Everything you never knew about George Washington

Belated Christmas gift from hell

Vicodin Earrings

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work

The wrong way to ask for a hand job

Amazing music video, one of the best of all time

Soundtrack for the world without Man (Animation by Wayne Lytle and Dave Crognale)

The reset button

http://www.pbfcomics.com

Roger Ebert on meds: Ending up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must

Since Roger Ebert has stopped writing about film, he has morphed into one of my favorite writers, tackling tough subjects with humor and clarity and humanity. If I had seen this piece without a byline, it would never have occurred to me it was from that guy who used to be on At the Movies. This is a whole other realm. I don't know what meds he's on but I want some.

Ending up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must

by Roger Ebert

The day will come when the words of Shakespeare are no longer known. The day will come, perhaps sooner, when all the words on the internet, in every language, have disappeared. These very words, and all the words we have read and written, will no longer exist. Oh, for a long time they may be on a hard drive somewhere, one able to store the entirety of the web. But not forever. Not even close. A word not read is like the proverbial tree falling in the forest. The word existed, the tree fell, but without witness, what does it mean?

These thoughts were inspired, oddly enough, by an advice column by Cary Tennis on Salon.com. He is asked a question, and answers it. I suspect the question was asked by Tennis of himself, in a spell of existential funk. His question comes down to: "Will anybody ever read what we write here, after today? I am sure our writing will persist in the World Wide Web, but will anybody ever read it again?

Will our best, well-meant advice ever help anybody else in the future? Will our detailed knowledge ever be of any use? Or do we just get filed, permanently?"

Filed permanently, is my guess. And eventually the files will be lost or forgotten. And if the contents of the internet, like radio signals, travel unimaginable distances into the void and are intercepted by a SETI program on another world, and can be interpreted and understood, what will it avail? No human being has ever been able to master the internet after its first hour or two. If the aliens are lucky enough to stumble upon Google Earth, will they devise the correct software? I began reading Cary Tennis's answer in an idle frame of mind. Then his words took hold. I was blind-sided. He was venting his feelings not only about his advice column but about the very act of writing itself. He wrote with poetry, vision, and mournful drama.

Here is his final paragraph:

So it goes. Our uncertainty and doubt extend to the infinite sky and throughout time, shrouding perfection, blurring truth, undermining what feeble faith we can muster, reminding us that we are both divine and mortal, that we live both inside time and outside time, that we are creatures of many worlds, and that we will always wonder, and always try to cheat death, and always listen for the echoes of our words in every strange town, on every strange mountain, in every strange dream that comes to us in the night.

This is not really about the destiny of our words on the internet. It is about the dilemma of being alive and able to think and being aware of our own mortality. Of dying in a world without end. It would be no special tragedy if the contents of the internet were lost. Far, far more words than that have been lost: Virtually every word spoken by Man. A very few have been preserved, mostly in writing, now in other forms, but eventually they will be lost, too. It will be as if no one had ever spoken, and every human life had been forgotten.

I accept that. I don't expect, desire or deserve immortality for my own words. People will have their own words to produce and be forgotten. If there could be one book to represent Man in all his frailty, tragedy, comedy, humor, dreams, disappointments, and poetic yearnings, I do not know of a better one than the collected works of Shakespeare. It is a miracle that they were preserved at all, collected from prompt scripts, actors' memories and imperfect quartos, some years after his death. Shakespeare never saw a book of his collected works, nor can we guess if he desired one. His words will also all spin into the void.

So why then did he write? Why am I writing? Why do you write? Why are you reading? Why do we read Shakespeare? Not for a moment would I compare us to him; it simply occurs to me that we are all in the same boat.

"A person has to participate," Studs Terkel liked to say. That's how I feel. Meditating on futility--that's no way to live. One of the most useful pieces of advice ever given me, at a time when I despaired, was: Act as if. Act as if you make a difference. If infinity is too big for you, live in the day. Shakespeare as usual expressed this better than anyone else, and it took him six words: To be, or not to be. That wasn't simply an expression of the Existentialist choice between choosing to live or die. It was the choice to act, or not to act. To participate.

