Greatest equine snack product ever

This is blowing my mind. There is a snack product for horses called Uncle Jimmy's Hangin' Balls. "Your horse will spend hours trying to lick and grab these balls."

Link.

In case you haven't noticed, this blog has been pretty quiet lately. If this poses a problem, might I kindly refer you to one of the seven bajillion other tacky blogs that litter the Internet.

I guess there's a chance that I might pick this stanky football (by which I mean blog) up again and run with it this fall, but if I were a betting man I'd head to Vegas and blow it all on a sweet game of craps. That's not to say I won't resume regular screeding at some point; mainly I guess I just wanted to work the words "stanky" and "craps" into this paragraph. Probably I could have executed my "stanky/craps" combo more smoothly, but fuck it, like Rhyming Ghost Shakespeare said, "to thine own self be true, foo'." Doing so means amusing myself with the least effort possible, craps craps craps,

stankily,
Mike

Entrepreneur-turned-pundit confronts fact that pundits are a dime a dozen, writes book about it

Ho ho! What's up readers? I know it's been a while since I've come at you with any fresh musings, but fuck it, life goes on, huh? The overwhelming irrelevance of my protracted silence on this here “blog” (a word that I still hate, by the way) suggests that -- holy shit, Batman -- hack punditry and cheap dick jokes are easy to come by, which makes them something of a low-cost, bulk commodity. There's plenty to go around, which is why no one gets worked up when one of the many trillions of bright shining stars in the “blogosphere” ceases to twinkle. Basic economics dictates that talk is cheap, because there's so much of it -- we are talking junior high level supply and demand theory here -- and today's post is about a dude who wrote a book that misses this very point.

The dude in question is Andrew Keen, an entrepreneur who bit it during the dotcom bubble of the late nineties, and eventually went on to develop a deep skepticism of “Web 2.0” (a phrase that I hate even more than the word “blog”). Full of profound things to say on the subject, he recently wrote a book. Here's a snippet from a New York Times review of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture:

Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

Mr. Keen's arguments would be perfectly cromulent if not for the fact that virtually every single one of his criticisms applies to the mainstream media as well. Superficial observations -- like softball human interest stories masquerading as news? Shrill opinion -- what, like Nancy Grace asking a guest why we don't all move to Nazi Germany because he suggested that there may very well be reasonable doubt in the Duke rape case? Content as mere dressing for advertising -- seriously, is this guy oblivious to commercial breaks, ubiquitous product placement, and tech stories that read like paid ads?

I'm not saying that a bunch of stupid twits like me waving their dicks around on the Internet is a perfect system -- quite the contrary. It's deeply flawed, but it's following a road of defects blazed by the mainstream media. The reason the mainstream media is suffering isn't because a grossly inferior product is presenting a cheap and easy alternative -- it's because the Internet has greatly lowered the cost of creating and distributing a shitty product in the first place, thereby lowering the cost of entry to the “shitty news and hack punditry” marketplace.

(And if you think that the last sentence reflects a lower level of discourse than professional media, I remind you it's apparently okay for the "real" media to suggest that torture should be a televised sport. The Internet may be a bit crass more crass than some of our paid and syndicated pundits, but not by much.)

This lowered cost of entry is the same reason we're getting more and more of our entertainment from “amateur” content. It's a one percent kind of thing. Let's say one percent of Americans are musicians. And let's say that of those musicians, one percent are actually worth listening to at all. That's only one one-hundredth of a percent of all Americans that create music worth listening to. But .01% of 300 million Americans equates to 30,000 people that make decent music. Most of these amateurs will never make a top 40 list, but that doesn't mean they're not worth a listen. Hell, right now I'm listening to a garage band that I've never heard of before yesterday, and they sound absolutely awesome. Better than most of the tripe on commercial radio. The problem for artists like this isn't “Web 2.0,” it's obscurity.

Here's Keen's take on the economic implications of all these bangin' new technologies that lower the cost of entry for content creators: “The new winners — Google, YouTube, MySpace, Craigslist, and the hundreds of start-ups hungry for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie — are unlikely to fill the shoes of the industries they are helping to undermine, in terms of products produced, jobs created, revenue generated or benefits conferred.”

