Italian Spiderman – The superhero film the world has been waiting for, but missed cuz I wasn’t paying enough attention. I mean, It missed, not I. The world in this instance is certainly not a metaphor for me, because I would surely never miss something so blindingly cool…. Obviously. Avert your accusatory eyes, you harlots!

See more at youtube. Obviously.

ALIEN VS. POOH

That silly billy Winnie the Pooh! Lovely pictures of terrible things afoot in the hundred acre wood. Dig that mocked up hardcover. Click your way through to the harrowing conclusion!

G O D X I L I A R Y: ALIEN VS. POOH

via mental floss

Charlie Brooker: A man of the times

Charlie Brooker has been providing scathing and satirical insights into the twisted machinations (oh, how I love that word) of the media since, well, whenever he started doing it. Below, see him lay into television news with, um, scathing and satirical insight.

( via 23narchy in the uk. )

Several dozen moons ago my friend Matt would often clue me into the latest of Mr Brooker’s brilliant Guardian column Screenburn, in which he takes a rusty hacksaw to the banality of television and dismembers it’s corpse with disturbing glee. You can find an archive of the column here.

Below, an excerpt from his latest piece where he goes to town on vapid and soul-destroying ITV dating show ‘Take Me Out’, something which I was planning to do myself, offering a poor facisimile of his writing style, after accidently catching the opening credits and first 30 seconds. Thank fuck I don’t have to now, because it would of actually involved having to watch it.

Anticipation is everything. If someone tells you to close your eyes and open your mouth while they feed you a slice of the most delicious chocolate gateau you’ll ever encounter, only to spoon a pawful of dead mashed mouldering cat on to your tongue, chances are you’ll vomit. You’d vomit anyway, of course, but the contrast between what you were expecting and what you actually got would make you spew hard enough to bring up your own kidneys.

This also works in reverse. Over the past few weeks, several people have emailed imploring me to watch Take Me Out (Sat, 8pm, ITV1), ITV’s new Saturday night dating show. They described it using the sort of damning language usually reserved for war crime tribunals at the Hague. I rubbed my hands together, like a sadist approaching a car crash, settled in to my sofa and watched an episode. And you know what? It’s not bad.

Okay, it is bad, obviously, but only if you compare it to something worthy or suave or less shrieky. On its own terms, as a raucous chunk of meaningless idiocy, it succeeds.

( read the rest of that column here )

But Brooker is no mere columnist, oh no, for surely that would be a waste of his talents. He created the brilliant zombie/big brother parody/horror/drama (the reality show, not the orwellian concept of surveillance society) Dead Set, which was screened over 5 consequitive nights on E4 in the UK. I actually tuned in eagerly for every single part, which is a rare occurance indeed. He only wrote the first episode though.

He’s also worked quite extensively with another british satirical genius Chris Morris, co-writing the absolutely hilarious satire of London media-type assholes, Nathan Barley. The show featured alot of the Mighty Boosh/IT crowd bunch and was no only insanely quotable, piss-yourself funny and largely ignored, It also managed to ring disturbingly true, as if this was what these people are like in their vapid cocoon of popular-culture and fad fed idiocracy. For weeks after seeing it on DVD I had nightmares that I would become one of these people. I still fear that I will wake up one day and, finding this to be true, ride my miniscooter screaming under a double-decker bus.

A click from episode 5 of deadset:

And the only two clips from nathan barley that I could find that hadn’t had embedding disabled by request. It’s worth a trip to youtube to check out the other stuff though. There are whole episodes to be seen in bite sized parts.

Nietzsche’s Angel Food Cake.

BY REBECCA COFFEY

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1. Allow the angel to reach room temperature. Then kill it.

2. Kill God. Set Him aside.

3. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

4. Ecstatically whip, as if possessed by a storm-wind of freedom, 1-1/2 cups of excellent egg whites with 1/4 tsp. salt and 1-1/2 tsp. cream of tartar. Continue until peaks are as if raised to their own heights and given wings in a fine air, a robust air.

5. Gradually add 3/4 cup sugar, about 3 tbsp. at a time.

6. You are brilliant.

7. Now, add 1 tsp. vanilla and 1/4 tsp. almond extract, and then sift together 1-1/4 cups flour and 3/4 cup sugar.

8. Blend in God and the angel. Emboldened, add the egg mixture.

9. Gaze into the überbatter. The überbatter will gaze into you.

10. While prancing about in a frenzy of self-satisfaction and anticipation, use a rubber scraper to push the überbatter into an ungreased 10″ tube pan, for it is destined to be there.

11. Bake on a lower rack until done, usually 35-40 minutes, while reciting to the upper rack a long, convoluted anecdote about your childhood.

12. Invert the tube pan over a bottle for a few hours. Then impetuously rap the pan. Shout, “Aha!” and slide a knife along the pan’s insides.

13. Call what tumbles out a cake if you dare. Call it miraculous even.

14. Eat it. It is delicate, morbid, loveable, and you will die depressed, delirious, and overweight.

Nietzsche’s Angel Food Cake By Rebecca Coffey
Great Moments in Sports, Which, Had They Involved Me, Would Not Have Been Such Great Moments By Frank Ferri
A Few Words Regarding My Recent Appearances on Maury By Jesse Adelman
The Gospel According to His Good Friend Dennis By Rich Cohen
Mom Takes Children’s Songs Literally By Sarah Schmelling
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McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Nietzsche’s Angel Food Cake..

X-factor/RATM parody video

props to this post for cluing me in on this parody mash-up (which i found following a referal link that lead to either/or/bored). The video had been taken down (on request by the British Phonograph Institute, the bastards!) from youtube by the time I clicked it but i did find another one quick-snap.

If it goes down again just go to google video and do a search for “X-factor rage against the machine parody”.

Enjoy the amusement!

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: The Allegory of the Beer Cave.

Parody of Plato’s allegory of the cave with the part of Socrates being played by a magic 8-ball. 

*snip*

[Glaucon] And when they run out of beer and have to send a freshman back to the beer cave, do you not think that he might look upon the changes he has made to himself and pity those still dwelling there?

[Socrates] It is decidedly so.

[Glaucon] What if he returned to the beer cave and saw the prisoners as they played games amongst themselves, predicting what the shadows would do? What if he sat with them and tried to play alongside them; would he not still be buzzed and unable to compete against them? Would he not be ridiculed by them?

[Socrates] Yes.

[Glaucon] Would he not have to practice going into and out of the beer cave to teach them to party? Whereas there are those that say that partying must be put into the soul, does not our dialogue prove that the ability to party exists in the soul already and the knowledge to use it must be learned by bits and sips?

[Socrates] It is certain, I said.

[Glaucon] Then those that have partied in the world must be made to sober up and return to the beer cave to take a turn living amongst the punks to make them the next generation of party hosts. For it can be said that the party at which the hosts are most eager to share their beer is always best, and in which they are most reluctant, the lamest.

via McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: The Allegory of the Beer Cave..