I also love Antiques Roadshow. Not even in an ironic way; my father was, and still is unless yesterday he had a massive career crisis, a dealer in antiques, and as a result the whole scene gets me fierce wet.
Yep. I just dropped some fierce wet in your lap.
The best thing about AR isn’t the surging overtone of heartbreak, or mortality, or even the musty smell of tweed. It’s the weird shit that occasionally surfaces. Take, for example, this PIG. It’s a circa 1900 wheelie-toy thing, and in a single moment, upon viewing it, I completely understood why turn-of-the-twentieth-century children were so brain-shittingly creepy. When you combine the fact that there were chimney sweeps still living and operating in major urban sprawls, coupled with dangerous levels of chalk inhalation, and you add this fucking DEMON PIG into the mix… well. Is it any wonder so many houses are haunted by glassy-eyed little cretins in petty coats, speaking in unison and burning you armpit hair with their mind powers?
Some genius has managed to do a breakdown of how to make pancakes like a crackhead. It’s adorable delivery is only just able to counter the crackhead theme of the whole thing, but it also struggles against some incredibly vitriolic entries in it’s comment section. It’s startling how some people just ‘get’ comedy:
‘Next time i see a smack head in town im gona get his scrawny lil neck place his mouth over da curb then stamp on his head that makes his bottom jaw smash off then be in bad pain oh yeah and smash ur teeth out if any left daft cunt.’
WHIMSY!
You see, most comments seem to be about how the post isn’t funny, or how crackheads should die, or, bafflingly, how irresponsible it was for the post to show how to make pancakes OUT OF CRACK. However, as Luke told me once, NEVER FEED THE TROLLS. Otherwise this can happen. And despite what you may think, nobody – and I do mean nobody – wins in a butter eating contest.
Advance Australia Fair: what a dirge. Bland, pretentious, uses the word girt. Is there anything good about it at all? We don’t even have golden soil. It’s more of a brownish-red. Useless for growing stuff. But this on the other hand. I think this song, so very squarely, seems to sum up this nation and its peoples. Because when I think of Australia, I think of the phrase “Italo-Christian Disco fever”. I know I’m not alone. Quite simply, I think this song says everything there is to say about Australia, and even some things you probably can’t say about Australia. In particular, the line “Skiing all summer, and surfing all winter long” seems a little hard to back up. But “far beyond the kangaroos, Australia gave us the Bee Gees too”. Man, no arguing with that! Also, as someone so sagely pointed out, there are far too few national anthems with a saxophone solo.
If you still need convincing, here’s the MP3. It took me until the sixtieth or seventieth listen to really get it, but boy, when I got there, there was no turning back. I also developed a bit of an obsession with pimp hats and bright red waistcoated jumpsuits, but I’m sure we can all agree those are two things that Australia definitely needs more of.
William Shatner is pretty much one of my favourite people on the planet.
Not only is he prolifically self-effacing and a hell of a recording artist, he’s been through various periods where he’s… well, let’s just say he was pressed to find viable work at several points throughout his esteemed career. I adore the guy, and he’s certainly received the accolades he deserves, but below is a commercial for a supermarket chain named Loblaws. I frankly can’t moved past the similarity the name bears to a certain Arrested Development character, but I hope you enjoy this nauseating slice of yesteryear.
Remember SETI? Everyone got really excited about it back in 1999 when they introduced the SETI@Home screen saver (Jesus, remember screen savers?), allowing people to use spare processing power on their magnificent Pentium 1 monsters to parse cosmic radio waves for evidence of intelligent life. Well, the bad news is that, as yet, no such evidence exists. Even with the thousands upon thousands of Pentium 1 monsters chewing through the data. But the good news is that a small group of people are ready for the inevitable moment of contact, and have even set up a website to welcome extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI) to Earth. And boy are we putting our best foot forward with this project. Because if there’s one thing we want to express to aliens on our first meeting, it’s definitely our deep and enduring love of Comic Sans:
This is apparently the masterstroke of “a diverse group of approximately 100 individuals”. They go on to explain that they “come from various parts of our planet. Almost all of us are related to science — as researchers, engineers, artists, writers, benefactors, or graduate students.”. They are also definitely not xenophobic: “our welcome is extended to any manifestation of extraterrestrial intelligence or alien intelligence that has reached our planet. Regardless of your form, regardless of where in the universe you originated, regardless of when you arrived, regardless of how deeply different you are from us, we welcome you.” But they do understand that perhaps aliens need to be convinced that talking to us is a worthwhile project, so they list “some possible benefits for you, in case you have not already thought of all of them”. These are by and large the kind of loosely patronising concepts I’m sure well-meaning missionaries the world over are well versed in, and include such corkers as:
Interacting with a few people in depth could help you gain a deeper understanding of human psychology, society, and relationships. As a community of people with some understanding of alien intelligence and contact, we might be useful in this venture. [Translation: I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves]
You might enjoy the experience of interacting with humans and feeling bonded and connected with them. You might find this experience interesting, illuminating, even joyful. Two-way love and caring might transcend any differences between your form of intelligence and ours, just as they sometimes transcend enormous differences between individual humans. [Translation: If you see a link to an article about something called "World War II", please don't click on it]
You could gain intellectual excitement and a sense of adventure as you experience the dialogue, watch our learning, and see how the interaction unfolds. Let’s experiment with contact and see where it goes! [Translation: Hey baby, nice antennae, want to grab a drink later? Maybe afterwards you can wrap your ovipositor around my... Dierdre? What are you doing here? This isn't what it looks like, I promis- ARGH! The beautiful insect queen is eating my face!]
