One rodent and no time

I’m really way too busy to write anything at the moment. As usual, here’s a mountain beaver to keep up appearances.

Youtube sweep of the week: Radiohead fanwork

Making unofficial videos for a band which has made some of the greatest music videos ever themselves may seem a tad overkill, but a quick scouring of the ’tube shows that the visual talent of the Oxford lot obviously has spilled over onto their fanbase.

Dan Provost molds images from his Düsseldorf tenure into a perfectly synced, sterile backdrop to the already robotic and industrial Packt Like Sardines in A Crushd Tin Can, and Deadlyminx (who also gets credits for his Romeo & Juliet take on Talk Show Host) clearly shows that You And Whose Army should have made it into the Kingdom Of Heaven soundtrack. The real killer, however, may very well be JL Williams’ juxtaposition of How To Disappear Completely and the Tom Tykwer feature Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer. The ethereal, fleeting quality of the song fits rather flawlessly to a film more concerned with olfactory sensations than visuals.

This Year’s Most Loathsome People (Or “Yes, Mike Huckabee is #47″)

In a world gone not only mad but batshit insane, satire is at times the only way to retain said sanity. The Beast’s list of this year’s 50 Most Loathsome People in America is some funny, and very well-deserved, shit.

Last thoughts on Benazir Bhutto

There are any number of perspectives one can put on today’s assassination of  the Pakistani opposition leader in Rawalpindi: a mindless act of cowardice by bearded death cultists, an event possibly orchestrated by the Musharraf administration, or the death blow to the already fragile process for democracy in Pakistan, to name a few. In either way, it’s a tragic occurence which is likely to shape the development in the region for quite some time ahead. Bhutto may be gone, but her legacy isn’t – the fight for democracy and progressive values in the Muslim world. This is not the time to quit that fight.

In the spirit of the season

 

Time to gather in the heap of Christmas greetings from the left side of the web. Roy Zimmerman offers an intentionally excruciating parody/tribute to his more famous namesake (watch out for the harmonica solo), while his younger, nerdier self Jonathan Coulton sends a less-than-idyllic card from the poor souls at the interstellar penal colony Chiron Beta Prime. To round it up, watch The Pogues revisit their evergreen Fairytale of New York 17 years later.

Quote of the week

“It’s sort of the reaction that one would get for a book called “I was abducted by little green men”, when the commenters were the Abduction Survivors Group on the one hand and the Psychiatrists’ Association on the other. “

(A customer draws a rather stellar parable on the ongoing Amazon comment war between evilutionists and Jesus Horse proponents over William Dembski/Dumbski’s latest output) 

Cats that glow in the dark

 

Besides, the South Korean fluorescent cats are pretty damn kickass. Perhaps this is the solution to the avian extinctions caused worldwide by domestic cats? Glowing in the dark kinda spoils the camouflage for a nocturnal predator.

Go stuff it, Bill Donahue

 

If you haven’t already done it, go read the official Evil Atheist Conspiracy Novel™ of the season. As you’ve probably noticed, the screen adaptation has set the fundietards reeling.)

On a related note, I think The Parable of the Hobbit Necromancer Commandos has some genuine meme potential. If nothing else, it’s a most welcome variation from those orbiting teapots and pink invisible unicorns.

I can has science?

Yeah, I know… lolscience is all the buzz these days. Teh forerunners at Physics Cat Macros are deffo worth checking out, too.

Picture of the week: Say hello to your cousin

No, that is not Linda Blair of  The Exorcist doing the wild thing. It’s a Tarsier, a small prosimian native of southeast Asia. The tarsiers can be thought of as the “owls” of the primate order, since they have many of the evolutionary adaptions to nocturnal living found in the Strigiformes lot: huge eyes for better night vision, and the uncanny ability to rotate their heads 180°. Differing from their avian brethren, they are mostly insectivorous, although they are known to prey upon the occasional bird or snake. The tarsiers have the largest eyes in proportion to body size of any known animal, as evidenced here.