanrio, in case you don’t know, are the evil evil people who thought up Hello Kitty and probably are lapdogs of Satan, now that I think about it.
The players couldn’t agree more and, back in March, one of them sent proof positive of Sanrio’s diabolic influence: Sanrio Puroland in beautiful downtown Tokyo!
“You must realize,” I said, “that we’ve found the main nerve.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s what gives me the Fear.”
I found this Flash movie a loooooooooong time ago – like five years and three homes ago – on Newgrounds.com. It’s not there anymore but, luckily, the good folks at Bored.com picked it up. It wasn’t done when I first saw it; glad to see it is now.
What is Nose Pilot? Well, to mangle Morpheus from The Matrix: “Unfortunately, no one can be told what Nose Pilot is. You have to see it for yourself.”
By the way, you’ll want to click “anglais” in the diver’s mask… unless you parlez français, that is. Not that it really matters; it’s mostly visual. And wonderful.
I’m praying to Christ that this is some kind of weird Aum Shinrikyo-esque cosplay cult that worships Pokemon or Digimon or Hegemon or whatever the hell those two misshapen vegetable-demon hellspawn are near the back of the line.
The alternatives are simply too terrifying to entertain.
Image of the gates of hell courtesy of WFMU.org, whose staff seem to have a knack for finding images like this. This one topped their front page for 12-28-07.
