adrian is rad

I haven’t watched a lot of Ellen but this clip is hilarious. Thank you, internet.

This ad is on SA TV quite a bit. I think it’s pretty funny. What’s funnier than a guy dancing to “Single Ladies”?

There’s also the flash dance version of “Single Ladies” if you like that sort of thing. (And that reminds me of the Belgian train station version of a Sound of Music.)

And another ad that I always laugh at is this one that’s on here as well as US TV:

Andy sent me an email that made my day. It was an mp3 he’d ripped from a 7″ in the collection of his grandfather, who had lived in SE Pennsylvania. It was Pennsylvania Dutch stand up comedy. It was so weird and wonderful that I had a grin for hours.

Here it is. Like I said, you’re welcome.

Prof. (Herman E.) Schnitzel – Schussel Along with Schnitzel (mp3)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Believe it or not, Schussel along with Schnitzel is available for purchase.

A few days ago some DJs at my radio station ran a fake NCAA Magic the Gathering tournament broadcast. It was pretty hilarious and nerdy.

Here’s a snippet.

KZSU – NCAA Magic the Gathering Tournament (mp3)

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Today I found the Wikipedia:unusual articles page. It’s an awesome way to sink many hours.

Leck mich im Arsch is a canon by Mozart. Yes, it translates to “Lick Me in the Arse”. It’s cited by some as evidence that Mozart may have had Tourette’s.

The Metric Marvels was created by the same people who did School House Rocks! It was not as successful. Did you know that Pres. Ford signed the Metric Conversion Act that made “the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce” in 1975. Wow that’s gone well.

Resignation from the British House of Commons has not been legal since the 1623. To resign, MPs have to get appointed to an office under the Crown.

There’s one single-arch McDonald’s sign left in the US. It’s in Pine Bluff, AR.

Joyce Hatto was a pianist whose husband issued a number of recordings in her name that were stolen from other recordings and altered slightly.

Eric Moussambani was a swimmer from Equitorial Guinea that competed in the 2000 Olypmics. He took twice as long as anyone else to swim the 100m…and he still won his heat.

Scottish law allows for a third verdict besides conviction and not guilty: not proven.

And, finally, there’s an incredibly titled North Korean propaganda film called Let’s Trim Our Hair in Accordance with Socialist Lifestyle.

xkcd has some nerdy shirts, like the one below.

However, if you really want to turn the nerd up, you have to go over to mental floss:

or

This is pretty funny.

My friend Dave (not this one) found this in the Palo Alto Daily News and cut it out.

I thought it was pretty funny.

[I feel it sort of stands alone, but if you really want to read Abby's response you can find it here.]

This is what the internet was made for. Example:

SO ALSO IN KINDERGARTEN I APPARENTLY THOUGHT THAT THE KIDS IN MY CLASS DIDN’T KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT COUGARS FOR SOME REASON, BECAUSE I DEFINITELY MADE A SWEET COUGAR QUIZ WHICH I INSISTED ON GIVING OUT TO THE CLASS THE NEXT DAY.

WHAT COLOR IS THE COUGAR? GOLD? NO! BROWN? NO! RED? NO! THE ANSWER IS TAWNY.

There are many, many stories like this.

my newest joke: “I came back into town after being away for a while and I had to get my affairs back in order. But it was hard, let me tell you. Those women did not like organization.”

also.

but I still laughed. Any dance based around the Tide To Go pen wins some points in my book.

Colin wiil (or should!) like the dance moves around 0:48 in.

Bay Area bargain restaurants. I’ll have to check it out when I get back.

Very funny anti-movie piracy spoof:

On the bus, seen on a young woman presumably going to work:

WHAT DOES “FUCK” MEAN?
F = FOREVER I LOVE YOU
U = UNHAPPY WITHOUT YOU
C = CARE ABOUT YOU
K = KISS YOU WITH A HUG
I GIVE YOU BIGGEST F.U.C.K.

Oh, Taipei, how you amuse me.

The family, at dinner.

Brother: I got a few movies from Netflix and we could watch one tonight. I got Melinda and Melinda—from Woody Allen—Before Sunset, To Be and to Have[1], and a Hitchcock movie: Two Men on a Train [sic]. [explains some of the plot of Strangers on a Train for a couple minutes.]

Dad: So which Hitchcock is that?

Me: Alfred. [laughs for eight minutes]

[1] This is one of the best films I’ve seen in the last five years. A really really good documentary.

I saw Knocked Up on Friday night.

The basic plot is that a rather plain-looking slacker impregnates a beautiful go-getter during a one night stand. Hilarity ensues.

