Pistachio Pudding is another video that came out before Youtube and found on Albinoblacksheep.com I believe it came out in 2003. This video has caused me to scream out Streblo! at inopportune times to this day.

All Your Base Belong to Us. 

I saw this my freshman year in college. I had seen some silly and random things on the Internet in high school, though I was hardly ever on, and when I was I was looking up info on how to make films. This, however, blew my mind and opened me up to the world of random flash animations that people would post to Albinoblacksheep.com (youtube wasn’t around yet so finding amusing videos took some work). This and a flash animation involving a rabbit in space flying around and getting attacked by a kitten head with laser eyes to a jaunty little tune about Tarzan (possibly) were the first things that piqued my interest in what people were doing with the Internet. Sadly I have no clue as to what that rabbit-kitten flash was, or else I’d post it.

Ah September, the cicadas are buzzing, kids are grudgingly returning to school, and the army of ice cream trucks is starting to subside. It’s a perfect time to take a look at the wonder that is the Internet! For the next month I’m going to be compiling little tidbits of joy that I’ve come across on my journeys through the information super highway (oh how I miss that term). 

To get a jump on things let us start with this website: Zombo.com. What is Zombo.com? To put it plainly it’s heaven on the Internet, or purgatory depending on your view. At Zombo.com the only limit, as they say on the website itself, is yourself. For those that want to know the actual reason behind Zombo.com too bad I’m not going to go into it. There was a reason, sort of, but the experience of Zombo.com has outlived that reason, now Zombo.com is just there for you, the weary Internet user to find a place of solace. 

To me, Zombo.com acts like a park in cyberland. Stressed at work? Go to Zombo.com! Found out your ex and your best friend just changed their relationship status to “In a Relationship” at the exact time on Facebook? Go to Zombo.com! With it’s relaxing music, soothing voice and multicolored lights you can zone out and escape into the world of your mind!

So go to Zombo.com! Rejoice and be happy! For when you are at Zombo.com you truly know where you are, you’re at Zombo.com, for this is Zombo.com.

Ok so this is a remake of the 1978 Jaws parody Piranha, which is one of my favorite bad horror films of all time. This is the film in which has one of the best three lines of dialog in all of cheesy horror film history.

Assistant: Sir, the piranha?

Boss: What about the god damn piranha?

Assistant: They’re eating the guests sir.

GLORIOUS! 

Oh me oh my I actually almost skipped two songs! The one that I’ll post later is a further slide down into the pit of teenage despair and angst in a most humorous way, this one though this one’s a keeper.

Firstly, I should say that in the eighties, nineties and early 2000’s my mom was in love with Peter Gabriel so we had his music playing a lot along with other world musicians off of Gabriel’s WOMAD record label (which is definitely a great way to begin a journey into world music, if that’s a journey you wish to take). I dug him as well, though his songs were weird and his videos even more so, plus when you compare his music to, oh say, his old Genesis band mate Phil Collins you just get more personality with Gabriel than with Collins, crazy personality.

Which brings me to this particular song. Not a super famous one, but one that I loved to have rattling about in my head whenever I had to take a test at school. I’m not sure what this says about how my brain works but I found early on that I did better at tests if I could somehow get a song stuck in my head and provide a soundtrack to the test. This song was especially useful for essays and multiple choice. I would bounce a long in my seat while thinking about monkeys (not getting electroshocked, but more just monkeys gasping at shocking things, like banana cream pies). Surprisingly I did pretty well on almost all of my tests and this process only backfired once that I can remember. I high school I was taking a midterm in a college level physics class and had the Clash’s Hateful and Rudy Can’t Fail stuck in my head. I had to put my head on the desk for a while as the two songs seemed to push out all that I knew (and hated) about physics. Phil Collins and physics, two things I really don’t enjoy.

Psycho Killer by the Talking Heads. This was one of my favorite songs off of the Stop Making Sense album, which was the second album I ever bought (well technically it was the third but the first were Queen compilations that pretty much serve as a double album). While this song matches the last song I posted (Queen’s Slightly Mad), the song had a completely different effect on me. As I mentioned before Queen’s music mad me look inward and feel bleak, Psycho Killer made me feel quite the opposite. The Talking Heads were loud, raw and hilarious to me, it sounded like a song that Norman Bates would sing, added to the fact that Anthony Perkins and David Byrne actually look quite similar. 

For a while the Talking Heads were the only band that could pull me out of a funk, to be quite over analytical I think I latched on to the “Stop making sense” hook in Girlfriend is Better song and ran with it. When I got a bit sad or depressed as a young teen it would normally be because I was over thinking and worrying myself to pieces and I needed a musical slap in the face that life shouldn’t be taken too seriously. I have pretty much dedicated my life since that early revelation to filling my life with random acts of silly nonsense. I got into the theater of the absurd plays because of this and looking at the plays of Eugene Ionesco I can’t see a better soundtrack to use than some of the Talking Heads earlier songs. Both have this sense of a person lost in a chaotic swirl and forced to adapt to the shifting events (see the play Rhinoceros and the song Once in a Lifetime).

