I'm pretty sure if you watch this video you turn into a werewolf.



Via Giles

I guess Prince writes a lot of songs, but I was still surprised to find out he wrote Nothing Compares 2 U, made famous by Sinead O'Connor, and also Manic Monday made famous by The Bangles.

The other surprise from this is that the woman from 4NonBlondes wrote Pink's entire album.

My favorite of these all time is that Young MC wrote most of Tone Loc's album, including Wild Thing and Funky Cold Medina, but that's probably just because I love Young MC.

I thought it'd be fun to have more art inspired by the movie Groundhog Day, which is one of my favorites. Since I can't draw, the task fell to my friends (Vaughn Fender / Chris Piasick / Josh Lafayette / Lee Crutchley). We're going to try to do these a little more often, so we'll see how it goes. The art is below.

Josh Lafayette


Lee Crutchley


Chris Piascik


Vaughn Fender

Watch that first step. It's a doozy.

DC Scorpion Girl started collecting punk flyers 10 years ago with the idea of publishing a book of flyers from around the world. If you're a fan of Old Punk Flyers this is the book for you. I have some of these flyers somewhere, I think.

'Come to our show!' they pleaded as they handed out flyers, posted them on telephone poles, wheat-pasted them on walls. Here are the flyers from the world's most pioneering punk bands including Minor Threat, Fugazi, Youth of Today, Gorilla Biscuits, Youth Brigade, Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains, A.R.Z. (Peru), Fun People (Argentina), Leek and the Bouncing Souls (South Africa), Scream, Bikini Kill, Los Crudos, The Nation of Ulysses and many more.

You can download the book here [PDF].

Via Mike

I watch a lot of movies, but I guess all the movies are terrible, because I only saw 8 movies from this list of the Top 100 Movies of 2011 by Rotten Tomatoes. The highest rated 2011 movie I saw was number 34, and I only saw 2 in the top 50. How did you do?

Via Kari

This is one of my biggest internet sleuthing successes of the last year or so. Get excited for me, because that's the only way any of this will be interesting to you. About 7 years ago or so, Ben started working for the same company I did. We were bursting at the seams, people were jammed everywhere, 2 to a desk, etc. Ben ended up sharing an out of the way table with the printer. I sat around the corner and heard people asking Ben about print jobs all the time. I remembered hearing a This American Life about a guy in an office who sat in the hallway next to the copy machine. He was constantly getting badgered by people about the copier and no one really knew his name. In any case, I started telling Ben about this and figured it'd be no problem to find the show for him to listen. This was around 2005-2006 and the TAL website wasn't what it is now. Search was available, but it was terrible. I couldn't find the show. Anywhere. But I knew it was there. I knew it existed. And so every now and then when I thought about it, I'd try new search terms and variations on the TAL site and Google. Nothing. Ever! UNTIL the other day, I started fresh and happened upon this blog post talking about a very similar story and mentioning This American Life. Success! But wait. Unfortunately, since TAL changes their website every quarter or so, the link was dead. I knew I was close, though, and I persevered, finally finding Episode 241: 20 Acts in 60 Minutes and the mystery was solved. The reason I never could find it is this episode doesn't have a summary of all the stories so regardless of what I put in to search, the words were never there. In any case, I am now triumphant and Ben has heard the story.

Cool profile of astrophysicist extraordinaire Neil deGrasse Tyson in Playboy by Carl Zimmer (not linked to Playboy). One thing I didn't know about Tyson was he was the first to say Pluto was not a planet.

Tyson’s demotion of Pluto only came to the public’s attention when Kenneth Chang, a New York Times reporter, noticed there were only eight planets featured at the Rose Center. When Chang asked other astronomers to comment, they called the decision absurd. Letters of protest poured into the museum. But Tyson held firm, and in the years that followed, astronomers discovered other icy bodies at the edge of the solar system that were even bigger than Pluto. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union decided to classify it as a dwarf planet.

This Wired article about UX or Urban eXperiment, is fascinating and long. UX "is sort of like an artist’s collective, but far from being avant-garde—confronting audiences by pushing the boundaries of the new—its only audience is itself."

So many nuggets and details, just go read the whole thing:

UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of “restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesn’t have the means to maintain.” The group claims to have conducted 15 such covert restorations, often in centuries-old spaces, all over Paris.

UX’s most sensational caper (to be revealed so far, at least) was completed in 2006. A cadre spent months infiltrating the Pantheon, the grand structure in Paris that houses the remains of France’s most cherished citizens. Eight restorers built their own secret workshop in a storeroom, which they wired for electricity and Internet access and outfitted with armchairs, tools, a fridge, and a hot plate. During the course of a year, they painstakingly restored the Pantheon’s 19th- century clock, which had not chimed since the 1960s. Those in the neighborhood must have been shocked to hear the clock sound for the first time in decades: the hour, the half hour, the quarter hour.

Burgled in Philly on The Bygone Bureau is a crime story with some quirky details.

A word about the machine guns: one of them is mine, the other one is Matt’s, and they were for decoration. They were functional and we had ammunition, but they weren’t really for home defense or hunting. We thought they looked badass hanging on the wall — and they did.

Via Kayfabe