They then encourage contact in whatever way is convenient, whether that be “email, fax, telephone, or a face-to-face conversation”. Let me tell you, if aliens arrive and contact us via fax, I will eat one of my arms. That would also raise some serious questions about how a species managed to master the art of intergalactic travel, but still relied on fax to exchange information. I imagine the rates on interstellar faxing are just brutal. They then attach for the alien’s perusal the mighty Flag of Earth. This is slightly less embarrassing than the Comic Sans:
But not by much. Anyway, you get the idea. All in all, I feel this is a stunning example of human ingenuity that would make any alien feel right at home. Then we could lure them in and steal their kidneys.
Ahh, bacon. Scourge of pigs. I recently became a vegetarian, and the one thing I’ve missed is the pork family (although seafood is still pretty prominent on my list of ‘foods I want to have sex with’). As many friends and loved ones will attest to, one of my favorite breakfast pastimes was getting crazyawesome french toast, bacon, and drowning all of it in icing sugar and maple syrup. And icecream.
I have the metabolism of a rhinoceros, evidently.*
Anyhoo, I have two things to say about bacon. The first is that one time, back when I was doing film at university, I had a very good friend named Mikey. Mikey was great, and was a member of a hugely devout Jewish family, although I suspect his beliefs were more pronounced around his parental units in order to extract the sweet nectar of familial compliance (read: epic allowance). Regardless, he wouldn’t eat anything that came out of a pig. After a particularly taxing lecture and a Cassavetes screening, we made our way to the food court on campus, and settled on a Chinese dumpling stall. Mikey, who was being a simmering little shit sandwich that day, asked me to grab him two chicken buns whilst he made a phone call. I got him two pork buns, let him eat most of one, and then asked him how it tasted. “Good”, he replied, chewing happily. “Why?” “Because”, I replied, “it’s pork. And I’m not sorry, Mikey, I’m not sorry”.
Sufficed to say, he almost punched clean through my arm. I still think that institutionalized religions which control diet/clothing/gender rights/the right to choose/gay rights/the rights of people to kill other people/etc are pretty much all tinsel and bullshit, but I will concede that I may have crossed the line. And all because of delicious bacon. Delicious, evil bacon. Ever seen a pig NOT setting fire to libraries or peeing in the mouths of baby rabbits? I didn’t think so.
Didn’t I have a second point? Oh, right. Bacon, when uncooked, is abhorrently grotesque. And to illustrate that point, here is a guy being draped with hundreds of wet rashers of the stuff.
I probably ought to have waited until AFTER breakfast to post this.
Nicholas Cage is one of those actors whose very glare can render you infertile. Whether he’s wowing us by playing a sycophantic gambler in Snake Eyes, a pedantic cop in the Wicker Man remake, or JOHNNY BLAZE in GHOST RIDER*, the man has more range than the Andes. Which, as I learned during an abortive trivia session this past week, have a great deal of range. I also found out that yelling “VAGINA” every time a question is read out isn’t witty, and neither is attempting to call your team “TEAM VAGINA”.
Sigh.