I left behind the Talking Heads when I went into college but rediscovered them while driving around with a friend who played a couple albums while we drove around. While we drove and talked and sang I kept thinking to myself, Why don’t I have any Talking Heads music at home? It was like reuniting with an old friend who had seen you make some horrible mistakes and helped you laugh your way through the aftermath. 

New video listing project. I’m going through the songs that had some sort of sway over my life at one point or another. I’m going to try to do this in a chronological order as I’m a bit curious as to how my taste in music has evolved over the years. This first song was off of Queen’s Greatest Hits album (or Classic Queen, can’t remember which) and was the first album I ever bought with my allowance. Bought it on cassette and would wander about the playground listening to it when I didn’t feel all that social, kind of freaked out a few people.  

Queen also let me into a more darker part of my psyche, I know that isn’t the point behind their music but still songs like this, I Have to Break Free and the Show Must Go On made me think of the endless struggle of life. Don’t think most fifth graders start to ponder the point of existence while pacing back and forth in their kitchen with a walkman blasting in their ears. These songs would make me feel sad but sadness with a glimmer of hope that through bad times you just have to trudge through the sludge and persist. 

Before picking up this album I listened to my mother’s massive vinyl collection, listening to motown, the Beach Boys, the Beatles and the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar.  I’m not starting with these as I’m more interested in what I actively pursued outside of my family’s music collection (though many of the songs that will follow this were indeed influenced by my mom and two sisters).

One last thing, the first portion of these songs are probably going to come off as being bleak as I was a bleak little kid until sometime in high school/college, I was weird and silly, but also kind of sad. As are tons of people when they are slowly entering adolescence.  

Tonight in the basement of the Triple Crown bar in NYC my improv troupe Dearly Beloved performs an original long form known as the Wake. The show starts at 10:05 or round about then and costs you absolutely nothing! Hurray for free theater!

(Song is Oh Death by the amazing olde timey riot band the Can Kickers, see more of their stuff at www.cankickers.com)

Someone Stole the Kishka! Today’s comedy like song. Looking at this now I think it be more apt to call this segment songs that make me giggle. I would request this show on the polka show that followed my mother’s radio show around the time of my birthday.

^Link above to an article on Stanford’s move to an all digital library.^

I more or less have split feelings on digitizing libraries. On the one hand it will allow easier access to materials, cut down on space which in turn allows for more materials to be brought in to the collection. On the other hand, I like books. I’m not saying this as an old curmudgeon that loves how books smell and dislikes anything scanned and displayed on a computer. No, my reason for being weary of a transfer to an all digital library stems from my brief time working at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library. 

I worked at Yale as one of several acquisition assistants, one of my daily jobs was to make comparisons between the new books we received and the copies that we already had in the collection. We had several copies of the same edition of certain books, and while on face level they might all seem identical each one had slight variations to it that made the book unique. Many had autographs from the authors, printing errors, odd signs and notes of who had previously owned the copy, and various other tiny variants that caused the physical book itself to tell a story separate from the story written and printed in the book. When people came to Beinecke to research they were researching certain scholars/writers/historical famous people’s books for signs of that person’s personality. They wanted to not only see what kind of books they read but what they did with the books, what sections of a particular history book did Ezra Pound underscore for example, what kind of doodles can be found in the margins of books owned by Marcel Proust, that sort of thing. 

Working at Beinecke had me appreciate the little things that could be found in books and what we choose to write, underline, and doodle in books tell future readers about ourselves. Imagine going to an undergraduate library and taking out a book for a class on literature of the Romantic period, as you flip through a book that has been on the shelf since the 1960s you’ll stumble upon sections underlined, and briefly expounded upon in margins made by past students. Some notes may help guide you as you study, while other notes will serve as a distraction as you plug through yet another book on Nathaniel Hawthorn. Will these worked over copies of books find their way into the digital collection? Ten bucks says that most libraries will opt for scanning in the more pristine copies in their collection, and once digitized they will remain static and sterile for as long as the servers run. Gone will be the experience of unintentional collaboration between past and present scholars, gone will be the little marks of life that prove that a certain text has been used repeatedly for a certain paper assigned from that one professor who’s been around since velociraptors ruled the track and field, and gone will be the joy of finding a poem scribbled by some undiscovered poet in the blank pages at the end of a book.

Yes, a lot of this has to do with being overly romantic about the book being a unique piece of art and a window into past readers’ lives, but for me that is what makes libraries interesting. All those books were once read by someone and a decent portion of those readers have left their imprint on the books they held. Libraries don’t just hold books, they hold the secrets of those that read books.

Also in the article above theres a tiny line towards the end that discusses the process of picking which copy, translation, censored edition of a book that will eventually find its way into the digital collection. For example, The Adventures of Huck Finn. Do you want the cleaned up edition, the original text, or the edition that has illustrations that make blatant remarks on the politics of the time in which Twain first published the book (E.W. Kemble’s illustrations I believe…)? This is probably the more serious drawback to complete digitization as there may no longer be multiple editions available unless the library selectors really want to add different copies of the same title to the hefty load that will already be on their servers. Still, I enjoy my rant.