DSO Records: Trivia & Music

I wrote a piece for BoingBoing Gadgets on a new kind of motion capture software, into which I manage to shoehorn a digression about pasting ping-pong balls to Tiger Woods’ face that frankly sounded pretty genius as I was typing it.

Yes, there’s also video footage of me looking like I’m eight miles high in an Amsterdam brothel, listening to “I Can’t Help Myself” and trying to act out the story.

Look, the point of the article is this: the fireballs are fake. The technological advance is real.

Popularity: 11% [?]

You know, I’m totally going to miss Total Request Live. For real.

It was the cultural touchstone for a generation, the reason I was late for work when I lived near Times Square for a couple of years and I had to wade through the throngs of screaming preteens begging & clamoring for a glimpse through the second-floor window of whassisface from 98 Degrees or whatsername from that Disney show, not that one but the other one, no no no, you know who I’m talking about. Man, times none of us will ever forget, things those people will go home to their places where people are sensible and rational and grow old, and tell their grandkids about. God’s children, every one of us.

Over the entire run of TRL, I watched, cumulatively, a grand total of about 40 seconds of it. That includes clicking past it to get to something else, all the time I spent loitering in TV showrooms (handy hint: talk about a great place to meet people!), the occasional DVR leftover from when I was wanting to watch — oh, okay, I have never DVR’d anything on MTV. I’m just trying to be nice. But yeah, if I’ve watched an entire minute of TRL over the course of my (and its) life, that would be more than I thought.

But I will miss it. Because now, Carson Daly now has no fallback position, and when his show gets cancelled*, he’ll be up for the same temp jobs I’m going for, and that would be bad.

I will miss it because now all those teenpop would-bes are going to spill into other shows I actually watch, like Jeopardy! or Washington Week In Review or Antiques Roadshow or Billy Mays commercials. And really, that’s no good for anyone concerned, especially me. And Billy Mays.

I will miss it because it kept a significant group of obnoxious truants, hoodlums, ne’er-do-wells and — and other people I have been in my life — in a clear and easily-avoidable place in the city for a couple of hours every day, and now they’re gong to be infesting every corner of town, including and especially the places I go to in my daily travels. Again, nobody really wants that.

I understand the vagaries of ratings and market demand and corporate branding and the economy and all the other reasons shows like this bubble up and then fade back into the flotsam of the television world. But today, the world of popular culture is a little less spangled, and for that, as a species, we are poorer.

* Is that even still on? That’s another show I’ve never seen, wouldn’t know where to find, and have no real desire to find out about. I don’t hate Carson like some people I know do. It’s just that this world actually is big enough for the two of us. Does my apathy make me a bad person?

Popularity: 13% [?]

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New post up at Cocktailians:

The Final Presidential Debate Drinking Game Thread (Probably)

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I am providing these as a public service. It’s important to note that this is a comprehensive list; if you don’t find a costume that is appropriate for your needs on this list, consider it a sign that maybe you should stay in on October 31 with the lights out and catch up on your Bartlett’s.

Which is what I’ll be doing.

• sexy chicken
• sexy refrigerator
• sexy BLT
• sexy Buick LeSabre
• sexy racist John McCain supporter
• sexy wheelbarrow
• sexy parked car
• sexy bag of Cheez Doodles
• sexy Grimace (from McDonaldland)
• sexy topographic map of the floor of New York Harbor
• sexy Tom Brokaw
• sexy bowling alley
• sexy Metamucil container
• sexy steroid syringe
• sexy blueprint of an I.M. Pei building
• sexy votive candle
• sexy Trivial Pursuit game piece
• sexy gas pump
• sexy Zamboni (with or without driver)
• sexy Juan Valdez
• sexy bowl of Lipton onion soup
• sexy copy of the 9/11 Commission Final Report
• sexy bath mat
• sexy Season four DVD collection of “House”
• sexy drunk person in street clothes wrapped head to toe in toilet paper
• sexy despondent bond trader
• sexy Billy Mays
• sexy boil-in-the-bag mashed potatoes
• sexy pair of clown pants
• sexy George Washington wig
• Nicole Richie

That’s it. You’re welcome.