Anyway, Nicholas has become increasingly erratic and harder to comprehend over the past few years. After winning critics over in the Jonze/Kauffman masterpiece Adaptataion, he proceeded to plough dick-first into a despair-swamp of shitty roles, exacerbated by the fact that his hair appears to have grown directly into his chubby brain. So what better way to wrestle his career back on track than quite literally CONTROLLING THE CAGE? Brandon Bird has released the Nicholas Cage Adventure Set. Imagine paper dolls. Only with icecream. And a parrot. And Nicholas Motherfucking Cage. Here’s how the website breaks it all down:
Introducing the Nicolas Cage Adventure Set! The magic and wonder of one of the most dynamic figures of the 21st century comes home in this incredible playset (one might even call it a Colorforms set, if “Colorforms” was not a registered trademark of the University Games Corporation). Reusable vinyl stickers cling like magic to glossy backdrops! Mix and match accessories! Peel and re-peel to create new scenes! The fate of Nicolas Cage is in your hands!
Each set includes a double-sided 8.5 x 11 inch play background (depicting “tropical island” and “haunted castle” environments) and one 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of nine vinyl cling stickers: 3 full-body Nicolas Cages, battle axe, skateboard, ice cream cone, scary ghost, parrot, and space helmet.
I’m pretty sure I’m bleeding to death with joy over here.
/Paul
*I had ball-spasms whilst writing those words, hence the all caps.
Sometimes I look about at the state of the world and it makes me long for the days of yore, simpler times all, where a man was a man, a woman was a woman and midgets were included in the food pyramid. Gone now are the days of easy utilitarianism, where the ends always justified the means because the ends were, frankly, kicking. Penicillin? Fuck yeah! Cecil George Paine just gave it to some babies and hoped for the best. And here we are, 80 years later, with the ability to cure syphilis. Thanks babies!
But none of that these days. No, these days we are mired by an excess of knowledge, a cynicism toward understanding and a seemingly endless parade of “ethical qualms”. And in few places has the magic of discovery been more actively suppressed than in the field of SCIENCE!!!!. The pursuit of scientific knowledge is one of mankind’s great strivings, one of the fundamental drives that separates us from the animals. Except, that is, when said scientific pursuit involves animals quite personally. I mean, I’m not entirely sure they always know what’s going on, but I like to think they appreciate the fact that it’s all for the greater good.
I have previously waxed lyrical about such endeavours in this rousing piece about the ongoing practice of feeding animals psychotropic substances, but today I’m striking a more nostalgic tone and looking fondly back at the glory days of mule experimentation. Well, one experiment in particular – the 1878 demonstration of the first ever instantaneous photograph. A development that, at first glance, might seem to have a pretty tangential relationship to your average household mule, but don’t forget, this was in the glory days of science. Days where a man was a man, a woman was a woman, and a mule was an integral part of new advances in the photographic sciences. From an 1881 issue of Scientific American:
“It became necessary, one day, at Willet’s Point, to destroy a worthless mule… The mule was placed in proper position before a photo camera and duly focused upon the animal’s forehead, a cotton bag was tied containing six ounces of dynamite.”
Now, “necessary” is a big call, but I think we can all be thankful that at least they stayed away from the prize mules for this demonstration of what exactly it looks like in the split second after a mule has had dynamite detonated in close proximity to its head. I’ll leave you to peruse the rest of the story/images over at Gizmodo Australia (You can probably lodge a reasonable guess as to the outcome. Gritty!), but nonetheless, I’m sure that I speak for everybody here when I declare “Thank you mighty mule! Your noble sacrifice shant be forgotten! Henceforth, every time we use our iPhones to take a photo of our naked torsos and send it to our local Members of Parliament, we shall remember that it was you who made it all possible!” Huzzah! Everybody with me?… Everybody?
Every Wednesday morning, I’ll be posting a video of a total lech. Someone who probably eats children and grooms his moustache with the lawbone of their dead mother. Today, you’ll be watching some vintage Euro-disco, a genre which should be shot into the centre of the sun, but can’t on account of the fact that:
a) It’s a genre, and collecting it all together in one place is a highly abstract concept, and
b) the sun gives our planet life. You really think it’s going to keep doing that if we hurl tonnes of this shit into it?
With that firmly in mind, I do hope you enjoy this.*
Paul Verhoeven (right) is on Triple J, as host of the Weekend Breakfast Show. He is a writer and film critic for Yen Magazine, and insists he is a regular columnist for Horse and Hound magazine (unverified). He recently finished a weekly series for The Vine called Curiageous where he answered people's burning questions and drank his own urine. He enjoys ducks.
Luke Ryan (left) is a stand-up comic, writer, and general man-about-town. He is a news blogger and feature writer for The Vine and also writes for the music blog Electrorash and the street mag ThreeThousand. In 2009 he performed at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in his oh so descriptively titled show 'Luke's Got Cancer'. It was funnier than it sounds.
Both of them spend more of their time then they should perusing the Internet and gaming. The Somewhat Ambitious is essentially the product of this excess.