Oh, good God, no! Was Mr. Keen raising a stink like this when robots cost Detroit auto workers their jobs? I've got some sour news -- that's capitalism for you, dude. Adapt or die. Just because an entity has historically made money off a particular product or service does not automatically entitle that entity to continue making money in the face of a more competitive alternative. After so many years of trying to cater to their customers' desires for soft news and insipid entertainment, media conglomerates are finding out that their customers are actually pretty good at coming up with stupid, insipid shit themselves.

And that's what it all comes down to. Punditry, opinion, half-assed reporting, and base entertainment are easy to come by. No scarcity equals low intrinsic value. All the Internet is doing is destroying an artificial economy that used to exist because of the previously high barriers for distributing shitty content. If old media companies want to adapt, they should man up and create a superior product.

Anyway, that's all I have for now. If you're particularly interested in the book, you can read a section of it Mr. Keen's website. Finding his website is left as an exercise for the reader, because I'm a lazy, unpaid, hack pundit and also I hated the Flash interface necessary to read the excerpt of his book. I suppose you might use that upstart “new winner” Google to find his website and buy his book, thereby generating income for Mr. Keen and helping to fill the shoes of the industries that Google is undermining. Huh.

Sincerely,

Mike

ps: Could this dude have come up with a less “Web 2.0” example than Craigslist? Seriously, it got its start in about 1995, with it's present incarnation dating back to the late nineties.

pps: Here's some sweet user-created content, a picture of a baby bird that I took. I'm posting it here to undermine Getty images, who I otherwise would have paid to use a stock photo. Take that, old economy!

Goddamn motherfucking Chicago Tribune

Usually when I use the phrase "goddamn motherfucking" as an adjective for a newspaper, I'm describing The New York Times. However, today I uttered this phrase in reference to the Chicago Tribune for the first time ever.

I happened to peep last Thursday's Tribune, which had a cover story on the recently discovered gigantoraptor. Like all good newspapers, it used a pun in the headline: "Big bird joins cast of dinosaur fossils." (Get it? Get it? Like Big Bird, like, from the cast of Sesame Street? Get it?) It also used a puntastic subhead: "Giant flies in face of evolution theory." Great pun, but less overwhelmingly fantastic.

It's unclear whether or not the subhead is meant to refer to our theory of how birds evolved in the first place, or the theory of evolution in general. It's the kind of sloppy writing that gives fodder to creationist dudes. And at any rate this fossil really doesn't fly in the face of anything. I mean, maybe if it dated to the Cambrian period and was fossilized alongside a jetpack, sure, then it would be totally flying in the face of evolutionary theory, but right now it's merely just in your face, no flight involved.

A much better subhead would have read, "Gigantic dino-bird thought to have been totally fearsome; is now in your face."

Additional rumination on legitimacy

You know you're legit when you've got an entire folder on your hard drive devoted exclusively to storing pictures of double guitars. ("You know those guitars that are, like, double guitars?")



Further updates as events warrant.

-Mike

Rembrandt and the Vikings

Idea for movie:

Rembrandt, walking alone down a road one night, encounters a rip in the space time continuum. This phenomenon was caused by lightning striking a painting of a wormhole that he had done. As he stares in awe, a bunch of sweet Vikings come through the wormhole.

Initially, it looks like the movie will be a wacky "fish out of water" concept as the Vikings constantly blaze up in Amsterdam's red light district while Rembrandt paints a new wormhole to get them home. However, when the Vikings attempt to return home through the new wormhole, one of them forgets his baby and so Rembrandt has to jump through the wormhole with the baby just before it (the wormhole) closes.

After passing through the wormhole, Rembrandt discovers that they're not in Vikingland at all, the year is 1861 and they're in the middle of the Civil War! Rembrandt and the Vikings are forced to choose sides amidst the heat of battle.

Fortunately, even though Stonewall Jackson is wailing on the Union, and General Grant's soldiers are succumbing to gout and amputation at a terrifying rate, Rembrandt and the Vikings choose wisely and team up with the Union to turn the tide of the battle.

