Educate and excite, inform and infuriate.

Dag! Some people don’t wanna give the brotha a break! This eye-catching baseball jersey, urging the removal from office of a man who has never held it, comes in classic Run-DMC logo style with red sleeves, above, as well as black or blue ones…because that’s how anybody who messes with Obama is gonna end up—red…then black and blue!

Made of 100% cotton. S-XL, $19.99; XXL, $22.99, from CafeExpress. Order now. Wear yours with pride on January 20.

Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen remains one of the most heralded, inventive artists of the 20th century. For example, when William Hewitt, below, CEO of the John Deere tractor company, hired the bespectacled builder in 1956 to fashion their Moline IL world headquarters,

Hewitt emphasized that, while he wanted a headquarters that was unique, it must reflect the character of the company and its employees. “The several buildings should be thoroughly modern in concept but should not give the effect of being especially sophisticated or glossy. Instead, they should be more ‘down to earth’ and rugged,” he wrote. …

Saarinen satisfied Hewitt’s instruction that the buildings look down to earth by using Cor-ten steel for the exterior structure of the building. Cor-ten®, a material that resists corrosion by forming a protective coating of iron oxide, develops an earthy color as it ages, much like newly plowed soil. Developed for railroad track construction and other uses, this marked the first use of Cor-ten® in an architectural application.

The results, above, completed in 1964, three years after Saarinen’s death, were so imaginative they moved one critic to note that, having made something apt and fit for a farm equipment manufacturer, Saarinen had also created a site whose “strong yet artfully detailed lines bear a curious resemblance to Japanese temple architecture.”

Working almost continuously with Saarinen, photographer Balthazar Korab documented every aspect of the great man’s creative process. Over 800 of his images form the massive backbone of a new book, Eero Saarinen: Buildings From The Balthazar Korab Archive, edited by David G. DeLong and C. Ford Peatross.

C. Ford Peatross, a curator with the Library of Congress, is the guest today on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, November 14, at 2 pm ET.

Not only did Korab richly, beautifully record Saarinen’s work, argues Peatross—the lush book represents less than 10% of the photog’s archives—but Korab’s proficiency captured the earliest moments of Saarinen’s elusive method, enabling him to look more profoundly into his own deep thinking.

You can hear this original scholar’s ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, you can check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, check out our archive for up to two weeks after broadcast.

GRACE: Ooh! Speakin’ of butts, had another sex dream last night. This time I was in the shower with Barack Obama. Oh-bama, he was ba-rocking my world.

—Will & Grace, “Queens For A Day,” 11/25/2004

I think it speaks to the general quality of Racialicious that what, for them, is a mere side illustration is, for me, my whole act: The Head O State Sex Toy.

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Despite a lot of post-jumping on sofa, post-Scientology video blowback, Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie, in which he plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, above, an operative sent on an impossible mission to assassinate der Fuehrer, is looking kinda hot, if the trailers are to be believed.

Plus, I’m kinda feelin’ the one-sheet poster, right, designed by BLT & Associates, whose classic pieces for Star Trek, The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Transformers, Sin City, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the X-Men series, the Mission: Impossible series, the Spider Man series, Brokeback Mountain, The Silence of the Lambs, Saving Private Ryan, 12 Monkeys, Kill Bill, Titanic—whew!—have made them H’wood royalty. (Take a look at their web site, or their IMPA page, for a trip through contemporary movie poster art history.) It’s $20 from MoviePoster.com. Come December 26, maybe Hitler will be feelin’ deez…pieces of shrapnel. He definitely won’t be celebrating Kwanzaa.

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]