Highly recommended: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

For some explanation: Dr. Horrible fan site

Current Mood: amused

I was listening to NPR this afternoon and heard an article about a group of Austrian monks. To sum up:

"After a contact in London informed the Cistercian monks of Holy Cross monastery about Universal’s search for Gregorian singers, the 80 monks compiled a clip of their singing and put it on YouTube as an audition."

Here's a write-up about them, include the YouTube audition video.

It just tickles me, imagining monks surfing the web and uploading videos to YouTube.

In the usual makes-me-wince, derivative-Christian-culture fashion (see Settlers of Canaan, a sad take-off on the popular Settlers of Catan board game) there is a website called godtube.com, which is a YouTube clone. Anyway, there's one video worth watching, which predated the website (I believe): Baby Got Book, a Christian spoof/parody of Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back". "Thompson Chain with Big Red Letters!" :)


...and for something completely different: the World Wife-Carrying Championships.

Current Mood: amused

Apparently, there are depths to which even Wikipedia will not sink.

Yes, I went to Wikipedia to search for "Neo-Vikings".

Because, even though I was working hard on my thesis, jcobleigh distracted me with Amazon's top 25 sci-fi bestsellers list, which includes two "sci-fi romance" novels involving immortals with six-packs and having essentially the same titles (except with synonyms, so you can tell them apart). Which reminded me of the first time I encountered this genre. It was this book, which I was utterly surprised to find on a sci-fi bookstore shelf and which filled me with dawning horror as I read the blurb on the back cover. Plot summary: hot American actress tries to "get away from it all" and hot Neo-Viking warriors climb out from their underground medieval Scandinavian lairs and abduct her from her idyllic Alaskan cabin, whereupon they force her to marry some hunk who ravishes her repeatedly and fills her with conflicting feelings about whether she wants to go back to her posh Hollywood lifestyle above ground.

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With author names like "Jaid Black" and "Kresley Cole" (right up there with my favorite lame character names evar, "Rayford Steele" and "Buck Williams"), you know there's some reason why the authors feel the need to hide behind a pseudonym: shame and ludicrousness.

Current Mood: amused

Check out this fascinating article on the declining European birthrates. Very thoughtful, eye-opening analysis, in a Lewis-Black-Ripple-of-Evil kind of way.

Current Mood: thoughtful

If you're looking for greeting cards and you don't want the usual stuff from your local mega-mart, consider these lovely nature photographs that my friend Ashley has taken. She'll put them on nice-quality card stock and send them your way for a very reasonable price!

Bonus: no saccharine sentiments pre-written inside!

Current Mood: impressed

Current Mood: amused

Music as a roller-coaster ride

Current Mood: artistic

For your amusement: a modular, self-reassembling robot

Current Mood: cheerful

Borrow a person, instead of a book, for a thirty-minute "read".

I hope that comes to a library near me sometime soon. :)

Current Mood: cheerful

I came across a recent Slashdot article, PETA Offers X-Prize for Artificial Meat, which reminded me of a recent Torchwood episode, Meat, where a poor alien whale-like thing is trapped in our dimension, and some cold-hearted entrepreneurs sell parts of it that they hack off on an ongoing basis, putting the alien flesh into the local food supply and torturing the poor creature.

When I sent the article to jcobleigh, his response was "Soylent Green is people!"

Utterly ick.

Of course, that doesn't mean that I won't find myself eating the stuff someday.

But still.

Current Mood: grossed out