I thought it was really funny and worth seeing. Between all the laughs there is a bit of sappiness, but not bad sappiness. This is the least well-written review of anything ever. Sorry. I’m going to stop typing now.

So I’m thinking of becoming a stand up comic. Here’s part of my routine.

so. have you noticed how “hola” looks like “holla“? I like imagining mexicans saying “holla!!”"
[with mexican accent]: “hollaaaaa, seniorita!!!”

have you noticed that outside calipers aren’t like vernier calipers at all and yet they’re both called calipers? What’s the deal with that???

so there are all these apples product that have names that sort of make sense: iphone, imac, etc, but what the crap is ipod supposed to mean? it’s my ‘pod’? it doesn’t look like a pod at all!

This all comes out of a coversation with my friend, Andy. I’ve included the full conversation below because I think it’s funny.

(more…)

Extreme ironing competition. It is what it sounds like. Some great ones in there.

Were there help desks before computers?

Well executed!

where does dracula go for his movie listings?

that’s right: fangdango!

get it? FANGdango.

There are a few links I’ve been meaning to put up. Things I find interesting but I don’t want to add to the sidebar on the right.

Random links:

• designverb: a blog about design related topics, largely product design and the like. fairly interesting stuff.
• rbally has a nice Cat Power show from Berlin for download [update: rbally seems to have taken this down/ broken]
• youtube has a great chemistry lab safety video explosion. (dylan, are you seeing this?)
• bitsandpieces silly college humor, but sometimes entertaining
• wikipedia has a list of African countries by GDP (adjusted for purchasing power parity) per capita. South Africa’s on top, but barely. For reference, the US is 3rd in the world for GDP (PPP) per capita at about $42,000.
• oregon trail is it possible you haven’t played this game? there are even shirts about it. And you can download an emulated version
• Tom Wilson I feel like I should add him to my list of best producers. He did Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Velvet Underground and more

[This was going to be one post with the above part 1 and below part 3, but it was too much, so I split them up]
There was recently the kottke best links of 2006. Here are some of my favorites from that list (including some I’ve seen/ linked to before):

• How to Care for your Introvert (from 2003; describes a lot of people I know and, well, me) and a current interview with the author
• David Copperfield gets mugged but doesn’t lose any property because of…slight of hand!
• old timey (WWII-era) color photographs of America
• the JFK assassination Zapruder film, stabilized even stranger and freakier
• songtapper tap a rhythm, it tells you the song. didn’t work as well as I wanted, but still interesting
• shiny mud balls only from Japan…and a how-to!
• Amateur a non-piano player or drummer makes a music video with himself playing those two instruments with clever editting
• a photo essay of female soldier in Iraq
• free historical sounds (as mp3s) “I Have a Dream”(MLK) to “Luckiest Man on the face of the Earth” (Lou Gehrig)
• Sheep Market 10,000 sheep drawn by online workers via Amazon’s odd Mechanical Turk service
• crazy aerial photos that look like tiny model cities
• Lake Peigneur disappears a 14″ drill bit made a lake and much of an island disappear
• 1964 New Yorker article on Dylan
• hilariously bad movie pitches
  

  Idea #1:
  What if the Internet Turned into a Were-Wolf

• Photos of European football (soccer) fields very diverse and often in gorgeous settings

I don’t really get into webcomics much, but I’ve been really enjoying xkcd “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”

It’s pretty geeky stuff, generally. Some of it reminds me of jokes friends would make in college (like thing jwerberg said about the Apollo 11 space shuttle and it having the same computing power as a TI-85 “and that thing can’t even do tan 90!”)

There are some of my favorites.

I may relate a little too much to some.

Some are at the heights of geek humor while others are just sort of random.

And then there are the ones about love.

There are a couple entertaining videos that I found or ran across in the recent times:

Aries Spears impressions while freestyling. This is a guy doing impressions of LL Cool J, Snoop Dog, DMX and Jay Z while freestyling. It’s pretty dang impressive, though I’m not familiar with DMX at all and only somewhat familiar with the other three. I’m still very impressed. (A couple things of note: a) that’s Live 105, in SF and that’s the same studio where I did the college dj of the week thing and 2) it appears Woody, one of the hosts, is a Steelers fan as he’s sporting a hat and a Willy Parker jersey). (via stereogum)

Peyton Manning Mastercard Priceless Ad. I can see how you might not like Peyton Manning, but man, I love this commercial which started running last year. They have a second, similar one this season but it’s not as good. I laugh every time I see this one.

