Last night the Baltimore Orioles lost to the Texas Rangers 30-3, the worst major league baseball loss since 1897. Several other records were broken, and to make matters worse (if that's possible) this was only the first game of a doubleheader (the Orioles lost that one too, 9-7). Man...

I have to agree with For Your Entertainment's statement, "If you only watch one YouTube movie today featuring dancing country farmer's daughters contortionists singing about potato salad, it should be this one." Shoo...

This YouTube video of "Real Transformers" is sad yet mesmerizing...

Bad Gods features Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks. My favorite was:

The Raven

There once was a girl named Lenore
And a bird and a bust and a door
And a guy with depression
And a whole lot of questions
And the bird always says "Nevermore."

Newsvine is sponsoring ElectionVine, a site that aggregates monthly presidential election poll results from web sites utilizing its ElectionVine Widget, seen to the right. You may notice that it allows you to filter results for just this site, the entire Interweb, as well as by party. If there's enough interest I might add it to DrikoLand's sidebar. Vote now!

200 Bad Comics was the result of a dare. Mission accomplished.

Listology's feature Best Movies Never Made is a fairly comprehensive list of movie projects that never made it onto the silver screen, with links to more information in most cases.

Bud Light + Clamato = hurlicious Chelada. Who would drink this?!

Today Google announced Sky for Google Earth, a brand-new interface to Google Earth that lets you look at constellations; watch planets in motion; view high-resolution space imagery compiled from "one million photographs from scientific and academic sources;" and much more.

If you're interested in this sort of thing you should definitely consider checking out Celestia and Stellarium, two excellent, free planetarium applications.

Every year, Beloit College publishes its Mindset List, reminding us how incoming college freshmen view their world. This year's Mindset List for the Class of 2011 is particularly poignant, as most incoming freshmen were born in 1989, making them the first post-Cold War class. Read the list to see things from their perspective; man, I feel old... ;-(

The YouTube video Ultimate Canon Rock mashes up 40 renditions of Johann Pachelbel's Canon In D, more commonly known as Pachelbel's Canon.

The AtariAge Forums entry The 70s Games: What Games Would Had Been Made from the 70s is awesome!

Now that our old Atari VCS had turn 30th this year I think its time to go back and see what if Atari was cranking out many games using the 1970s theme from Blockbuster Movies, Cult Filmes, TV Shows and even Rock Songs. Here are some of the labels I made if Atari was making them from 1977 to 1979.

Definitely check it out (including the second page), as the thumbnail graphic above doesn't do it justice...

The August 2007 issue of Harper's Bazaar contained a pictorial article entitled The Simpsons Go To Paris with Linda Evangelista; NOTCOT has scanned in the article. The article features a bunch of images of Simpsons characters posing with fashion icons and their creations.

The automotive homage General Carbuncle is awesome:

James R Ford is a multi-media artist currently based in London, England. For this project, initiated in 2003, he aims to transform a second-hand Ford Capri into the General Lee, from Dukes of Hazzard, by covering it in little toy cars in the appropriate colours (mainly red and orange).

I know that this is a little dated, but the YouTube Bush Blog video on Scooter Libby is still hilarious.

Boing Boing opines that the Chess Coaster meme originated at the xkcd online comic strip may well be "the purpose of the Internet." ;-)

Gregg Easterbrook of The Huffington Post writes that the "greatest living American" was all but ignored by the mainstream press when he was recently awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, America's highest civilian award. I'll admit that I had no idea who Norman Borlaug was before I read more about him, and it's quite a pity that more people don't know about this Nobel Peace Prize Winner, one of only two living American-born laureates.

Modern Drunkard Magazine presents its list of the 10 Greatest Alcohol Icons of All Time, explaining the origins of icons like the Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull shown at right.

The YouTube video Optimus Prime Speed Painting is amazing...

Vladstudio.com's map Planet Earth - Inversed is pretty cool...

