ELECTION SONG CHUNDERNOZZLES

Published by Pinko Punko on November 6, 2012 in *BOOP*. 10 Comments

And you will know us by the trail of dead…CATATONIC

meh

Published by Pinko Punko on October 19, 2012 in *BOOP*. 16 Comments

Sorry everyone, spam has gotten so bad I don’t even check my pinkomail because we are just getting overridden.

Cloverhill Big Texas Honeybun keeps getting inappropriately hijinked. Also, Matt Yglesias continues to post his thoughts on topics. The stronger he gets the weaker we become.

Onward.

I will try to fix the other cob logs anon, but there every comment will go to moderation to try to kill the spam somehow. I don’t know exactly how the spam does the math but it freaks me out.

A mind is a terrible lizard

Published by plover on September 13, 2012 in but what the hell, Flights of Fancy and Kind of cashewy nut log. 40 Comments

I recently came across the following sentence:

I, for example, cannot imagine how the giant sauropods mated, except through the use of telekinesis.

I have two modest proposals for a solution to this conundrum.

1) Face-to-face

Find a lake with a depth equal to a little under twice the height of a sauropod torso. (If you can’t find such a lake, get a sauropod to dig you one. Tell the sauropod it gets to mate when it’s finished.) Put a sauropod in the lake. Tell it to roll over. Don’t take no, or, more to the point, blank incomprehension, for an answer. Note that the long neck conveniently allows the sauropod to keep its head out of the water while lying on its back. Put a second sauropod, of the opposite sex, in the lake. Presuming a reasonable amount of buoyancy on the part of sauropods, it should now be possible to fire up “Swan Lake” and have them dock together.

2) Oral sex

A male sauropod could perform oral sex on itself then on a female, or, conversely, a female could attend to a male first and then herself. While this explanation, like the previous one, would show selection pressure for long necks, it’s less clear there would be all that much selection pressure for gender discrimination, and sauropods may have gone around having oral sex pretty much at random. Cue outrage about how Darwinists want to teach your kids about gay dinosaurs.

*

The source of the quote is the 1987 novel Daughter of the Bear King by Eleanor Arnason, which features an appendix providing an evolutionary explanation for why dinosaurs were magical. The novel is one of the odder SF/fantasy hybrids I’ve come across, and so far I can’t really convince myself that it works, though it is interesting. However, Arnason would go on to write A Woman of the Iron People and Ring of Swords, two of the best anthropological sf novels around.

Oh Ian Cohen-This is a Bridge Too Far

Published by Pinko Punko on August 31, 2012 in Battle Rap, Pinko of Pork Records and Pitchfork. 18 Comments

PITCHFORK writes the Andrew W.K. apologia. WE JUST DIDN’T GET YOU ANDREW W.K.!!!! Compare to Ry Schry’s original take:

And yet, some of these ‘punk’ and ‘indie’ kids are still willing to back WK up with a number of ridiculous excuses that they deep-down know are inherently flawed. “It’s catchy” is no kind of argument. Every pop song you’ve ever truly hated is catchy. “It’s ironic” is wack, too, since there’s exactly zero irony to be had on any of I Get Wet or in WK’s motivational interviews. “It’s fun” is about the only legitimate excuse a guy could come up with– and that’s the one thing I’ll give it to warrant the .6 in the rating– but this world of music which history has graced us with is loaded with fun music. Even fun music with substance, fun music that doesn’t talk to you like you’re some kinda total dipshit that wouldn’t know Boredoms from buzzworthy. And you don’t even have to look that hard! So then, what is the excuse for a typically elitist music nerd to bow to Andrew WK’s blistering tard-rock? That’s right, folks: there isn’t one.

SHORTER SHREIBER: “YOU, READING THIS, YOU AREN’T AN IDIOT, ARE YOU? I MEAN I CLEARLY DON’T THINK YOU ARE, AND SINCE YOU AREN’T, YOU CLEARLY DON’T LIKE ANDREW W.K., DO YOU? I KNEW YOU DIDN’T. THANK GOD WE GOT PREVIEW COPIES OF THE LATEST BOREDOMS 7 INCH FROM THE FUTURE. IN FACT I HAVE BUILT A TIME MACHINE TO ENSURE THAT IT IS NEVER RELEASED AND YOU SHALL NEVER HEAR OF IT. I WILL DESCRIBE IT TO YOU IN WAYS THAT YOU SHALL NOT UNDERSTAND, BUT SURELY YOU WILL RECOGNIZE HOW MUCH IT MAKES YOU A DIPSHIT.”
Continue reading ‘Oh Ian Cohen-This is a Bridge Too Far’

Chuckleberry Finn

Published by Pinko Punko on August 25, 2012 in Flights of Fancy. 7 Comments

Or Sharkleberry Chuck?

Always has the best Celeb Dream Cameos.

