breaking bald

i’ve only seen 2.5 seasons of breaking bad—but i’ve already noticed an unusually high rate of baldness. over the course of seven hours, i developed a drinking game that leverages this observation.

lost again

a girl who is very pretty in the face came up to me on the street yesterday as i was snow jogging and asked if i was ever going to get around to updating my lost/philosopher chart to include the google image ranking of certain lesser-known lost cast members and certain lesser-known thinkers. normally, raynor ganan does not take requests—he just crams a powerbar into his favourite orifice and the next thing you see is a poof of powder as he snowjogs his way home. BUT the girl (whose prettiness of the face did not influence my decision) was very pretty in the face and after i changed out of my custom sneakers (with after-market nickel-plated treads) i made this new tally.

here we see edmund “those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it” burke versus that guy who has been in every t.v. show including law & order. we also get a google image smackdown between the russian revolutionary mikhail bakunin and the russian revolutionary mikhail bakunin.

i suppose the real test of who wins google images is how durable these results are. if you catch me snowjogging in five years and remind me to update these numbers to reflect the absence of lost from our 2016 hive mind—i pledge to oblige—no matter the level of prettiness of your face.

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odd: the first google image hit for mikhail bakunin is of karl marx.

the roman god of hot wet doo-doo

i don’t like discussing religion on the ragbag because i don’t believe in words that end in -ion. but from time to time i do make an exception. today is one of those times because i just learned about sterculius, the roman god of hot wet doo-doo.

for a poo god to make sense, one must understand that the early romans were deeply agrarian and that feces was then (as it still is all these many years later) a dependable fertilizer. thus, to pray to sterculius was to pray for a bountiful harvest. in fact, there was an entire of pantheon of kooky field gods:

Collina [presided] over the hills, and Vallonia over the valleys. Epona had charge of horses, Bubona of oxen. Seia or Segetra looked to the seed and the springing corn. Runcina was invoked when the fields were to be weeded; Occator, when they were to be harrowed. Sator and Sarritor presided over sowing and raking. Robigus or Robigo was worshiped to avert mildew.

there you have it, the next time that you spot some gnarly mildew in your fraternity house shower stall, drop robigo a quick prayer and hopefully everything will get cleared up in time for your next round of hazing.

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picture: the god sterculius as depicted in an old beavis and butt-head episode.
source: the mythology of ancient greece and italy (1854).

i was trying to explain jeremy bentham’s panopticon to my 5 year-old nephew this weekend and he was like, “geesh uncle ray, i already know all about that because of lost.” and then i was like, “look here half-pint, just cuz the producers of that television programme copy-pasted philosophers’ names for their characters’ names to spice up the mystery (despite the fact that the relationship is tenuous at best) this does not mean that you know the first thing about jeremy bentham or his panopticon.” and then my 5 year-old nephew turned on the waterworks and his mom made her way over to us and gave me disparaging looks.

so i got to wondering who was more popular in 2010, lost characters or the philosophers who they were named after. and as everyone knows, in the year 2010, the true measure of popularity is web presence. i then compared the first 100 google image “face” hits for “john locke” & “jeremy bentham” a character and a corpse both played by terry o’quinn on lost and named for two great thinkers of the enlightenment. what i found was that while lost google-image owns locke, the immortal head of jeremy bentham still wins the web.

update (2/14/11): more lost/philosopher/google image action can be found here.

a fruitful idea

i woke up this morning with an idea for the kind of blog that might score me a fat book deal. i made this image for my new site, it’s called pregnant-chicks-on-tv-pretending-they-isn’t-really-pregnant.com and it could make millions.

more here.

the ratio of horatio

an open letter to people with widescreen televisions who insist on forcing everything they watch into a 16:9 proportion (eg. my parents):

look, raynor ganan is as liberal as they come (i had a caricature of noam chomsky tattooed on a prostitute that i see occasionally)—but just cuz you shelled out the yearly wage of a tajikistani rodeo clown for a television the size of a surfboard does not mean that you should be plasmafying every last pixel on your set. the proportions of the female form are dumpy and out of whack and the ratio of horatio makes him look like a whiskerless gimli. there is nothing wrong with 4:3! indeed it is the same ratio of gin to tonic in the beverage that i am enjoying right now.

sorry for getting so political, but this topic really gets me hot and bothered.

occasionally, i will be coerced into a television binge where i watch many episodes of a series over a short amount of time. one of the games that i like to play with myself during these times is matching unknown actors’ stage names during the titles to the characters that they portray.

the game is more than just random matching around gender or ethnicity since many actors style their names based upon how they want to brand themselves—a decision which also involves which types of characters that they want to portray. additionally there is usually a correlation between screen time and the order in which the actor is billed.

all this being said, i was only able to correctly match 3 of the 13 characters in the show, battlestar galactica (and i already knew edward james olmos ahead of time). furthermore, i wasn’t even 1000‰ correct on matching genders. jamie bamber is a dood? i thought she was the brassy kara thrace. go figure. anyway, this game is playable with other shows besides battlestar galactica and works especially well with soap operas.

SPOILER ALERT: clone wars was abominable. the only redeeming feature is that george lucas was somehow able to get truman capote to do the voice for jabba the hutt’s super-nasty uncle.

an analysis of lonely island’s jizz in my pants

when i first saw the jizz in my pants video, i laughed so hard that i couldn’t stop squirting milk from my nose (and i wasn’t even drinking milk). thinking about it, i realised that its humor was derived from more than the utter baseness of it all—it was the crescendoing absurdity of the things that make the singers spontaneously orgasm and the well-timed way in which these items are presented.

this chart shows that not only are the items more and more absurd as time goes on, but also that the pacing is asymptotically frenetic. the only exception is that an alarm clock going off is a slightly more ridiculous orgasm agent than a warm breeze on one’s crotch (in my estimation). other than that, this video is definitely a valuable study in comedic timing.