Ricky Gervais: Why I’m An Atheist.

The objectification of writers.

Alf drops the n-word.

“Escape From Spiderhead” by George Saunders.

Quite frankly, Argentina has better dance reality shows.

Ten of the most intriguing movies of 2011.

Sarah Palin’s gloomy new poll numbers.

What has always been missing from your life and will now make it more complete: A mash-up between Fiddler On The Roof and You Got Served.

Eisenstein, Mickey Mouse, and the synthesis of ecstasy.

WikiLeaks and Nerd Supremacy.

15 things that Kurt Vonnegut said better than anyone.

The scientist who lit up the Dark Ages.

These screencaps, of course, are from Peter Hyam’s 1984 adaptation of 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

One of the absolute best comics of the year: Phonogram: The Singles Club.

One of the absolute worst comics of the year: When Kevin Smith took a big, smelly shit on Batman.

Does our universe show “bruises” from where it collided with other universes?

Angry people in local newspapers.

“Look at your God. Now look at me.” Cthulhu and Old Spice!

from here.

1. This…

…is hilarious to me. Art by a fella named Murray Groat mashing up TinTin with the Lovecraft mythos. Something about Hergé’s ligne claire style of art mixed with that lovable scamp Cthulhu is just perfect to me. I’m looking forward to Spielberg’s upcoming TinTin movie mostly because it seems like it’s Spielberg just geeking out and that seems fascinating to me since even when he’s at his zaniest, he’s still very controlled, very measured, never what I think you could call “excessive.” How great would it be to see that little French kid taking all tentacled Old Ones from beyond the stars that inspire madness at their very mention? That’s a recipe for box office success, yo.

2. Rumor: Matthew Goode as Superman in the Zack Snyder reboot? That’s bullshit.

I guess that’s better than Gerard Butler, Patrick Wilson, or Billy Crudup though. But, that said, if you’re worried that I’m going to complain about every little bit of news that pops up about Zack Snyder’s Superman movie, then… well, I have nothing to suggest otherwise. There’s a very good thing that I may do just that.

And, yes, also bullshit: That they’re still trying to push forward with the big screen Buffy The Vampire Slayer reboot. We’ll see if it actually makes it to movie theaters. But you should read the always classy Joss Whedon’s reaction to the latest news of the matter.

from here.

3. ast night’s season finale of The Venture Bros. was nothing short of amazing and more than made up for what was not so much a bad season but an unspectacular one. There’s just too much to talk about with the episode but I think the show found a niche that I’d like to see it explore more in the future (if it has a future): a one hour running time, which both allows the plotlines to breathe and run on but doesn’t ever stifle their growth. And, Jesus, they managed to wrap up like 15 storylines there too.

If this was the last episode of the show ever (a very sad but quite possible outcome), it was a worthy one. The show went back to it’s well: Balls to the wall failure and immaturity. Hank and Dean got a home school prom. All of the manly men struck out, dreams weren’t just crushed but stomped into the ground, and women are more than a whole other genre to the males of the show, they’re a whole other monstrous species. At first I was amazed at how long the “Rusty Venture” sex act gag went on and then it reached a point of equilibrium where I never wanted it to end. Al and Shore Leave were some of my least favorite characters (mostly because they, like Sgt. Hatred, were an incredibly funny idea that was literally beat into the ground over and over), but I kind of like that they’re the only ones that found happiness.

Is it sad that I not only loved the montage that ended the episode but almost found it as poignant as the final very musical moments of Lost from earlier this year. And, as if showrunners Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer didn’t have enough geek cred, I adored that the montage was set to Pulp’s “Like A Friend,” a song about how relationships are hard and that it’s easy to be yourself if you suck…

from here.

I’ll get back to you on what kind of day this is.

Anyway, some videos that I’ve come across in the past few days on the internet (yes, I’ll admit that these are all a few days old):

1. One of the new promos for Conan O’Brien’s upcoming show on TBS (debuting next month). This is just excellent stuff:

And it looks expensive-ish. Finally, with the addition of Conan, TBS’s tagline of “very funny” is actually becoming accurate.

2. The latest episode of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, this time interviewing Bruce Willis.

…which you can find here. I don’t dislike this little gimmick that appears online every now and then on Funny Or Die, but it’s kind of one note. That said, Willis’ episode feels especially great to me. Why? Just cause.

3. That dirty/hot/bizarre sex scene between Mary Louise Parker and Mark-Paul Gosselaar (Zack Morris!) on Weeds recently. I don’t watch Weeds but I do love that several people emailed me a link to this. Thanks, fellow internet weirdos.

That’s just the preamble to it all. You can find it talked about here and actually see it here (at around the 23 minute mark).

3 1/2. I’m really starting to hate the name Zack in any and all of it’s forms. No offense, but if you’re going to go name your kid Zack, then fuck you. It’s not 1987 anymore.

from here.

3 3/4. People doing condom tricks on youtube. Yes.

4. The intro to The Simpsons, as story boarded recently by Banksy:

Bottom line: It was pretty great. And all over the internet already. Shockingly it happened on major network TV when similar issues can’t be addressed on the cover of major magazines. Also, probably the best thing to happen on The Simpsons in, what… ten years? Jesus. Why not Banksy story board an entire episode next.

