You got a light, Mac?

Apropos of absolutely nothing, here are lines from songs that have caught my fancy for some reason or another over the years:

“You probably think this song is about you.”

“His hair was perfect.”

“Grunt, howl, grunt, howl.”

“And.”

“… with a soulful, bounding leap ….”

“I’m dead but I don’t know it.”

“Pippikippippippi!” ((Not to be confused with “Pipiru piru piru pipiru pi.”))

“Someone get me a ladder.”

“Today, I am two separate gorillas.”

“Fridays I go painting in the Louvre.”

“What a pumpkin.”

“We can’t even think of a word that rhymes.”

“No, but I’ve got a dark brown overcoat.”

Update: How could I forget:

And so, I broke into the Palace
With a sponge and a rusty spanner.
She said: “Eh, I know you, and you cannot sing.”
I said: “That’s nothing — you should hear me play piano.”

Not to mention, “I didn’t realize you wrote such bloody awful poetry.”

Still life with Marx and Engels

Fred recently discovered Komar and Melamid. I first encountered them half a lifetime ago when they made an appearance at Wichita State. Their schtick then was that they bought and sold souls. They were particularly proud of purchasing Andy Warhol’s. The business wasn’t as lucrative as they had hoped, though, so by then they only accepted souls on consignment.

They came to Fred’s attention through their fusion of musicology and statistics. By polling, they attempted to define the characteristics of the “most wanted” and “least wanted” songs, and then realize the songs. I’m afraid that I’m the in the 28% that dislike the wanted song. The unwanted song, however, is an amazing hodgepodge of accordion, bagpipes, tuba, banjo, operatic soprano and obnoxious kids, and it’s worth 22 minutes of your life. Once will probably be enough.

Oh, yeah, Komar and Melamid are painters, too.

*****

Mr. Darwin is the son of a planetarium lecturer. He reminisces about the artificial skies here.

55 billion silly faces

Shamus Young is the most dangerous sort of guy, with lots of ideas and the time and energy to implement them. He first came to my attention several years ago with The Lemon. Later there was The DM of the Rings. Currently he is one of the parties responsible for Chainmail Bikini. His most recent effort is a WordPress plugin, “Wavatars,” which I’ve installed here. If you leave a comment, your name will be accompanied by an eighty-pixel-square avatar determined by your email address. (If you have a Gravatar, as I do, that’s what you will see instead.) On a weblog like mine where comments are infrequent, these are just a cute novelty, but on sites where comment threads get lengthy, these could be useful for keeping the various writers straight.

If you like the idea but want something a little more macabre for your own site, consider MonsterID. (Via Aziz.)

Dance and more

Let’s take a break from ballet and look at some other kinds of dance. Via Mark Sullivan comes this example of dance as a martial art:

Bonus points if you can identify the pianist.

Via Robert the LLama Butcher, an outstanding canine performer.

And there’s the dancing stormtrooper of Akihabara.

*****

One more reason why I intend to remain the last person in North America without a cell phone.

*****

If three women together mean “mischief,” what would, say, three geeks mean?

*****

An epic win for the Japanese: the Gurren-Lagaan Jack. 

gurrenjack.png
 Via Will.

*****

Let’s get into the Olympic spirit: 

chinaolympic.jpg
 Via the Rat