If you use Firefox as your web browser (and why wouldn't you?) and have not yet discovered the usefulness of the Greasemonkey extension, I've found at least one Greasemonkey script that will make it worth the download. Pagerization allows search results from Google, flickr, Yahoo, Wikipedia, YouTube, del.icio.us, digg, and other sites to be preloaded, eliminating the need to hit a "next page" button or number. It sounds simple, but for me it has quickly become an essential addition for Google and flickr browsing in particular.

Let me know in the comments if you're interested in a post about other Greasemonkey scripts that I use...

How good are you at spotting a fake web site that could be trying to scam you? Take McAfee SiteAdvisor's Phishing Quiz and find out. I only missed one, but I have to admit that I was probably paying more attention than I normally would. How did you do?

fimoculous posts that "News Groper is an entire network of fake celeb bloggers." It's a mixed bag, but there are some very funny entries...

It's a bit depressing to think that The Princess Bride came out 20 years ago. The ABC News feature Princess Bride: 20 Years Later doesn't do much to make me feel any younger, although seeing how some of the stars have aged is slightly comforting. ;-p Best Week Ever's reaction is worth the read...

Esquire's article Greetings From Idiot America is one of the best-written diatribes on the decline of American society that I've ever read. I've chosen a couple of passages that I found most interesting, but the entire, somewhat long read is well worth it:

The Gut is the basis for the Great Premises of Idiot America. We hold these truths to be self-evident:
1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
2) Anything can be true if somebody says it on television.
3) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.
...
This is how Idiot America engages the great issues of the day. It decides, en masse, with a thousand keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the poor biologist's words carry no more weight than the thunderations of some turkey-neck preacher out of the Church of Christ's Own Parking Facility in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an "expert" and, therefore, an "elitist." Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He's brilliant, surely, but his Gut's the same as ours. He just ignores it, poor fool.
...
The rest of the world looks on in cockeyed wonder. The America of Franklin and Edison, of Fulton and Ford, of the Manhattan project and the Apollo program, the America of which Einstein wanted to be a part, seems to be enveloping itself in a curious fog behind which it's tying itself in knots over evolution, for pity's sake, and over the relative humanity of blastocysts versus the victims of Parkinson's disease.
...
"You don't need to be credible on television," explains Keith Olbermann, the erudite host of his own show on MSNBC. "You don't need to be authoritative. You don't need to be informed. You don't need to be honest. All these things that we used to associate with what we do are no longer factors.

"There is an entire network [the Fox News Channel] that bills itself as news that is devoted to reinforcing people's fears and saying to them, 'This is what you should be scared of, and here's whose fault it is,' " Olbermann says. "And that's what they get--two or three million frustrated paranoids who sit in front of the TV and go, 'Damn right, it's those liberals' fault.' Or, 'It's those--what's the word for it?--college graduates' fault.' "
...
"Somewhere along the line, we stopped rewarding intelligence with success and stopped equating intelligence with success," Olbermann says. We're all in the bar now, where everybody's an expert, where the Gut makes everyone so very sure. All opinions are of equal worth. No voice is more authoritative than any others; some are just louder. Of course, the problem in the bar is that sooner or later, for reasons that nobody will remember in the clear light of the next morning, some noisy asshole picks a fight. And it becomes clear that the rise of Idiot America has consequences.

Watching Dick Cheney pontificate on Iraq back in 1994 enrages me beyond words. What a fucking asshole.

Stage6's Charlie Brown characters drawn in Manga style are very disconcerting, albeit less so than an artist exploring their skeletal structures...

Ahead of the release of The Simpsons Movie (I know, I'm way late with this post), Vanity Fair published a very interesting article entitled Simpson Family Values, including a special interview with former writer Conan O'Brien. Well worth the read...

By the way, did any of you go see the movie? Ulana and I saw it on the first day over in Cambridge, MD as part of our fifth anniversary weekend; yeah, I know I'm a lucky guy ;-). That says something, because I've become such a crotchety old man that I refuse to go the the movie theater anymore. I think the last movies I've seen in a movie theater this century were the Lord Of The Rings trilogy and the Star Wars prequel trilogy.

