Dinosaur Jr. has had all their gear stolen following a gig in NYC last night. If you’re in the NYC area, check the pawn shops. Brutal.

I saw them in Columbus, OH in 1994 and they were amazing. Punishingly loud, but amazing. At the end of the show, to clear everyone out, the local authorities used some kind of mace product on the (completely well-behaved) crowd. Remember sneezing powder? Mace is a bit like that at first, and then your eyes hurt like hell and you wonder what the hell is going on.

But I digress. The Dinos are a great band. True originals. And while they’re critical darlings, they’ve never had major commercial success. This is a serious drag, and whomever stole their gear is a serious prick who should spend eternity watching The Byron Allen Show in hell.

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I’ve seen it with my own eyes: the first picture in the 2007 IKEA catalogue features a dog which seems to have a larger-than-normal and distinctly human shvantz. A spokesman for IKEA Canada claims that the photo has not been tampered with and that — as if this really helps the case — it was shot in Sweden.
I’ve looked at it and I think it was Photoshopped. So does my wife. You can look at the link below and enlarge the pic, but you can’t make the call until you actually look at the catalogue in all its hi-res glory.

GO

A while back, I noted that bow-tied irritant Tucker Carlson’s latest hard-hitting journalism assignment was on the prominent ABC newsmagazine known as Dancing with the Stars. Somehow, that post got lost when I reinstalled WordPress. If you really want your Tucker fix, though, the NY Times ran a piece this weekend. And unlike my meagre blog entry, the Times piece even featured pictures of Mister “The-T-is-pronounced-more-like-an-F” himself gettin’ his swerve on in some very, very pretty shoes.

Through the piece, Carlson’s instructor, a Russian dancer whose naked ambition for fame rivals Carlson’s, seems frustrated with him. He’s very impatient and unfocused, by the sounds of it.

It’s quite a funny article. Carlson must just be happy that he’ll finally have an audience again. When this season’s over, he can return to his rightful home in the cultural dumpster of failed curiosities who became famous, briefly, for being louder and more aggressively ignorant that those around him. And then had to dance on TV.
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Mobile phones now contain cameras, MP3 players, GPS units, video games and more. Generally, however, you don’t go a week without a dropped call, regardless of what carrier you’re with (and believe me, I’ve had ‘em all).

It’s probably for that reason that the Mobile Phone Throwing Championship was born. This year’s winner chucked a phone 292 feet. In the real world, I wonder what kind of catastrophic dropped call scenario might facilitate that kind of irritation-to-distance ratio? A dropped booty call maybe? That call to your broker to ditch your Enron stock? Or maybe a call from a telemarketer and/or Ben Mulroney that wouldn’t drop?
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Via Metafilter, I found an interesting pair of articles, one claiming that vinyl is dead, the other claiming that it ain’t going anywhere.

As someone with 4,000 records that I’ve dragged from apartment to apartment, and for which I eventually had to make a giant hutch in my den (okay, it holds my TV, too, but I just can’t bring myself to admit that I own a custom-made “entertainment unit”), I’m interested in the whole debate from an emotional standpoint, since, as even the guy who argues in support of vinyl admits that it’s, er, a little impractical in the iPod era.

Where he ends up, I think, is spot-on. Vinyl has what you might call a presence. If I were a pretentious ass, I might point you to Walter Benjamin’s seminal piece, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. But you know, Bloggerton is way too street for that bookish nonsense. I’m keepin’ it real.

The reason I might have thought of Benjamin (but only if I were a pretentious ass, mind you) is that he suggests that paintings, as opposed to photos, had an aura. (Ironically, of course, that’s shifted a bit, because in the Flickr era, photos have an aura. The difference between holding an old photo of your dad, on the one hand, and zapping the same photo up to Flickr is a pretty big one, I think.)

Vinyl has an aura. MP3s, not so much.

For myself, there’s naturally a place for both. That’s why I hope vinyl won’t die, even though I can’t remember the last time I actually bought one.

Anyway, I’ll shut it. How did this post end up being all crazy philisophical? Check out the articles. It’s a fun little debate.

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A dentist in Indiana has figured out a way to put gold teeth on a cat — in this case, a Persian named Sebastian.

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YouTube and Google Video have become platforms for jerks to do mean things to each other.

Jack Link’s Beef Jerky has created a campaign that spins the whole prank video in a pretty funny way. It’s called “Messin’ with Sasquatch”, and while it’s certainly not what you could call highbrow humour, a couple of the spots had me laughing out loud.

Skip the intro, click the video camera, watch the spots, then watch the “Too Hot for TV” versions.

Just don’t go to the appalling MySpace page. I would link to it, but seriously, I don’t want you to go to it.

WATCH

I posted yesterday about a great archive of old ads called adclassix.

Today, I stumbled on a similar — and similarly amusing — repository: Modern Mechanix.

Pretty well-written, and tons of fun to trawl through, though, assuming you like that sort of thing.

But really, what’s not to like about this?

Where was that free book when I needed it? I had to learn everything I know from a hobo named Tim. And it was all LIES.

If you spot any other gems, let me know.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Popurls is a pretty decent way to get a snapshot of what’s bubbling up around the Internet’s water cooler. The site functions as an aggregator of top hits from del.icio.us, digg, reddit, metafilter, youtube, flickr and about a dozen other sites.

It’s no replacement for your daily news, but trawling the headlines trying to find the interesting/absurd/useful stuff can be fun. If I were a writer on The Daily Show or the Colbert Report, I’d certainly be there every morning.

Check it out

Or was that 1899?

Stupid historical perspective. Always getting in the way of yet another gold rush.
CNN reports that an assortment of venture capitalists are ponying up a collective $100 million on some ideas that they’re sure will be winners.

Some examples:

The Ultimate iDrive: A driver’s tech fantasy fully realized: an in-dash computer with a keyboard built into the steering wheel and a full-screen heads-up display projected on the windshield.

What they’ll invest: $5 million for a deeply qualified 20-person team to deliver a prototype and a plan for pitching a commercial version to automakers within three years.

Or how about:

A design scheme for a community of affordable new homes, packed with luxury amenities and based on green values. This is yet another baby-boomer play, but AOL co-founder [Steve] Case and partner [Donn] Davis — who helped bring fractional ownership to the ultraluxury-home market with Exclusive Resorts — don’t think builders like KB Home and Pulte Homes have all the angles covered.

“Wellness” lifestyles are big draws among retiring boomers. But so is price, Davis says, as more and more people worry about shrinking retirement incomes. That’s why he’d like to see modest homes inside a community that offers an eclectic mix of perks — a spa, yoga classes, a community garden, room service, and so on.

Homeowners should be able to choose among full or fractional ownership and different levels of property management, perhaps even taking part in selling the community’s services to outsiders.

What they’ll invest: $5 million for the right plan.

Condos? With yoga studios? Hell, why not $10 million? I’ve never heard of such a thing.

But hey, who knows? Maybe the next pets.com is out there somewhere, too…

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