"Martin Luther said if he knew the world ended tomorrow, he would plant a tree," Werner Herzog told me. "I would start a film." What would I do? Plan to review it, and ask my editor to save some space in the paper. If you admire Herzog, you might want to pre-order your tickets. In the cartoons, there are always those wild-eyed guys with a placard saying, The End is Now. We are saved by a loophole: It is never Now yet.

It's a long piece. The rest of it is here. He follows it with this psychedelic video, a 2001-derish visualization of the infinity where all of our words go, The Mandlebrot Set by Bill Boll, that will make you wonder why you ever stopped taking mushrooms.

Pete Seeger sings "Newspapermen Meet Such Interesting People"

Gotta recommend the Bus Slogan Generator

"Atheists have started advertising on buses in the UK. Do you want to see your own message on the side of a bus? Well now's your chance."

Do it yourself at http://ruletheweb.co.uk/b3ta/bus/

David Letterman airs the 'lost' Bill Hicks routine

by Steve Korn

This past Friday night, David Letterman devoted a chunk of his show to a bit of insider baseball, a piece of late-night talk show history that probably meant nothing to 99 percent of his audience, but enough to him to give about half his show over to it. The segment centered around a legendary ''lost'' routine by the comedian Bill Hicks from the early days of the Late Show in 1993. Its legend comes not from viewers' memories of it, but because no one got to see it (this was a time before all video made its way onto the Internet within hours). As Letterman explained on Friday, he deemed the routine not suitable to air, for reasons he seems at a loss to explain. In a sad coda, Hicks, a frequent guest on Letterman's 12:30 a.m. show on NBC who was visiting the then-new CBS 11:30 p.m. Late Show for the first time, would be dead from cancer months later.

See David Letterman's introduction of the segment here:

With Hicks' mother as his guest on Friday, Letterman revisited this long-ago episode, finally airing the 1993 routine in its entirety. It's a fascinating segment, watching him tread on this uncomfortable ground, coming face-to-face with the idea you can't put your arms around a memory; whatever he'd want to say to Hicks now, he can't. In the second part of the segment, here he is trying to say it to Hicks' mom:

It's compelling to watch Letterman seeming to struggle from the perspective of 2009 to understand –- or make us understand -- a decision made in the far-different television universe of 1993. Hicks' brand of social commentary -– his routine, embedded below, includes barbs on aggressively mindless pop culture figures of the day, cultural attitudes about homosexuality, pro-lifers, and religious symbolism -- must have seemed discomfiting so soon after Letterman lost The Tonight Show gig to Jay Leno, and an endless stream of commentary questioned if Letterman's ''edgier''-by-comparison approach had a chance to succeed on CBS at the earlier hour.

Flash ahead a decade and a half, and time has changed everything: The 11:30 Letterman show is a fixed spot on the national pop culture landscape, and Bill Hicks' work still has resonance. After the Hicks routine, Letterman notes that the piece really doesn't seem dated, and other than a reference to Billy Ray Cyrus here and ''Marky Mark'' there, that's true (the names may change, but a mind-set remains the same). But here's what I'm wondering: Even with all the proliferation of late-night talk, would someone with something to say on issues that Bill Hicks tackles here even get booked in 2009? If there's a Bill Hicks out there working now, will he or she get on Late Show, The Tonight Show, or Jimmy Kimmel Live? In the age of the Internet and cable, does it even matter?

Still, it's interesting to see Letterman's perspective shift from one of a younger, competitive host wanting to win a ratings war, to a more human attempt to tell a mom who seems still to feel stung by how the rejection affected her critically ill son (a fact Letterman makes clear was not known by the show at the time) that his work deserved better and to at least publicly acknowledge a lingering regret that a decision made in the heat of one moment looks unnecessarily harsh with the passage of time. What happened then can't be undone, but give Letterman points for trying to wrestle with it all these years on, and letting us watch.

Anyone else moved by this last Friday? Do you think late-night TV -- or TV in general -- is still willing to address issues Hicks deals with in 2009, or has the ratings war destroyed that aspect?

http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2009/02/david-letterman.html