Tonight I met someone who knows the most famous person who shares my name. Now I’m one step closer to meeting him at a barbecue; it’s going to be great!  I figure we can do a Patty Duke Show routine together. And, while he’s the most famous person with my name, he’ll have to somehow come to terms with the fact that I’m the (I) on IMDB while he’s the (II). Take that!

For my mother:

CrazyMonk points to a great article about “how black Baltimore drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories to confound the Feds.”

In the previous year, nearly twenty defendants in other Baltimore cases had begun adopting what lawyers in the federal courthouse came to call “the flesh-and-blood defense.” The defense, such as it is, boils down to this: As officers of the court, all defense lawyers are really on the government’s side, having sworn an oath to uphold a vast, century-old conspiracy to conceal the fact that most aspects of the federal government are illegitimate, including the courts, which have no constitutional authority to bring people to trial. The defendants also believed that a legal distinction could be drawn between their name as written on their indictment and their true identity as a “flesh and blood man.”

It’s long, but good.

The top has played an important role in modern history. Without top hats, we wouldn’t have had the Civil War, World War II or Guns n’ Roses. Since the top hat’s impact on important human events is often overlooked and underestimated, here’s a collection of pictures of famous people wearing top hats:

Abraham Lincoln:

UPDATE: I’ve added a few more famous people to our top hat collection:

Bob Dylan:

It just occurred to me that, after the success of Hypnobama ‘08, I should make an election bumper stick for the surprising candidacy of Joss Whedon and Wil Wheaton. I haven’t yet decided who will be at the top of the Wheaton/Whedon ‘08 ticket.

You wouldn’t like me when I’m curious!

Simpsons Characters: 58 out of 63. I’m embarrassed about a few of the ones I missed. Via Reddit.

When I watch episodes of Lost on ABC.com, I don’t see any ads in between segments of the show. Does nobody see ads, or is my ad blocking software removing them? If so, that’s fantastic!

MSNBC has a schlocky Dateline documentary called Into the Woods about “[a] brave high school girl tries to outfox her fugitive kidnapper after being held hostage for ten days in an underground bunker.”

Now, of course there’s also the award winning Sondheim musical of the same name:

It’s understandable how you might confuse the two, and Daniel Kells noticed that Time Warner Cable had in fact done just that:

There’s going to be some very unhappy musical theater geeks tonight (and some very unhappy fans of pedophile kidnappers).

Bud Cort’s alternate name is pretty cool.

Speaking of prescient, here’s a very forward thinking clip from a ten-year-old episode of Sliders:

My favorite image from the Daily Show clip that CrazyMonk linked to:

It looks like a Soviet propaganda poster. Hell, it looks like THIS Soviet propaganda poster:

Now, let’s combine them:

UPDATE: For CrazyMonk:

Bill Cosby sounds like a parody of himself, even when he’s talking about his disapproval of teenage sex: “Let’s get with these teenage children and their sex and having sex. I’m telling you, you’ve got to talk to your children.”

The Del Rubio triplets sing Whip It by Devo:

Where you would rather live: Warp Drive, Picard Lane, Crusher Avenue, Federation Court, or Ryker Court?  I feel pretty confident in assuming that nobody ever chooses Ryker Court.

Erin Esurance is my favorite television commercial character. I can explain neither why I have a favorite television commercial character, nor why it should be Erin Esurance.  Hypnosis may be involved.

Here are some interesting points of note about Erin Esurance:

1. She has a blog (though it doesn’t have an RSS feed so tracking it is difficult).
2. She is voiced by Mo Mellady which just has to be a stage name, right? It really should be the stage name of a brassy R&B singer (or a hard core rapper), but I guess that would be too much to ask for.
3. Doing a Google Image Search for Erin Esurance is… troubling (NSFW) .  Rule 34 of course applies.
4. They’re animated by GhostBot, who are kind enough to occasionally post step-by-step explanations of how such things get done.
5. She’s all over YouTube.

I can’t explain why I put this post together.  I promise, I’m as troubled by it as you are.

One more small clip from Sliders.

I love the Crying Man.