From here on out the movie takes a decidedly more serious tone. Lincoln calls Rembrandt and the Vikings to the White House, and they devise a sweet new battle plan that utilizes all of the Vikings' skills. Also, one of the Vikings is a totally accomplished blacksmith, and he comes up with some sweet Civil War-era Viking gear to help them fight.

Years pass as the Vikings spend their time constructing the Merrimack, which is modified to look like an ironside Viking longship, and which has been tricked out with sweet graphics of Valhalla that Rembrandt airbrushed on the side. After the lead Viking applies a "Don't Tread on Me" decal to the ship, it is finally finished, and the Vikings can begin their epic campaign to end the Civil War.

Working in concert with General Sherman and his forces, they begin "Operation Norse Pinch." As Sherman marches down to the ATL, the Vikings steam upriver to meet him there. Along the way, both parties do some epic pillaging. But in Atlanta the Confederacy has constructed a massive barricade around the city and holed up inside.

General Lee's forces don't know when to quit, and they have concocted a desperate plan to foil the Union. Once Sherman and the Vikings have the city surrounded, the Confederates enact "Operation Reverse Trojan Horse."

Pretending to surrender, they let all the Vikings and Union army into Atlanta at once. The ATL is quiet -- too quiet. Johnny Reb is nowhere to be seen! The confederates have all fled through secret tunnels, trapping the Yankee/Viking forces in the city, which they are now burning down!

Oh shit! Is this the end of the Union Army and the Vikings?!

NO WAY MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!!

Out of nowhere, Rembrandt cruises into the city at top speed (5 knots) on a customized jalopy airship! He parachutes into town with his easel and other art supplies, and begins painting at a furious rate.

As the city burns, storm clouds gather. Faster and faster Rembrandt paints. His masterpiece takes shape. It is Atlanta, as seen from the outside, burning. There are also a ton of gigantic Viking horses and M-16s in the foreground.

When Rembrandt applies the final stroke to his painting, it is instantly hit by lightning, opening up a wormhole. The Union Army and all the Vikings dive through, and suddenly they're outside the town again, and they pick up their sweet machine guns and horses and sneak up on the Confederate Army from behind!!!

At this point, the Confederate Army is completely wasted on moonshine, and the Vikings give them the choice to surrender or die. Some dudes choose to surrender, but there is still a sweet battle with the holdouts, who all die.

Victorious, Rembrandt and the Vikings return to Washington, DC. Lincoln shakes their hand and invites them to see a show at the Ford Theater. That night, John Wilkes Booth attempts to murder Lincoln, but Rembrandt, who is sitting behind him, takes the bullet instead. Rembrandt dies and the nation mourns.

Without Rembrandt's wormholes, the Vikings are trapped in 1865 America. Unable to return home, they pick up some hot Swedish immigrant chicks in the upper Midwest, and set out to become hardscrabble gold miners in the Sierra Nevada.

The end ... or is it?

(ps: The name of this movie is Rembrandt and the Vikings)



+



=

AWESOME

The meme stops here.

Word up, dudes! Comin' at you -- I know it's been an extended absence, but my hands are totally full right now.

I know what you're thinking. "Mike, you're a 26-year-old that lives with his mom. The high point of your year is Shark Week, and the most you exerted yourself yesterday was when you wasted ten minutes griping about how much you hate hard candies. How could your hands possibly be full?"

Valid question. Well, here's an outline:

(0) What I've been up to: Introduction
(1) What I've been up to: Methodology
(2) An aside: Some memetic shit
(3) What I've been up to: Results and Discussion


===============================
(0) Shit, in brief
===============================

So here's the scoop. As you may or may not recall, Lady Shihady and I moved from Seattle to Iowa. We're now living with my folks and are in the process of buying a house. This is really difficult and I think I peed myself at least three times looking at how much a mortgage costs. But things seem to be in order -- we close on April 30th and move in next week. (Ye gods!)

Lately the business travel's been kicked up a bit as well. I went to Chicago and New York, but failed to find really exceptional hot dogs or pizza in either city. I guess that speaks volumes about my general ability to function as a human being.


