king cab

I was convinced that all the Michael Jackson ephemera bobbing around in my skull tricked my eyes into seeing a Michael Jackson tribute on top of a taxi last night, but it turns out it was a real thing:


The ads are sponsored by Microsoft's sad stab at launching a search engine with a nonsense name that can be used as a verb, BING. (I Googled it!)

Next up:

Okay, this is serious. Unlike the usual free Facebook gifts (e.g., Share your excitement for the 2009 Pontiac Vibe with a spray-painted Pontiac logo! Tap the Rockies with this Coors Light E-Coaster! Tell your friends that He's Just Not That Into You, in theaters this Friday, with a spinning Jennifer Aniston head!, etc.), here's one I can't fuck up. While I mull over which friend deserves this, here's a sick M.J. remix from '97, an underplayed (but frequently sampled) Jackson 5 banger, an ignored later-period single, and an odd but totally funky B-side that prominently features monkey sounds.

loonies

I guess this is where I write about the Will.i.am / Perez Hilton feud because this is a blog, and every blog on the internet is currently doing that, as per President Obama's edict. So here we go. As I understand it, Mr. Hilton and Mr. i.am got in some kind of BOOM BOOM POW fist fight at the Much Music Awards in Toronto that ended with former calling the latter a "faggot," which makes no sense whatsoever, mostly because I thought Much Music stopped broadcasting sometime in 1999. Instead of calling the police, Perez used his phone to Twitter that anyone reading should call the police (it's similar to the situation in Iran) and now everyone is choosing sides (now that we've all moved on from Jon & Kate) because everyone loves a good old-fashioned East Coast/West Coast and Canada hip-hop war. Even Kirstie Alley!

As paralyzingly stupid as all of this might seem, it does remind us of an important lesson that always bears repeating: in a world of uncertainties, Will.i.am's verse in any song that contains a Will.i.am verse will be the worst fucking part of that song. If you don't know what I'm talking about seek out his bit in Justin Timberlake's "Damn Girl." It is, with absolute certainty, one of the worst raps I've ever heard. And I went to high school with a bunch of white kids from Queens.

this is why you're fat

wwe, wtf?

i am very sure

Nicks has often told the story of how she wrote the song. She wrote it shortly after she was married to Kim Anderson. The newlyweds were driving up to San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara when Prince's song "Little Red Corvette" came on the radio. Nicks states that she started humming along to the melody of the song, especially inspired by the lush synthesizers of the song, and "Stand Back" was born. They stopped and got a tape recorder and she recorded the demo right there in the honeymoon suite that night. Later, when Nicks went into the studio to record the song, she called Prince and told him the story of how she wrote the song to his melody. He came to the studio that night and played synthesizers on it, although his contribution is uncredited on the album. Then, she says, "he just got up and left as if the whole thing happened in a dream." 

I would give top dollar to buy and download video of all that going down. Prince and Stevie Nicks -- can you imagine how many flowing scarves were present in that recording studio? The official music video is the next best thing, though. And behold, it's conveniently featured on my other blog, learning things about musicians from music videos.

(NOW THAT'S WHAT WE CALL SYNERGY)

finding sarah palin

I wasn't aware she did interviews of any other kind?

This update coming to you live from the Apple store on W. 14th St., I'm officially part of the tribe. If I had a car it might have an Apple sticker on it and you would all be right to want to run me off the road.

safari

I'm not sure if the pop-up ad below is a commentary on the interchangeability of advanced degrees, or clip art as robot-generated pop art, but either way it's convinced me to pursue an online degree. I have two years to spare and oh look at that friendly giraffe!

pit bull

If you've watched anything vaguely manly on TV in the last month ("SportsCenter," "MANswers," "The Wendy Williams Show") you've probably caught this ad:

HA HA HA check out the wimp with sensitive pits!!! Seriously though, enough of this bullshit. It's hard enough to go deodorant shopping, what with the 299 different varieties already up for grabs. It seems easy enough: run into the CVS, grab some deodorant. Cut to ten minutes later when I'm still standing in the aisle, completely dumbfounded, trying to weigh the merits of "Mountain Valley Rush" versus "X-Treme Cool Blast Power Stripe" versus "24 Hour Arctic Peak Fusion" -- and now I'm also supposed to figure out my "pit type"?!

This is the reason CVS is the size of a supermarket, and the supermarket is the size of an airplane hanger. Speed Stick knows that the more retarded "flavors" they have on the shelf, the better the chance is that my eyes will lock on one of them and buy it. But this just encourages every other brand to introduce more and more variations and next thing you know the deodorant aisle is 50 feet long. Dude, it's deodorant. All I want is one that will keep me from smelling like a locker room, without making me smell like a bridge and tunnel date rapist.

Blah blah blah this probably means I have sensitive pits.

it's free and anyone can join

Facebook's newsfeed isn't of much use to me, but I do think that it provides a nice reminder that, when things seem shitty, there are simultaneously people who are doing great, or just fell in love, or are 12 episodes into the second season of "CSI: Miami" on demand, or are most like Uncredited Nurse No. 2 in Shift Happens, a Season 7 episode of "Sabrina The Teenage Witch" (3 people like this!), and before long you'll be in their shoes and they'll be in yours.

Seeing the ups and downs of other people's lives spelled out in list form underscores that sometimes life is a bummer and sometimes it's awesome and -- we are talking about Facebook here -- a lot of the time it's totally inane. But in the end we can take solace in the fact that we're all in this together, humans on this glorious spaceship called Earth, powered by AT&T. (I'm paraphrasing that from EPCOT Center.)