Anyone even marginally intelligent can finally understand the the basics of the credit crisis and the esoteric financial terms being bandied about these days, like sub-prime mortgages, CDO’s and Credit Default Swaps with this brilliantly simple animation by Jonathan Jarvis. Hopefully if enough people understand how the economy got into the toilet we’ll see the train coming at us the next time around.
One of the funniest shows on television right now is HBO’s ‘Flight of the Conchords‘, a musical sitcom about a couple of dudes from New Zealand trying to make it in the Big Apple as a band. It’s so funny it’ll make your toes curl.
Obviously it won’t EVER make it to our shores because the networks are too busy milking the ‘Friends’ syndication by running endless re-runs of it that people watch for the billionth time. Crap.
UPDATE: The website watchtheconchords.com had all the episodes online so you could watch them in your browser but now, when you click on any of the episodes you get a terse message “Video removed due to copyright infringement”.
Well, Fuckyouverymuch HBO!
So, torrent the entire show here. They are currently in their second season but watch the first season to begin with. Happy copyright infringing!
P.S. Piratebay.org and Transmission, the two reasons I haven’t owned, watched or missed television in 4 years.
P.P.S. Post number one hundred!
This awesome clip from the animated show, ‘The Family Guy’ is doing the rounds of the internet. They’re taking the piss outta Microsoft’s Zune MP3 Player.
Internet find of the day FUCKMYLIFE.COM
Some brilliant examples of the one liners on the site:
Today, the girl I love told me she was sick of guys. I replied that I happened to be a guy. She laughed and said “No, I mean the boyfriend type!” FML
Today, I went to the Doctor with my parents. When the doctor asked if I was sexually active, I said ‘Yes.’ My mom laughed and said ‘Good one.’ My dad, for added effect said, ‘Your hand doesn’t count.’ FML
Today, I was having sex with my girlfriend for the first time, and she asked me if I ever get made fun of in the locker room for my small penis. FML
Bwaaaaa haaaaaa haaaaaaaaaaaa!
So, I got an iPod Touch and I just got back from some Asian Band Festival at the Old Fort in New Delhi.
First, the concert. One of the bands performing was a Bhutanese band called ‘Who’s your Daddy?‘ and they did AC/DC covers. (I am not making any of this up)
All in all, a pleasant evening and even though I didn’t hear a single really great band, I didn’t hear anyone that sucked either. Perhaps because we left before Parikrama came on. (Don’t send me hate mail, I get off on it)
I finally saw a lot of groups that people have been telling me about for a while like Shair & Func and Skinny Alley and all I can say is that none of them really rocked my boat.
What did rock my boat was the Old Fort or Purana Qila. Forts still fascinate me in a way only people who spent their entire childhood daydreaming, will understand. The entire city of Delhi is dotted with these little tombs or isolated, dilapidated ramparts (in my expert opinion) from bygone eras, built by bygone rulers. You often come upon these little fragments in the most bizarre places, in back of beyond bylanes, in the middle of abandoned playgrounds, on the fairways of golf-courses.
When you are new to the city this is brilliant, like a little treasure hunt. But as with most great things, you soon get jaded and about these forts and tombs.
But every once in a while you see them at night, lit up and it reminds you of how fucking spectacular these forts are and how craptacular your own life’s work is when compared to them. It’s like the Mughals are mocking us.
Oh wow! You made a short-film? A TV Show? Well I built this fort that’s been around for three hundred years and it will probably be around for another three hundred years after you’ve been dead and forgotten kiddo. So tell me, who’s your daddy?
Crap. I gotta build a fort.
I consider myself a pretty nerdy, techy guy. I’ve been around computers for twenty years now. I’ve built computers for friends, worked in tech support, I can edit video and audio with ease. Yesterday, to test the performance of a new hard drive I disassembled this laptop. Twice.
So why the fuck is it that in all my days I have NEVER found a single text editor that doesn’t make me want to throw the computer I’m using out the window? Am I specially-abled or something? Am I fucking retard?
I’ve tried them all. Microsoft Word is the most vile of the lot, every now and then when I’m stuck on a Windows machine and confronted with doing any writing on it, my scalp tingles. So many years of Word crashing on me after I have slaved over some writing for hours has left me with an instinctual, feral, aversion to it. Oh and by the way, the fine folks at Microsoft that designed the ‘Autosave’ feature in Word? Please mail me for my home address so you can come over here and kiss my arse.
Even simple stuff like dragging a margin or creating a hanging indent in Word damn near drives me to tears. Word on the Mac is better by an infinitesimally small amount. Geez.
Open Office sucks too but I’ve always lived by the adage that you get what you pay for and Open Office is free. My point proven.
Apple’s Pages is bearable, until you start getting adventurous with the formatting at which point all bets are off. Also you usually have to export your work into the de-facto Word Format (so the 99% of the world not using a Macintosh can read your opus) which is another crap-shoot.
And now there’s a new joy in my life. WordPress! For the most part I still use the online interface. It’s actually that good, even for an old school ‘apps for everything‘ dude like myself. Except for the text editor.
Now and then when I’m making a post WordPress will decide to totally fuck with me by adding a line-feed where I don’t want it or right justifying something I want left justified. The previous post was an example. After half an hour of trying, I gave up on getting WordPress to format the post the way I wanted. I rewrote the entire post from scratch and this isn’t the first time this has happened. Brought to my goddamn knees by some HTML and some javascript. Pathetic.
So. Can anyone please tell me, why is a self-confessed ubergeek like myself flummoxed by what are essentially fucking text editors on steroids? Anyone?
So, out of all the films I watched this week, the funniest and most entertaining by far was the hugely sacrilegious comedy/documentary ‘Religulous’. It’s been directed by Larry Charles, the director of ‘Borat’ and a writer on ‘Seinfeld’ and written and presented by comedian and social critic Bill Maher who’s best endorsement (for me) comes in the form of a report on Anti-Catholicism which claimed that, following the 2002 clergy sex abuse scandal, “no one insulted Catholics more than Bill Maher”. Brilliant!
Whatever you views on religion are, you really have to watch this film. It’s funny as hell. (Though if you’re the type that believes in the immaculate conception or armies of monkey-men you’d better have a thick skin)
Bill Maher (who also presents the film) totally rips into organised religion of all kinds, the film is brilliantly edited for maximum effect and is full of scathing one liners that will make you laugh out loud. Here’s the trailer:
