Let there be touchdown dances.

And it was good.

I just remembered the best scene in Extras. God bless.

The new Jaga Jazzist album, “One-Armed Bandit” is amazing. If you haven’t heard them, they play in a similar style to Stereolab or Tortoise. Its sort of a complex instrumental lounge prog post rock kind of sound. Similar to how I feel about most of Tortoise’s catalogue, this Jaga Jazzist in particular is a perfect album to get shit done to. Like reading for example. Or, perhaps you have to do the dishes. Watch the video above for a taste, and look in the comments or talk to me for a treat if you like it.

“We always say that one football team ‘wins’ the Super Bowl and one football team ‘loses’ it, but when you think about it—really think about it outside the narrow framework of scoring points—is that an accurate assessment of what happens?” Wheeling, WV resident Matthew Holland said. “One team celebrates while another walks solemnly back into the tunnel, but why? Another football season will begin again soon, and in the fullness of time, another Super Bowl will be played as if nothing had happened. And in a way, nothing has.”

Holland’s ambivalence toward what he calls “the tenuous and ephemeral concept of victory” is representative of a large and growing movement in football fandom. Although Super Bowl parties are going ahead as scheduled, many are puzzled, and even resentful, saying that in the span of a lifetime nobody ever really wins or loses, a fact that, by natural deduction, would also include Super Bowl participants. (link)

This is why I love the onion.  Two of my favorite things rolled up into one! Existential pining and dread, and foosball glory. And, this isn’t the first time. Don’t forget this one :

Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jacksonville Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life

First of all this video is the best video of the last 30 years. Its got all the great epic shit you want : making out on the beach, caves, mountain screams, fire, curly hair blowin’, eagles in the sky. Oh, and fucking horses on the beach splashin’ up waves! YES PLEASE. Can you find a more metal video?

So. New NTH contest. Can you find a better epic light rock video that has more epic as fuck shit in it? Prize? This awesome Michael Bolton poster, signed by the bombastic motherfucker himself : link !

I saw this at the grocery store yesterday, which caused both me and the patron in front of me to spontaneously crack up in the check out.

I can just imagine the crazy conga lines that our tax dollars our supporting.  How would you even spend 10 million dollars on a conga line?    I think you would have to hire a million person Cuban band, pay their benefits, and encrust all of their brass instruments with diamonds to spend that much.  No wonder my taxes are so outrageous.

15 years after it ended, and over 20 since his last interview the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson, decided to give another interview (Cleveland Plain Dealer).

Not much in my life had as much as an effect on me as Calvin and Hobbes did. I still have a distinct memory of being asking in class to name a type of mammal and I said “human”, I was 8 at the time, and the whole class laughed at me. I didn’t know why they laughed at the time and to this day I still don’t understand. I think maybe I connected more with Calvin than I did with my peers. A child who has too much knowledge and not enough social skills to understand how that might cause problems. In other words, this:

Nixonites, which song do you think is older?

Or maybe this one?

With apologies to the AVClub: “after enduring the gratingly chirpy horns that Reel Big Fish grafted onto “Take On Me,” it’s easy to imagine that it was A-Ha who came along to turn an older generation’s corny trash into cool-ass gold, not the other way around.”

Amazingly, the first one is from 1998 while the second is 1985. Somehow, the cultural artifacts of the late nineteen nineties have been subjected to forces that drastically increase their age. Reel Big Fish and ska in general seem almost as ridiculous as humanly possible. This is a really wild observation and is bound to have large effects in our understanding of temporal processes and biodegeneration. Perhaps Ray Kurzweil is right; perhaps we can live forever. If only we step into the comic book.

Okay. So most of you know by now of Apple’s release of their tablet. And, you might be thinking to yourself, “hmmmmmm… The iPod was revolutionary, the iPhone was revolutionary, the iPad must be revolutionary!” Or perhaps, on the other end of the spectrum, you’re thinking, “I hate Apple pods!” For sure, there is middle ground to fall under. For captivation’s sake, let us say we’re all included in this discussion.

The question, that many have already passed judgement on, is this: Will the iPad make a major impact on the world of electronics, internet, computing, etc…? My answer: Besides the lessons that will be learned by the industry? No.

Let me point out: I am an enthusiastic user of Apple’s OS X. I think it is the best marriage to date of open source technologies and private sector innovation. That said, Apple has made many moves in the recent history that make me cringe a bit. Certainly, an application developer environment that makes large financial incentives for developers to innovate, as Apple’s App Store does, is probably a good thing. However, the decision to keep that environment closed, controlled, and crippled is most certainly a dead end. Why Apple didn’t learn this from the computing explosion that happened from Microsoft opening development of applications that would run in Windows to anyone, without any process of censorship is beyond understandable. The parallels between the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad OS’s and Google’s Android OS, and Apple’s old operating system and Microsoft’s first iteration of Windows are remarkably similar.

The iPad does something differently than the iPhone: it tries to provide an alternate answer for something that has already been answered sufficiently by other electronics manufacturers. Simply put, netbooks are clearly superior to an iPad. Apple is sitting on a gold mine or oil field that they don’t even acknowledge exists: an actual OS X netbook. There is an entire community dedicated to installing OS X on a netbook. The amount of hubris it takes to think that you know better than this large of a community is really quite astounding. Instead of jumping on that bandwagon and building upon a solid foundation, Apple decided to release a gimpy, gimmicky, device that claims to do lots of things ‘the best’ but really does everything rather poorly with a few gimmicks to make you feel good about spending $500 for a pretty piece of technology.

Lets get down the brass tacks: Steve Jobs is not a fan of proprietary web technology, namely flash. My response? That’s great and all, but right now, flash is necessary to execute the things that the public demands and developers/designers want to innovate. Sorry Steve, any internet experience that doesn’t include flash is not ‘the best’ experience of the internet. Steve Jobs is also not a fan of supporting non-proprietary hardware. (Ahh the hypocrisy there…) The explosion of netbooks that could have OS X installed on them is clearly viewed as threatening to the perceived/hyper-inflated value of Apple / OS X. (And, let me speak from personal experience: OS X on a netbook is a beautiful thing.)The fact that Apple favors proprietary hardware and controlled environments over open hardware requirements and free development platforms again, is why their angle will ultimately fail… Again!

Google’s Android is in its infancy. However, it has the foundation to spread more rapidly than Windows, yet still have a central command center for guidance and leadership in the development community. This is Microsoft vs Apple times 1000.

What can Apple do to prevent another long hard fall? Open up the iPhone OS. It can certainly maintain the App Store environment, but with a more open and automated process for developers to submit and sell applications. The value of that will be so high that any mobile service provider would be silly to turn their backs on such a community, even when considering the potential risks of abuse of bandwidth and security.

Why do I care? Good question, Peter. I’m glad you asked. Google’s Android OS is not without its flaws in implementation. I would like to see a viable competitor to google in the developing mobile market. As the dominance of Microsoft in the computing boom pointed out: It’s not good for progress to have one key player upon which all major innovations within a sector are built.

Apple has an interesting angle. It has produced solid innovation, quality products, and contributed to open source communities. I’d love to see it abandon it’s shadier side in favor of embracing the thing that builds real brand value: Brilliant ideas that serve a large and strong demand.

So Apple, here’s my challenge: Look at what people are doing and learn how to work with the community that already enthusiastically exists to build something truly amazing instead of favoring proprietary environments upon which innovation is crippled.