PITCHFORK *CHECK PLEASE*

Published by Pinko Punko on August 23, 2012 in Pinko of Pork Records, Pitchfork and Question Mark and The Mysterians. 11 Comments

Relevant

UC chastised me for participating in Le Pitchfork’s People’s List, where everyone got to vote for their favorite albums from Pitchfork’s existence. They said they’d take all the data and present it in super cool ways. Instead, they show some top 20 lists parsed by some geography and a few questions (most listened to genre). For the whole shebang they give the top 200 albums on a nice looking page and a graph where they break the thing down by albums from year with a table or so about some of the data. They just seemed like they failed. Where they succeeded is I assume some information harvesting app because they required voting through social media sites. Who knows. UC and I kind of had a group vote- we traded suggestions back and forth with arcane rules for vetoes etc.,

Suggestions for what would have been actually cool:

1) Top 1000 or even 2000 albums- nothing in the top 200 is surprising so much, but it would be interesting to know what albums were in the next pockets of interest (since there were tons of albums voted for) and a great way to remember some albums that have maybe fallen off.

2) Top write-in albums (bunch of well known albums were not in their database) UPDATE- OOPS- they did have this one. This was a little bit sad because these should have been in the database- I would have liked to see how many of the top 200 were suggested in their pages for the top rated albums- perhaps a little selection bias maybe

TOP-VOTED WRITE-IN ALBUMS
PAVEMENT BRIGHTEN THE CORNERS
REFUSED THE SHAPE OF PUNK TO COME
LAURYN HILL THE MISEDUCATION OF LAURYN HILL
BRAND NEW THE DEVIL AND GOD ARE RAGING INSIDE ME
PULP THIS IS HARDCORE
QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE RATED R
DEFTONES WHITE PONY
JAY-Z REASONABLE DOUBT
BEASTIE BOYS HELLO NASTY
PAVEMENT TERROR TWILIGHT
THE WHITE STRIPES DE STIJL
BLUR BLUR
DELTRON 3030 DELTRON 3030
OUTKAST ATLIENS
DR. DRE 2001
SLEATER-KINNEY DIG ME OUT
MUSE ORIGIN OF SYMMETRY
THE VERVE URBAN HYMNS
MUSE ABSOLUTION
JIMMY EAT WORLD CLARITY

3) Distribution of rankings for albums in the top 20 at least (kind of like how IMDB lets you look at distribution of scores for movies- and then gives some demographic breakdowns).

4) A selection of some people’s number 1s that didn’t make the top 200 and their comments. People’s comments were a nice feature. I presume they harvested a ton of comments from people on albums they love, yet they only used 10 of them. It is nice to see regular people write about stuff without trying too hard (™ Grayson Currin writing about metal, Ian Cohen writing about re-releases, maybe anyone at Pitchfork?).

5) They had one small list of albums that scored OK but had no number 1 votes. That was interesting. They could have had more breakdowns along these lines.

6) Maybe geography by state instead of two entries for NYC (holla Brooklyn!)

WHOA CONTENT TORRENT!!!!!!!

Published by Pinko Punko on August 14, 2012 in Cobagitation, Gumshoery and Gun Cake. 33 Comments

Quick test of my geographical neighborhood via le Google. Please type in “how to make a nap” into Google and let us know in comments what the first 3-4 guesses are.

We feel a bit worried about our local search results.

UPDATE:

don’t use quotes and I don’t want the search results I want what google is going to guess about your typing

In a Frivolous Diversion

Published by Pinko Punko on August 14, 2012 in *BOOP*. 23 Comments

Haha. GC put the Magic Shell in the fridge. This is like the keys in the freezer gambit, but more sinister!

MAKE THIS WEB LOG WRITE ITSELF

Published by Pinko Punko on August 5, 2012 in *BOOP*. 34 Comments

I need that xkcd comic “somebody is wrong on the internet” but the person is not typing furiously, instead they are beat down into nothing. They can’t even respond to Yglesias trolling over the postal service or Drum contrarianing over complaining about the Olympics. And then being very sad about Inkblot being killed by a coyote. It is the dog days.

If you feel like being laid low, enjoy these animated graphs about the melting of the Arctic.

Maybe I should post some reruns. IC3W3DG3!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Radio Report

Published by Pinko Punko on June 30, 2012 in *BOOP*. 30 Comments

A) I am a big Donald Glover fan, so I am sorry to say when I heard a song on the radio that sounded like Linkin Park rap over a Justice beat dressing up Drake lyrics, I was sad to find out that it was Childish Gambino (DG’s rap moniker).

B) Kanye West’s verses get worse and worse but the beats are better and better. See “Mercy” and “No Church in the Wild”.

C) The oldies station that has only been on a year- a super cheapie with pre-recorded DJs- but still had lots of 60s Neil Diamond AND The Standells AND about 15 Beach Boys songs AND Sonny and Cher AND The Supremes AND some very random songs AND a bunch of Stevie Wonder AND a pretty deep library is doing that thing where they are changing formats. Their format change appears to coincide with the “classic rock” station disappearing from the airwaves, and now Oldies means 70s and 80s crapola. I has a sad. BLARG.

Please give our Ombuds some attention, they really do love nothing more. If you were to create a parody of Matt Yglesias, would you bother to change anything about him or just make him more concentrated?