In 1977 Elvis Costello busted into his own Saturday Night Live performance to play Radio Radio:
In 1999 he busted into a Beastie Boys Saturday Night Live performance to play Radio Radio:
Beware performers, your Saturday Night Live performance could be next.
And that was only the first half…
There was one channel on TV in Japan that showed complicated math (and physics?) problems for at least two hours one morning. I request that someone who knows math kindly solve all of the equations:
Forget about the Bradley effect, I’m now concerned about the Brady effect.
Apparently I never bothered to link to this story from last year about four congressional Democrats who live together in DC to see what happens when elected officials stop being polite, and start being real:
“I once had to pick up a mouse by the tail that Durbin refused to pick up,” complained Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, referring to his roommate Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois.
This characterization is not fair to Mr. Durbin, interjected another tenant in the Capitol Hill row house, Representative Bill Delahunt of Massachusetts. For starters, it overlooks Mr. Durbin’s gift for killing rats. “He will kill them with his bare hands,” Mr. Delahunt marveled.
“Oh, will you stop with the rats,” said the annoyed fourth roommate, Representative George Miller of California. He owns the house and is sensitive to any suggestion that he harbors pestilence. It’s dicey enough that he harbors politicians.
So, is there any hope that this will be turned into a real TV show? Probably not:
“Everybody in the world says they’re going to do a television series based on us,” said Mr. Durbin, who was collapsed on the couch on a recent Monday night. Still in a tie, he sipped ice water from a massive Chicago Cubs cup while waiting for the Chinese food to arrive.
“But then they realize that the story of four middle-aged men, with no sex and violence, is not going to last two weeks,” he said. The prevailing topics of their discussions are grandchildren and Metamucil, he added.
“Hey, speak for yourself, Durbin,” Mr. Delahunt said, protesting the claim of no sex and violence.
“There is a lot of violence in here,” Mr. Schumer said.
In fact, the roommates have never resorted to violence, at least with one another. (Crickets are another story.) Their weapons are verbal, and often aimed at Mr. Schumer, who admits to a serious dereliction of roommate duties, like grocery shopping. He is also prone to a blatant disregard for conserving a most precious household resource, cereal.
This is one of my favorite newspaper stories of all time.
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!
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.
Simpsons Characters: 58 out of 63. I’m embarrassed about a few of the ones I missed. Via Reddit.
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.”