dope. we were close to seeing this this weekend, but got caught up in a bunch of other non-materializing plans, but plan on seeing that and napoleon dynamite soon.
.

onion av club interviewed mike judge, talked about an upcoming film:

So this starts out as a documentary about how the people who are reproducing the fastest are guys who are too lazy to put on a rubber, and lots of highly educated people are waiting until they’re 40 to have a kid, and then having one or none. It’s kind of a sleeper movie about how, 400 or 500 years from now, a guy who’s your average dumbass today is the smartest person in the world.

also talks about the possibility of a new beavis and butt-head film, which would be great and hopefully better than the first one.

i, along with many of my co-workers, received that stupid-ass book eats, shoots & leaves as part of a “christmas bonus” last year. the new yorker has done a smashing job nitpicking grammar mistakes from the book. i didn’t notice any, mostly because i never really opened the book.

say what you want about ebert, but he’s right about moore and everything else he says in this article: ‘9/11′: Just the facts?

the new weblogs.com video game weblog, joystiq, looks promising. niche-blogging, the way to go. too bad i have so many interests and no focus. hello, jack of all trades, master of none.

-anyone in seattle try these computerized toilets at all? i wanna try it. the closest thing i got to a computerized toilet was the toilets at that one huge department store, what’s that place called? oh, yeah, bloomingdales. that place is weird, other than self-dispensing toilet seat covers, they their bags just say stuff like “large brown bag” on them.

-mcdonald’s people in australia are showing commercials countering points covered in super size me. my god, did this guy see the movie? No one eats McDonald’s food three times a day, every day, and no one should,” he said yesterday. “We believe, and have always believed, that McDonald’s can be eaten as part of a well-balanced diet. mutherfucka’s dumb, yo.

-interview with craig newmark of craiglist. i don’t have the patience (or time) to read the whole thing, and i’m a great proponent of craigslist, but i find cl’s contribution to reality television as well as craig newmark himself a little sad, if not quirkily charming.

-i’ve posted this before, but you can stream rocky votalato’s most recent album suicide machines. check out the kick-ass drum recording that chris walla produced on track 6, montana.

-if a hybrid suv is good enough for ted leo, it’s good enough for me. he makes the case on them on his site. and i’ve been loving the raw demos he has up, especially, me and mia.

-these new playstations with integrated pvr’s of 150 gig and 250 gig seem overpriced at roughly 600 skins for the low-end, but those are huge hard drives and it’s basically a media center. but i could also think of a ton of other things i’d rather spend 6 bills on, and i already have a tivo and a ps2.

-going into things explode’s rehearsal space tomorrow night to lay down as many drum tracks as possible to the 12 tracks i have ready. no more hot rod sticks on my records, ever! (prolly not, but i want some loud kicks and snare on this shit, gonna blow your doors off, watch out).

i know it’s been quiet around here for a while, but that’s just because shit is happening. i’m getting it together elsewhere and will share it with you asap. peace.

tbs acquired family guy, and will be airing the episodes (i think the new ones, maybe) on primetime on weds.

a fellow from the university of chicago recently published a project on using music criticism as a creative tool. there’s a couple mp3’s up from the project, here’s the abstract:

This project combines a computer science background and a songwriting hobby with an unhealthy obsession for popular music reviews. In it, I attempt to come up with a new computer-assisted songwriting method which takes music critics’ opinions into account. By writing software to statisically analyze the content of several thousand record reviews from the Pitchfork music website (www.pitchforkmedia.com), I generate a set of compositional guidelines based on the musical preferences expressed by the critics. I then use those guidelines to write and record a couple of original songs, discussing in detail the relationships between the songs and the data that I have collected.

jack put up a new the online romance song, don’t know exactly when, but it’s new to me: twitch.

there’s certain songwriters out there that just simply get me every time, i don’t understand it and i can’t explain it– every time i try to, it just sounds like i’m repeating myself. jack is one of those.

if you bought achilles’ heel, you can visit the pedro the lion site and get some daily downloads (there’s a u/n and password inside the cd)

Starting on June 9th we’ll post a new live MP3 everyday from the Pedro The Lion Summer tour; new songs, old songs, sound checks, record store and radio station performances, etc. Each mp3 will be posted at 2pm (CT) and will be available for 24 hours. Think of it as a audio documentary of the tour…you need a username and password found inside your copy of the Achilles Heel CD and LP.

the show was great, btw. i hadn’t seen bazan in probably like 5 years or so, before he started doing his q&a thing, which was impressive and courageous. vanderslice was sweet, too, the absence of christopher maguire on drums wasn’t too terrible, since it left a little room for the actual music to be heard– scott solter’s keyboard samples were amazing. that being said, i’d like to see a mountain goats tour with maguire manning the skins. also would like to see: vanderslice/solter produced/engineered pedro the lion album. also: vanderslice/walsh/bazan harmonies in performances

some kid kept yelling, “discree-shun!”, and bazan just laughed and said, “discree-shun?”

did you know that , the unemployment rate for the entire west coast as of april ‘04 is above 6%? that’s consistently highest in the country, with oregon leading the three at 6.7%, washington at 6.3, and california just a smidge behind at 6.2. washington, d.c. and alaska are the only ones that hit higher than 7%. unemployment rates are about 1% for lower for each state last year.

no point, just a curious fact. among others (paralegal job opportunities are growing faster than average) that i found at the bureau of labor statistics.

it’s fucking HOT in the office today. la is so cursed that even a day when outside it’s cooler than it has been all week, it’s still 85 degrees in the office. going to see pedro the lion and john vanderslice tonight.

for mac users, i found this could-be-interesting freeware called
oblique strategies. check it.

so stoked on watching season two of the west wing last night (whilst dogsitting db’s dog) that i almost threw down a c-note and bought both of them plus sports night last night. i’m a cheap and wasteful bastard sometimes though. somebody buy me that shit!

been listening to this stuff all week. velvet teen, from santa rosa, ca; everybody else, feat. ex-push kings; and maritime, which got reamed in the pitchfork review by some college boy that likes to use big words.

the velvet teen | naked girl