Keeping Up With The Joneses
Where Are The Joneses? is an interactive sitcom from Steve Coogan‘s production company. The action centres on Dawn Jones, who, on learning that she is the daughter of a sperm donor, sets out to find her twenty-seven siblings. You can watch episodes on YouTube, follow a Flickr photo-diary, and, inevitably, keep up via Dawn’s Twitter account. Don’t like the plot, characters or gags? Then rewrite the show on its wiki.
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There’s really nothing a giant doughnut can’t do
The votes are in. Vermont wins the Springfield Challenge.
Now all they have to do is find a big enough theater.
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Hey! Hey! You! You! Gonna File A Lawsuit!
The Rubinoos recently filed a lawsuit against Avril Lavigne, claiming that her song Girlfriend (Youtube) plagiarized from their song, I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend (mp3). An authorized cover version of the Rubinoos song performed by Lush and retitled "I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend" has even more similarities to the Lavigne song. Now that the teeming millions on the Internets have gotten into the act, YouTubers are now arguing whether Lavigne is a plagiarist, whether the Rubinoos plagiarized from the Rolling Stones, and whether Ms. Lavigne plagiarized a second time. Now that Web 2.0 has made it easier to uncover musical copycats, I’m hot on the case of Bob Marley vs. The Banana Splits.
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Michael Moore Jon Stewarts Wolf Blitzer
Michael Moore will not be on CNN again for a while
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Famous Cartoonists Drawing While Blindfolded
"In 1947 Life Magazine asked some famous comic strip artists to to draw their famous characters while wearing a blindfold. The results are interesting…"
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Dope…but not dopes.
The Indoor Yield-O-Rama is a scientific look at how much marijuana people can expect to grow under certain conditions. No matter you think about marijuana or your country’s drug laws, the level of sophistication in this statistical analysis may surprise you.
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3 is an odd prime, 5 is an odd prime, 7 is an odd prime, 9 is a very odd prime…
The Prime Game is not really much of a game, but it is a neat & little-known fact about the decimal representation of prime numbers.
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The Censored Eleven
The Censored Eleven is a group of Warner Brothers cartoons that have been withheld from syndication because of their racial stereotypes: Hittin’ the Trail to Hallelujah Land (1931; info), Sunday Go to Meetin’ Time (1936; info), Clean Pastures (1937; info), Uncle Tom’s Bungalow (1937), Jungle Jitters (1938), The Isle of Pingo Pongo (1938), All This and Rabbit Stew (1941; info), Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943; info), Tin Pan Alley Cats (1943; info), Angel Puss (1944), and Goldilocks and the Jivin’ Bears (1944).
Somehow Tokio Jokio (1943; recap) didn’t make the list.
The "Twelve missing hares" are 12 politically incorrect Bugs Bunny cartoons that weren’t aired during Cartoon Network’s 2001 June Bugs Marathon: Hiawatha’s Rabbit Hunt (1941; info), Any Bonds Today? (1942; info), What’s Cookin’ Doc? (1944; info), Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips (1944; info), Herr Meets Hare (1945; info), A Feather in his Hare (1948; info), Mississippi Hare (1949; info), Frigid Hare (1949; info), Which is Witch? (1949; info), and Bushy Hare (1950; info), Horse Hare (1960; info). ("All This and Rabbit Stew" is on both lists.)
Bug Bunny does an Uncle Tom parody in Southern Fried Rabbit (1953; info).
Warner Brothers included "Southern Fried Rabbit" uncut on Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 4, with this disclaimer:
The cartoons you are about to see are products of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today’s society, these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.
Oh, also here’s a copy of the full version of 1942’s Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd vehicle “Fresh Hare“, including its habitually censored ending
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Armless woman refused service at McDonald’s
Rockford, IL woman Dawn Larson, who was born without arms, was refused service at a McDonald’s drive through, because the staff refused to let her take her food away with her feet (she uses her feet to drive, handle money, etc). The staff were vociferously revolted by the woman’s disability.
McDonald’s head office response? A $10 gift-certificate.
