Under anesthetic, subdivided and synthetic

From an ESPN story re: the Shaq-to-Cleveland trade: Shaquille O'Neal's first full year with the Phoenix Suns, in which the team won nine fewer games than the previous season, was an abomination when looking at his history with new teams.

That might be true, but only accidentally. Perhaps you were looking for another "ab-" word?

An FYI from your friendly li'l LJ Support volunteerling: if your main e-mail address on record with LJ is a work or (shudder) Hotmail account, might want to poke through kateshort's post here (short version: sekrit question). Because I'd hate to see any of my f-list zombified.

Also, Jesus Christ in a coffee mug. Which actually makes perfect sense to me.

Where would you be if you were LJ comment notifications? If you said "why, in your e-mail inbox," you'd be wrong, blinded by raw optimism. I'm getting them sporadically at best, which fits my attention span nicely, but is still vexing.

Oh dear holy God.

Microsoft has a new program called "Songsmith," which, when you feed it a vocal track, will generate the MIDI-esque backing music for you. Technically, it works, I guess, for very small values of "works." Aesthetically it...uhm. How do I work in the word "abomination?"

Don't take my word for it. Watch the videos, and if you hate yourself, turn the music up all the way:

Billy Idol, "White Wedding" (I approve of the banjos, if nothing else)
Rush, "Tom Sawyer" (oh sweet holy God stop)
Marvin Gaye, "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" (Marvin, I'm so, so sorry)
The Police, "Roxanne" (salsa!)
The Beatles, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (insufficient medication to make this congeal)
Nirvana, "In Bloom" (set phasers to "bossa nova," Spock)
Radiohead, "Creep" (worst rodeo ever)
Britney Spears, "Toxic" (I may actually like this one more)
Michael Jackson, "Beat It" (WHARRGARBL)

Edit: in addition to the winners in the comments (Ozzy's Polka Train gave me a stroke), don't miss Rick Astley. It's nine kinds of awful, and I'm finding some consistency in the SongSmith drummer's apparent ADHD behaviors....

Via gynocide: WordPress has an LJ import filter. You know, FYI.

The Twitter Inbedder. From Lore, the same madman who brought you the Doo-Dah News.

Once again, Digg makes me chuckle. The headline: 11 Very Important Benefits the Economic Crysis Has to Offer. Yes, with a "y," just like the game. No, not intentional, just stupid.

The perfect reply: Yeah, this economic Crysis brought a lot of Bioshock to Americans that didn't see it coming, but who knows when we'll see the total Fallout from this event. Some say that it's a Far Cry from the Great Depression while others are expressing great F.E.A.R. at the prospect. Despite what anyone thinks, we must answer our Call of Duty to right these economic woes in our civic power of the vote. We can be the lone voice in a World in Conflict. Command and Conquer those who are corrupt amongst our politicians, for in the future is most certainly their Day of Defeat. They are the ones that can be Left 4 Dead. It's almost Unreal the way this country is going. We are experiencing the change needed to EndWar.

You all probably noticed by now, but just in case you hadn't, MightyGodKing is back.

The latest nugget of brilliance from the Great White North: "The Jets and the Crips? Shortest feud ever."

ME: Of course, the Jets would counter with precision uniform dancing. We can’t underrate that.
ERIC: I find it surprisingly easy to underrate that when the other side has guns.

-- I finally figured out where GDBM is going next. And it's closer to canon than you might expect. (Canon? In my Goddamn Batman? It's more likely than you think. Hint: Paul Dini.)

-- Got one of my Spectre covers hotlinked from a hilariously strange post to scans_daily, so I get notices early in the morning when my 20 MB bandwidth cap gets exceeded. This is how the other half lives, I see. I take back my picspam hotlinking arguments. (No, I haven't forgotten picspam, either.) Just seems counter-productive to hotlink to a site that's only going to be up five hours a day because of the traffic. Hrm. (Then again, the tech support page says that a tool for measuring quota use says they "will build an interface to provide this information" and I'm pretty sure that statement is ten years old now. No hurry, kids. At least I've actually accomplished everything I set out to do ten years ago. Just...slowly.)

-- Via Romenesko: Reporters covering Sarah Palin in Clearwater were greeted with taunts by a crowd of about 3,000, reports Dana Milbank. When Palin blamed Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media," her supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks, shouting abuse and hurling obscenities. Milbank says one supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

-- Speaking of, yes, there's a debate tonight, but it's a pseudo-"town-hall" format, questions submitted in advance, no cross-questioning, so it's a simultaneous stump-speech. Actually, they won't be talking simultaneously, though that would be more entertaining. Sure as hell not watching it -- might try to find a good liveblog so I don't have to. (I will say MightyGodKing's take on the last two debates has been consistently the most entertaining aspect of the election cycle thus far, with Tina Fey a distant second.)

-- Via rosefox8: I wear my pentical (its just the way it make scene to spell it to me) all the time! and i was playing with it in class and this girl like "your a witch" I said "get your facts right I not!" she said"I not dumb i know what that star means" I said "yep it only has one meaning and i am a witch and you should behead me!" She said "so your a witch" me " No i am a Celt there is a different get it right before you judge" The sad thing is I've had to grade less coherent work than this.

-- The Leonidas icon is moving in time to Todd Rundgren's "Bang the Drum."

-- Via anw: If you've spent the last few weeks in a funk brought on by a cataclysmic economy, political insipidy, pigskin agony (goddammit, Norv!) or just the general intense fail endemic to the human race, maybe you need a pick-me-up. Read this, then this. Sometimes you just have to delight in the way the world works.

So the 2008 NFL season has begun and I managed to let my Flash helmet generator go utterly untouched in the offseason, despite figuring out a sneaky way to get multi-colored logos into the mix. Maybe later. Right now I've got a bug bite on my left temple and it itches like all holy hell so now it's all red and I look fantastically freaky, even for me. Which is a good reason to abhor society, stay in and perform acts of mass diversion all weekend, I s'pose. Like I need a reason.