[Update:] Oh man, I found another Peyton priceless commercial and it’s hilarious too. Also, there’s a blooper commercial from the first Peyton video and the making of (including the actual commercial at the end) a third in the series.

Maybe it was growing up during the early 90’s but for some reason I still tune in to Saturday Night Live every week. For a few years, I’d watch up until Weekend Update and then switch it off: during most of the Falon-Fey years it was certainly the funniest thing of the night. Since Fallon and then Fey left, even that hasn’t been all that funny recently.

But tonight I was surprised. The show was actually funny throughout. I laughed out loud during a number of sketches. Maybe it was Alec Baldwin (who hosted) who was great. Or maybe Tina Fey wrote some sketches (she cameo-ed on the show). And it probably wasn’t hurt by cameos by, Tina Fey, Tracey Morgan, Steve Martin, Martin Short (who appeared for about 22 seconds), Paul McCartney (similarly, 22 seconds), and Tony Bennett.

Anyway, funny stuff tonight. Maybe it’ll happen again next week…or again in six or seven years.

Funny!

(via boingboing)

What could you call a cross-dressing Sarah Michelle Geller impersonator?

Sarah Michelle Feller!!!@@@

If you haven’t seen them there are some funny or awesome videos floating around.

The band Ok Go managed to make one of the most entertaining videos (QT WMV) I’ve seen recently simply with a few rented treadmills and a borrowed video camera. That is some serious choreography. They also choreographed a back yard dance routine for one of their other videos (QT WMV). It’s not quite as entertaining, but it’s still fun.

Chad Vader, Day Shift Manager has a title that speaks for itself.

The “Chinese Backstreet Boys” are a couple Chinese college students who record video of themselves while animatedly singing along to Backstreet Boys songs. I Want It That Way is pretty great while As Long As You Love Me is more for completists.

10 Unintentially funny domain names

sample:

A site called ‘Who Represents‘ where you can find the name of the agent that represents a celebrity. Their domain name… wait for it… is
www.whorepresents.com

I bet they did not mean that!

I’d almost forgotten about this. I remember the font being more readable than that.

There were three more of them. I’m trying to see if archive.org has any of them.

I saw Dave Chapelle’’s Block Party last night with the roomies, Raag and Jesse. Good times!

Quick summary: Dave Chapelle gets signed to a $50 million contract, decides to blow some of it. He throws a block party in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn and invites a bunch of people from his current hometown in south west Ohio. (NOTE ANDY: he grew up in Silver Spring for part of his time!) He also found some decent hip-hop acts to come and preform (the Roots, Kanye, Mos Def, the Fugees, etc)

And also! he invited a marching band, once again proving that marching bands are cool.

It happens that Michel Gondry directs, but that doesn’t have much bearing on the situation. Dave Chapelle’s funny as it turns out. The music is pretty fantastic. I loved a lot of the performances. I’m not the most familiar with either mainstream or underground hip hop and I imagine most of you are more familiar so you might enjoy the music even more than I do.

I loved the scene of Kanye watching the marching band play his “Jesus Walks” with a huge smile on his face.

There are also little stories of people through out. The old woman from Ohio. The two kids from Ohio that are out of their mind that they get to go. The very very strange couple that lives in the most-abandoned house right where the block party is going to be held. The marching band director and members. The neighborhood pre-school director.

In the end I sort of wish I could have seen more of all of it: the humor, the music and the people stories.

It’s good and surprisingly uplifting. I vote yes.

Regret the Error is a blog that collects errata and corrections from newspapers around the world. They are often funny.

Example:

In an interview with Jodie Marsh (I could’ve been a lawyer, page 12, G2, January 25) we referred to the silicon-enhanced charms of her rival, Jordan. Silicon is a non-metallic element, as in silicon chip. Silicone is the polymer used in breast implants. This has been corrected on five previous occasions: February 29 2000; June 20 2000; May 31 2001; November 10 2004; October 21 2005

Also, on a completely unrelated note, a one-liner in an email from my mom that I thought was pretty great:

The frenzy builds in Pittsburgh. Can anyone survive?

During all my years of high school, I played trumpet in the pit orchestra for the high school musical. Much of the time was boring and we were under-recognized for our tremendous skill. We were also some of the only people to see the musical in its entirety many times—many of the leads and chorus members only saw the scenes they were in—to the point where we knew all the lines and scenes in the musical, putting us in a unique position to make fun of it.