===============================
(1) Breakin' it down now:
===============================

Here's a picture of me in Chicago with a cop on a Segueway. Why do cops always end their conversations by admonishing me to "Stay out of trouble, son?"




The trip to NYC was cold and wet. I lived in the Pacific Northwest for a good eight or nine years without every purchasing an umbrella. But when I went to New York, it was positively pissing out, and I wisely purchased the first umbrella I could find, which, as luck would have it, was a brilliant shade of hot pink. I was soaked by that point anyway, but the hot pink umbrella was better than the busted-ass umbrella that I'd fished out of a garbage pile earlier in the day.

New York seems to have drainage issues. This is rainwater gushing out of a chink in the wall at the Times Square subway station:




Another great thing that I did was head on down to a cabin in Southern Missouri one weekend. Here's some pictures of that memorable shindig.


Here's a dude named Luke earning everybody's respect.



We invented a fun game where Vic would wear a hockey mask, and then we'd smash a beer into his face as he swung from a tree.



A nice behind-the-scenes shot of the beer-toss crew.



Extreme air guitar session.


===============================
(2) The meme stops here
===============================

So this "blog" got "tagged" with a "meme" in which I am somehow required by the Gods of the Olde and Vengeful Internet to post five random, distinct facts that you did not know. I am going to subvert this meme by (a) not "tagging" anybody else with this, and (b) posting five random lies.

Fact #1:
Shark cloacas are full of candy.

Fact #2:
In certain translations of the Old Testament, Moses is explicitly described as having a "sweet ZZ-top style beard." But because sunglasses weren't yet invented he had to wear those kick-ass Eskimo glacier shades that are just a piece of bark with a slit cut in them. Ancient murals depict radiant beings that match this description descending on unicycles from tricked-out UFOs.

Fact #3:
The hoverboards from Back to the Future 2 were actually manufactured in California for like five days, but then some kid fell and broke his neck and he was paralyzed, and his mom sued, so they had to stop making them, but you can still sometimes find them on eBay, but they cost like a shitload of money, like almost $400, and even then they have those pink Barbie logos on them.

Fact #4:
President Hoover once appeared in a rare Little Rascals-Three Stooges crossover episode. In this episode, Hoover appointed both the Rascals and the Stooges to his Joint Presidential Council on High Jinks and Epic Capers. The Joint Presidential Council was to appear at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Hoover Dam, where they were charged with serving shaved-ice treats to attendees. However, infighting among the Stooges caused them to become distracted and forget about monitoring the ice machine, which soon covered the entire Hoover Dam in four feet of snow. The Little Rascals were to ride a toboggan down the dam and somehow learn a valuable lesson in transit to the bottom.

However, the episode took an unscripted turn for the worse when the Rascals' mascot dog began to frantically hump the leg of President Hoover, causing the president to stumble into a big pot of hobo stew. Because the editing technology needed to remove the embarassing footage did not yet exist, the entire storyline needed to be re-shot from the beginning. Unfortunately, President Hoover's schedule was very tight, and this was ultimately impossible.

The sole copy of the dog-humping-hobo-stew-spill footage was locked up in a vault, and then sold on the black market, where it changed hands several times. It currently resides in the private collection of Quentin Tarantino, who is in negotions with George Lucas to include it as special feature for the DVD release of a widescreen original-edition Empire Strikes Back that has an alternate ending where Luke joins the dark side and is killed when Yoda ramps a really loud motocross dirtbike into his face. Yoda then slams a Mountain Dew. In this alternate ending, dirt and blood totally fly everywhere.

Fact #5:
Roger Waters and David Gilmour have put aside their differences, and are planning to perform again as Pink Floyd in a seriously mind-blowing tour. This is scheduled to take place in the year 2000 and will coincide with the legalization of all drugs.


===============================
(3) Conclusion
===============================

So, anyway, like I say, we close on the house on April 30th ... seems like a good time to do some spring cleaning on this "blog" thing here. I'm thinking of calling Blotto Grotto quits and setting up a more generalized web site type thing (e.g., something non-Blogger, maybe a Wordpress or Drupal setup). We'll see what comes of this. I'm sure all 1.5 of my readers will have strong opinions on this.

-Mike

Word up