A Shockingly Good Point

It's like a really bad Disney movie. You know? The hockey mom, 'Oh I'm just a hockey mom from Alaska,' and she's the PRESIDENT, and it's like she's facing down Vladamir Putin and using the folksy stuff she learned at the hockey rink. It's absurd, it's totally absurd, and I don't understand why more people aren't talking about how absurd it is.

It's true! How long until the Internet produces a video of Palin hunting terrorists with a plane? (BONUS QUESTION: Considering the McCain camp has already compared Obama campaign workers to wolves, will the McCain camp make that video first?)

The most shocking part? The quote's from Matt Damon.

Celebrities offering cogent, accurate political opinions? What's next? Dogs and cats living together?


(P.S.: Go watch Ghost Busters)

Yay Britney!

Britney Spears won 3 VMAs tonight, delivered 3 brief, coherent, charming acceptance speeches, and looked great.

I'm so relieved. She's become imbued with a certain cultural significance by her meteoric rise and very public meltdown. Her mental health has become res publica, and her rehabilitation will do us all some good.

Más 106&Parkblogging!

Now with me saying nice(-ish) things about V.I.C.!
Specifically, "Wobble"


I)The video's dedicated to Cab Calloway. It's a classy touch (since they bite his style the WHOLE TIME), and also, it's nice to see ANYONE in contemporary music making any mention of anyone who made music before 1955.
II)I don't know how much V.I.C. does in the production room (although I cannot imagine him having all that much to do with the 3-man "Package Store" production team), but in the video, he does almost nothing. In the Collipark mode, there's a multi-part hook that accounts for most of the actual song. Introductory pre-song skit aside, V.I.C. is like the 4th person you see. It's almost as if he's smugly emphasizing his novelty status.
III)Is this the first time the word "vibrator" has appeared in a song on 106 & Park? 'Cause it's pretty awesome.



ALSO: the reaction of the Livest Audience to Robin Thicke (Alan Thicke's son, he looks like this [for the record]) is BLOWING MY MIND. He's looks (and, to a great extent sounds) like the second coming of Barry Manilow. And they (=mostly girls in the front) are EATING THIS SHIT UP.
SLIGHTLY RACIST FOLLOW-UP ESSAY PROMPT: Compare and contrast Robin Thicke and Barack Obama, placing special emphasis on transcending racial animus and cheekbones.
UPDATE: Now Terence J and Roxie are comparing Alan Thicke to Barack Obama themselves!

[BONUS ADD VIDEO:

Cab Calloway + Betty Boop = FUCKING AWESOME. Props to my dad for playing shit like this for us when we were kids.]

I <3 This Video

And it's even a T-Pain song! [Embedding disabled by request (but seriously, watch it)]

My favorite parts (OMG SPOILERZ!): "Welcome to WISCANSIN" and the pantomime bear with a top-hat.

There's a really excellent air of whimsy here, which I REALLY appreciate, especially in hip-hop videos. Despite the fact that there is just as much weed being smoked in your average rapper's abode as in your average rock band's—if not more—the videos tend to be relatively formulaic, at least in comparison to rock videos. (Which is not to say rock videos aren't formulaic; cars, girls, and [artificial-]wind-swept performances are now wholly cliché, largely thanks to the '80s. But it is precisely because rock videos had the 80s, in all their leather-clad overabundance, that such formulas have had the time and exposure to become cliché in the first place. The format's been given time to breathe a bit, I suppose.) This could be because of the smaller corpus, but I suspect at least as much credit has to be placed on the lack of wide-scale involvement in hip-hop videos by over-moneyed white boys with film degrees. I would point to Sabotage by the Beastie Boys as an example of what could have been.

I suppose some consideration could be given to the possibility, over time, of the more marginalized "indie" rap genres coming to prominence as a percentage of the overall cultural share of "hip-hop," in a way comparable to the progress made by "indie" music over the years. But I have to go pay rent now.



[BONUS ADD EMBED:

Pantomime Horses! It's a cold world.]

A Happy Accident

Gov. David Patterson knocking John McCain:

Gov. David A. Paterson, continuing his oratorical assault on John McCain as Democrats gather in Denver for their national convention, used a phenomenon known by physicists as the “Parallax Effect” to slam the presumptive Republican nominee.

...

“When something is so far away that you cant even measure it, you take an object that’s a little closer. And by knowing the distance between you and that object, you can now assess how far away the third body is,” Mr. Paterson told New Jersey delegates in a speech on Wednesday morning.

Astronomy metaphors from a blind guy!

David Patterson: Awesome Governor, or the AWESOMEST Governor?



[Hat Tip: Wonkette]

AAARGH!!

There's a commercial for Wendy's stupid new artery-clogger wherein a girl offers a guy a bite of her salad, and the guy responds that he's a "Meatatarian." He then takes a bite of his sandwich which has CHEESE AND BREAD ON IT. He also has french fries, which are (technically) made from POTATOES!

I'm sorry. This commercial comes on ALL THE TIME, and it really INFURIATES ME.


It's so infuriating as to not even be on stupid YouTube for me to link to. God damnit.



ALSO: WENDY'S. YOU ARE NOT NOT FAST FOOD. YOU ARE AN ESTABLISHMENT WHEREIN ONE IS SERVED 'FOOD' FROM BEHIND A COUNTER IN A RAPID FASHION. GET THE FUCK OVER YOURSELF.

Again, I realize it's just a stupid slogan and I'm a worse person for getting riled up by it, but still: I AM FUCKING RILED.



Also also: Bangkok Dangerous looks like the most retarded movie of all time. Seriously. The marketing campaign is literally: "ACTION MOVIE! EXPLOSIONS! ASIAN CHICKS!" Towards the end of the trailer, since it's an action movie, the time comes for the gravel-voiced announcer to make a pun based on the title. So he says, "Things are about to get...Dangerous." That's not a pun; that's a fucking crime.

I Love Theoretical Math Articles on Wikipedia

LOVE them:

An approximation algorithm is called a c-approximation algorithm for some constant c if it can be proven that the solution that the algorithm finds is at most c times worse than the optimal solution. Here, c is called the approximation ratio. Depending on whether the problem is a minimization or a maximization problem, this can either denote c times larger or c times smaller, respectively. For example, the vertex cover problem and traveling salesman problem with triangle inequality each have simple 2-approximation algorithms. In contrast to that it's proven that the traveling salesman problem with arbitrary edge-lengths can not be approximated with approximation ratio bounded by a constant as long as the Hamiltonian-path problem can not be solved in polynomial time.

They're like those embedded 3-d Magic Eye posters for your entire left hemisphere! If you look hard enough, you can see a sailboat, travelling the shortest route between several islands that are various fixed distances from each other.