An that’s what we did. Jeff Miller and Colin Ashe, still friends of mine, started with a small-scale parody of Cinderella. The following year was the first real Pit Skit with Toilet Paper Man, a parody of Music Man, where a man comes to town to try to sell toilet paper to the people. The next years were Brig-a-Mart, a story of a Canadian convenience store that was stuck 10*pi years behind, a parody of Brigadoon and Joseph (or was Jorje) and his Amazing Techinocolor Pimpcoat, where I played the lead, a parody of, well you should figure that one out by now. The three that I did (Toilet Paper Man was the first) were a lot of fun. We wrote and rehearsed these two-act, 20-30 minute elaborate skits complete with props, a program, and plenty of sexual innuendo. They were performed over two nights at the pre-show meeting. We regularly would have to ask people to not laugh as much because we didn’t have that much time and they were missing our other funny lines.

What got me thinking about all this was a scene from Brig-a-Mart that still makes me smile. In Brigadoon, there was a scene in which the guy from the present is talking to one of the stuck-300-years-in-the-past Scottish ladies that goes something like this:

him: are you crazy?!
her: what is ‘crazy’?
him: insane.

And Brig-a-Mart, we had it like this:

him: are you nuts?
a guy-dressed-as-a-girl: what is ‘nuts’?
him [hands her a dictionary]: here’s a frickin’ dictionary. look it up!
a guy-dressed-as-a-girl [flips to page]: oh, I see, ‘testicles’.

The guy was played by Jimmy Cramer and the guy-dressed-as-a-girl by one of the best to ever play such a part, Pat Bird.

I should also mention that we didn’t rehearse with props. I would go around my house the night before and collect props. Sometimes we would forget about a prop and just fake it.

This all leads up to how the above scene played out during the perfomance. Pat and Jimmy were going along with the scene. I realized that the dictionary was still in the prop bag still. I reached into the bag and grabbed it. Jimmy’s facing me and Pat away from me. Let’s see how it turns out:

Jimmy: Are you nuts?
[I make eye contact with Jimmy and indicate the dictionary]
Pat: What is ‘nuts’?
[I toss the book. It makes a perfect parabolic arc over Pat's head, clearing it by a couple inches. Jimmy snatches it out of the air just as he's beginning to say:]
Jimmy: Here’s a frickin dictionary. Look it up!
…

I couldn’t have planned it better. I still smile thinking about it.

Any other USC HS people have fun Pit Skit memories?

From 5ives:

Five things I suspect I’m not supposed to think about when watching those bands with messy hair who sound like Joy Division

1. Wow. That’s a really expensive amp.
2. That bass player has nice skin for someone who’s so unhappy.
3. I wonder if they all have really cool apartments.
4. Would it kill them to get a tambourine?
5. Man. These guys sound a lot like Joy Division.

I was walking around the other day and this phrase and the way of saying it popped into my head: “so sad!” I couldn’t figure out for the life of me where it was from.

Then! Revelation! It’s from a funny Washington Mutal commercial. They made a series of commercials that were quite funny. The acting and writing in all of these are impressive (for non-national commercials).

The basic premise was introducing a character who had some bad personal trait (untrusting, dishonest, etc), demostrate this, show that some feature that Washington Mutual offers gives them peace of mind (or reversed that trait) and then changes the character’s life to display this new trait.

To be more specific, these are my top three:
(you should really watch these, at least the first one)

1. “Tom.” This is where the “so sad!” comes from. Tom has “weak principles” demostrated by him steeling lemonade from a kid’s stand and then throwing the cup on the ground. He becomes honest from his encounter with WaMu. Three scenes of him being honest: talking to a girl at a bar, “I’ve never had a girlfriend and I still live with my mother”; walking in late for a meeting “Sorry, I’m late. I had a job interview. Nailed it!”; and talking movies with guys over poker, “Have you guys scene Steel Magnolias? I was bawling. So sad!”
2. “Geoffrey” Geoffrey is untrusting displayed by a scene where he walks up to a hostess at a restaurant. “Name?” she asks and then he looks suspicious: “Why?” Some identity theft thing makes him more trusting. The kicker of this one is a scene where he enters his house and there’s a robber in black and a ski mask and everything carrying out his stereo. “What are you doing?” The robber replies “Factory recall” and Geoffrey says “Oh. Okay.” Then the robber stands there for a moment before he says “Excuse me.” Geoffrey says “Oh. sorry” and gets out of the way.
3. “Rick” Rick is frustrated with his home loan and brought that frustration to his construction job site. After WaMu he’s much more easy going. He proceeds to pull a few really dangerous practical jokes which he thinks are hilarious and rides a wrecking ball into a brick wall, which he thinks is great fun.

“Debra” is also pretty funny.