Popularity: 63% [?]

I’m assuming “palining” will replace “fronting” in the dictionary soon, right?

I mean, that’s the fascination at this point, right? There’s nothing else. There really is no there there. She’s talking as much shit as possible and praying no one checks her work. She’s a Ponzi scheme of ideas, with Bill Kristol in a cameo as The Wizard Behind The Curtain.

I’m not saying Sarah Palin is stupid. I’m saying she’s trying to be sneaky. She reminds me of a four-year-old who’s learned that manipulating people is an easy way to get stuff he wants. She’s smart enough to talk her way into trouble, but not smart enough to talk her way back out. (I know this person. I may be this person.) She could get away with it in Alaska, where she could scream Jesus and fagbashing and flirt with every registered voter in the state to their face and squeeze one out on Election Day. But to do that in a national election, on a (way more than) 50x scale, is beyond her ken, and it’s started to catch up with her. I think she’s becoming aware of it now, but she can’t go backwards.

She’s successfully going to cleave the neoconservatives in the Republican Party from the conservatives. The neocons, the children of Rove, Atwater, Gingrich and all the other feckless dorks who went Gay for Reagan and think of politics as a game you win, not as, y’know, an actual process by which a nation functions in the world, are being exposed as the tools, stooges and soulless fucks they are, and the uneasy marriage that held for a generation between them and the true conservative thinkers, who actually believe in governs-best-who-governs-least and have found the nepotism and looting-the-treasury bullshit of these upstart morons detestable, is being ripped apart by this twinkly little uncurious no-talent heather, the Yoko Ono of the Grand Old Party.

Also, I know Alaskans and Yukon residents, and even the ones who talk like her don’t talk anything like her. It’s like they beat her accent out of her, and then told her to put it back in when they found it played better. Now she sounds like an Arctic Minnie Pearl, without the comic timing or the material.

She’s not stupid. She’s just shallow. She belongs in an Anchorage public television version of The Hills, not Anna-Nicoleing her way into the Oval Office with Rick Davis’ hand in her back.

Alright, I’m done.

(Note: No insult to Yoko Ono was intended. Maybe I should have said Courtney Love.)

Popularity: 66% [?]

It’s true: in 1963, the Rolling Stones did an ad for Rice Krispies:

Popularity: 77% [?]

Not for nothing, but someone’s going home with free ice cream tonight. Also in the prize pool this evening: A nifty desk clock and some books with purty pitchers in ‘em. And maybe a cow. (Yes, a cow.) We’ll see how it goes.

Come on down if you can. I could use the company.

Popularity: 76% [?]

Jeopardy! ran the following round recently. See how many of these you can figure out:

I won’t say anything about the difficulty level.

[via Paul Lukas]

Popularity: 74% [?]

As a regular service, I like to provide the latest news items from the ever-growing world of crap in the news. This week, two items of, as Janis Joplin used to say, great social and political import:

• The economy hitting you hard? Are you a major multinational investment corporation with strong ties to the federal government? Then you won’t need BuyMyShitPile.com, a site where you can sell whatever crap you’ve had lying around your house to the government for whatever you happen to think (or, let’s face it, are willing to pretend) they’re actually worth:

  With our economy in crisis, the US Government is scrambling to rescue our banks by purchasing their “distressed assets”, i.e., assets that no one else wants to buy from them. We figured that instead of protesting this plan, we’d give regular Americans the same opportunity to sell their bad assets to the government. We need your help and you need the Government’s help!

• This news item, courtesy of America’s Number One News Source:
  
  Obama Promises To Stop America’s Shitty Jobs From Going Overseas

Popularity: 83% [?]