Sunday, November 18, 2012

Places I Visited on the Internet Today #2

I spend a lot of time looking at things on the Internet. Here's where I was today:

  • Sweetpea Baking because I was thinking about breakfast and was wondering if they still did their Sunday brunch. They had a vegan mozzarella pesto quiche, but since two of those nouns shouldn't be vegan, I passed on that. Instead I got a cherry almond streudel and it was super good.
  • Because I confused Liam Neeson with Jeremy Renner, my pal Angela sent me this YouTube link to a piece called How Big is Liam Neeson's Cock? from Hollywood Babylon. I will never confuse Liam Neeson with anyone else again.
  • I read about some comics art forger named Rob Granito, although the story of his comeuppance happened over a year and a half ago. I enjoy stories about frauds who get their comeuppance. 
  • Via @Steve_Lieber, I learn that someone in the city has a pet alligator. (That barks!?)
  • On the Retronaut, there are some pretty fascinating non-gruesome old pictures of car crashes in Boston. I think my favorite one is the car that's rolled back into a metal fence, which is now preventing it from tumbling off of an embankment. 
  • Also on the Retronaut are some pictures of the crew of Star Trek hanging out with the space shuttle Enterprise in 1976. Shatner was too stuck up to show up or something. In a picture with a lot of great suits and outfits, I think it is George Takei's that I would want to wear the most.
  • So I didn't realize that the AV Club has a new regular feature called Hatesong, where they have a musician describe what song they hate the most and why. Steve Albini describing why he dislikes Cher's "Believe" is just great. (via @nonobody).
  • A baby sloth on ZooBorns! Let's all go to the Pueblo Zoo!! And a baby rhino! How awesome would it be to bottle feed a baby rhino?!
  • Heather posted a link to this sweet little guy on my Facebook wall. We really want to get a kitten to keep our cat company, so we look at an inordinate amount of kittens on the Internet. I think that Heather's Internet consumption is probably about 70% kittens, actually. Here's another kitten.
  • Speaking of kittens... (via @ErikLuyten)
  • From the Portland Police bureau: a guy tries to break into a dental clinic with a switchblade. This isn't a particularly exciting story, but I think this is the sort of press release that the PPB puts out to make it sound like they're being confronted by ultraviolent criminals all the time. The switchblade sounds potentially dangerous, but it also sounds like it was just being used as a tool. Maybe not in this instance, but sometimes I feel that the descriptions of altercations that they get into with suspects sound exaggerated for affect.
  • Barry Johnson of OregonArtsWatch has a long article on Measure 26-146 (the "arts tax") that passed, a post-mortem of the attempts to defeat it, and where it is going now that it has passed. He was a good counterbalance to the Oregonian and Willamette Week's over-the-top anti- positions during the election campaign.
  • http://windows95tips.tumblr.com/
  • GIFs. (via @_lucky)
Twinkies/Hostess Links:
  • Here's a dumb Huffington Post link to some dumb/boring facts about Twinkies. Every time I click a link that leads to the Huffington Post, I get really disappointed. The Huffington Post is the Twinkies of websites.
  • And here's an article explaining the demise of Hostess, and how it did not go bankrupt because of a union strike, but because of venture capitalists. I take some issue with the bias in this article, with its repeated references to Bain Capital and Romney - I get that it's a reference to the AFL-CIO president's comments, it's just a little ham-fisted here. Total tangent: I'm always wondering why partisan political websites have the shittiest designs - I mean, look at the resolution of that logo! Why is it so blurry? Couldn't you find someone to re-create that for you at a higher resolution? (For some terrible looking conservative websites, please see: drudgereport.com or unskewedpolls.com)
  • From the same site, Rush Limbaugh has some completely reasonable, perfectly sane, totally non-racist person thoughts on why the President wanted Hostess to go out of business. (The gist: the First Lady hates junk food, and the President wants more people on welfare. Sure.)
Non-Hostess Political Links:
Wikipedia pages:
  • Band on the Run - I don't have access to the Beatles discography via our music service (MOG), so I occasionally find myself trying to give Paul McCartney a chance. "Ram" wasn't cutting it for me, so I looked to find what album "Band on the Run" was on because I'd heard that was a good album. Ergo:
  • Wings
  • Ram
  • Reichstag - This after reading an essay on Christo and Jean-Claude's Wrapped Reichstag.
  • Flak Tower
  • Zoo Flak Tower
  • Kent State Shootings
  • Nixon Tapes

4 comments:

adventure! said...

Steve Albini hating something? I never would've thought!

Hey Chris!

Unknown said...

Ha, I know, Shawn! I do appreciate that he is very articulate about the hows and whys of the things he hates.

Patricia said...

Dammit, I didn't know about HateSong either and I just lost a half hour reading it. That "Believe" one was good and I am not a fan of the overt auto-tune myself, but the "Be With You" one was my favorite as I hate that song myself.

Unknown said...

Yeah, the "Be With You" one was great as well - that is just a terrible, terrible song. I especially like when they get into discussing the lyrics. On a side note, I know the guys that run the festival in Tilburg that the musician references.