Anyhoo, overall the movie did not suck, which in itself definitely exceeded my expectations. There were plenty of things that could have been better, including better use of the extensive cast of characters rather than just making sure that everyone got at least one line. The main plot wasn't as good as it could have been, and the way they portrayed Homer was a new low, something that's pretty difficult to do considering where they've taken his character in the past. On the whole, though, I came out of the theater satisfied, yet still wondering how much longer they'll be able to keep this up...

goldenfiddle managed to uncover a bunch of demo tracks from around 1981 that didn't make it onto The Police's album Ghost In The Machine. There's a reason some of them never made it onto the album, but for a fan like me this was quite a find...

Double Viking has a great feature entitled Real Men Love The Fifth Element. I personally think it's an underrated classic...

Blender's list of 100 Days That Changed Music is pretty comprehensive...

McSweeney's Internet Tendency presents A Letter to Optimus Prime From His GEICO Auto Insurance Agent.

Sports Illustrated has a pretty good list of The best athletes by number, from Jim Otto to Wayne Gretzky.

Best Week Ever's list of Top 10 Movies That Ruined Our Childhood Memories is right on the money...

I finally finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow over the weekend and was extremely happy that nobody spoiled it for me. Don't worry, I won't spoil it for anyone that hasn't finished yet.

However, there are plenty of links that I've saved for after I finished the book that any fan should immediately visit. The best gem is a transcript from an extensive question-and-answer session that JK Rowling hosted via live web chat on Bloomsbury's official website. Fans submitted over 120,000 questions, and although she didn't answer nearly all of them, she answered many questions that I had and filled in a lot of back story. In an interview with TODAY’s Meredith Vieira a couple more tidbits of back story were also revealed.

The TODAY interview also revealed that Rowling "'probably will' publish a Potter encyclopedia, promising many more details about her beloved characters and the fate of the wizarding world beyond the few clues provided in the seventh book’s epilogue."

Finally, read why Rowling changed the last word of the book and whether Daniel Radcliffe's guess about Harry Potter's fate was correct.

Did any of you read the book(s)? What did you think?

Although Sports Illustrated's lead story on Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron's home record is subtitled Steroids or not, Bonds' ability never in question, many (myself included) will disagree. Besides the obvious asterisk that will always be placed next to the record because of Bonds' obvious "alleged" steroid use, I've included another after reading an article that further puts his vaunted athletic prowess in doubt. Editor and Publisher's article Barry Bonds' HR Record Tainted by Elbow 'Armor'? reveals that the protective gear Bonds has employed in various forms for over 10 years is actually quite a marvel of engineering, conferring at least several advantages to his swing. Supporters of Bonds who claim that steroid use does not affect his reaction time or swing mechanics may have less of a leg to stand on when considering this...

A MetaFilter thread I came across explores the highly engineered design of newer bats, but I'll exclude that from my rant as it is a factor not necessarily unique to Bonds.

"Don't Klingon to power, Trek star tells Burma junta." I hate to see Chekov Walter Koenig even remotely associated with that quote...

WOW Russia! is a pretty fun faux travel guide site...

Radar Online presents their list of 50 Things You Should Never Say:

Everything's a bit more casual in summer, but that still doesn't mean you can wear jorts and crocs. Or for that matter ever admit to owning said items aloud. In the spirit of public service, Radar has compiled a list of 50 other things best kept to yourself, including those tired catch-phrases that make everyone around you groan.

I have to admit using several of these regularly... ;-p

The YouTube video Lego Millenium Falcon Stop Motion is pretty fun...

The large JPG graphic Apple Form Factor Evolution displays all of the hardware, devices, and accessories Apple created from 1976 to 2007.

Cabinet Magazine has a very interesting article on micro-nations, "entities that display all the trappings of established independent states, yet garner none of the respect."

Good Cop, Baby Cop is another hilarious video produced by Funny or Die and starring Will Ferrell and his baby daughter Pearl. If you haven't already seen their other video The Landlord you are missing out... :-)

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