Dawn says her disability’s never stopped her from leading a normal life. “I do everyday things like everyday people.” But on November 3rd, she says that changed. Larson pulled up to the McDonald’s drive through on Kishwaukee Street and ordered food for her and her sons. She drove to the first window, gave the cashier her credit card with her foot, and pulled up to get her food. Dawn says, “The first girl said, ‘Girl, you ain’t got no arms’ and the manager said she couldn’t hand me her food and she just kept sticking to the fact that I didn’t have no arms and she was disgusted by it. I had the right to eat my dinner and feed my kids and they took that away from me.”
Larson says the manager eventually agreed to hand Larson’s son the food. But she says an incident 3 and a half moths later at the McDonald’s on 11th Street didn’t end that way. Larson claims an employee there refused to even do that. “I paid to be discriminated against and I paid to be disrespected and I paid to not even have the right to eat my food.”
Larson says McDonald’s sent her a 10 dollar gift certificate in response to her complaint. Now she’s suing the fast food corporation to prevent anyone else from going through what she did. “That’s saying McDonald’s condones and urges people to treat the handicapped that way. I don’t want that message to come across. I want to fight for my rights and my kids rights and have these things changed.”
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These days, Wheeler is a “food defense specialist” for the American Institute of Baking.
Bill O’Reilly alerts the nation to the roving lesbian gang menace.
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Iraq Movie Posters
Iraq’s Horror Movie Posters. According to Sky News, insurgent forces are taking up Worth1000 style criticism to hold up a mirror to citizens of the US and their Military-Entertainment complex.
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“A Compound From Olive-pomace Oil Gets 80% Slowing Down Of HIV Spread”
In the past, various possible treatments and methods have been suspected of helping combat AIDS, which have later been proven correct. Other, less reputable treatments have also been claimed to work, the likes of which descend towards malpractice, pseudoscience and criminal negligence. But in a turnabout, the olive oil element of South Africa’s controversial treatment, deemed to be "Africa’s Solution", actually helps as well.
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Hairy Mementos
Things Gone By is an antique jewelry dealer specializing in the category of "mourning jewelry"; items worn in memory of the dead, usually involving locks of their hair & other materials. The mourning items are not limited to jewelry, as they also feature a gallery of mourning artwork, again made with the hair of the beloved deceased.
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Simpson Family Values
Vanity Fair has an interesting write up on the history of the Simpsons. There are quotes from all sorts of people, including: Art Spiegelman, Jay Kogen, Rupert Murdoch, Conan O’Brien, etc.
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30,000 matchheads go up in flame
Kids fill a tin can with 30,000 matchheads, insert a long-ass fuse, retreat, and set off a gigantic fireball. Don’t do this as home. Don’t do this anywhere. But: enjoy.
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Custom Monkey Drawings & More
Illustrator Apelad has many various projects & flickrsets, including the fairly well known Laugh Out Loud Cats & the Hodgman inspired Hobo Names project, but some of the lesser known ones are awesome as well, including this set of images created for common HTTP Errors, this Alphabet of Monsters, and a personal favorite, Monkey!, wherein users send in a monkey description and receive in return a drawing.
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What are you doing? Puttin’ on the foil!
Where Are They Now? The Hanson Brothers. Reliving the goon old days with the Hanson Brothers from Slap Shot (and the 2002 sequel).
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One Book Project
Looking for something to read this summer? Well, if you like crime fiction The Rap Sheet has some recommendations for you.
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Guys and Dolls – uncanny love
Real Dolls and the men who love them – this 46 minute documentary explores the lives of four men and the relationships they have established with alternative partners in life. NSFW – doll nudity alert.
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Kill The Wabbit!
What’s Opera, Doc? (YouTube, approx. 7 mins.) The opera-parodying Merrie Melodies cartoon, which some consider to be Chuck Jones’ career masterpiece, turned 50 years old this week. The short is also known as "Kill The Wabbit" in reference to the line sung by Elmer Fudd to the tune of "Ride Of The Valkyries," which is just one of many Wagner references in the piece.
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The Angry Nintendo Nerd
Remember the old 8-bit Nintendo glory days, when you’d save your allowances to buy an overpriced cartridge for $49.99 only to discover that it was a piece of crap? If you’ve been nursing hatred and remorse in your soul all these years, then The Angry Nintendo Nerd has got your back. I find his profanity-laced rants on such turds as Simon’s Quest and The Karate Kid to be strangely cathartic. Best of all is his two-part nostalgia trip that sums up what everyone our age thought of the ill-fated original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie trilogy. Part I, Part II.
RobDurdle.com 
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