Entries from November 2008 ↓

How did I miss MC Yogi‘s svelte and limber “Obama ’08: Vote for Hope,” above? (Yet, somehow, I couldn’t escape Will.I.Am’s pretentious and flaccid “Yes We Can.”)

Hearing “Vote for Hope,” I realized we have firmly entered the era of Barack Obama hip-hop samples. His voice has become an weighty signifier, instantly recognizable, a profound way, when mixed with beats, to give the record a bigger meaning than the content of his actual words. Enjoy this timeless, get-out-the-vote gem.

Movie zombies unnerve me. Whether the lumbering ghouls of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Michael Jackson’s Thriller, or the track-stars-in-our-former-lives of 28 Days Later, carnivorous cadavers, foaming blood, coming from every direction are the stuff of which very bad dreams are made.

The November 18 release of Valve Corporation’s Left 4 Dead, above, then, pledges sleepless nights of sweat-drenched dread. The game pits four human survivors against armies of the rotting undead, says Valve, battling them in single player, co-op, and multiplayer game modes.

Set in the immediate aftermath of the zombie apocalypse, L4D offers four expansive “movie campaigns” that challenge you and your fellow survivors to battle thousands of swarming zombies as you travel across the rooftops of an abandoned metropolis, through rural ghost towns and pitch-black forests.

Mere words. Take a look at this clip from the game and hold on to your head. In the sequence, you and your three human co-partners—driven either by actual players or the machine’s AI—attempt to storm a kitchen in an overrun, infected house. This draws the zombies in for a meal—you—right as you draw your shotgun. Lemme at ’em. On PC / Xbox 360.

Alfred E. Neuman meets rapper Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr. on the December 2008 cover of MAD. Lil Wayne, wow: You have officially made it.

[via Tom’s MAD Blog]

Do you love your dog to death, but feel that the way the bitch proudly parades her business through the streets, tail held high, is, from a homo sapiens perspective, just a tad…indecorous?

So did Virginia Commonwealth University art student Meg Roberts. However, instead of just averting her eyes—like you do—she fashioned an anus-cloaking, tastefully enameled triangular copper piece, with delicate white and pink accents, and “a hinged door that falls open with gravity.”

Apparently, the object, appropriately titled A Lady Never Reveals Too Much, is a one-off, and Roberts has no plans to market it.

To which I say, Meg: Do you want to be a starving artist all your life? Do you know how many blue-haired, Upper East Side, New York City matrons would happily strap a gold-plated, diamond-encrusted one over Fifi’s sourpuss?

[via ExtremeCraft]

There’s a pretty sweet teaser out for Disney / Pixar’s May 2009 release, Up. It’s about an elderly curmudgeon who, sick of people, takes his house on a wild trip into the heavens, carried aloft by thousands of colorful helium balloons. The ad features Pixar’s expected, now legendary craftsmanship, but I gotta say: I hope no other studio picks up their habit of starting each teaser with a recount of every movie they’ve ever made.

I don’t play Guitar Hero, the massive hit video game (yet). But I can still tell that McFarlane Toys’ Guitar Hero Rockers—2-inch figurines of characters from the game packed deux to a box—are completely ill. If the actual pieces in February 2009 end up looking as good as these final painted sculpts, I’m grabbing all four: Spike-haired Johnny Napalm, bad-to-the-basics Axel Steel, KISS-whore Lars Ümlaut, and, my personal favorite, above, rockabilly renegade Eddie Knox. Total ‘tude, dude.

[via tomopop.com]

I first got a hint of the fi-yaah! Apple’s “One App At a Time” campaign was working with while watching the Olympics, when I peeped their iPhone 3G Lonely Planet Mandarin Audiobook commercial. The software appears to hold hundreds of common Chinese phrases, all spoken fluently by natives. One can play any of them back upon command, seamlessly turning communication within a complex tongue into something as easy as pointing.

So they had me at hello, but, yo: That iPhone 3G Shazam app commercial, above, where you put the phone up to a music source, it tells you what the song is you’re hearing, and even takes you to iTunes to buy a copy, is one of the frostiest things I’ve ever seen. (Apple-style, in the advertisement, the track Shazam detects is the very one playing in the ad advertising Shazam, the Submarines’ yummy, Beatlesesque “You, Me, and the Bourgeoisie.”)

Has anybody gotten this toy yet? I noticed the “Sequence Shortened” copy in the ad, above, but still: Is it as niiiiiiiiice to use as it looks?

Siberian-born Marina Bychkova’s immaculate Enchanted Dolls wield world-weary attitude, bristling sexuality, fully fleshed-out backstories, and better clothes than you.

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Testicles, from the series Body of Love,
Lambda print, 40×28 in., 2002-2005, by Sheffy Bleier

Meat After Meat Joy, at Daneyal Mahmood Gallery in New York City (511 W. 25th St.), “brings together the work of contemporary artists who use meat in their work (raw meat, the concept of meat, its symbolism and viscera) in order to investigate the paradoxical relationship meat has to the body.”

From Sheffy Bleier’s photo of bull’s testicles, above, to Zhang Huan’s beef muscle suit, right, to Simone Rachell’s wax paper sculpture of a toilet made of meat, it’s a show you can intellectually, ahem, sink your teeth into…or, then again, harshly protest with 30 of your closest vegan comrades. Through Nov. 15; daneyalmahmood.com.

[via BoingBoing]

I’m not really a true fan of CBS’s The Big Bang Theory (Mondays, 8 pm ET), and haven’t even watched a full episode yet. But every time I see it come on, I blast its uber-cool intro.

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