5. For cross promotional reasons, Michael J. Fox recreates the Back To The Future teaser trailer for the Scream Awards on Spike. And also because it’s the 25th anniversary of the film:

Back To The Future nostalgia is definitely something I can get behind, but that Spike thing just seems so sad. I’m just amazed that it’s taken a quarter of a century for us to actually see some of the footage of Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly. I mean, shit, this isn’t news. We all knew that he was originally cast in the movie and did five weeks on it. Even Fringe referenced this. Of course, the footage scene in that clip floating around the internet is just meh, but the wowza really hit me, like a lot of people, when we saw that alternate fading away photograph:

from here.

That’s a question we can ask ourselves, certainly, but maybe another time.

Cause we are clearly not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

I haven’t seen a lot of great April Fool’s Day jokes out there, not even a tremendous amount of RickRolling either, but Maria pointed out that Joel McHale took over Ryan Seacrest’s site, which is kind of funny to me, and also an upgrade, obviously.

How can Ryan Seacrest’s joke be anything but a failure when it’s a celebration of someone like Ryan Seacrest? An age old question. If you look good and hard at the walls in Plato’s cave, that question is written there, along with mythic super hero hieroglyphics and crude depictions of humans hunting animals and having sex with lightning bolts or whatever crazy thing people were onto back then.

Oh, and then I just saw this:

I giggled a bit at that, I won’t lie.

Oh, and this:

Way to go fake science news, as reported by CNET UK: “A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had traveled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.”

So many lovely references in the CNET UK article there, I recommend you glance at it, sci fi nerds. There’s a nice glance towards H. G. Well’s famous novel in the paragraph above, but the story also references that the mysterious stranger from the future was wearing “wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age,” which is a lovely nod to the fact that, as I shall remind you once again, the new series of Doctor Who starts this weekend with the brand new Doctor.

Oh, and this clips’s decent as well.

Maybe I was wrong before when I saw that time travel was something special about last year, something that was meant to stay in last year and that our lurch towards something big and new and wonderful here in the year we make contact was going to be just that, here, now, in this year. But maybe time travel isn’t done with us yet. At least not in pop culture. I say that half seriously, half in jest, and a whole other crazy half in an attempt to segue into how I think that next week’s episode of Lost, which of course is a Desmond one, makes me think it’ll be similar to “The Constant.”

What do you think? Yes, no, maybe? Oh, who knows. We’ll just watch and see. It’s Desmond, so it’ll be good.

But Benjie Light and I were talking the other day, gabbing and gossiping as we’re prone to do, waxing poetic about things we’d like to see as the last season of Lost winds down and half jokingly, and half in an eerie calm wave of deadly seriousness, we decided that whatever the finale image of Lost is… whether it’s Jack smiling at having found his destiny or a gorgeous sunset or Sayid marching off into the future with a whole bevy of beautiful women on his arm, we’d then like the producers to immediately cut to this:

And if, for some reason, Cthulhu isn’t doing it for you today, there’s always this:

via the always always always interesting Molly Crabapple, but look also here and perhaps maybe here, if you’re into that kind of thing. And let’s face it: you probably are, right?

Edited to add:

ALSO! Up next: Post #500! It’s been that many, can you believe it? Shocking, right? For that very special post we have something planned that may be very interesting. Or, it may suck hard. Either way… stay tuned! Until then, here’s a picture of Sarah Palin visiting herself from the future:

If Obama can bring people together to talk over beers, then why can’t fictional semi-religious horror icons like Cthulhu and Jesus do the same?

This is my rough estimation of what your top Halloween costumes will look like this year…

1. Michael Jackson. I don’t think this will be a big surprise. We love death! Especially celebrity death, and what better way to celebrate a man who had faded into a rather ghoulish appearance/existence/notoriety than to dress up in his horrifying visage on All Hallow’s Eve. It’s a special kind of homage. For reference, see…

2. The Joker/Heath Ledger. This appeals to the above mentioned death fetishists, those fuckers who dress like clowns/painted demons every goddamn year, and Crow/Cure fans 3.0. As annoying as this gets once you’ve seen it forty times at the same party, it could be worse people. The same guy dressed up in a Joker costume could instead be dressed up in some kind of fishnet mesh shirt… thing.

3. Pirate. Ugh. Shiver my timbers, you morons. Go walk a plank. Seinfeld summed it up best years ago: But I don’t wanna be a pirate! This is not the costume of a self respecting man. The Dread Pirate Robert being the only exception, of course. And last but not least…

Anything “sexy,” or…

…”adult”-ish, or…

…involving cat ears or devil horns. Hey, I’m not judging. And I’m not really complaining either. It’s an interesting place to be. Intellectually, I respect a woman who wants to dress up like Amelia Earhart or Marie Curie or Lucrezia Borgia or whatever. But then again, if you want dress up like Wonder Woman or a sexy astrophysicist or a sexy brain surgeon, I’m okay with that too. In fact, more power to you.

But, me, personally, I’m going to go with the dark horse candidate this Halloween. This year it’s all about the infamous figure everyone will be dressing up as next year: Roman Polanski.

It’s either that, or something involving a cape. And I don’t know what the going rate on capes are these days, but I think this will be cheaper.

This costume really only requires a camera, some qualuudes, and an invite back to Jack Nicholson’s house. It’s the perfect thing for a very frugal season. And, on the plus side, it’s so very, very, very much in incredibly bad taste.

from here, and here, and here.