Tuesday, May 20, 2025

That's Trump Derangement!



Randy Rainbow's latest parody song is set to the tune of "That's Entertainment!" He takes the role of a fake TV doctor and diagnoses your symptoms as TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome. There's a skippable ad within this fake ad from :50 to 2:25.  


American History Class



Hmm, I seem to recall a war from 1991 in which we kicked Iraq out of Kuwait in a matter of weeks, after a buildup of several months. It was the second Iraq War that gave us an initial victory over Saddam Hussein and then dragged on for years to an ambiguous withdrawal. 
 
But I get the point. Even back in my school days, American History only covered wars, Revolutionary, Civil, and World War II, and then ended. World War I was covered so quickly no one learned anything, because we had to get to the second one, since all our teachers lived through it. Vietnam was not history yet. From Married to the Sea.

Killing in the Name, Hillbilly Version



"Killing in the Name" by Rage Against the Machine has been covered by everyone and their brother, but this is the first bluegrass version I've heard. The band is Tião e os Bravos, from Brazil. Strangely, this version has SFW lyrics. (via Laughing Squid)

Self-description



(via Fark)

Choral Black Hole Sun



Choir! Choir! Choir! from Toronto put together a 225-person choir to sing Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” in tribute to vocalist Chris Cornell, who committed suicide in 2017. (via Uproxx)

Monday, May 19, 2025

Headline Writer Having Fun

Confusing Things About Grocery Stores in the US



Laurence Brown of Lost in the Pond has been in the US for years, and is now an American citizen, but still recalls enough about Britain to compare and contrast the two countries. This video is about a grocery shopping trip and some American things that confused him until he got used to them. Why do American cashiers have to stand up all day? Why do Americans refrigerate eggs? How can you compare the size of milk when the measurements are so different? And then there's the tax thing, which is a surprise to Europeans. Our taxes are added after the sale because each state has a different sales tax rate. Some cities also add another tax. And some states don't tax groceries at all. The video is not as long as it looks; there's a 95-second skippable ad at 2:40.



Strong Windows

When Your Favorite Movie Aged Terribly



Children aren't great movie critics. A film that really impressed you as a kid could be just another example of the horrible schlock rushed to home video to feed the masses. Gen X and Millennials are finding this out now, as Ryan George illustrates. Boomers, not so much, because fewer movies got made or seen in the days before home video, and the movies we saw in theaters required bigger budgets, more vetting, and had to appeal to adults as well as children. B-movies at the drive-in were an exception, but we knew even then that they were not expected to become classics.    



The Driver May Be...



"The Star Spangled Banner" Gets a New Tune



One thing we've always heard about the United States' national anthem is that it is hard to sing, what with that one high note near the end. We've hear it all our lives, from beautiful performances to versions that are laughably awful. What would Dustin Ballard do with the song? A mashup of course. There I Ruined It gave "The Star Spangled Banner" a completely new but familiar tune, setting the words we all know to the tune of "Black Hole Sun" by Soundgarden. The meter of the lyrics fits pretty well. It might seem a little weird to you, but "the land of the free" would be a whole lot easier to sing this way. And, as one commenter pointed out, if we adopted this version, both the lyrics and the tune would have an American writing credit.


Miss Cellania's Links

‘The Worst Journey in the World’ — Remembering the Untold Heroism of HMS Achates and the Arctic Convoys. (via Strange Company

How we are losing our free press. John Oliver explains it in chilling detail.

Edmonton six-legged cat on the mend after surgery. Bitsy now has three legs and gets around just fine. (via Metafilter)

NASA resurrects Voyager 1 interstellar spacecraft's thrusters after 20 years: 'These thrusters were considered dead.' (via Slashdot)

The Cat Butt Pencil Sharpener. It meows in agony. (via Nag on the Lake)

Barney Fife Wasn’t Allowed to Faint on The Andy Griffith Show.

Decades-long mystery of ginger cats revealed. They are the way they are because of a specific uninhibited gene. (via Damn Interesting)

The Country That Eats The Most Pizza Isn't Italy Or The US. (via Fark)

Paige Compositor: The Invention That Bankrupted Mark Twain. 

Terms and Conditions



(via Fark)

Whole Lotta Sex Machine



This remix by djericill gives us the best of James Brown and the best of Led Zeppelin at the same time.

Sunday, May 18, 2025

Error

Teenage Mutant Ninja Sofa

Spotted at Craigslist. (via Boing Boing)

Claycat in DOOM: The Dark Ages



Warning: gory animation. Lee Hardcastle is a claymation animator with a penchant for violence. Where can he go for the inspiration to outdo himself? Video games, of course, the most violent media we come across in our everyday lives. This video recreates scenes from the new game DOOM: The Dark Ages, in which his character Claycat goes all HAM on his demon opponents. But this is claymation, where the mayhem is both scary and silly. You know how it is with clay- give a little kid a lump of Play-Doh, and their first instinct is to tear and smash it. If you can handle DOOM, you can handle the stop-motion clay version. (via Geeks Are Sexy)

Nominative Determinism



(Thanks, WTM!)

A Trip to the Middle East



Saturday Night Live
opened the final episode of season 50 with our president's recent trip to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. He soon breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience as if her were doing the monologue. Not the strongest opening of the year. Much funnier was the annual joke swap on Weekend Update, in which Micheal Che and Colin Jost brutally make each other humiliate themselves on live TV. Jost got revenge for last year by making Che apologize to Jost's wife, who was on hand because she was the guest host. Despite that, Che still got the best of Jost.



Fat Cat



(via Fark)